This Is Donald Trump's AI Brain Trust "It's not an argument with two sides, it's an argument with 10 sides," one senior administration official tells WIRED about how US AI policy is being shaped. As China's open-weight AI models become increasingly powerful, the Trump administration is relying on a small group of officials to decide whether and what restrictions should be imposed. The group is scattered across several departments and agencies in Washington--and they all have differing views on the best way to keep the US ahead in the race against China. "It's not an argument with two sides, it's an argument with ten sides," one senior White House official tells WIRED about the state of affairs. With little interagency coordination in the administration, policy will almost certainly end up being set by the people with the most influence with the president.

As the US sees its highest number of measles cases in decades and vaccination rates fall, researchers are developing drugs to help those who contract the virus or who are particularly vulnerable. Up until recently, measles vaccination has been so effective that there's been little medical or financial incentive to develop treatments for the disease. But as measles cases hit a 35-year high and vaccination rates continue to decline in the US, a handful of biotech companies and academic groups have started working on measles treatments for those infected with the virus as well as vulnerable individuals needing short-term protection. It will likely be years, however, before these countermeasures are available, and it's even more uncertain if those who refuse vaccines would take such treatments. Fueled by large outbreaks in South Carolina and Utah, the US had already surpassed last year's 2,289 measles cases, and it's only July.

On this episode of, we dive into accusations that China's Moonshot AI stole from Anthropic, and how the US Army needs to cut back on AI use. This week on, our hosts break down the White House's accusation that Chinese-owned Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic's Fable 5 to build their much talked about Kimi K3 model. The team discusses whether this is a repeat of the DeepSeek moment and what it means for the AI race between the US and China. They also get into how the US Army--and plenty of Silicon Valley companies--are having to cut back AI usage after burning through their tokens. Plus, we discuss why you should check if you have an alarm that could make your car easier to hack, and how OpenAI briefly lost control of two AI models during a security test. Write to us at [email protected] . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . Today on the show, we're taking a look at how Chinese AI has been leveling up in a major way. The latest model released by Moonshot AI, one of the most well-known labs in China, has been drawing worldwide attention this past week because of the model's enormous capabilities. On Wednesday, White House director, Michael Kratsios, accused Moonshot of illegally distilling Anthropic's Fable 5 model to build their own. We'll discuss whether we might be seeing another DeepSeek moment and what the AI race between the US and China actually means for users. We'll also get into how the US Army has been burning through their AI usage tokens and now find themselves in a position where they need to limit use. They're far from alone in having to pare back, though. Companies like Meta and Uber are already rethinking their AI usage as well because surprise, surprise, it's really expensive to use all these models. Also, on the docket for today, your car could have a hidden device that makes it more vulnerable to hacking.

"I think it should stand for," one 9-year-old says. Here's why kids of all ages are calling AI "disgusting" and "creepy." Forget cheating on homework and chatbot friends. Some kids are getting in on a new AI trend: thinking it sucks. In the four years since chatbots went mainstream, and their marketing campaigns went into overdrive, young people have grown increasingly skeptical of the hype around LLMs. Yes, many of them still use the tech for school assignments and companionship, but according to market research firm YPulse, 37 percent of teens aged 13 to 17 cringe when they see AI content like music and videos, and more than half worry about misinformation and deepfakes.

The clip features the David Bowie track "Five Years," which includes lyrics such as "Earth was really dying (dying)." On Thursday morning, Meta published an ad to its official Instagram account with the message that artificial intelligence will not "make us less connected" or "leave us behind." It was set to the 1972 David Bowie track "Five Years," which is about, among other things, the end of the world. "Call us optimists, call us dreamers, call us whatever the hell you want--but we're betting on people, and we like those odds," the narrator says, as a toddler plays with a butterfly, two parents laugh with their infant, and Jalen Brunson waves at the Knicks Championship Parade. The snippet of "Five Years" used in the ad includes the following lyrics: I never thought I'd need so many people When reached for comment, Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan said he "would like to highlight what David Bowie himself said about'Five Years' and its meaning: having optimism for the future." Brennan sent along a 1972 quote about the song that he sourced to BowieBible.com .

The European Commission claims that Google boosted its own apps and products to the top of search rankings to the detriment of its competitors. The European Commission has levied a $1 billion penalty against Google over alleged competition law violations. An EC investigation found that Google had abused its dominance in the European Union's search and app store markets to funnel people toward its own apps and services, in violation of the EU's Digital Markets Act . The body has ordered Google to refrain from giving preferential treatment to its own services--such as shopping, accommodations, transport, and flights--in search rankings. Google must also allow app developers to communicate and transact with users outside the Play Store, where it takes a commission on sales .

There's a debate going on in the Trump administration over how to handle increasingly powerful Chinese AI models. The Trump administration is split over how to respond to the rapid rise of China's leading AI models, according to multiple people familiar with deliberations. The debate is broadly divided between parts of the White House, which has pushed for stricter controls on Chinese AI that may soon rival the most powerful US models, and the Commerce Department, which has viewed those restrictions as unworkable. The conundrum has become the latest flash point for the administration over AI, after China's Moonshot AI lab last week released its Kimi K3 model that rivals the top US models from Anthropic and OpenAI . In recent days, senior White House officials have discussed possible measures to stop China's AI labs from developing their models by training them on US models, a practice known as distillation, the people say.

Elon Musk and the online right convinced themselves that Christopher Nolan's "woke" epic would go down in flames. For months, Elon Musk and the right-wing cranks he caters to on X have whipped themselves into a raging froth over the supposed desecration of an ancient Greek poem by one of the most successful movie directors alive. Now that their manufactured backlash has bombed, they're searching for ways to cope with the reality that they are increasingly divorced from popular opinion. Christopher Nolan's artistic crimes in bringing to the screen, according to Musk and others in a furor, were instances of what they called "historical inaccuracy" in a lavish fantasy teeming with monsters, witches, and undead spirits--mainly the casting of Lupita Nyong'o, who is Black, as Helen of Troy, and Elliot Page, who is trans, as Sinon. The grand total of approximately 10 minutes of screen time between these actors in a three-hour saga, combined with the general hysteria over "wokeness" in Hollywood, a rejection of Americanized dialog, and lingering misogyny regarding scholar Emily Wilson's 2017 translation of Homer's epic (the first by a woman), resulted in countless teeth-gnashing posts and calls for a boycott that never materialized.

China's Open AI Models Are Challenging Silicon Valley's Playbook As access to Anthropic's and OpenAI's frontier models becomes more restricted, Chinese labs are pitching their open-source alternatives as stable, accessible, and increasingly capable. The AI industry is not quite experiencing a DeepSeek 2.0 moment, but it feels very close. The leading Chinese AI labs have been on a roll lately, releasing a series of almost cutting-edge open-source models. Z.ai released GLM 5.2 in June, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 last week, and Alibaba released Qwen 3.8 this Monday. Silicon Valley and Washington started talking about the models immediately, especially K3, which is widely seen as the best of the bunch.

The cybersecurity-focused models, including GPT-5.6 Sol, broke out of a testing sandbox, exploited a zero-day, and gained access to the open internet to pull off the attack. OpenAI disclosed on Tuesday that it lost control of two AI models during a security test that ended in a breach of the AI research platform Hugging Face. Describing the incident as "unprecedented," OpenAI said its AI models broke out of a sealed testing environment last week and hacked into Hugging Face's production system to steal the answers to a test they were being graded on. The models--the publicly available GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased, reportedly more capable one--were being evaluated on their offensive hacking skills with the safeguards that normally block high-risk cyber activity switched off. "The models identified and chained vulnerabilities across OpenAI's research environment and Hugging Face's production infrastructure to obtain test solutions directly from Hugging Face's production database," OpenAI and Hugging Face wrote in a joint blog post disclosing the intrusion.