AI is causing a crisis of agency. Back in the web-traffic-obsessed days of 2018, at a time of dawning awareness of how easily audiences online could be manipulated and spoofed by bots, the writer Max Read argued that the internet had crossed a threshold known as "the Inversion." Not only had bots proliferated across the internet; they had come to constitute it. In outnumbering humans, bots were also loosening everyone's grasp on the very reality of online experience. "What's gone from the internet, after all, isn't'truth,' but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be," Read wrote.

'In Silicon Valley, some have suggested that the pope doesn't know what he's talking about.' 'In Silicon Valley, some have suggested that the pope doesn't know what he's talking about.' The intelligent and thoughtful encyclical is an important warning of the uses and misuses of a rapidly developing technology. O ften I'm asked if I think that the novels of the future will all be written by AI. Do I worry that a machine can do what I do, only better? I usually say something like: "No algorithm is going to write Anna Karenina!" which is also not a real answer.

When Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical on artificial intelligence at the Vatican on Monday, he invited Christopher Olah, cofounder of Anthropic, to speak. The move signaled an unprecedented alliance between the Catholic church and Silicon Valley. But to understand how this partnership came about, we need to go back to Anthropic's founding. Anthropic launched in 2021 after a group of OpenAI researchers, including Dario and Daniela Amodei, left to form a rival lab. They did so with a clear conviction: Artificial intelligence models were becoming too powerful to be developed exclusively according to the logic of competition and speed.

Imagine what happens if jobs actually start disappearing. Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders don't agree on much. But both think that AI is a disaster for the working class. The Vermont senator recently wrote that "AI oligarchs do not want to just replace specific jobs. They want to replace workers."

Are you married to a man who's obsessed with AI? If i had to listen to another minute of my husband talking about Claude Code, I might have actually died. It was 11 pm in Berkeley, California, where I was home alone with our 10-month-old daughter, and 2 am in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was visiting for his newish job in AI. "JUST LOOK AT THIS!" he shouted. The FaceTime camera zoomed toward a laptop sitting on a hotel bed. I still had to take the dog out. "ARE YOU LOOKING?" he shouted again. I was looking at our real baby. There are two babies in this household now: the small human one and the large language model.

Things to Do in L.A. Fears of an AI breakthrough force the U.S. and China to talk Quiet discussions have taken place ahead of President Trump's state visit to China this week to explore reviving talks on an emergency channel, officials told The Times. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Discussions have taken place ahead of President Trump's state visit to China to explore reviving talks on an emergency channel for AI matters between Washington and Beijing, officials say. Any talks between the United States and China over AI regulations will be fraught with suspicion and risk.

California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer is proposing a new jobs guarantee for workers displaced by artificial intelligence. Billionaire California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer is rolling out a new proposal that would guarantee jobs with benefits for workers displaced by artificial intelligence . He's the first state-wide candidate to make such a pledge. The plan, which builds on a broader AI policy framework Steyer released in March, promises to make California "the first major economy in the world" to ensure "good-paying" jobs to workers impacted by AI. To do so, Steyer tells WIRED he plans to build off a previous proposal to introduce a "token tax" which would tax big tech companies "a fraction of a cent for every unit of data processed" for AI.

This story appears in the June 2026 print edition. While some stories from this issue are not yet available to read online, you can explore more from the magazine . Get our editors' guide to what matters in the world, delivered to your inbox every weekday. The courtship between Silicon Valley and MAGA was consummated on June 6, 2024, in San Francisco's Pacific Heights neighborhood, on a street known as "Billionaires' Row," at the 22,000-square-foot, $45 million French-limestone mansion of a venture capitalist named David Sacks. Along with Chamath Palihapitiya, a fellow venture capitalist and a colleague on the podcast, Sacks hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump. He knew that other technology titans were coming around to the ex-president but remained in the closet. "And I think that this event is going to break the ice on that," Sacks said on the podcast the week before the fundraiser. "And maybe it'll create a preference cascade, where all of a sudden it becomes acceptable to acknowledge the truth." Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. A few years earlier, Sacks had described the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol as an "insurrection" and pronounced Trump "disqualified" from ever again holding national office. "What Trump did was absolutely outrageous, and I think it brought him to an ignominious end in American politics," he said on the podcast a few days after the event. "He will pay for it in the history books, if not in a court of law." Palihapitiya was more colloquial, calling Trump "a complete piece-of-shit fucking scumbag." These might seem like tricky positions to climb down from--but the path that leads from scathing denunciation through gradual accommodation to sycophantic embrace of Trump is a well-worn pilgrimage trail. The journey is less wearisome for self-mortifiers who never considered democracy (a word seldom spoken on the podcast) all that important in the first place.

Musk v. Altman is a fight over how much power is too much in Silicon Valley. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. In May 2016, Elon Musk did something out of character that he has now spent years of his life trying to undo: He made what he believed to be a charitable donation. The world's richest man is also among its stingiest. Musk's private foundation often doles out less than the minimum percentage required by law.

Elon Musk Boosts New Yorker's Sam Altman Exposé on X as Trial Begins The move comes as the trial for Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI kicks off in federal court in Oakland. Elon Musk is boosting a post on X promoting The New Yorker's extensive investigation into Sam Altman's allegedly deceptive behavior, WIRED has confirmed. The move comes just as Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman heads to a jury trial in a federal courtroom on Monday morning. People scrolling X on Monday reported seeing an April 6 post from Ronan Farrow, a coauthor on the New Yorker article, promoting the investigation. A pop-up on the post on X's mobile app says it was boosted by @elonmusk, who also owns the platform.