The company's latest recall of 3,871 vehicles follows incidents of its autonomous cars "prioritizing other hazards" or failing to recognize closed construction zones altogether. Waymo has filed its fourth safety recall since February 2024, after its driverless cars were caught entering closed freeway-construction zones. The recall, filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on June 17, appears to affect Waymo's entire US fleet, covering 3,871 vehicles running Waymo's 5th Generation automated driving system (ADS). NHTSA estimates 100 precent of the affected units carry the defect, which is outlined in the filed safety recall report as "under certain circumstances, the AV may enter and drive at speed in freeway-construction zones due to inappropriately prioritizing the avoidance of other freeway hazards and/or failing to recognize the construction zone." Waymo started offering highway rides in late 2025, and the underlying problem appears to be a failure of priority logic.

This week only, every donation is doubled! Halfway through our Summer Membership Drive, we're still well behind where we need to be. But there's good news: This week, every donation will be doubled up, to $50,000 We need you right now. We need you right now. Trump's Justice Department Backs Elon Musk in Data Center Lawsuit DOJ urges judge to throw NAACP's legal action over xAI's gas turbines in Mississippi.

DOJ Lawyers Argue xAI Is'Vital' for National Security in NAACP Lawsuit In a bid to dismiss a lawsuit over xAI's polluting gas turbines, the Justice Department claimed the company is integral to military operations--including the Iran War. The Department of Justice intervened in a lawsuit over xAI's gas turbines on Monday. In a filing, the agency sided with Elon Musk's company, saying attempts to stop xAI from running the natural gas turbines "threatens American national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War's military operations." The DOJ, along with xAI and the state of Mississippi, asked the court to dismiss the suit, filed by the NAACP in April. The NAACP alleges xAI isn't following the Clean Air Act and is endangering public health by running unpermitted natural gas turbines at the site of its second data center in Southaven, Mississippi, dubbed Colossus 2. In May, the NAACP filed a request for a preliminary injunction to stop xAI from running the turbines, alleging that their continued use without a permit "increases risks of asthma attacks and heart disease" in communities with an already heavy pollution burden .

Activists raised a 40-foot-tall inflatable Elon Musk in Manhattan to draw attention to the risk he allegedly poses to investors. It was surrounded by black banners with statements alleging "Grok makes AI child porn" and "SpaceX owns Grok," referring to the Musk-owned AI chatbot whose image-generation tool was used to create a flood of sexualized images of minors earlier this year. Masked attendants stood nearby, handing out flyers with additional information, but they would not speak with the media. The demonstration was helmed by Safe AI Now (SAIN), which describes itself as "a coalition of faith leaders, family advocates, child development experts, online safety organizations, educators, legal professionals, technologists, and concerned citizens," ahead of SpaceX's initial public offering on Friday. The location was strategically chosen--right in front of the Nasdaq and the offices of JP Morgan, one of the banks participating in the IPO .

The CEO of Google DeepMind tells WIRED that companies should use the productivity gains of AI to do more, not lay people off. Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, is keen to talk about the coding skills of his company's newest model, Gemini 3.5 Flash. The model has been trained to perform complex agentic coding tasks: translate large code bases from one language to another; find and fix bugs lurking deep in knotty code; and even write entire operating systems from scratch. Hassabis does not, however, think this spells doom for software developers. "I have no idea why people are going around talking with certainty about that," Hassabis tells WIRED ahead of the new model reveal at today's Google's I/O event .

The ex-employees, who cofounded a new AI watchdog group, say investors deserve more information about xAI's safety practices before SpaceX goes public. Two former OpenAI employees and a group of AI safety nonprofits are warning that Elon Musk's AI lab, xAI, could become a liability for prospective investors in SpaceX, which is preparing to file what's expected to be the largest initial public offering in Wall Street History. In a letter directed to investors published on Tuesday, the ex-staffers highlighted what they describe as "unpriced risks" related to xAI that could complicate SpaceX's reported plans to raise up to $75 billion as part of its IPO. The rocket company's private valuation shot up to over $1 trillion after it acquired xAI last year . Musk claimed his rocket company could launch data centers into space for his AI lab, but the letter's authors argue that xAI's poor record on safety issues could complicate how investors view the combined company as it gets ready to submit its IPO prospectus filing .

It's called Grok Build, and it's still in its early beta version that's initially only available to SuperGrok Heavy subscribers paying $300 per month for the service. It says it will take user feedback from the early beta release to improve the product. SuperGrok Heavy users can install the beta from xAI's website and then log into their account to be able to access it. As Bloomberg notes, xAI has been trying to catch up to its rival companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Elon Musk, the company's founder and CEO, previously admitted that it has fallen behind its competitors when it comes to coding.

In an unexpected turn, the two companies signed a deal for Anthropic to use computing resources from Elon Musk's xAI. Anthropic and Elon Musk's SpaceX said on Wednesday that the two entities have signed an agreement for Anthropic to use computing resources from xAI's data center in Memphis, Tennessee. It's the latest tie up in an industry that is scrambling to find enough computers to run complex AI software. SpaceX and xAI were previously separate companies, but the two merged earlier this year. The combined entity, also owned by Musk, is called SpaceXAI.

Pearl's causal hierarchy shows that observational, interventional, and counterfactual queries are qualitatively distinct. We ask a quantitative version of this question: how many additional bits are needed to specify higher-rung causal answers once lower-rung answers are known? We formalize this via query-class description length, the Kolmogorov complexity of the answer oracle induced by an SCM for a class of queries. Our main construction gives binary acyclic SCMs whose observational distribution has constant description length, while the single-variable interventional answer oracle has description length $Θ(n^2)$. A degree-sensitive upper bound shows that finite-gate-schema SCMs of indegree $d$ have observational-interventional gap at most $O(nd \log(en/d) + n \log n)$, making the quadratic construction order-optimal in the dense regime and a rooted-tree construction order-optimal for bounded indegree. The quadratic separation persists under $\varepsilon$-accurate total-variation descriptions for every fixed $\varepsilon < 1/4$. At the next rung, the full hard-do interventional oracle can still leave a $Θ(n)$ counterfactual description gap. A general ambiguity-to-bits theorem and Shannon analogue show that these gaps equal the logarithm of residual higher-rung ambiguity up to lower-order terms.

Musk v. Altman week 1: Elon Musk says he was duped, warns AI could kill us all, and admits that xAI distills OpenAI's models Musk kept his cool, and OpenAI's lawyer bulldozed him with piercing questions about his motivations for suing the company. In the first week of the landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, Musk took the stand in a crisp black suit and tie and argued that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman had deceived him into bankrolling the company. Along the way, he warned that AI could destroy us all and sat through revelations that he had poached OpenAI employees for his own companies. He even confessed, to some audible gasps in the courtroom, that his own AI company, xAI, which makes the chatbot Grok, uses OpenAI's models to train its own. The federal courthouse in Oakland, California, was packed with armies of lawyers carrying boxes of exhibits, journalists typing away at their laptops, and a handful of concerned OpenAI employees. Outside, protesters lined the streets, carrying signs urging people to quit ChatGPT, boycott Tesla, or both.