Business

Tech Crackdown

Microsoft Faces EU Charges Over ‘Abusive’ Bundling

The European Union has issued competition charges against Microsoft, accusing it of illegally linking Teams with Office.

Morgan Meaker

Pipe Down

The US Is Being Flooded by Chinese Vapes

Louise Matsakis

Face the Music

US Record Labels Sue AI Music Generators Suno and Udio for Copyright Infringement

Kate Knibbs

Artificial Intelligence

We’re Still Waiting for the Next Big Leap in AI

Anthropic’s latest Claude AI model pulls ahead of rivals from OpenAI and Google. But advances in machine intelligence have lately been more incremental than revolutionary.

Will Knight

Europe Scrambles for Relevance in the Age of AI

With chatbot and AI development largely coming from the US, some EU entrepreneurs and politicians say local champions are needed to prevent a cultural flattening.

Peter Guest

Light-Based Chips Could Help Slake AI’s Ever-Growing Thirst for Energy

Optical neural networks, which use photons instead of electrons, have advantages over traditional systems. They also face major obstacles.

Amos Zeeberg

As Google Targets AI Search Ads, It Could Learn a Lot From Bing

Microsoft and Google are bringing ads to their AI search experiences. But users don’t always find it helpful.

Paresh Dave

Startups and Tech Culture

My Memories Are Just Meta's Training Data Now

Meta’s plans to use personal content posted by Facebook and Instagram users to train algorithms suggest our digital histories are being repackaged to teach AI about—and how to mimic—humanity.

Morgan Meaker

Airbnb’s Olympics Push Could Help It Win Over Paris

Paris officials have placed tough new restrictions on Airbnb rentals in recent years. The company is using the Olympics to try and win over locals and broaden its footprint in the iconic city.

Amanda Hoover

OpenAI-Backed Nonprofits Have Gone Back on Their Transparency Pledges

Two organizations that handed out unconditional cash grants told WIRED that they will no longer disclose their financial statements and internal policies. Their stance follows a similar denial by OpenAI.

Paresh Dave

No Matter How You Package It, Apple Intelligence Is AI

Apple is eager to show us that its approach to artificial intelligence is safer, better, and more useful than the competition. Maybe that's just a hallucination, but it's working.

Steven Levy

Blockchain and Cryptocurrency

How Researchers Cracked an 11-Year-Old Password to a $3 Million Crypto Wallet

Thanks to a flaw in a decade-old version of the RoboForm password manager and a bit of luck, researchers were able to unearth the password to a crypto wallet containing a fortune.

Kim Zetter

The $2.3 Billion Tornado Cash Case Is a Pivotal Moment for Crypto Privacy

Tuesday’s verdict in the trial of Alexey Pertsev, a creator of crypto-privacy service Tornado Cash, is the first in a string of cases that could make it much harder to skirt financial surveillance.

Andy Greenberg

A Vast New Data Set Could Supercharge the AI Hunt for Crypto Money Laundering

Blockchain analysis firm Elliptic, MIT, and IBM have released a new AI model—and the 200-million-transaction dataset it's trained on—that aims to spot the “shape” of bitcoin money laundering.

Andy Greenberg

Crypto FOMO Is Back. So Are the Scams

After cryptocurrency prices spiked, scammers have flooded the market with fake tokens that promise investors great riches, but leave them penniless. It’s working.

Joel Khalili