David Sacks and Mark Zuckerberg attend a dinner with tech leaders at the White House in Washington DC on 4 September 2025. David Sacks and Mark Zuckerberg attend a dinner with tech leaders at the White House in Washington DC on 4 September 2025. How big tech got its way on Trump's AI executive order The US president's reversal on calling for a safety review of new AI models is a green light for tech's unchecked power Only hours before Donald Trump was set to sign a long-awaited executive order on Thursday that would have called for a government safety review of new artificial intelligence models before their release, the president abruptly backed out . Despite growing public backlash to the technology and experts warning new models will pose critical security risks, Trump vowed the US government would not slow down the AI race. During a meeting with reporters on Thursday, Trump cited both American dominance and competition with China and as his reasoning behind the reversal.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Tech leaders funding Matt Mahan's campaign for California governor say it's not about tech This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . San José Mayor Matt Mahan's late-entry bid for California governor has been supercharged by millions from Silicon Valley billionaires. Critics say that will make Mahan beholden to Big Tech if he wins, but several of his funders from the tech sector said their backing isn't about deregulation or favors, but Mahan's centrist focus on crime, homelessness, housing and education.

OpenAI's President Gave Millions to Trump. He Says It's for Humanity In an interview with WIRED, Greg Brockman says his political donations support OpenAI's mission--even if some employees at the company disagree. OpenAI's president and cofounder Greg Brockman doesn't consider himself political, which is surprising, because he was one of President Trump's biggest individual donors of 2025. Greg and his wife, Anna Brockman, gave $25 million to MAGA Inc--a super PAC that supports President Trump--in September of last year. The pair also gave $25 million to a bipartisan AI super PAC, Leading the Future, which says it plans to oppose politicians that jeopardize Americans' "ability to benefit from AI."

While many tech workers protested President Donald Trump's policies during his first term, Silicon Valley's rank and file has been quieter over the past year as their bosses genuflect to his administration. But that may be changing following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Last week, following the killing of Good, more than 200 Silicon Valley staffers published a letter urging tech leaders to use their platforms to call for ICE's removal from U.S. cities. As of Tuesday, following the killing of Pretti, the letter has more than 450 signatories, including employees from Google, Amazon and TikTok. The letter argues that tech leaders have a unique ability to influence Trump.

We asked tech CEOs, journalists, entertainers, students, and more about the promise and peril of artificial intelligence. The future never feels fully certain. But in this time of rapid, intense transformation--political, technological, cultural, scientific--it's as difficult as it ever has been to get a sense of what's around the next corner. Here at WIRED, we're obsessed with what comes next. Our pursuit of the future most often takes the form of vigorously reported stories, in-depth videos, and interviews with the people helping define it.

The killing of George Floyd in 2020 prompted a wave of statements from tech companies and CEOs. Today, pushback against ICE is largely coming from employees, not executives. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House last January, the biggest names in tech have mostly fallen in line with the new regime, attending dinners with officials, heaping praise upon the administration, presenting the president with lavish gifts, and pleading for Trump's permission to sell their products to China . It's been mostly business as usual for Silicon Valley over the past year, even as the administration ignored a wide range of constitutional norms and attempted to slap arbitrary fees on everything from chip exports to worker visas for high-skilled immigrants employed by tech firms. But after an ICE agent shot and killed an unarmed US citizen, Renee Nicole Good, in broad daylight in Minneapolis last week, a number of tech leaders have begun publicly speaking out about the Trump administration's tactics.

Welcome back to In the Loop, new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? In the past few weeks, many tech leaders have made bold predictions about what AI will achieve in 2026, from mastering the field of biology to surpassing human intelligence outright . But in 2026's first week, the most visible use of AI has been X users employing Grok to digitally disrobe women. Elon Musk's platform X has been flooded with nonconsensual AI-created images, requested by users, of unclothed or scantily-clad women, men and children, sometimes in sexual positions.

Donald Trump's AI summit in Washington this week was a fanfare-filled event catered to the tech elite. The president took the stage on Wednesday evening, as the song God Bless the USA piped over the loudspeakers, and then he decreed: "America must once again be a country where innovators are rewarded with a green light, not strangled with red tape, so they can't move, so they can't breathe." The message was clear – the tech regulatory environment that was once the focus of federal lawmakers is no longer. "I've been watching for many years," Trump continued. I've been a victim of regulation."

Jesse Armstrong loves to pull fictional stories out of reality. His universally acclaimed TV show Succession, for instance, was inspired by real-life media dynasties like the Murdochs and the Hearsts. Mountainhead, which releases on HBO on May 31 at 8 p.m. ET, portrays four top tech executives who retreat to a Utah hideaway as the AI deepfake tools newly released by one of their companies wreak havoc across the world. As the believable deepfakes inflame hatred on social media and real-world violence, the comfortably-appointed quartet mulls a global governmental takeover, intergalactic conquest and immortality, before interpersonal conflict derails their plans. Armstrong tells TIME in a Zoom interview that he first became interested in writing a story about tech titans after reading books like Michael Lewis' Going Infinite (about Sam Bankman-Fried) and Ashlee Vance's Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, as well as journalistic profiles of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and others. He then built the story around the interplay between four character archetypes--the father, the dynamo, the usurper, and the hanger-on--and conducted extensive research so that his fictional executives reflected real ones.

Fox News congressional correspondent Aishah Hasnie has more on who will be in attendance and policies President-elect Donald Trump will enact during his first day in office on'Special Report.' President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration guest list will include some of America's most influential billionaires, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos--signaling a sharp political shift among the tech industry's biggest players. Silicon Valley, traditionally a stronghold for left-leaning ideals, has largely embraced Trump following the November election. The incoming president amassed a record-breaking inaugural fund with substantial donations from tech executives. The heads of companies such as Google, OpenAI, Apple, Uber, and Microsoft have also forked over millions to fund inaugural events, including parades and swanky parties.