News

#wired.com. × CBP Wants AI-Powered ‘Quantum Sensors’ for Finding Fentanyl in Cars. US Customs and Border Protection is paying General Dynamics to create prototype “quantum sensors,” to be used with an AI database to detect fentanyl and other narcotics.

#Jan.23.2026

#wired.com. × Age Verification Is Reaching a Global Tipping Point. Is TikTok’s Strategy a Good Compromise?. TikTok’s new age-detection tech seems like a better solution than automatically banning youth accounts. But experts say it still requires social platforms to surveil users more closely.

#Jan.23.2026

#wired.com. × The Math on AI Agents Doesn’t Add Up. A research paper suggests AI agents are mathematically doomed to fail. The industry doesn’t agree.

#Jan.23.2026

#wired.com. × 149 Million Usernames and Passwords Exposed by Unsecured Database. This “dream wish list for criminals” includes millions of Gmail, Facebook, banking logins, and more. The researcher who discovered it suspects they were collected using infostealing malware.

#Jan.23.2026

#wired.com. × What Happens When a Chinese Battery Factory Comes to Town. Chinese firms are building battery plants from Europe to North America, promising jobs while prompting local concerns about the environment, politics, and who really benefits.

#Jan.22.2026

#wired.com. × Sorry MAGA, Turns Out People Still Like ‘Woke’ Art. From Black vampires gobbling up Oscar nominations to gay pro hockey players dominating the culture, diverse stories broke through in an environment that’s increasingly hostile to them.

#Jan.23.2026

#wired.com. × How Claude Code Is Reshaping Software—and Anthropic. WIRED spoke with Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code, about how the viral coding tool is changing the way Anthropic works.

#Jan.22.2026

#wired.com. × ICE Agents Are ‘Doxing’ Themselves. The alleged risks of being publicly identified have not stopped DHS and ICE employees from creating profiles on LinkedIn, even as Kristi Noem threatens to treat revealing agents’ identities as a crime.

#Jan.22.2026

#wired.com. × We Are Witnessing the Self-Immolation of a Superpower. With Donald Trump’s actions in Greenland, Minneapolis, and Venezuela, a foreign enemy could not invent a better chain of events to wreck the standing of the United States.

#Jan.22.2026

#wired.com. × Google Nabs Top Talent From AI Voice Startup Hume AI. Hume AI’s CEO, Alan Cowen, will join Google DeepMind along with several top engineers as part of a major licensing deal.

#Jan.22.2026

#wired.com. × The US Is In For Another Bad Year of Measles Cases. A growing measles outbreak in South Carolina has infected more than 600 people since October, with hundreds more being potentially exposed.

#Jan.22.2026

#wired.com. × The US and China Are Collaborating More Closely on AI Than You Think. WIRED analyzed more than 5,000 papers from NeurIPS using OpenAI’s Codex to understand the areas where the US and China actually work together on AI research.

#Jan.21.2026

#wired.com. × What We Know About the Winter Storm About to Hit the US—and What We Don’t. A huge portion of the United States is going to be hit with snow or freezing rain this weekend. Exactly where, what, and how much remains uncertain.

#Jan.21.2026

#wired.com. × Surveillance and ICE Are Driving Patients Away From Medical Care, Report Warns. A new EPIC report says data brokers, ad-tech surveillance, and ICE enforcement are among the factors leading to a “health privacy crisis” that is eroding trust and deterring people from seeking care.

#Jan.21.2026

#wired.com. × Micron Megafab Project Faces a New Hurdle as Activists Seek a Benefits Deal. Activists are demanding a way to hold the memory-chip maker accountable to its promises to protect the environment and embrace communities of color in central New York.

#Jan.21.2026

#wired.com. × Meta Seeks to Bar Mentions of Mental Health—and Zuckerberg’s Harvard Past—From Child Safety Trial. The trial starts soon in New Mexico’s case against Meta—and the company is pulling out all the stops to protect its reputation.

#Jan.21.2026

#wired.com. × The AI Boom Will Increase US Carbon Emissions—but It Doesn’t Have To. A new analysis finds that data centers’ energy demands will drastically increase power plant emissions over the next decade. Renewables, though, could cut them while helping keep prices from rising.

#Jan.21.2026

#wired.com. × ‘Veronika’ Is the First Cow Known to Use a Tool. This is the first recorded instance of a bovine using tools from her environment to relieve an itch—leaving scientists astonished.

#Jan.20.2026

#wired.com. × ICE Details a New Minnesota-Based Detention Network That Spans 5 States. Internal ICE planning documents propose spending up to $50 million on a privately run network capable of shipping immigrants in custody hundreds of miles across the Upper Midwest.

#Jan.20.2026

#wired.com. × Jimmy Wales Will Never Edit Donald Trump’s Wikipedia Page: He ‘Makes Me Insane’. On this week’s episode of ‘The Big Interview’ podcast, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales talks about maintaining neutrality in an online ecosystem increasingly hostile to facts.

#Jan.20.2026

#wired.com. × She Was Given Up by Her Chinese Parents—and Spent 14 Years Trying to Find a Way Back. More and more Chinese adoptees in the US are trying to reunite with their birth parents. For Youxue, it took more than a decade, and a remarkable coincidence.

#Jan.20.2026

#wired.com. × 23 Ways You’re Already Living in the Chinese Century. The robotics explosion. The energy revolution. The cultural takeover. It’s everything you wanted for the United States—but done better in China.

#Jan.20.2026