The UK government is facing calls to cancel a sprawling health care contract with Palantir. The region of Greater Manchester insists it can do a better job itself. The UK government has six months to decide whether to terminate a deal worth more than $400 million between the country's National Health Service and American software company Palantir . If one part of the NHS is already doing without Palantir, politicians are asking, why can't the rest of the country? In 2023, the UK commissioned Palantir to develop a " federated data platform " (FDP) that could ingest and organize the tangle of health data produced across the country.

The app now allows men to make the first move, suggesting its women-first positioning was limiting growth. It joins other dating apps now throwing everything at the wall in a bid to stay relevant. Not even 24 hours after dating app Bumble announced it was getting rid of its trademark feature that requires women to make the first move, Robin H.'s inbox was already attracting unwanted attention. "This guy responded to my prompt, and he wasn't a person I would have swiped on. I can't believe some of these men think we're a match," the 53-year-old social worker in Orlando, Florida, tells WIRED.

Tina Peters was convicted of seven counts related to election interference in 2024. Now, she's fielding an offer from a county that's become a hotbed of voting-related conspiracy theories. Last week, Clint Curtis, the top election official in Shasta County, California, publicly accused members of his own staff of bypassing security, which he later claimed was an attempt "to sabotage a federal election." Days later, Curtis announced plans to hire a new deputy: Tina Peters, the election denial superstar who was convicted of seven counts related to election interference in 2024 and sentenced to nine years in prison. Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, has yet to publicly comment on the offer, but her lawyer Peter Ticktin tells WIRED she "is giving consideration to helping in the efforts in Shasta County, as there most definitely has been monkey business in the way the election was handled."

Hot or Not Built the Internet We're Still Swiping Through The early website Hot or Not taught its users to rank people at scale. Twenty-six years later, dating apps are trying to escape the culture the site helped create. Before the internet learned to like, match, and swipe, it learned to ask one brutally simple question: hot or not? Launched in 2000, Hot or Not invited people to upload photographs of themselves and be rated by strangers on a scale from 1 to 10. It was crude, addictive, and, within weeks, one of the most visited sites on the web.

From threats to the safety of poll workers to voters who can't distinguish between odds and results, prediction markets are already scrambling the political process. When Jim Allen, the elections director for Delaware County, Pennsylvania, recently ran a training session for poll workers, he began a conversation about a topic he'd never previously had to address during training: prediction markets . "There was one person who stood up, and they said, 'Well, what if we just want to make a minor bet on what turnout will be, that'll keep things interesting?' And we said: 'No, this is all bad,'" Allen, who oversees 383 precincts, recounts. As a result, Allen and the board of elections in Delaware County amended the oaths signed by people involved in elections to include "an affirmation that the workers have no direct or indirect interests in any bets, wagers, or prediction markets."

An AI interview is increasingly the first step of a hiring process. Since there's no human on the other end, candidates are scheduling them whenever--even deep into the night. When Tim Millard received an email about interviewing for a media relations job in January, six months into his job hunt, he assumed he'd speak to a human. When he was instead instructed to record himself answering a series of questions on camera, he felt a familiar pang of resignation--one that had followed him throughout the job hunt . "I figured, I have to do this if I want to be considered for the job," Millard tells WIRED.

WIRED spoke with Tucker Bryant, an artist and former Google employee who created ChatTJB to get people to reflect on the "strange moment" we're in. What if, instead of typing the next silly question you have into Claude or ChatGPT, you asked a random guy instead? A San Francisco billboard describes ChatTJB as "the leading chat interface powered by AI." In this case, though, AI stands for "average individual." Bryant didn't train an LLM to respond based on how he writes.

An error with the cloud computing giant's billing operation caused some customers' monthly bills to rise from a few cents to billions of dollars. A glitch with Amazon Web Services' billing operation led some customers to believe they owed the world's fifth most valuable company billions of dollars. Bill Radjewski, who runs CollegeFootballData.com, was one of the affected customers. This morning, he woke up to a jarring email alert from AWS: He had racked up more than $1.5 billion in usage fees, and his August 1 bill was on track to be upwards of $3 billion. "I've had this account for 6+ years and in that time my monthly spend has never exceeded $0.02," Radjewski tells WIRED.

One of Kalshi's most prominent traders tells WIRED he's swearing off Spotify-related markets until the issue is resolved. Top Kalshi trader Caleb Davies usually speaks to the press about how prediction markets help him rake in money. The Minneapolis-based IT worker estimates he's made $1.2 million overall across different prediction platforms, with $414,000 in winnings from Kalshi's culture markets alone. He especially enjoys wagering on music charts, because he carefully analyzes Spotify data to pick winners. "Every single morning, I'm going in, downloading the data, and updating my projections," he tells WIRED.

Big Tech is throwing big money into data center buildouts. As national opposition to the facilities grows, some workers are beginning to question whether it's worth it. As Big Tech dumps billions of dollars into America's data center buildout, a slew of opportunities have opened up to the electricians wiring these massive facilities. In some cases, the scale of the projects and the demanding construction timelines are fueling talent wars for the industry's best and brightest. The US-based International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) has argued that its workers are "powering the AI Revolution," and a set of "Data Center Principles" published in March argues that union labor is "essential to the future of AI." Tech companies are trying to meet the moment: Meta recently announced a skilled trade academy program, and Google committed $50 million to help train people in skilled trades.