The agency that oversees prediction markets has investigated Polymarket trades on Biden pardons and the Iran war--and even more potential insider trading at Google, documents obtained by WIRED show. The US government launched at least three previously unreported investigations into trading on the prediction market Polymarket, according to documents obtained by WIRED through a Freedom of Information Act request. Voting records from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates prediction markets, shed new light on how the government approaches these investigations. In early May, CFTC chairman Michael Selig approved an order allowing the agency's enforcement division to launch a private investigation into potential insider trading on Polymarket event contracts related to pardons issued by former president Joseph Biden. The order granted permission to take testimony, obtain subpoenas, administer oaths, and require the production of documents in the course of the investigation.

The proposed class action alleges Meta illegally harvested people's Facebook and Instagram photos to train its AI image-generation models and to build its unreleased "NameTag" face recognition feature. A set of parents and their children in Illinois and California filed a lawsuit last week in federal court in Chicago alleging that Meta illegally used their Facebook and Instagram photos to build NameTag, an unreleased face-recognition system for its smart glasses, and to train generative AI models including Emu and Muse Image . The proposed class action alleges that Meta violated Illinois and California privacy laws by extracting biometric information from people's photos without notice or consent. WIRED reported in June that code for NameTag had been secretly embedded in the Meta glasses AI companion app, which had been downloaded more than 50 million times. While the feature had not been enabled for users of the app, the analysis found that the system was designed to turn faces captured by the glasses into biometric signatures and compare them with so-called faceprints stored in a database on the user's phone.

One of AI's Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is'Meant to Distract Us' Timnit Gebru argues that AI companies are stoking fears of extinction to avoid discussing actual harms, like autonomous weapons. Here at WIRED we've been trying to make sense of at least two incidents in the AI industry this week: First, the major fight over a million-dollar math problem and whether OpenAI surreptitiously borrowed the work of other researchers to solve the problem first. A day later, an Anthropic researcher--who had previously worked at OpenAI--very publicly quit his job, citing concerns about how both companies were handling AI safety. Another technical staffer at Anthropic said in response that people at the company "really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade."

The Trump Alien'Disclosure Speech' Rumors Are Reaching a Fever Pitch The US government has been sharing more information about UFOs. That's fueling excitement over the possibility of the president announcing that humans are not alone. In 2006, Donald Trump was firing people on and Dr. Phil was daytime television's reigning tough-love therapist. Twenty years later, the former is president of the United States, the latter, his informal UFO ambassador--recently trusted with unreleased government files on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) to gauge how the public might handle what's inside. Here's what comes in stages.

The new joint operation uses laser-based technology capable of detecting, tracking, and disabling commercial drones linked to human and drug trafficking. A US Border Patrol agent demonstrates the use of a drone near the border with Mexico. Defense agencies of Mexico and the US have announced they are implementing a new collaborative strategy to combat drones used by criminal organizations. The operation, dubbed High Eagle, or Águila Alta, builds on recent tests of anti-drone technologies carried out along the border between the two countries. The first phase of the strategy took place between August 31 and September 2 along the border between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico.

A combination of rapid advances, recursive self-improvement, and agentic swarms are genuinely "spooking people" inside big labs. Earlier this year, Rishub Jain left his position as an artificial intelligence researcher at Google DeepMind after a revelation. As he worked on new models, he came to believe that he and everyone else on AI's frontier were ceding control. By using AI's coding skills to accelerate work on the next generation of models, he was removing himself from the equation. AI labs hope to evolve this approach to the point that AI will improve itself indefinitely, a process known as recursive self-improvement.

AI leaders worry antitrust law could stand in the way of what they view as an increasingly urgent push to coordinate a slowdown in AI development. OpenAI has asked members of Congress in recent weeks for clear guidance about whether orchestrating an industry-wide slowdown on frontier AI development would be legal, people close to the company tell WIRED. Substantive coordination on safety between AI labs may risk running afoul of antitrust law, the people say, which poses a significant obstacle to bringing major tech giants on board with the effort. Last weekend, OpenAI's chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, published a blog post arguing that the best path forward for the AI research world includes "coordinating to slow down future development," which he thinks will be key to ensuring that self-improving AI systems are safe. In the short term, he expects " voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established."

Charlie Kirk Was Shot a Year Ago. Experts say conspiracy theorizing about the identity and motive of Charlie Kirk's killer will likely continue for a long time to come. In the days after the assassination of conservative activist and Turning Point cofounder Charlie Kirk, the online reaction was a mess. Graphic videos of the shooting were everywhere within minutes of his death, far-right figures called for violence and vengeance, and right-wing lawmakers and influencers called for the cancellation --and worse--of anyone celebrating. Then, the conspiracy theories began .

'Killmonger Locs' Are Everywhere in Video Games. The villain's hairstyle has become a default for Black video game characters because it's easy to code. Danielle Udogaranya is changing that. When the life-simulation game was released in early access, Danielle Udogaranya's hand ached at the thought of making new Black hairstyles for it. It wasn't because she didn't want to create for the game.

In Emily St. John Mandel's new novel, becoming a "ghost" means running afoul of the state. In this excerpt, a secret agent discovers it doesn't take much. True diligence is I read the sentence in a detective novel in childhood, when I was 8 or 9 years old, and then the phrase stayed with me forever after. For a long time I wrote in stylized curly letters on the inside page of every notebook, or sometimes on the front cover. I had notebooks for writing down clues, because even at 9 I wanted to work for the Internal Intelligence Service. What child doesn't secretly wish to be a spy? We were terrified and fascinated by Service in equal measure. Service was dark cars moving down the block, men and women in forgettable clothing stopping our parents on the street for brief random interrogations. Service was the force that made people disappear--when I was in the first grade, my friend from across the street climbed into the back of a black car with her parents, and their apartment stood empty for a year before other people moved in--but also Service carried a kind of dark glamour, an aura of power that called to us.