A San Francisco “Hot List” is trying to buck stereotypes about dating in tech circles amid wider debates about the value of being perceived as attractive.

From Downing Street to Silicon Valley: Matt Clifford played a key role in helping create the UK's AI Security Institute. From Downing Street to Silicon Valley: Matt Clifford played a key role in helping create the UK's AI Security Institute. Architect of UK's AI strategy joins Anthropic amid conflict of interest warning The architect of the UK government's AI strategy has joined the US startup Anthropic in a senior role a year after stepping down from his Downing Street post. Matt Clifford, a successful tech investor, was appointed as AI opportunities adviser by Keir Starmer last year but resigned from the unpaid role six months later for personal reasons. His move to the company behind the Claude chatbot has raised concern, with the head of the House of Commons science, innovation and technology committee, Chi Onwurah, warning that his decision to remain as chair of the government-backed Aria funding body represents a "clear conflict of interest".

Whatever the AI future is, we're in it right now. O ne evening in early August, Sam Stowers and several neighbors packed into an apartment near San Francisco's Alamo Square and pondered the beginning of the end. Stowers and his guests, many of whom work in the AI industry, were gathered to watch a newly released YouTube video in which two OpenAI researchers divulged new details about an alarming cybersecurity breach . Perhaps this would have been an odd way to spend a weeknight were they not in San Francisco, in a neighborhood that is filled with entrepreneurs and programmers who obsessively follow every twist and turn in AI's capabilities. Stowers is an AI-software engineer and not, in any traditional sense, a doomer.

The opposition to datacenters has crossed party lines. The opposition to datacenters has crossed party lines. Tue 1 Sep 2026 08.19 EDTLast modified on Tue 1 Sep 2026 09.08 EDT I was lucky enough to see her in concert a decade ago in California, in the same arena where Google now hosts its annual I/O conference. It's been a long time, and all my iPhone 4 photos are so blurry you can barely tell it's a musical performance, but my memory is clear enough to compensate. She told many stories about her childhood, which led into a trio of fabulous songs: My Tennessee Mountain Home, Applejack and Dr Robert F Thomas.

Many of the tech billionaires who built our world have taken the wrong lessons from their favorite science fiction. A fter reading Jill Lepore's The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, I have a new destination for a time machine, should I ever finally get my hands on one. I'd set the dial to some night in the late 1970s or '80s and visit the boyhood rooms of the Silicon Valley titans Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman. Then I'd confiscate all of their science fiction. As young people, the future billionaires were spending hours (under their covers with flashlights, I imagine) consuming stories about killer robots or Mars colonies. What they seemed not to get--maybe couldn't get--was that these were cautionary tales, stories that projected deep societal worries into space or onto a future many millennia away.

A new group is targeting tech companies and the government with the climate movement's playbook. I f there's one thing America seems to agree on, it's AI. Some three-quarters of Americans oppose a data center being built in their area, three-quarters of Americans think AI will hurt their job security, nearly 70 percent think the technology is advancing too quickly--the polls go on. Progressive and Republican candidates alike are bashing the tech industry to win primary elections. States and cities are halting plans for data-center development.

You have questions about data centers, and WIRED has answers. Join our livestream on September 10 and our panel of experts will tell you everything you need to know. Just a couple of years ago, hearing the term "data center" wouldn't have struck a nerve with most Americans. Now, mention the noisy oversized warehouses and you'll spark a fierce debate. The infrastructure powering the AI industry is at the heart of heated discussions of politics, business, and the environment, and in the months leading up to the 2026 midterm elections, backlash to data centers has proven to be an issue activating Americans across the political spectrum.

Meta went on trial last week for allegedly designing platforms that are addictive for children. Meta went on trial last week for allegedly designing platforms that are addictive for children. I'm Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian, writing to you from a sunny park in New York City, which was supposed to endure rain all weekend but in fact delivered the best weather of the year. Why Meta's big American backlash happened in court A blockbuster case against Meta went to trial a week ago in Oakland, California, just north of the US tech company's headquarters in Silicon Valley . California and 28 other US states are suing the £1tn ($1.36tn) company for allegedly designing products that are addictive for children, and hiding that information from the public.

Why Is Everyone in Silicon Valley Talking Like That? Did you mix something up? Silicon Valley has long had its own dialect. Venture capitalists are always talking about the value of being "high agency" and making "orthogonal bets." But lately, tech vernacular has taken a peculiar turn--people have started describing themselves as if they were chatbots.

Silicon Valley Doesn't Get Why You Hate AI Technology leaders don't seem to understand society's gripes about AI, but boy, are they posting through it. Silicon Valley is trying to make sense of the growing backlash against artificial intelligence, but so far, it's not going that well. The inconvenient truth is that a significant portion of the world is not optimistic about the technology they're building. But recent attempts to diagnose the root of the problem by CEOs like Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Anthropic's Dario Amodei indicate they don't understand what's actually driving society's disdain for AI. The rest of popular culture, meanwhile, is finding ways to capitalize on AI hate. Just look at this new commercial for Liquid Death and Garage Beer.