Trump Risks Key Surveillance Authority Over'Unqualified' Spy-Chief Pick US lawmakers are alarmed that Bill Pulte, a housing official with no intelligence experience, is poised to take charge of one of the government's most powerful surveillance tools. A sweeping warrantless surveillance authority remains on track to expire Friday, with no clear path to a deal, after President Donald Trump refused this week to abandon his pick of housing official Bill Pulte to temporarily lead the US intelligence community--even tasking Pulte with gutting the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in a DOGE-style "downsizing" before a permanent director is named. In a Truth Social post after his second White House meeting in two days with House speaker Mike Johnson, Trump called Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act "very important to our military, and keeping the American people safe" and asked Congress for a short-term extension to give him time to find a permanent director of national intelligence. Section 702 lets the government collect the communications of foreign targets abroad without a warrant, sweeping in an unknown volume of Americans' messages that the FBI can later search. It faces a first-ever lapse in its legal authorization if Congress does not act by the end of Friday, June 12.

Alex Vindman Survived Trump's Retaliation Machine. In 2019, Alex Vindman testified during President Trump's first impeachment trial--a decision that ended his military career. Now he wants to challenge the president from the halls of Congress. Alex Vindman knows a thing or two about pissing off President Donald Trump . In 2019, Vindman rose to national prominence when he served as a witness during Trump's first impeachment trial. If you've lost track of that particular scandal, it's the one involving Trump, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, the Biden family and Vindman listening in on a troubling phone call in his capacity as the director for European affairs on the National Security Council. Vindman's congressional testimony describing that pivotal call was widely lauded, even as it ended his storied military career: After being ousted from the NSC, Vindman retired from the Army in 2020. Six years later, he's got his eye on another governmental gig. In January, Vindman announced plans to challenge Republican incumbent Ashley Moody for the Florida seat in the US Senate previously held by Marco Rubio. Vindman, who tells me he moved to Florida in 2023 because his wife wanted to politics, is the latest candidate I'm chatting with ahead of the November midterms. He's particularly interesting to me, and WIRED, for a few reasons: Vindman has lived through--and emerged from--the Trump retaliation machine, and I wanted to hear more about that journey; he's been vocal about his opposition to both the war in Iran and ICE, two topics we cover frequently; and I wanted his view, as a longtime service member, on AI through the lens of national security. Then there's the fact that Vindman, running in what's ostensibly a Republican stronghold, has a decent shot at winning the damn thing: Though Senator Moody still leads in most polls, Vindman is often within spitting distance--no small feat for a first-time candidate whose campaign started around five months ago. KATIE DRUMMOND: Welcome to the Big Interview, Alex. Good to be here with you, Katie. So glad to have you here. You are maybe best known on a national level as a whistleblower, but you were also an Army veteran of more than 20 years. You were honored with a Purple Heart after being wounded in Iraq, and you were on the National Security Council.

The US military has long known that cheap fixes could stop location data from exposing its troops. It adopted almost none--and now says adversaries are using the data to target soldiers during a war. For nearly a decade, the Pentagon was warned--by its own contractors, analysts, and intelligence agencies--that anyone with a credit card could buy a map of where American troops sleep, work, and store nuclear weapons. Now the bill has come due in a war zone. A newly disclosed letter shows the warnings went unheeded: US Central Command now confirms it has received "multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil US personnel in theater"--the first official acknowledgment that the data-broker economy is being used to hunt American forces in the Middle East.

AI regulation requires harmonization between state and federal approaches, but fragmented policies risk undermining US competitive advantage in this critical technology.

Jensen Huang was riding high. The name of the company he runs, Nvidia, is a play on the Latin word for . But when asked last month, Huang could not think of a single thing he is envious of. "I have a pretty great life," he said toward the end of a 75-minute interview with TIME, before tallying a list of things he is grateful for: his happy marriage, his adult children, and his two dogs, who earlier that day both received the all-clear on their ultrasounds. Then, of course, there was his professional life: running the world's most valuable company, worth some $4.3 trillion.

Plus: The SEC lets SolarWinds off the hook, Microsoft stops a historic DDoS attack, and FBI documents reveal the agency spied on an immigration activist Signal group in New York City. Eight years after a researcher warned WhatsApp that it was possible to extract user phone numbers en masse from the Meta-owned app, another team of researchers found that they could still do exactly that using a similar technique. The issue stems from WhatsApp's discovery feature, which allows someone to enter a person's phone number to see if they're on the app. By doing this billions of times--which WhatsApp did not prevent--researchers from the University of Vienna uncovered what they're calling "the most extensive exposure of phone numbers" ever . Vaping is a major problem in US high schools.

The United States has formed a $1bn partnership with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to construct two supercomputers that will tackle large scientific problems ranging from nuclear power to cancer treatments to national security. The Reuters news agency first reported the new partnership, citing Energy Secretary Chris Wright and AMD CEO Lisa Su. The machines can accelerate the process of making scientific discoveries in areas the US is focused on. Energy Secretary Wright said the systems would "supercharge" advances in nuclear power and fusion energy, technologies for defence and national security, and the development of drugs. Scientists and companies are trying to replicate fusion, the reaction that fuels the sun, by jamming light atoms in a plasma gas under intense heat and pressure to release massive amounts of energy.

Early frameworks like the EU's AI Act focused on highly visible applications - banning high-risk uses in health, employment and law enforcement to prevent societal harms. But countries now target the underlying building blocks of AI. China restricts models to combat deepfakes and inauthentic content. Citing national security risks, the US controls the exports of the most advanced chips and, under Biden, even model weights - the "secret sauce" that turns user queries into results. These AI regulations are hiding in dense administrative language - "Implementation of Additional Export Controls" or "Supercomputer and Semiconductor End Use" bury the ledes. But behind this complex language is a clear trend: regulation is moving from AI applications to its building blocks.

China will soon have a new Five Year Plan. Here's how they have changed the world so far China's top leaders are gathering in Beijing this week to decide on the country's key goals and aspirations for the rest of the decade. Every year or so, the country's highest political body, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, convenes for a week of meetings, also known as a Plenum. What it decides at this one will eventually form the basis of China's next Five Year Plan - the blueprint that the world's second largest economy will follow between 2026 and 2030. The full plan won't come until next year, but officials are likely to hint at its contents on Wednesday and have previously given more details within a week of that.

The tech industry is reeling from President Trump's surprising new deal with Nvidia. Earlier this week, Trump said he would allow the company to continue selling its H20 chips to China in exchange for a 15 percent share of the revenues. You know, it's one of those things, but it still has a market," Trump said at a press conference on Monday. "So we negotiated a little deal." The unusual and legally dubious arrangement is a striking reversal for the Trump administration, which banned all H20 sales to China earlier this year. The president reportedly changed his mind about the issue after meeting with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has argued that allowing Chinese companies to buy H20s doesn't pose a risk to US national security. On one hand, this is a simple story about a president who appears to have been influenced by a powerful executive lobbying in his company's interest. But beneath the surface, there's a much more interesting and complicated saga about how we got here. Nvidia introduced the H20 last year after the US government banned the company from selling a more powerful chip, the H800, to China. The move was part of an ambitious project orchestrated by Biden administration officials who believed the United States needed to prevent China from developing advanced artificial intelligence first. For the past few months, I've been working closely with Graham Webster, a researcher at Stanford University who sought to understand how and why the Biden team decided the US needed to curb China's access to advanced semiconductors in the first place. Today, WIRED is publishing Graham's definitive account of what really happened behind the scenes, based on interviews with more than 10 former US officials and policy experts, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity. "I did this piece because the official legal justification for the controls, military and human rights, was obviously never the whole story," Graham told me. "Clearly AI was in the mix, and I wanted to understand why in some depth." Graham writes that several key officials in Biden's White House and Commerce Department "believed AI was approaching an inflection point--or several--that could give a nation major military and economic advantages.