A recent attack on Sam Altman's home and OpenAI offices has put corporate security under renewed scrutiny. Records reveal how much some tech firms spend to arm up. Elon Musk called violent crime in San Francisco " horrific " and moved the offices of his social media business X outside the city in 2024 because of safety and business considerations. Other local tech companies have attempted to address their security concerns by partnering directly with cops. Airbnb and Salesforce are among businesses that for years have contracted San Francisco police to protect their offices on a regular basis, according to public records obtained by WIRED.

ICE and CBP's Face-Recognition App Can't Actually Verify Who People Are ICE has used Mobile Fortify to identify immigrants and citizens alike over 100,000 times, by one estimate. It wasn't built to work like that--and only got approved after DHS abandoned its own privacy rules. The face-recognition app Mobile Fortify, now used by United States immigration agents in towns and cities across the US, is not designed to reliably identify people in the streets and was deployed without the scrutiny that has historically governed the rollout of technologies that impact people's privacy, according to records reviewed by WIRED. The Department of Homeland Security launched Mobile Fortify in the spring of 2025 to "determine or verify" the identities of individuals stopped or detained by DHS officers during federal operations, records show. DHS explicitly linked the rollout to an executive order, signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office, which called for a "total and efficient" crackdown on undocumented immigrants through the use of expedited removals, expanded detention, and funding pressure on states, among other tactics. Despite DHS repeatedly framing Mobile Fortify as a tool for identifying people through facial recognition, however, the app does not actually "verify" the identities of people stopped by federal immigration agents--a well-known limitation of the technology and a function of how Mobile Fortify is designed and used.

When OpenAI issued a casting call last year for a secret project to endow OpenAI's popular ChatGPT with a human voice, the flier had several requests: The actors should be nonunion. They should sound between 25 and 45 years old. And their voices should be "warm, engaging [and] charismatic."

Overall, autonomous car companies tested more than 9 million miles during the last reporting period on California roads last year. That's nearly 4 million more miles than 2022, according to state Department of Motor Vehicles data analyzed by The Washington Post. Nearly two-thirds of the miles driven in the 2023 reporting period -- including those from Apple -- were with so-called safety drivers, who were ready to take over whenever the technology made a mistake or needed assistance. The rest were fully autonomous with no human driver present.

Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy has the latest on the president's speech at the U.S. on'Special Report' Federal law enforcement agencies in the Biden administration are reportedly purchasing surveillance drones from China that have previously been labeled a potential national security threat by the Pentagon. The U.S. Secret Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have recently acquired surveillance drones from the Shenzhen-based company DJI, around the same time the Defense Department deemed products from the Chinese company to be a potential national security threat, according to an Axios report. DOBRIANSKY AND RUNDE: CHINA'S POWER INSIDE THE UN IS GROWING RAPIDLY AND US MUST UP ITS GAME Procurement records show that the Secret Service bought eight DJI drones on July 26 just three days after the Defense Department issued a statement warning about possible threats posed by the company's products. Around the same time, records show that the FBI bought 19 drones from DJI. DJI is one of the most popular drone manufacturers in the industry, and the company requires those who purchase their products to download proprietary software and provide to users their own mapping databases that have the potential to be monitored remotely. Concerns about the company's products being used to advance China's interests have been longstanding and include a 2017 statement from the Department of Homeland Security that claimed with "moderate confidence" that DJI was "providing U.S. critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government."

The Los Angeles Police Department has used facial-recognition software nearly 30,000 times since 2009, with hundreds of officers running images of suspects from surveillance cameras and other sources against a massive database of mugshots taken by law enforcement. The new figures, released to The Times, reveal for the first time how commonly facial recognition is used in the department, which for years has provided vague and contradictory information about how and whether it uses the technology. The LAPD has consistently denied having records related to facial recognition, and at times denied using the technology at all. The truth is that, while it does not have its own facial-recognition platform, LAPD personnel have access to facial-recognition software through a regional database maintained by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. And between Nov. 6, 2009, and Sept. 11 of this year, LAPD officers used the system's software 29,817 times.

Amazon today announced updates to Alexa's Video Skills API, which will soon allow users of TiVo, DirectTV, DISH, and Verizon television services to record their favorite shows using their voice on an Alexa-enabled device so a user will be able to say "Alexa, record the Warriors game" to start a DVR recording. The update announced today for the API that gives Alexa control of video content will also allow customers to navigate to often-used destinations, like a show guide, home screen, or DVR menu. It will also allow users to ask for TV apps like Prime Video by name or say "Alexa, pause" to stop play. Tech giants making AI assistants are vying for people's attention on many fronts. Amazon wants to enter your workplace and your car, but the main battlefront today still seems to be the home, and there the company has made pitches to enter virtually every room.

When police officers removed the mirrored doors behind which Yonatan Daniel Aguilar had died hours earlier, they found a crumpled blanket on the ground, obscuring his emaciated body -- pale and stiff, curled in a fetal position, with cuts on his face. One officer lifted a corner of the blanket and two cockroaches crawled out. The child was so tiny that officers thought maybe he was 6 years old or so. Details about the condition of Yonatan's body when it was found last month in his Echo Park home were disclosed in more than 100 pages of heavily-redacted case records and police reports released to The Times by the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services this week. The records show that Yonatan's risk of abuse at home had been marked as "high" four times from 2009 to 2012 by a county program intended to guide social workers' level of intervention.