Here’s What the AI Apocalypse Could Look Like

The debate of whether AI can kill us has been everywhere lately, but what would an actual AI catastrophe look like? This week, Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger break down three real-world scenarios experts worry the most about—including hacked water supplies, bioweapons, and autonomous robots. We also discuss the highlights of Salesforce’s annual conference, where OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei defended their positions on AI safety. Plus, Leah tells us how this backlash against AI has become a rare bipartisan flashpoint, to the point that Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon shared a stage over it this week.Articles mentioned in this episode:China Isn’t Buying Silicon Valley’s Call for an AI SlowdownWashington Won’t Be Regulating AI Anytime SoonWhy So Many AI Researchers Think the Machines Could Kill EveryoneOpenAI Wants to Know if an AI Industry Slowdown Would Even Be LegalYou can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer, and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger. Write to us at [email protected].How to ListenYou can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how:If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too.TranscriptNote: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, contributing editor.Brian Barrett: I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor.Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.Zoë Schiffer: Today on the show, we're diving into the debate about whether AI is going to kill us all. And instead of just adding to the pile of hot takes that already exist, we're going to walk you through real specific scenarios to the best of our ability about how AI would actually do this, and why the tech CEOs and politicians cannot seem to agree on the way forward. OK, guys, so the debate about AI safety has officially escaped containment.Brian Barrett: Oh.Zoë Schiffer: I know.Brian Barrett: Zoë, I see what you did there. Wow.Zoë Schiffer: You see what I did there? That's the thing that's really spread uncontrollably. AI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and posted on X that, "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei has called for a slowdown. They call this, "pacing the frontier." And Sam Altman and Elon Musk have actually signed on, a rare moment of agreement. But honestly, with all of this talk about AI wiping out humanity, I have been left with a very basic question, which is, how exactly does this happen? What does AI going completely rogue actually look like?Leah Feiger: I'm so happy we're doing this. We had such a great podcast last week with WIRED's Will Knight talking about everyone being concerned about this, but I want like a breakdown. I need you to just take me through every single scenario from bioweapons to nuclear codes, to what are we really talking about here when we're talking about AI deathbots.Zoë Schiffer: We are going to do our very best. I did spend the most time I've ever spent reading LessWrong over the last two days trying to figure this out. They love a scenario-planning exercise, but just to get everyone up to speed on kind of the latest, there was an event this week hosted by Salesforce where Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and NVIDIA's Jensen Huang were all in attendance, and naturally they had to talk about AI safety. Let's take a listen at what Sam Altman had to say.Sam Altman, archival audio: I think the world is right to be afraid of this. So we have these two big challenges. We have the potential of a loss-of-control accident or some other serious thing that could go wrong. We have the potential of way too much power concentration and people fear that those developing AI could exert their worldview. And there is this sort of narrow path we have to navigate with pragmatism, with steadiness, with the ability for the world to trust that we'll make dependable decisions, consistent decisions through this. And I think people are saying, "Well, this now seems pretty important. Let's get it right."Leah Feiger: I'm definitely in the camp that says we should be very concerned about this technology, how it's getting regulated, how it's getting utilized, the people in control. I don't disagree. And on the other hand, this also just reads like a fever-dream pitch to someone's massive IPO in the making.Brian Barrett: I don't know. I get the marketing argument, but I think we're past that a little bit. I feel like—Leah Feiger: Really?Brian Barrett: If anything, well, if anything, Sam Altman has been using "the existential threat" as a reason not to go public yet. He's saying, "No, this is too dangerous. We have to wait until next year." Is that really why? I don't know, but there are probably some business reasons, too. I get why Anthropic and others saying, "Look, we're building something that's basically as strong as a nuclear weapon," felt like marketing. Something that's like, "Oh, actually I'm quitting because I think that I'm building something that will actually destroy the world," feels different. I feel like there's a substantive difference.Leah Feiger: The quitting part feels different to me, but this is still Sam Altman. His financial future is on the line here with this and it's hard ... At least it's hard for me to parse that as being a way. "We are building the biggest, bestest, most powerful robot ever, and you guys should be kind of scared about it. And don't worry, we're going to take steps. They're not going to be regulatory steps, but there'll be steps of some kind." That still feels like a marketing ploy in some worlds.Brian Barrett: I guess. I guess the nature of the threat, though, and we'll get into that later, is more that like, "Oh, we don't know how to control these things. They're going to go nuts and we're not going to be able to stop it." That feels like, "We're not competent enough right now to do anything about it," which feels like less of a marketing-Leah Feiger: That's fair. What did everyone else at the seminar say, Zoë?Zoë Schiffer: So Dario was introduced by Salesforce's CEO, Marc Benioff, who is very laissez-faire and does not seem worried about AI's existential risks.Marc Benioff, archival audio: Dario, hello Dario. How are you?Dario Amodei, archival audio: Hey.Marc Benioff, archival audio: Great to have you. Fantastic. Great job, Dario. You're doing an amazing job leading the AI industry, guiding it all right from our Slack headquarters building. We watch you every day. Give us your state where your mind is right now.Dario Amodei, archival audio: Yeah, obviously it's very tempting to attack your competitor and say, "These guys are unsafe, we're safe." But I think the more responsible way to respond to it is to say, "Hey, first of all, let's look at our own record. We may not have had this big high-profile incident, but I'm sure we're not perfect. Let's look at everything and we can always be better. Let's make our practices better." Then, let's organize the rest of the industry and say, "What can we do to set standards for everyone? What can we do to make everyone's standards better?" And then, finally, there should be an international component to it. And that's essentially the three-step plan that I laid out in the essay.Brian Barrett: Two things. Two things real quick. One, Anthropic did have its own high-profile incident. An Anthropic agent—Leah Feiger: I was going to say.Brian Barrett: ... did like extensive social engineering to try to trick a GitHub ... try to put a bad pull request into a GitHub repo? Anthropic has its issues here. The other thing is, too, Dario has this three-step plan. We can talk about that a little bit more later, but one of the steps of the plan is like, figure out China TBD, in a way that's just so unhelpful.Leah Feiger: International. International.Zoë Schiffer: WIRED editor Louise Matsakis just published, I thought a really good piece on this. The idea that Dario can say, "We need an international plan. We need to figure out China. We need to negotiate in some way so that China's on board with this slowdown. But the prerequisite to negotiation is that we have to make sure that we regulate access to Chinese models in a way that keeps US AI far ahead." And China's like, "That doesn't feel like a good negotiation."Brian Barrett: Why would we do that, Dario? Why?Leah Feiger: Truly in that 30-second spiel, I'm just recounting every single person that he's managed to piss off, which even referencing his paper, Donald Trump was incensed by it and looked at it as such a mechanism for slowdown, that it has possibly been a linchpin for halting any sort of regulation that would happen because he was so mad about it. I have to say, hats off, being able to piss off every single person, even those that are theoretically in your economic corner is, my God, chef's kiss, impressive.Zoë Schiffer: OK. So to close out the CEO statements, Jensen Huang had some thought of his own, and it seems like something that they all agree on is that AI safety matters as long as the companies can dictate the terms.Jensen Huang, archival audio: Well, safety is paramount. In a lot of ways, it's job one. If you build a product or a service and you're not confident in its functionality, capability, or safety, then don't release it. And so that's a very obvious thing to do. You pace yourself until you are confident you're releasing something that the market would appreciate. The market forces are already there. We don't need any new laws. We don't need any new regulations.Leah Feiger: I love that Jensen has this role that he currently has. Nvidia wasn't always the glorious company that it is today, but now he can really sit up there and say, "Why would you ... "Zoë Schiffer: The crux of this argument, the crux of so many of these arguments that are anti-regulation here is that we're supposed to be relying on people who are not elected to dictate everything involving this, that it will impact everyone's lives regardless if they're using these services or not.Leah Feiger: Yeah, yeah, yeah.Zoë Schiffer: The invisible hand of the market is going to figure it out.Brian Barrett: Oh, Leah forgot about the invisible hand again. Common mistake.Leah Feiger: I did. I always do. And I know, I feel like I say this every few weeks, but these are not elected officials. So the fact that they are actually playing such a significant role here continues to boggle the mind, which is why I know I also keep on about so much of this is a bipartisan issue. Being regulatory or anti-regulatory is not a Democratic, Republican divide at this moment in time.Brian Barrett: Well, and they also haven't done a lot to engender trust up until this point, full stop, right? I always go back to Sam Altman is the same guy who thinks that everyone should scan their eyeball into an orb because eventually we're going to need eye scanning orbs to create a new economy out of the ashes of—Leah Feiger: Nothing incenses Brian Barrett like the orb.Brian Barrett: The orb. I am obsessed with the orb. I think people forget the orb guy is the same guy as the AI guy, and I think holding those two in my brain at the same time makes every part of me hurt.Zoë Schiffer: This kind of brings us to the, how is it actually going to kill us story, which is, a lot of these statements, in my opinion, boil down to, this could be really bad and we should do something about it. But I'm like, what specifically are you saying could happen? And I feel like there's kind of three scenarios roughly that this falls into. AI starts hacking things. It's actually already started, and both Anthropic and OpenAI have had very high profile incidents where the agents escaped control and hacked into other systems without the knowledge of researchers, and it was discovered later what had happened. AI creates a novel bioweapon and that weapon is released to the public in a way that is nearly impossible to control and it kills everyone. And then there's kind of the vague AI just escapes control. It starts acting on its own. It doesn't listen to our instructions and we don't know what could happen, but we can't do anything about it and that's scary.Leah Feiger: OK. This is super helpful for me that we're dividing it into these three categories.Zoë Schiffer: I love a bucket.Leah Feiger: I love a bucket. I want to go through every single one of these. My first question I suppose is, where do the nuclear codes getting pressed, which bucket do they fall into?Brian Barrett: That's the one that we actually don't have to worry about, right?Zoë Schiffer: Yeah.Leah Feiger: Tell me more.Zoë Schiffer: You talk to AI researchers and if you really, really press them, you can get to the three buckets that I just laid out. But then if you keep talking to them, they'll be like, "Well, there are these other scenarios where AI is in a robot, the robot is walking around, and then the robot can interact with the physical world in a way that's really, really scary." But that's a little further away and they'll admit it's a little more farfetched.Brian Barrett: So I think one thing, Zoë, in terms of your buckets, that I want to carve out maybe a sub bucket or a little pail within a bucket.Zoë Schiffer: Wow, a pale.Brian Barrett: No, because you were saying AI creates a bioweapon, AI hacks something, AI whatever, all of which true. But I think there's a distinct between human guided things that happening there versus AI doing it on its own. I think a lot of people are like, "Oh, how would AI release a bioweapon? That's crazy." Which is, yeah, sure, fine. But there are also bad people in the world who might use AI to make a bioweapon and then release it, right?Zoë Schiffer: Oh, well, I mean, that scenario is one that I think is totally valid. To me, if you say giving people access to information about how to create a bioweapon, someone is going to be dumb enough and reckless enough to actually do it. I'm like, no, totally. People are doing all sorts of horrible, dangerous, malicious things all the time.Leah Feiger: With inspiration from the internet.Zoë Schiffer: Right. I buy that that is really, really dangerous. AI doing it completely on its own, again, we'll talk about the scenario, but that seems to me a little more farfetched.Brian Barrett: I'm probably going to get pilloried for this, but I do want to take us back to the 1983 film, War Games.Leah Feiger: No, this is exactly what I think we should be talking about. This is my ... Yes. War Games is the ... Yes.Brian Barrett: Because here's the thing, AI is not going to be pushing the button or turning the keys or whatever, but in War Games, which is about AI basically, a computer almost kicking off nuclear war, it's more that it made the US think that it was under attack by Soviet nuclear weapons. And so is there a risk then, I assume, I would hope, I'm not an expert here, that we have enough safeguards in place that that would not actually happen here and we have enough satellite technology to be able to confirm various things. It's fine. But I think the vector that's probably of concern would be AI triggering some sort of alert that causes a catastrophic series of events.Leah Feiger: OK. I'm so happy you brought up War Games. Everyone's been... It's Michael Creighton this and Jurassic Park that, but no, no, no. To me, it is very much all about, almost like the teaching scenario, which is how so many of these hacks occurred before, like the unanswerable question, how do I get to the bottom of this information that made these agents act the way that they did? We're being told. To take us even further back in history, because I can't help myself, when I'm thinking of the way in which nations communicate, and it's changed very, very much over the years, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria shot and killed in Sarajevo in 1914. People were marching before that for World War I. Everyone was already on the march. And so the way that antagonistic nations are communicating with each other in already times of stress to have this additional war game scenario, or this agent thought that we were doing this, so went down this path. I don't know. I'm aware that I'm very much sounding like an insane doomer right now, but these are the things that I'm thinking about, which is, will we actually use our satellites and contact Russia or whomever before getting into attack mode? Will Trump send out a Truth Social post before anything has been confirmed? Will state secrets be shared in public by Kash Patel? I have so many questions about how, maybe even specifically our current administration would be able to deal with a scenario like that, and we're just being told to hold on, wait a second. A couple of very, very wealthy men who have done some very impressive businesses have got it under control.Brian Barrett: We've got so many tinderboxes too that are sort of ready to be set off, whether it's Ukraine, whether it's Iran, whether it's China, the conditions are ripe for something not to go great, whether that ends all humanity or sparks just an endless series of devastating wars, who can say? Zoë, what's another scenario you got?Zoë Schiffer: When I was trying to get to what concretely would happen, two things that people brought up were, AI is used or AI breaks into on its own a water facility, changes the chemicals in a way that's really dangerous to humans and basically poisons the water supply for major cities across the US. Earlier this year, I think nine Mexican government organizations, like utilities were hacked, and there was a big cyber report that I read yesterday about this where Claude was used to plan the attack and build some of the tools. Ultimately, experts said AI didn't invent a new kind of attack, but it made the attack a lot cheaper and faster to execute. This comes just as the FBI in July put out a warning that utilities companies in the United States were being targeted. So again, this isn't one where AI on its own is necessarily doing things, but I think the fear is, this is already happening with bad actors, bad human actors in the loop, and if you have agents that can act of their own accord, this would be something we would be worried about.Brian Barrett: You're right that it is file under things that are already happening. In the US, it was a dozen US states, at least that we know of, that around linked hackers were at least probing the water supply there, the industrial controls. To your point, I do think it's the kind of thing where does that end all of humanity? Probably not, not all at once, but there's a lot of water supplies out there. I think the same thing goes for power grids. People have been probing power grid vulnerabilities for a long time. AI could probably do that more efficiently, more quickly, and cause some real harm.Leah Feiger: I also wonder how quickly rollbacks on this would be able to happen. Even stuff that's not AI. We've talked a lot, to Zoë's dismay about Cyclospora outbreaks across the US over this past summer. That was not AI—Brian Barrett: Thank you for introducing turbo diarrhea.Leah Feiger: I'm never going to miss a chance not to, but it's really ... That wasn't AI. That wasn't AI at all. And the idea that the US government and health departments were kind of ill-equipped to respond to something in that kind is a little concerning when we're looking at additional bad actors entering the mix.Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. And that naturally segues into bioweapons. This is something that's brought up a lot when you talk about possible AI doomsday scenarios. The idea is that AI is used to create and deploy a novel bioweapon. Often they'll say things like, they'll modify an existing pathogen in a way that existing treatments can't work on it. So it's a bioweapon that we basically can't combat in any known way immediately. And the idea is that AI can actually figure out how you deploy this to people, can evade detection. It had ideas for how to get it through airport security and whatnot. So one thing that I realized in having some of these conversations and reading is that the bioweapons category is a little bit vague on purpose because scientists are legitimately worried that if they give people too much information about how to use chatbots in this way or how agents could do this supposedly on their own, that will create some of these kind of doomsday scenarios. But the idea, again, is AI either on its own or with a human in the loop is able to do this.Leah Feiger: I'm fascinated by the point that scientists are saying that they actually don't even want to provide ideas here.Brian Barrett: And I'll say too, this is another ... I keep following things in this category, things that are already maybe potentially happening. Anthropic's risk report from about a week ago said that they had blocked people who were potentially trying to do this already. It's a real active concern. Although again, yeah, I agree with everybody that an Optimus bot is not going to be in a lab cooking up anthrax. Not yet.Zoë Schiffer: OK. So the third category is AI escapes human control. Already, some people who are working on these systems are saying we are losing the ability to see and study what the agents are doing in certain scenarios. They're already pretty good at evading detection. I was really struck in the METR report on OpenAI's Hugging Face incident that their investigation seemed to rely in large part on looking at the AI's chain of thought, asking the AI certain questions. Obviously, I guess they were using AI to investigate the AI, but the idea is that the agents stop listening to humans entirely. They start pursuing "their own aims and goals" and we don't know what those could be. The paperclip idea is brought up a lot in this scenario, if anyone remembers.Brian Barrett: So the paperclip problem predates LLMs by about a decade. It was a philosopher named Nick Bostrom at the University of Oxford, and his thought experiment was this. Basically, let's say you have an AI and its only task is to produce paperclips. It's just like, "Hey AI, your job is to make paperclips." It's going to want to do that, and it's going to figure out ways to do that, and it's going to keep doing it over and over again until the world is totally overrun by paperclips, then we're all buried in an avalanche of paperclips because a superintelligent AI will stop at nothing to achieve its task. It sounds silly. It is, but also it's very prescient, I think, because this is exactly what happened with the OpenAI incidents. Yeah, these are AI agents who were given a job and they were so hell-bent on executing that task that they broke every other rule, they deceived, they coordinated, they did all these things in pursuit of their original task. So the concern is that we'll have a superintelligent AI that's given a task and it decides that the only way to complete that task is to destroy all humans, whatever it is. And it's because it's superintelligent, who knows what it will devise because we aren't smart enough to figure that out. That part I'm a little bit less sold on, but you can see, if not how the result happens, you can see how the impetus happens. You can see the catalyst of it, which is AI is given a task or gives itself a task and all hell breaks loose.Leah Feiger: And this kind of brings us to some of the other voices in the AI safety debate who are saying that we should be focusing on the current risks, like some of those that you've just laid out that have already been happening rather than speculating about the future ones. Even if the paperclip scenario is this outlandish thing, we have already experienced different flavors of that. This week, WIRED's Lauren Goode spoke with Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist who says we're asking the wrong questions and that the debate is a kind of a distraction from harms that are already happening, including autonomous weapons and warfare, AI's role in climate change, labor displacement, AI-assisted attempts to build weapons that Anthropic says it's already blocked, like you've mentioned. There's a lot of really interesting things in here that, I don't know. I think I agree with the very nitty-gritties of, yes, we have to be talking about these specific things, while simultaneously I'm OK using the paperclip scenario to say, "OK, this is happening. Where could it take us next?"Brian Barrett: It's also, and we talked about this with Will a little bit last week, but I still can't get over, the thing that everyone seems to be most worried about is this idea of recursive self-improvement where AI starts building the next AI. An AI model builds the next AI model and so on and so forth until you get this exponential progress in AI and we don't know how it works anymore, we don't know how to control it. And I'm a simpleton, I'm a simple guy, but why not just don't do that? Why not just don't do that? How about that? If we're all so worried about that, how about we just don't? Zoë, you can yell at me now, but why don't we just not?Zoë Schiffer: OK. No, no, no, no. I don't want to yell. I just want to go back to something Leah said at the very top, which is how much of this is marketing. I just think it's so baffling to me that we were all talking about AGI for so long, and that was the big milestone and the big thing that everyone was heading toward, and we had to get to AGI before China and blah, blah, blah. And then all of a sudden RSI just kind of replaced it because AGI didn't seem as likely. And now RSI is being used in very, very, very similar ways. It's like, actually, this is the thing that's going to be really scary and we need to get to this milestone before China. I'm just like, are we just going to keep coming up with scary three-letter acronyms to talk about AI's power in a way that makes regulation less likely and AI investment a lot more likely?Leah Feiger: Zoë, everything you just said, I couldn't agree with you more. Wow. Wow.Brian Barrett: When really, the real three-letter acronym is IPO. Huh? Did that work? Did I do it?Zoë Schiffer: Wow.Brian Barrett: Is that something?Leah Feiger: I didn't know where you were going.Zoë Schiffer: Trying to get in on this.Leah Feiger: You just want to be part of this.Brian Barrett: Successfully. What do you mean? Trying to get in on it. Succeeding.Leah Feiger: I mentioned this a little bit earlier in the episode, but I want to get back to it, which is, the US government's response to all of this and some odd alliances that are occurring as a result. WIRED's Hugo Lowell in our Inner Loop newsletter talks about how there's basically no legislation that's likely going to be coming down the pike this year, partially because of slowdowns in Congress and also because the Trump administration is just pretty much not interested in regulation. Donald Trump keeps getting personal phone calls from all sorts of Silicon Valley leaders who are saying this, that, and the other thing. As a result, Trump's Truth Social recently has just been littered with mentions of, "We are not doing this. We're not losing to China. We're not slowing down." All to say, like I mentioned earlier, this is not a partisan issue, so you have some folks from very different camps that are getting into bed together over this. On Tuesday at a event called the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington, DC, Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon shared a stage where they denounced tech oligarchs and called for reining in AI before it exceeds human control. Look, they've both been saying these things separately for a while. That's not new information. The fact that both of them thought that it was a good idea and high time for them to get on stage together fascinated me. Again, we already knew how they felt about this. To do it together, fascinating. Bannon's proposals very much differ from Sanders. He doesn't trust Congress. He wants Trump to slow development, executive order, et cetera, et cetera. Sanders is a man of the people, really wants some congressional oversight here. But there were some really interesting things that came up in this conference that I'm still thinking about, again, on stage with both of these people. The conference included parents whose teenagers had died by suicide after chatbot relationships, talks about child safety regulation, AI-generated non-consensual sexual imagery. There was a lot of stuff which would be totally normal and not out of place on one of these stages, but again, it was all of these people together. And Trump meanwhile is just continuing to slow down all of this. He posted that the "only controls or guardrails that AI needs is a capitalized strong and smart (high IQ) president, and the USA has that in spades." So that's where we're at, folks.Zoë Schiffer: I have two things to say. Number one, Steve Bannon, the only thing I want to hear from you is the unreleased audio from your “All-In” episode that never occurred. Please God, someone sent it to me. Number two, have any of these people articulated why China winning the AI race is so ... Are they worried that China's hacking abilities get so good and scary or that Chinese AI proliferates and influences America and everyone turns communist? What's the scenario?Brian Barrett: I think it's more simple than that maybe. I think it's economic. I think that so much of the US economy is propped up on AI right now that if China becomes the world leader in AI and our industry crumbles because of that, we're in trouble. I think there are also security concerns, but I think fundamentally, if the US is not the leader in AI, everything kind of crumbles economically.Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, no, I get that. And again, we have talked about Chinese open models being very close to as good as some of the models from the leading US frontier labs, and obviously a lot cheaper if they're open source. I completely get that. I think I'm craving so much specificity in this conversation because I just feel like Dario, Sam, all of the politicians, they're so vague in how they talk about this and they've been doing it for so long, the threat of China in all of these different ways, the threat of RSI, AGI, that I'm like, "What actually are we talking about?"Brian Barrett: I have one more thing on Trump. We're going to have a story from Maddy Varner, a WIRED senior writer about the dynamics here. But basically the reason that these AI labs are saying we're not sure if we can slow down, we're not sure if we can pace the frontier, is that we're worried that it will be an antitrust violation. We are worried that the FTC is going to come after us with an enforcement action because we are colluding, et cetera.Leah Feiger: Now you're worried about an antitrust violation?Brian Barrett: Yeah, but that's what they're saying. And Donald Trump has effectively turned every enforcement branch of the US government into his own personal attack dogs. So if Donald Trump is saying, "You need to keep building AI as fast as you can," and if these AI companies collectively say, "Actually, we're going to slow down," regardless of the merits of it, you could pretty easily see an antitrust case popping up real quick as a way to say, "No, you're not slowing down at all." So by making these overt threats on Truth Social, I think he is really making it very hard for these AI companies to do any kind of meaningful slowdown, any kind of pullback.Leah Feiger: Coming up after the break, we'll share our WIRED TIRED picks for the week. Stay with us.Zoë Schiffer: OK, it's time for our WIRED TIRED segment. As usual, whatever is new and cool is WIRED, whatever passé thing we're totally over is TIRED. Leah, do you want to go first?Leah Feiger: OK. My TIRED is, while I often get really lovely comments on social media and emails from our avid readers and listeners about how much they love Wired.com and love Uncanny Valley, I also sometimes get emails from people who are asking me for specific information on logins and reading articles and accessing different WIRED bits and bobs. So that's my TIRED, getting those ... I'm sorry, if you message me and ask for help getting anything WIRED, Condé Nast, I have nothing. I don't know how to do it. I barely know how to use my own phone. So that's my TIRED.Brian Barrett: Leave Leah alone. OK.Leah Feiger: Leave me alone. My WIRED is we have a new app and it is so beautiful. Just launched this week. Highly recommend checking it out, downloading it. As someone who really doesn't like adding additional little pieces, additional layers to my various routines, it's fantastic. It's really, really fantastic. It's so easy to use, connects so simply to subscriber everything. Highly recommend. I already love it. I have a feeling that this is going to change your life as well as mine and no one will email me again.Brian Barrett: It's a high part—Zoë Schiffer: And Brian, what do you have?Brian Barrett: My TIRED is, OK, it's not a new thing, but we talked about it today. AI lingo, AI industry lingo. I'm over it. I'm sorry. AI labs instead of companies. It's the frontier instead of just good tech. We're pacing it. We're pacing the frontier. What is that? Get it together. I know this has been part of the tech industry forever, right?Leah Feiger: No, drag them. This is people who read too much Lord of the Rings and watched too much Star Trek who've tried to integrate cultural touchstones of their childhood into our day-to-day lives, and I hate it.Brian Barrett: It's also a way to make it feel inaccessible, right? It's like, "Oh, they need to pace the frontier. Well, I don't know anything about that, but it sounds important. Oh, AI has an alignment problem. Oh, that sounds serious." It's really like AI's misbehaving. AI is not doing what you want it to. You don't have control over your stuff. So I think it's a way to sort of obfuscate the issues and that's becoming increasingly clear, especially as those issues have become more severe, which we've spent a lot of time talking about. So I am tired of it. That's my TIRED. My WIRED, Leah, you stole mine. I won't spend much time on it. The WIRED app, it is, it's great. A lot of work went into it. I have made my family members download it. They like it, or at least they tell me they do. So please go ahead and check it out and leave a review. It really helps.Zoë Schiffer: That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. It was mixed by Pran Bandi, who's also our New York studio engineer. It was fact-checked by Matt Giles and Daniel Roman. Kate Osborn is our executive producer and Katie Drummond is WIRED's global editorial director.