authoritarianism

Maduro is gone, but his surveillance state has a Chinese AI upgrade on order

AndyC 9 September 2026

Casual observers of Venezuelan politics might have assumed that the US capture and removal of former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro...

Muse, Meta’s New Personal AI Agent, Needs You to Trust It

AndyC 9 September 2026

Meta announced Tuesday the release of Muse, a personal AI agent that people can message to automate digital tasks in a secure cloud environment, all...

Meta Failed to Catch Hundreds of AI Child Abuse Ads. Some Included Images of Real Kids

AndyC 8 September 2026

Editor’s note: This article contains descriptions of imagery depicting child sexual abuse. Reader discretion is strongly advised.Early last month, Meta deleted around 50 ads posted...

OpenAI Agents Hacked Another Website

AndyC 5 September 2026

After reporting last week that the surveillance company Flock Safety is building an AI search tool for law enforcement, WIRED reconstructed Flock’s latest search tool...

ICE Wants to Know Everyone Who Bought a Certain Green Beanie From REI in the Last 2 Years

AndyC 4 September 2026

Did you buy a beanie from REI recently? The Department of Homeland Security might be looking for you.New court filings allege that Homeland Security Investigations...

Nobody Is Saying Why OpenAI and Anthropic Had Outages Today

AndyC 4 September 2026

Frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI all experienced rare outages on Thursday morning, creating downtime for their corresponding AI chatbots. SpaceX, xAI’s parent company,...

Prediction Market Betting Is Getting People Banned and Arrested

AndyC 4 September 2026

Uncanny Valley is back! This week, senior writer Kate Knibbs joins Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger to discuss the two incidents that have...