Report: Samsung execs worried company could lose money on smartphones for the first time

Man faces 5 years in prison for using AI to fake sighting of runaway wolf

A 40-year-old man was arrested after using artificial intelligence to generate a fake image of a runaway wolf that South Korean authorities said obstructed an urgent investigation, the BBC reported. After Neukgu, a 2-year-old wolf, burrowed out of a zoo in Daejeon city, officials launched an all-out effort to bring him back. The third-generation descendant’s safe return was deemed critical to a yearslong effort to revive wolf populations after native South Korean wolves became extinct in the wild in the 1960s. Concern increased nationwide, with animal rights activists worried the wolf would be injured in the wild or perhaps killed during his rescue. South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, promised that rescue teams would prioritize Neukgu’s safety, The Guardian reported. Drones, police, emergency workers, and veterinarians all joined the search, alongside community members whose footage documenting the wolf’s movements helped…

Google will invest as much as $40 billion in Anthropic

Google will invest at least $10 billion in Anthropic, and that amount could rise to $40 billion if Anthropic meets certain performance targets, Bloomberg reports. The investment follows Amazon’s $5 billion initial investment in Anthropic a few days ago; the Amazon deal also leaves the door open to further investment based on performance. Both investments value Anthropic at $350 billion. Anthropic has seen rapid growth in the use of its Claude models and related products, such as Claude Code, which promises to significantly increase the speed and efficiency with which companies or individuals can develop software. (The reality varies from big improvements to setbacks, depending on the nature of the project and company, how Claude Code is used, and many other factors.) Several factors contributed to Anthropic’s success in recent months, including controversies around OpenAI and its ChatGPT product and…

US accuses China of “industrial-scale” AI theft. China says it’s “slander.”

The US is preparing to crack down on China’s allegedly “industrial-scale theft of American artificial intelligence labs’ intellectual property,” the Financial Times reported Thursday. Since the launch of DeepSeek—a Chinese model that OpenAI claimed was trained using outputs from its models—other AI firms have accused global rivals of using a method called distillation to steal their IP. In January, Google claimed that “commercially motivated” actors not limited to China attempted to clone its Gemini AI chatbot by promoting the model more than 100,000 times in bids to train cheaper copycats. The next month, Anthropic accused Chinese firms DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of using the same tactic to generate “over 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts.” Also in February, OpenAI confirmed that most attacks it saw originated from China. For the US, these distillation attacks supposedly threaten…

Greenhouse gases from data center boom could outpace entire nations

New gas projects linked to just 11 data center campuses around the US have the potential to create more greenhouse gases than the country of Morocco emitted in 2024. Emissions estimates from air permit documents examined by WIRED show that these natural gas projects—which are being built to power data centers to serve some of the US’s most powerful AI companies, including OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and xAI—have the potential to emit more than 129 million tons of greenhouse gases per year. As tech companies race to secure massive power deals to build out hundreds of data centers across the country, these projects represent just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the potential climate cost of the AI boom. The infrastructure on this list of large natural gas projects reviewed by WIRED is being developed to largely bypass…

Anthropic tested removing Claude Code from the Pro plan

Anthropic caused a stir among developers with what appeared to be a surprise change to its pricing plan: The company signaled that Claude Code, the popular agentic development tool, would no longer be available to subscribers on the $20-per-month Pro plan. Users took to Reddit and X to point out that Anthropic’s pricing page for Claude explicitly showed Claude Code as not supported in the Pro plan. (It remained in the $100/month+ Max plan.) Some new users signing up for Pro subscriptions were unable to access Claude Code. Meanwhile, existing subscribers saw no interruption. After speculation and frustration spread, Anthropic’s head of growth, Amol Avasare, took to social media to clarify that this was a “small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups.” As for the reasoning, he explained: When we launched Max a year ago, it didn’t include Claude…

Google unveils two new TPUs designed for the "agentic era"

Most of the companies that have fully committed to building AI models are gobbling up every Nvidia AI accelerator they can get, but Google has taken a different approach. Most of its cloud AI infrastructure is based on its line of custom Tensor processing units (TPUs). After announcing the seventh-gen Ironwood TPU in 2025, the company has moved on to the eighth-gen version, but it’s not just a faster iteration of the same chip. The new TPUs come in two flavors, providing Google and its customers with an AI platform that is faster and more efficient, the company says. Google is pushing the idea that the “agent era” is fundamentally different from the AI systems that came before, necessitating a new approach to the hardware. So engineers have devised the TPU8t (for training) and the TPU 8i (for inference). Before…

Indian med student rakes in thousands with AI-generated MAGA hottie

Like many medical school students, Sam was broke. The 22-year-old aspiring orthopedic surgeon from northern India got some money from his parents, but he says he spent most of it subsidizing his licensing exams, and he’s still saving up to hopefully emigrate to the US after graduation. So he started searching for ways to make additional money online. Sam, who requested a pseudonym to avoid jeopardizing his medical career and immigration status, tried a few things, with varying degrees of legitimacy and success. He made YouTube shorts and sold study notes to other med students. It wasn’t until he started scrolling through his Instagram feed that he landed on an idea: Why not make an AI-generated girl using Google Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro and sell bikini photos of her online? But when Sam started posting generic photos of a beautiful,…

Florida probes ChatGPT role in mass shooting. OpenAI says bot "not responsible."

OpenAI now faces a criminal probe after ChatGPT advised a gunman ahead of a mass shooting at a university in Florida, where two people were killed and six were wounded last year. In a press release, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier confirmed that the investigation into OpenAI’s potential criminal liability was launched after reviewing shocking chat logs between ChatGPT and an account linked to the suspected gunman, Phoenix Ikner. The 20-year-old Florida State University student is currently awaiting trial “on multiple charges of murder and attempted murder,” Politico reported. At a press conference, Uthmeier revealed that the logs showed that ChatGPT provided “significant advice” before Ikner allegedly “committed such heinous crimes.” The attorney general emphasized that under Florida’s aiding and abetting laws, “if ChatGPT were a person,” it too “would be facing charges for murder.” For OpenAI, the probe will…

Anthropic gets $5B investment from Amazon, will use it to buy Amazon chips

Amazon has significantly boosted its multibillion-dollar bet on Claude developer Anthropic by investing an additional $5 billion—enabling Anthropic to eventually secure up to 5 gigawatts’ worth of AI chips from Amazon to help train and run its popular Claude AI models. Amazon is already one of Anthropic’s largest investors, having previously invested $8 billion in the AI startup. The latest move brings Amazon’s immediate investment up to $13 billion, and the companies have agreed to the possibility of Amazon committing another $20 billion in the future if the partnership achieves certain commercial milestones, according to Wall Street Journal reporting. The large cash infusion and prospect of obtaining more computing resources come at a crucial time for Anthropic, given the massive surge in paid subscriptions for Claude-related services early this year. That demand spike and strain on the existing cloud compute…

Report: Meta will train AI agents by tracking employees' mouse, keyboard use

Meta will begin tracking the mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes of its US employees to generate high-quality training data for future AI agents, Reuters reports. The news organization cites internal memos posted by the Meta Superintelligence Labs team in reporting on the new Model Capability Initiative employee-tracking software. That software will operate on specific work-related apps and websites and also make use of periodic screenshots to provide context for the AI training, according to the memo. “This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work,” the memo reads, in part, Reuters reports. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told Reuters that the collected training data will help Meta’s AI agents with tasks that it sometimes struggles with, including “things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus.” “If we’re building agents to…

Mozilla: Anthropic's Mythos found 271 security vulnerabilities in Firefox 150

Earlier this month, Anthropic said its Mythos Preview model was so good at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities that the company was limiting its initial release to “a limited group of critical industry partners.” Since then, debate has raged over whether the model presages an era of turbocharged AI-aided hacking or if Anthropic is just building hype for what is a relatively normal step up on the ladder of advancing AI capabilities. Mozilla added some important data to that debate Tuesday, writing in a blog post that early access to Mythos Preview had helped it pre-identify 271 security vulnerabilities in this week’s release of Firefox 150. The results were significant enough to get Firefox CTO Bobby Holley to enthuse that, in the never-ending battle between cyberattackers and cyberdefenders, “defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively.” “We’ve rounded the curve” Holley didn’t…

Pentagon wants $54B for drones, more than most nations’ military budgets

The US military’s massive $1.5 trillion budget request for the next fiscal year includes what Pentagon officials described as the largest investment in drone warfare and counter-drone technology in US history. The proposed spending on drone and autonomous warfare technologies within the FY2027 budget proposal for the US Department of Defense would surpass most countries’ defense budgets and rank among the top 10 in the world for military spending, ahead of countries such as Ukraine, South Korea, and Israel. Specifically, the Pentagon is requesting $53.6 billion to boost US production and procurement of drones, train drone operators, build out a logistics network for sustaining drone deployments, and expand counter-drone systems to defend more US military sites. The funding request is budgeted under the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG), an organization established in late 2025 that would see a massive budget…

Robot runner handily beats humans in half-marathon, setting new record

Humanoid robots outran the fastest human competitors while surpassing the human world record during a half-marathon event held in Beijing on April 19. The demonstration of fast-improving robotic speed and autonomy comes as China’s tech industry is rapidly scaling up mass production of humanoid robots to explore possible uses in the real world. The fastest robot from Chinese smartphone-maker Honor notched a winning time of 50 minutes and 26 seconds while autonomously navigating the 13-mile (21-kilometer) route, according to the Global Times. That beat the human world record of 57 minutes and 20 seconds recently set by Ugandan long-distance runner Jacob Kiplimo during the Lisbon Half Marathon. The winning robot design took inspiration from top human athletes by incorporating long legs measuring approximately 37 inches (95 centimeters) in length, said Du Xiaodi, a test development engineer for Honor, who spoke…

Deezer says 44% of new music uploads are AI-generated, most streams are fraudulent

Music streaming services like Spotify and YouTube Music have become the primary way people listen to music, which can be a lot more convenient than buying individual albums. However, this also makes it easier for AI-created tracks to worm their way into your playlists. Most streamers don’t go out of their way to label AI music, but Deezer has worked to develop technology to identify that content. In a recent update, the company says AI music is approaching half of all new uploads, and most of the supposed listeners of those streams are AI themselves. AI-generated music has taken off in the last few years, but it doesn’t get as much attention as other parts of the AI ecosystem. That’s due, in part, to the fact that AI music can fly under the radar. With the right context and prompting,…

Anthropic's Mythos AI model sparks fears of turbocharged hacking

Anthropic’s new Mythos AI model is raising concern among governments and companies that it could outpace current cyber security defenses, turbocharge hacking, and expose weaknesses faster than they can be fixed. The San Francisco-based startup released a cyber-focused model this month, which has shown the ability to detect software flaws faster than humans but also demonstrated it can generate exploits needed to take advantage of them. In one alarming case, the Mythos model showed it could break out of a secure digital environment to contact an Anthropic worker and publicly reveal software glitches, overriding the intention of its human makers. This week, OpenAI also released its own advanced cyber model with similar capabilities. The developments have led senior international financial officials and government ministers around the world scrambling to understand the dangers, in some cases seeking access to the new…

Satellite and drone images reveal big delays in US data center construction

Silicon Valley has been pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into building ever-larger AI data centers that require as much electricity as hundreds of thousands of US homes—but that massive buildout faces significant construction and power challenges along with growing local resistance. Now satellite imagery is showing that nearly 40 percent of US data center projects may fail to be completed this year as scheduled. The Financial Times drew upon satellite imagery from the geospatial data analytics company SynMax showing how much progress has been made in clearing land and laying building foundations for each data center project. It also cross-checked project progress against public statements and permit documents compiled by the industry research group IIR Energy. The resulting analysis revealed how major projects from tech companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, and OpenAI are “likely to miss completion dates by…

Meta's AI spending spree is helping make its Quest headsets more expensive

The rising costs of RAM and other computing components are pushing up the price of Meta’s Quest VR headsets, which the company says will increase by $50–$100 (about 12–20 percent) starting on April 19. In announcing that price increase on Thursday, the company cited the “global surge in the price of critical components—specifically memory chips—[that] is impacting almost every category of consumer electronics, including VR.” But unlike many of the other tech companies that have been pushed into similar price increases in recent months, Meta’s own spending priorities are at least partly to blame for the rising prices of those components. The company’s recent hard pivot to the “AI superintelligence” race has directly contributed to the conditions that are now making its own Quest headsets more expensive. Spending like a drunk sailor In January, Meta announced that it plans to…

OpenAI starts offering a biology-tuned LLM

On Thursday, OpenAI announced it had developed a large language model specifically trained on common biology workflows. Called GPT-Rosalind after Rosalind Franklin, the model appears to differ from most science-focused models from major tech companies, which have generally taken a more generic approach that works for various fields. In a press briefing, Yunyun Wang, OpenAI’s Life Sciences Product Lead, said the system was designed to tackle two major roadblocks faced by current biology researchers. One is the massive datasets created by decades of genome sequencing and protein biochemistry, which can be too much for any one researcher to take in. The second is that biology has many highly specialized subfields, each with its own techniques and jargon. So, for example, a geneticist who finds themselves working on a gene that’s active in brain cells might struggle to understand the immense…

Mozilla launches Thunderbolt AI client with focus on self-hosted infrastructure

Mozilla is the latest legacy tech brand to make a play for the enterprise AI market. But the company behind Firefox and Thunderbird isn’t releasing its own standalone AI model or agentic browser. Instead, the newly announced Thunderbolt is being sold as a front-end client for users and businesses who want to run their own self-hosted AI infrastructure without relying on cloud-based third-party services. Thunderbolt is built on top of Haystack, an existing open source AI framework that lets users build custom, modular AI pipelines from user-chosen components. Thunderbolt acts as what Mozilla calls a “sovereign AI client” on top of that underlying infrastructure. The combo promises to let users easily plug into any ACP-compatible agent or OpenAI-compatible API (including Claude, Codex, OpenClaw, DeepSeek, and OpenCode). The system can also integrate with locally stored enterprise data through open protocols and…