In an exclusive interview with WIRED, Paragon Solutions CEO Andrew Boyd reveals the limits of the company's promise to keep bad actors from abusing its powerful espionage tool. Spyware maker Paragon Solutions has long positioned itself as the good guy in an industry seemingly filled with bad ones, vowing to never sell its mobile spyware to authoritarian regimes or ones with poor human rights records. It also promises to cut off any customer caught misusing its products against journalists, dissidents, or other non-legitimate targets. Yet weeks after Paragon, then Israeli-owned, was acquired by the US equity firm AE Industrial Partners in December 2024 and merged with REDLattice--an American offensive cyber firm owned by AE that this week announced plans to go public --WhatsApp alleged that Paragon's Graphite spyware was used to infect the phones of more than 60 individuals in more than 20 countries, including journalists and activists. Most of the targets were not identified, but the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab named two journalists and two activists in Italy. Italian authorities denied misuse . Paragon and its new US owners, despite their zero-tolerance policy for customer abuse of their software, initially declined to comment on the allegations, and reportedly was exploring potential legal action against WhatsApp after the company sent a cease-and-desist letter to Paragon.

Trump's AI Safety'Accord' Is a Fancy Pinky-Swear Six major AI companies signed a voluntary agreement with the White House this week vowing to implement safeguards. On Tuesday, executives for Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Nvidia all signed "The White House Accord on Super Intelligence," which was announced following a luncheon held by President Donald Trump. The effort was an act of "tremendous self-regulation," as Trump put it, but the agreement is not the sweeping AI regulation that people inside the companies themselves have been asking for. And while failing to honor these public commitments could count as illegally lying to consumers, even that wouldn't be enough to trigger massive reforms. The statement says that companies "should implement" several things: First, they should ensure they have "robust internal controls" to monitor their models' capabilities and ability to not go rogue or hack things in unintended ways.

'Making AI go well is a shared responsibility.' 'Making AI go well is a shared responsibility.' Here's how tech companies can prepare for a slowdown I understand the pressure on AI companies to rush forward. L ast month, more than a thousand employees at frontier AI companies signed a letter asking the US government to find a way to "pace" AI development, citing the risk of the technology spiraling out of human control as it begins to build itself . They were right to be concerned: just days earlier, two AI models that OpenAI was testing internally escaped the test environment, then autonomously hacked the company Hugging Face and at least three other online services .

China Is Strapping'Digital Bombs' to Civilian Infrastructure--Is the US Ready? Earlier this year, insurance executives gathered in a Times Square conference room to play out a scenario: a Chinese cyberattack knocks out 5,000 US water utilities at once. If you think that's a far-fetched scenario, think again. WIRED's Andy Greenberg got rare access to the closed-door war game and walked away with some disturbing conclusions. This week, Brian Barrett sits down to talk with Andy about Volt Typhoon, the Chinese state-sponsored hacking group that's spent the past three years pre-positioning itself inside American infrastructure. You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett and Andy Greenberg on Bluesky at @agreenberg . Write to us at [email protected] . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link .

Analysts project sales of humanoid robots could rise from $2bn in 2025 to $300bn in 2035. Analysts project sales of humanoid robots could rise from $2bn in 2025 to $300bn in 2035. Company's robots have gained global fame via videos of them performing martial arts and as dancers for pop stars EDTLast modified on Wed 19 Aug 2026 04.44 EDT Unitree, the world's biggest humanoid robot maker, has made a spectacular entry on to China's stock market, with its shares surging by more than 600%. The Chinese company's robots have gained global fame via viral videos of them performing martial arts, running at Olympic speeds and serving as backup dancers for pop stars. Photograph: Adek Berry/AFP/Getty ImagesShares in the business, officially known as Yushu Technology Co, rose to as high as 1,100 yuan (£120.39) on Wednesday, up from an IPO price of just 150.8 yuan.

Pat Gelsinger wants to pave the way to ever more powerful artificial intelligence using tiny beams of light. After Pat Gelsinger departed Intel as CEO in late 2024, he held 100 meetings in 100 days. The idea, he told WIRED recently, was to whittle down his options until he figured out what to do next. The following March, Gelsinger announced that he had taken a position as general partner at Playground Capital, a venture capital firm specializing in deep tech, taking bets on fledgling technologies built on new science. Gelsinger took the role with the aim of helping a new generation of semiconductor startups reawaken Moore's law . Decades ago, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would double roughly every two years, with a corresponding leap in performance.

China's AI models have Trump's AI world at war with itself Kimi and other free models from China have again been seen as a wake-up call. David Sacks, the president's AI and crypto "czar" until March, branded Anthropic's models as "lobotomized" and "woke." Emil Michael, a top Pentagon official, called OpenAI's new head of strategic futures a "supreme village idiot." It began because no one can agree on what to do about Kimi, a free, open source model that Chinese AI company Moonshot launched last week. It appears to rival the intelligence of models from OpenAI and Anthropic, which are very much not free. Kimi and other Chinese models like it pose a real problem for Trump.

Check your subscription status, update your details and more. Powerful artificial intelligence models built by Chinese companies have gone from inducing widespread panic to being met with a shrug of the shoulders - what changed? When Chinese company DeepSeek released its open-source R1 model in January 2025, it made headlines around the world. The large language model (LLM) was reported to rival some of the most powerful AIs from US companies, but it was completely free for anyone to download. A trillion dollars was wiped off the value of US tech companies and US lawmakers immediately proposed banning it on government devices.

Peter Shor's algorithm could break the internet - but he's not worried Few people have invented an algorithm with the potential to spark a worldwide crisis, so why is quantum computing pioneer Peter Shor so unconcerned? "So, he's the Beyoncé of this event?" a young woman standing behind me says to a colleague. The three of us are standing, looking at the back of a crowd, whose members are all looking at a bearded man in an orange sweater. Getting a look at him is like trying to see the - only fleeting glimpses are possible. "His algorithm is the algorithm that will break everything," the colleague says, as I briefly catch sight of people posing for selfies and getting their conference badges signed.

Sam Altman is in talks with the US government in a bid to clear political hurdles, says the Financial Times. OpenAI's Sam Altman has reportedly been in talks with the US government to ensure his company's path towards achieving its goals remains free of political hurdles. According to the Financial Times, Altman has suggested giving the government a five percent stake in the company, in order to share the spoils of the AI boom with the public. But his idea doesn't only involve OpenAI: Under his proposal, other top AI companies like Google, Anthropic, xAI and Meta would have to agree to give the government a similar stake in their businesses. AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have recently encountered roadblocks from the US government when it came to releasing their latest AI models.