'The tech bro fight club is real!' The titans of AI get the Succession treatment in a wild new TV show The Audacity is a fearless satire taking on Silicon Valley's'egomaniac weirdos'. S howrunner Jonathan Glatzer wanted the tagline of his latest TV creation to be: "We're so fucked." "Sadly it got rejected by the network. Hey, maybe I can use it for season two!" The show in question is The Audacity, his darkly comic drama about AI tech titans. Instead, it went with the more PG tagline "Move fast and break people" - a twist on "Move fast and break things", the Facebook motto coined by Mark Zuckerberg. The Audacity promises to do for tech bros what Succession did for legacy media. Considering Glatzer is a former writer on Succession, that is no empty threat.

Meta's board feared that its CEO's departure could disrupt the company's AI ambitions. A new stock agreement gives him financial incentives to stay put. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has agreed to keep living in Silicon Valley for eight years, potentially exposing himself to billions of dollars in one-time taxes if California voters approve a contentious ballot measure next month, according to a company regulatory filing released Wednesday. During a dinner with Meta board members on September 9, Zuckerberg informed them that he was considering leaving California because of the measure, known as Proposition 40, and that he planned to list his Palo Alto, California home for sale four days later, the 109-page filing stated. The ballot proposal, which could be subject to lawsuits even if voters approve it, calls for a one-time 5 percent tax on stock and other assets held by billionaires in the state as of January 2026.

It's the latest in a growing wave of bets that AI companies are making on brain data. OpenAI's venture capital arm as well as Peter Thiel's Founders Fund are investing in Coherence Neuro, a startup developing a brain implant to detect and treat cancer . The investments are part of a $45 million seed funding round for Coherence and reflect Big Tech's burgeoning interest in brain data . Coherence's CEO and cofounder Ben Woodington says there is "growing synergy" between the big AI labs and companies building devices to decode the brain, known as brain-computer interfaces . "The idea of capturing data to train better models and use it to optimize treatments is going to be super important," he says.

An ex-OpenAI engineer accused of planting a recording device in an executive conference room at the AI company appears to have received considerable support from the Saudi government, United States prosecutors have said in a court filing. Federal prosecutors allege that the defendant, Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, was in frequent communication with an unnamed member of the Saudi royal family and that a Saudi military official paid for a one-way plane ticket for Alfozan's wife and young son to return to Saudi Arabia after his arrest, according to the court document, made public late on Sunday. Alfozan, a Saudi national and lawful permanent resident in the US, is scheduled to appear in federal court in San Francisco later on Monday. The case has highlighted security challenges around sensitive AI research as companies and governments compete fiercely for an edge in the transformational technology. "The defendant went to significant lengths to create customized, encrypted recording devices to secretly record highly sensitive meetings involving senior OpenAI personnel and executives, high-level business counterparts, and government officials, all while communicating with individuals of significance in Saudi Arabia and pursuing opportunities in -- and making plans to travel to -- Saudi Arabia," prosecutors wrote in a detention memo.

WIRED was the first magazine to cover Theranos and its enticing billionaire founder. There were warning signs even then. Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of the fraud-ridden blood-test company Theranos, made her national press debut in The Wall Street Journal in 2013. It ran in the Opinion section, by a writer on the Journal's editorial board named Joseph Rago, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for critiques of the Affordable Care Act. He wrote that he was impressed by the prospect of individuals having more direct control of their health care; no less an eminence than former secretary of state George Shultz, a Theranos board member, had told Rago that Holmes was the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. By 2014, Holmes was the youngest woman billionaire ever, and the mid-2010s were electric with tech-industry success stories--the iPhone, Tesla, Airbnb, Twitter.

Maybe Chatbots Shouldn't Get to Say'I' or'Me' MIT professor Sherry Turkle warns that people have become dangerously enmeshed with chatbots. During four decades of studying the effects of interaction with computers, Sherry Turkle has developed a reputation as a careful if critical social scientist who approaches her work with academic rigor and distance. It is a polemic warning that we have reached a state of emergency where our humanity is at risk from overreliance on soulless machines who pose as our tutors, mentors, friends, colleagues, and lovers . Turkle is aiming for the high bar of books --,, --that awaken the public to impending crises. Essentially, this diminutive MIT professor is taking on a multitrillion-dollar industry backed by a government eager to accelerate AI into every corner of our personal and professional lives.

Men Can't Stop Faking How Much They Know About AI More than half of the men surveyed in a new Harvard study claimed to recognize AI leaders who were, in fact, totally fictional. Say you're a guy who reads WIRED--you know a thing or two about artificial intelligence . You recognize the names of well-known people developing AI, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman . But do you know who Mira Murati is? In a new survey of more than 5,400 Americans, 73 percent of male respondents told Harvard researchers they knew who Altman was.

Chatbot prompts reveal the engineer's alleged efforts to set up a covert listening device days before one was found in a meeting room used by high-level executives. An engineer at OpenAI allegedly concealed an audio recording device in a piece of toilet paper and attached it behind a monitor inside an executive conference room at one of the company's San Francisco offices, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Tuesday. Abdulrahman Alfozan, who federal prosecutors describe as a 35-year-old Saudi Arabian national and US permanent resident, allegedly spent several weeks querying an unspecified "productivity agent" and an "AI chatbot" to plan his alleged surveillance operation. He used an internal OpenAI tool to ask about meetings scheduled in the targeted conference room. He also appears to have used a chatbot account associated with his spouse to ask various technical questions about setting up a covert audio recording device, according to prosecutors and the court filing.

Musk, we find your lack of security disturbing. There's been a disturbance in the force. It seems that Elon Musk, while crowing on X about how useful his Grok Bot AI agent was in ordering some Lego Star Wars kits on Sunday, managed to reveal via a screenshot to his more than 240 million followers not only the 10-digit Lego order number of his purchase, but also what he paid for the sets, the delivery and billing addresses, the last four digits of his credit card, and the email address his bot used to buy the bricks from Lego . Faster than the Millennium Falcon making the jump to light speed, the inevitable happened. An X account holder named Enderman posted screenshots of interactions with Lego's customer service chatbot on its website, where the user seemingly managed--using the email and order number Musk kindly, but recklessly, provided--to get the system to cancel Musk's order.

Solar geoengineering could buy humanity time against climate change--or trigger a dangerous new arms race. A first-of-its-kind simulation offered a glimpse of what happens when geopolitics takes the wheel. When it comes to deciding the fate of the planet, Colleen Golja always thought science and reason would have a seat at the table. That was until one morning last September in London, when the climate researcher took part in the first in a series of war games. The goal: to prevent an uncontrolled global race to develop a technology aimed at cooling the planet but that comes with vast, unknown risks that could reshape life on Earth. "I thought that would be such an easy thing. Like, we can all agree to do ethical research and make sure it's for the better of all humans," she told WIRED.