The FCC Wants to Kill Burner Phones
Key takeaways
- As Europe looks to separate and insulate itself from US Big Tech, WIRED created a timeline that tracks all the ways EU governments, companies, and other organizations are moving away from US tech.
- The 2026 World Cup is in full swing, and WIRED looked at the surveillance technologies, from anti-drone tech to face recognition, that are being used in US, Canadian, and Mexican stadiums.
- Donald Trump, meanwhile, jeopardized the future of a key surveillance authority after selecting Bill Pulte, who’s been described as “deeply unqualified,” as the acting director of national intelligence.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Photo by Avalon/Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story After WIRED reported last week that Meta’s smart glasses app contained code that would enable the company to activate face-recognition features on the devices, the company removed the code this week without commenting on why or whether it plans to add such functionality back into the app later. Another WIRED investigation this week found that x AI’s Grok is still hosting sexualized deepfakes, including “nudified” images and videos, of celebrities and at least one prominent US politician.
After limiting the release of its new Mythos-class AI model over concerns about its potential impacts on cybersecurity, Anthropic announced a model upgrade for partners in its limited-access group this week and launched a “safe” version of the model to the public with guardrails meant to keep the system from being used to fuel cyberattacks. Meanwhile, the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a new directive to federal agencies this week in reaction to new AI threats that includes a requirement to fix the most urgent software vulnerabilities in as little as three days.
As Europe looks to separate and insulate itself from US Big Tech, WIRED created a timeline that tracks all the ways EU governments, companies, and other organizations are moving away from US tech. A new open-source project dubbed Encrypted Spaces could be used to make countless mainstream collaboration apps more private and surveillance-resistant with end-to-end encryption. And illegal pharmacy and scam websites hijacked Spotify’s search rankings using fake podcasts, according to a new joint US Congressional report.