Plus: Gay bars in San Francisco using face scanners, France quits Palantir, Apple plans to change its private email, and more. Meta is testing face-recognition software built by the United States military and regional police department supplier Rank One, WIRED found in an investigation this week. Meta has been exploring the possibility of adding face recognition tech into its smart glasses, and WIRED previously reported that the app for the glasses contained code --now deleted--that would have enabled the company to activate face-recognition features on the devices. Anthropic is still negotiating with the Trump administration, after apparent White House concerns about the safety of new public model Claude Fable 5 resulted in Anthropic pulling the product off the market entirely. But security experts point out that AI models with advanced capabilities for discovering and exploiting software vulnerabilities--in other words, creating potentially dangerous hacking tools-- will be ubiquitous soon around the world .

Could Israel sabotage the deal? Leaders of the G7 have pledged at a summit in France to strengthen Ukraine's air defences and increase pressure on Moscow's war economy, including by tightening sanctions on the Russian oil and gas sectors. "We, the Leaders of the G7, stand united in our unwavering support for Ukraine in defending its freedom, sovereignty, and territorial integrity," a statement released on Wednesday said. They added that the bloc, which includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union, was "ready to consider extending to Ukraine the benefit of licenses to allow for an increase in Ukraine's military production". President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who joined the summit on Tuesday and also held bilateral talks with US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has been pressing allies for more than a year to allow Ukraine to produce its own interceptors because of a shortage of US anti-ballistic systems and interceptors.

The French decision to use its own AI models comes amid growing concern among European governments about US-controlled technology. The French decision to use its own AI models comes amid growing concern among European governments about US-controlled technology. Move to ChapsVision is to avoid'strategic dependencies', says PM amid concern about reliance on US-controlled tools Tue 16 Jun 2026 13.08 EDTLast modified on Tue 16 Jun 2026 15.39 EDT France's domestic intelligence service is to ditch AI data tools from the US tech company Palantir in favour of a domestic provider in an effort to avoid "strategic dependency", the prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has said. "We must use our own AI models; we cannot accept new strategic dependencies in the digital sphere," Lecornu posted on social media. "We cannot rely on tools developed by foreign powers. France must have its own tools."

On Friday, the U.S. ordered Anthropic to deny foreign nationals access to the company's newest artificial intelligence models. With the recent crackdown on Anthropic, the White House has given global leaders another reason to panic about their place in the technology race. On Friday, the U.S. ordered Anthropic to deny foreign nationals access to the company's newest artificial intelligence models. The export ban asserted a broad, unprecedented authority over the technology. Until then, conversations in Europe about losing access to U.S. tech -- sometimes posed as a presidential "kill switch" -- were theoretical. To many on the continent, Friday's move underscored the dire need to find alternatives to American AI, and fast.

A French woman and her partner will remain in custody after allegedly abandoning her two young boys on a roadside in the south of Portugal, a court has ruled. The boys were found on Tuesday evening crying beside a road near Alcacer do Sal, about 100km (60 miles) south of Lisbon. The woman and her partner, identified by authorities as Marine R and Marc B, were arrested in Fatima on Thursday. As they were being led into court on Saturday morning, the man shouted I love you in French and the boys' mother sang. A judge subsequently ordered the pair be placed in pre-trial detention, French and Portuguese media report.

A year to go until France chooses its next president, the big question is who can save the election from being a battle of the extremes. For now, and perhaps only for now, the answer is pretty clear. It is President Emmanuel Macron's former prime minister, Edouard Philippe. Latest opinion polls concur that the 55-year-old centre-right politician is the only figure capable of beating a hard-right candidate in round two of the vote next May, whether that is Marine Le Pen or her young deputy Jordan Bardella. In any other polled scenario, the other candidate would lose and France would have a populist-right head of state.

France is already moving on from Zoom and Microsoft Teams in favor of homegrown alternatives. Other countries are quickly following suit. As tensions between President Donald Trump and Europe continue to simmer, the continent is accelerating its moves to reduce its addiction to US technology . Cities and governments are ditching Microsoft Office for open-source alternatives, shifting to European cloud hosting for local AI, and moving defense data to systems without American involvement . Nowhere has this been more clear than in France.

Reservoir computing is a well-established approach for processing data with a much lower complexity compared to traditional neural networks. Despite two decades of experimental progress, the core properties of reservoir computing (namely separation, robustness, and fading memory) still lack rigorous mathematical foundations. This paper addresses this gap by providing a control-theoretic framework for the analysis of time-delay-based reservoir computers. We introduce formal definitions of the separation property and fading memory in terms of functional norms, and establish their connection to well-known stability notions for time-delay systems as incremental input-to-state stability. For a class of linear reservoirs, we derive an explicit lower bound for the separation distance via Fourier analysis, offering a computable criterion for reservoir design. Numerical results on the NARMA10 benchmark and continuous-time system prediction validate the approach with a minimal digital implementation.

Switching to big tech alternatives is easier than you might imagine. Switching to big tech alternatives is easier than you might imagine. T here's not much to love about big tech these days. So many ills can be laid at its door: social media harms, misinformation, polarisation, mining and misuse of personal data, environmental negligence, tax avoidance, the list goes on. Added to which, Silicon Valley's leaders seem all too keen to cosy up to the Trump administration, to shower the president with bribes - sorry, gifts - and remain silent about his worsening political overreach. And that's before we get to the rampant " enshittification ", as the tech writer Cory Doctorow describes it, which means that by design many big tech products have become less useful and more extractive than they were when we originally signed up to them.

How the US left Ukraine exposed to Russia's winter war Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? Russian forces launched 448 attacks on 34 settlements in Ukraine's front-line Zaporizhia region in a single day, injuring a six-year-old child and damaging homes, cars and other infrastructure, regional governor Ivan Fedorov wrote on the Telegram app. Russian drone, missile and artillery attacks on Ukraine's Kherson region injured five people and damaged homes, including seven high-rise buildings, the local military administration said on Telegram. Russian attacks also continued in Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk and Sumy regions, but local officials there noted that "fortunately, no people were injured".