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The AI arms race between China and the US has researchers on both sides worried about a "Chernobyl moment." Just over a week ago, I attended a major artificial intelligence conference in Zhongguancun, Beijing's bustling high-tech district. It was packed with fascinating sessions touching on everything from recursive self-improvement--the idea that models can tweak their own code and advance indefinitely--to humanoid robots. And it featured a few legends of computing, including Whitfield Diffie, co-inventor of public-key cryptography, and Andrew Barto, who won the Turing Award with Rich Sutton for his pioneering work on reinforcement learning. But I left with one takeaway above all else: The US and China should put their fierce AI rivalry to the side.

The Trump White House Is Over Anthropic's Dario Amodei At high-stakes meetings with the White House, Anthropic's CEO--a weirdo, per one official--has been replaced by cofounder Tom Brown. The Trump administration has been happier talking to Anthropic lately, according to people familiar with the matter: They don't have to deal with CEO Dario Amodei anymore, because he's been replaced in meetings about re-releasing the Claude Fable 5 AI model by his cofounder Tom Brown. "Tom Brown is not being a weirdo like Dario and can actually engage," said one person directly familiar with the calls. The administration has not yet lifted the export controls that took Anthropic's most powerful models offline on June 12 after the National Security Agency affirmed there were ways to disable guardrails and access the more powerful capabilities of the company's restricted Mythos model. But the administration has had multiple calls with Anthropic in recent days, encouraged by the fact that Brown and Anthropic's public policy chief, Sarah Heck, have been leading the outreach.

Anthropic still can't distribute Claude Mythos or Fable 5 after running afoul of the Trump administration. But no one can say exactly what the company did wrong. It's been nearly a week since the Trump administration sent an export control directive to Anthropic, forcing one of the world's leading AI labs to pull its most advanced models offline. After days of negotiations between Anthropic and the White House, the two still remain at odds about how to bring Claude Mythos and Fable 5 back. Well, it depends whom you ask.

"You would not believe the texts I got from these tech guys," NYT reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan quote Donald Trump as telling associates in an upcoming book. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos sought to ingratiate themselves with President Donald Trump after he won the 2024 election, and in return he mocked their efforts behind their backs, according to a new book by The New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Zuckerberg once texted Trump a photo of a letter written by one of his grade-school-age children, who wrote that they "looked forward to the golden age of America," a slogan Trump had repeated at rallies during the presidential campaign. And over dinner at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club, Bezos denigrated The Washington Post to Trump and essentially described the newspaper as one of his worst financial investments, months before he unsuccessfully sought a business favor from the president. These episodes are detailed in the book, a copy of which WIRED obtained ahead of its release on June 23.

Days before Anthropic took its most advanced AI models offline, the White House ordered the company to revoke SK Telecom's access to Claude Mythos over claims of alleged ties to China. The Trump administration's move to impose export controls on Anthropic's most powerful AI technology followed a spat over the company granting South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom access to its Claude Mythos model, according to people familiar with the matter. US officials were concerned about what they alleged were SK Telecom's ties to China, those people said. Those concerns appear to have compounded when Amazon later flagged vulnerabilities it identified in Fable 5 to the White House. Fable 5 is a highly safeguarded version of Mythos that Anthropic released to the public on June 9.

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Trump administration officials tell WIRED that if Anthropic wants to rerelease Fable 5, it will need to ensure the model's guardrails can't be circumvented. Security experts say that can't be done. The Trump administration's disagreement with Anthropic over its most advanced AI models appears to be fast coming to a head. Trump officials tell Inner Loop that if Anthropic wants to rerelease Claude Fable 5, the AI model that they took offline with export controls last week over concerns about jailbreaking--a method of using prompts to get around a model's safeguards--the company will need to take steps to actually address what the government alleges are vulnerabilities. Anthropic has said for days that the administration's concerns are overblown and that the effects of the jailbreaks are minimal.

More than 200 of the world's elites registered for a retreat whose agenda runs from panels on cult-building and sex to prepping for World War III. An associated app offers matchmaking. A trove of internal records from a secret society for powerful figures in US politics, finance, and tech was left exposed online, WIRED has confirmed, naming participants in its events and revealing sensitive personal details they were assured would stay private. The group, called Dialog, is a private, invitation-only organization cofounded in 2006 by the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel . It convenes US officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives at off-the-record annual retreats. Dialog has spent two decades declining to disclose its members.

'Dangerous' AI Models Are Coming No Matter What The US government crackdown on Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 hides a glaring truth: AI models with advanced hacking capabilities will soon be the norm. Late last week, Anthropic took its new Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models offline following a United States government export-control directive barring "any foreign national" from using the services. The company has been in talks with the White House since Friday but has yet to secure an agreement that would allow it to reinstate the offerings. Since Mythos debuted in April, Anthropic has claimed--and warned--that the model has advanced capabilities for not only finding software vulnerabilities to help defenders patch them, but also figuring out ways to exploit them that could be used by bad actors. Anthropic itself noted this double edged sword in its launch of Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5. "A great deal of advanced usage of AI models is dual use: the same queries that are beneficial in the hands of cybersecurity professionals and biology researchers could be dangerous if available to malicious actors," the company wrote in a blog post last week.