Planting a garden or laying down sod for your yard is the easy part. Keeping that foliage appropriately hydrated, that’s the real challenge—and it’s one that just keeps going and going, only getting more complicated as the seasons change.

In recent years, interior smart home technology has spilled outside, and you’ll now find dozens of wireless watering systems on the market that can take some of the confusion and complexity out of irrigating your plants. Whether you have a sophisticated in-ground sprinkler or drip irrigation system or you rely on an old-fashioned hose, multiple smart watering solutions are readily available. The good news: We’ve got you covered no matter what type of outdoor environment you have.

Be sure to check out our other guides to backyard tech, including the Best Smart Bird Feeders, Best Grills and Smart Grills, Best Flat-Top Grills and Griddles, Best Coolers, and Best Pool Cleaning Robots.

What Can Smart Irrigation Systems Do?

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Across the board, smart watering solutions are fundamentally designed around scheduling. While you can always initiate a manual watering run with one of these systems, their real value is in setting up a recurring schedule so you can basically forget about them. The best systems offer sophisticated scheduling tools that let you water on your chosen days of the week or month, along with the time of watering and the amount of water you want to deliver.

Best of all, the more sophisticated solutions include what’s now commonly known as “weather intelligence,” a fancy way of saying they will check the internet for local weather conditions and adjust watering based on whether it’s going to rain or freeze. Many systems will also work with wireless soil monitors to give you even finer control over ground moisture levels—and help you conserve as much water as possible.

What if I Have an Existing Irrigation System?

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If you already have an in-ground watering system with a traditional timer attached, upgrading to a smart irrigation system is pretty simple. You simply remove your old controller and replace it with the smart one, connecting the zone wiring leads to the terminal posts inside the smart controller, just as they were in the old controller, leaving the remaining infrastructure in place. (Make sure the controller you purchase has enough zones to handle your infrastructure; controllers typically support either 8 or 16 zones.)

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Photograph: Chris Null

From there, you’ll use an app to configure your zones based on plant type, shade conditions, and soil type. Most apps will recommend watering durations for each zone based on this information, and you can fine-tune these durations as you go, zone by zone. For setups involving a garden hose, configuration is even easier. Smart sprinklers attach to the terminus of any standard hose and can be placed anywhere in your yard. Alternately, smart hose timers attach to the spigot; you then connect your own sprinkler (or, in some cases, drip irrigation) to the timer. Mobile app features will of course vary, but many are just as sophisticated as permanent smart sprinkler systems.

How I Test Smart Irrigation Systems

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I’ve been testing smart irrigation products since 2017 in yards as large as 1.3 acres in both California and Texas. My current sprinkler system is a permanently plumbed solution that spans 11 zones and includes both in-ground sprinklers and drip irrigation. For hose-based solutions, I test by connecting to a standard hose spigot, typically in both lawn and flower bed environments.

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Best Smart Controller for In-Ground Sprinkler Systems

Rachio

3 Smart Sprinkler Controller

I’ve tested over a dozen smart sprinkler controllers with my underground irrigation systems, and this Rachio controller is the one I use every day. To be sure, there’s nothing remarkable about the hardware, though it’s easy to connect zone wiring thanks to spring-loaded clips instead of screws, and the onboard controls cover just the basics.

The real magic is in Rachio’s app. Here, you define your zones based on vegetation type, nozzle/drip type, soil type, sun exposure level, and slope. If you want to get really wild, advanced options let you set everything from root depth to the amount of water depletion you wish to allow. Assign each zone a name and a photo, and they’re all presented in an intuitive grid, which you can use as a point-and-click interface for manual watering operations as needed.

Rachio’s scheduling can be fixed based on day or date, or dynamic, with adjustments automatically applied based on rolling weather conditions. The app’s logging system is copious, detailing every run’s timing and duration—for each zone and each day. It’s also easy to share access with my professional irrigation team, so they can periodically test zones for leaks or other problems without needing physical access to my garage, where the controller lives.

Other Solid Smart Controller Picks

Irrigreen 3.0

Photograph: Christopher Null

Irrigreen 3.0 Starting at $2,089: Irrigreen isn’t just a controller. It’s a pricey, complete irrigation solution that requires fresh plumbing and an upgrade of all your sprinkler heads to Irrigreen’s conservationist “water painting” system. I wouldn’t rip out an existing system for it, but if you’re installing sprinklers from scratch, it’s worth a strong look.

Silver paint catches every ray of sunlight across the smooth curves of this 2006 Aston Martin DB9. A linear actuator tilts the front fascia forward on hinged brackets. Twin assemblies shaped like miniguns slide into view right behind the grille. Propane and oxygen tanks stored in the trunk feed these devices so they shoot real flames when activated. Smoke canisters mounted on the rear subframe release thick clouds for equally dramatic exits. These effects turn the car into a rolling tribute to James Bond without any actual weapons involved.

Power comes from a 6.2-liter LS3 V8 that used to power a Corvette, as creating this car required removing the standard V12 and installing some aftermarket goodies such as a mild camshaft, bespoke air intake, and long tube headers. The electronics are handled by a Holley Terminator X Max system, giving the entire setup a professional appearance. And it all goes to the rear wheels via a 4L65E four-speed automatic transaxle sourced from a Corvette and still connected to the existing subframe. All of this results in smooth, powerful acceleration and the distinct growl of a genuine American V8.

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Inside the cabin, black Alcantara has been utilized to cover the seats, center console, and door panels, adding a stylish touch. The instrument cluster features bespoke digital gauges and a Bond-themed design. A specialized control panel is crammed into the center stack, and the push-button gear selector is hidden in the console. You can connect your music over Bluetooth to a modern digital receiver, and because some people prefer that sort of thing, a manual toggle has been installed for the air conditioning compressor, which is very reasonable. The windshield wipers are still locked in neutral, which isn’t a bad thing, and the horn has been moved to the dashboard for better access. To avoid potential problems, fuel is added slowly to the tank.

Conquer Custom in Tampa, Florida completely rebuilt this DB9. They purchased it in 2021, after a prior accident had declared it a total write-off. After then, salvage titles began to oppose it, but they were eventually able to get it re-titled as a rebuilt one. They wanted to highlight the Holley engine management system and make it a true eye-catcher worthy of the big screen. The final automobile had its public debut at the 2025 LS Fest in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Since the work was completed, the automobile has accumulated around 4,500 miles.

However, the unusual DB9 is still available through a live Bring a Trailer auction, so fans of the series with a large budget will still have a chance at it when the sale closes on May 24th. The price is steadily creeping beyond $40,000 at the moment.
[Source]

For most teams, fraud performance is still summed up in a single metric: chargeback rate. It is visible, painful, and tied directly to card network thresholds, so it naturally becomes the north star for fraud programs.

The new VP of Fraud Strategy at IPQS, Alexander Hall, recently sat down with Jordan Harris of The Fraud Boxer to unpack a growing issue many teams are underestimating: the true impact of fraud beyond chargebacks.  

These hidden impacts rarely show up in chargeback metrics but significantly affect revenue, operations, and brand trust, making it critical for organizations to broaden how they measure fraud. 

The problem is that chargebacks capture only a narrow slice of fraud losses, and focusing on them alone can hide bigger issues affecting growth, customer experience, and long term profitability. 

These cases eat into margins just as much as disputes, but they are rarely tagged as fraud in internal reporting, so they do not inform future risk decisions.

As an example, ecommerce and airlines are experiencing a troubling rise in account takeovers (ATOs).

While teams work hard to create seamless user experiences, successful ATOs quickly undo that effort, driving customer churn, increasing acquisition costs through negative word of mouth, and enabling off-platform identity theft through stolen PII. They also lead to direct losses like reimbursing stolen stored value, including loyalty points. 

Similar patterns are emerging across industries, with iGaming platforms seeing fraudulent withdrawals after account changes, banking facing a surge in synthetic identity fraud, and money movement platforms dealing with identity theft used to create and operate fraudulent businesses.

Opportunity Cost: Good Customers You Never See

The other side of fraud is the revenue you never earn. When rules or tools are too strict, good customers are declined or forced into slow manual reviews.

False positives are one of the largest and least visible costs of fraud prevention. A legitimate customer who gets blocked because their IP, device, or email “looks risky” may abandon the purchase and never return.

From IPQS’ vantage point, this is where accurate risk scoring and tuning matter as much as catching fraud itself.

Operational Drag: Manual Reviews, Support Tickets, and Rework

Every suspicious order that goes to manual review adds labor cost, slows fulfillment, and creates friction for customers waiting on decisions.

Fraud related tickets also pile up in support queues, from refund requests and account lockouts to disputes over promotional abuse. Over time, the operational drag of managing fraud can rival direct loss, especially for high volume merchants and platforms.

Brand and Customer Experience Risk

Fraud is ultimately a trust problem. When accounts are taken over or fake accounts abuse a platform, legitimate users start to question whether their data and money are safe.

IPQS frequently works with companies where fraud has become a brand issue, not just a risk issue: users lose confidence after seeing spam, scams, or repeated login problems, and organic growth slows because word of mouth suffers.

Looking Beyond Chargebacks: Key Metrics to Track

From an IPQS perspective, a mature fraud program treats chargebacks as one outcome among many, not the whole picture. Useful additional metrics include:

• Approval rate for good customers

• False positive rate or “good customer decline” rate

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• Manual review rate and average decision time

• Volume and value of fraud related refunds or credits

• Abuse rates for promotions, referrals, and loyalty programs

• Account takeover incidents and new account abuse volume

Tracking these metrics side by side with chargebacks gives a much clearer view of whether your fraud controls are truly supporting growth.

How IPQS Thinks About Measuring Fraud Impact

As a fraud and risk data provider, IPQS is designed to plug visibility gaps rather than just block obvious bad payments. Our scoring looks at the user and their behavior across signals like IP reputation, device intelligence, email history, and past abuse patterns, not just the payment details in front of you.

The goal is to help teams:

• Catch more fraud before it becomes a chargeback

• Reduce friction and false positives for legitimate customers

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• Identify patterns of abuse in accounts, promotions, and traffic sources

• Feed more accurate data back into internal reporting and decisioning

When risk scores and signals align with your own outcomes data, your fraud metrics evolve from “chargebacks this month” to “total impact on revenue, costs, and growth.”

Questions to Ask Inside Your Organization

If you are looking to measure fraud impact beyond chargebacks, a few internal questions can help start the conversation:

• Where are we writing off loss that is not labeled as fraud today

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• How many legitimate orders are delayed or declined by current controls

• Which marketing or growth programs see the highest rate of abuse

• How often do fraud cases create support tickets or manual work for other teams

• Do we have a shared view of fraud impact across risk, product, finance, and marketing

Aligning on these questions helps teams move from reactive dispute handling to proactive fraud strategy.

Turning Broader Insight into Better Decisions

Once you recognize that chargebacks are only one symptom, you can redesign your fraud program around a wider set of outcomes.

From the IPQS perspective, the strongest programs are not just “stopping fraud” but actively protecting customer experience, enabling marketing to scale safely, and giving leadership confidence that risk controls support long term growth rather than restrict it.

Sign up for IPQS free trial today and see the difference when you prevent fraud before it starts.

Sponsored and written by IPQS.

Linn is not done tinkering with its flagship 360 loudspeaker, and for 2026, the Scottish hi-fi manufacturer has announced a new driver upgrade aimed at reducing one of the last major sources of distortion in the system: the lower-frequency drive units.

Originally introduced in 2023, the Linn 360 already combined the company’s Exakt phase-linear digital crossover, Adaptive Bias Control, Power DAC architecture, and a highly engineered cabinet design to deliver wide dispersion and low distortion. But Linn concluded that the existing off-the-shelf bass drivers were still limiting performance. Very Scottish response: stop complaining, spend three years designing your own.

The result is a new 6-inch upper-bass driver and 8-inch woofer, both developed from first principles around Linn’s Pistonik motor system. The company says the new drive units are designed to improve linearity across their excursion range, lower distortion, and deliver greater accuracy from its flagship loudspeaker platform. Whether your room, wallet, and neighbors are ready for that level of scrutiny is another matter.

Pistonik Motor Technology

At the heart of the new drivers is Pistonik, Linn’s proprietary motor system. The design is intended to maintain consistent force across the driver’s full in-and-out excursion, even when pushed hard with bass-heavy material. Linn achieves this through a long-stroke motor topology and an extended magnet gap, both aimed at improving linearity and reducing distortion when the 360 is asked to do the heavy lifting down low.

Pistonik is designed to address the magnetic, mechanical, and thermal issues that can compromise driver linearity. When used in the Linn 360, the new drivers are intended to move more air with greater control, while Linn claims they deliver the widest linear excursion of any low-frequency drive units to date. That is Linn’s claim, not a court ruling from Edinburgh.

Magnetic Stability: Linn says the Pistonik motor assembly is placed in permanent magnetic saturation to stabilize the magnetic field inside the voice-coil gap and reduce the effects of eddy currents. The goal is lower distortion, improved responsiveness, and less magnetic drag, which can also reduce the load placed on the amplifier.

Ventilation: Linn says Pistonik uses a triple-layer ventilation network to reduce acoustic compression inside the motor structure, which can contribute to distortion and noise. The design is intended to let air move more freely through the driver assembly, helping the moving mass travel more smoothly while minimizing audible turbulence.

Thermal Cooling: Untroubled by rising resistance due to thermal build-up, performance remains steadfast after hours of continuous listening. The voice coil is kept cool by carefully designed ventilation paths, with heat drawn directly into surrounding steel and aluminium structures so that warm air is continuously exchanged for cool air within the speaker cabinet. 

Suspension: Linn pairs the Pistonik motor system with a bespoke suspension designed specifically for the 360 loudspeaker platform. Because Linn controls the full system — including the amplification, crossover, and how the drivers are operated — it says it was able to design a more precisely tuned suspension than would be practical in a conventional passive loudspeaker.

Linn says advanced multi-physics simulation was used to create a suspension that remains linear through most of its travel, then stiffens rapidly and predictably near maximum excursion. The goal is greater control at high output levels without allowing the driver to drift into unwanted distortion or mechanical stress.

Aluminium Diaphragm: For both the 6” and 8” drive units, Linn designed a hard aluminium diaphragm. Strong, rigid, and light, it allows break-up behaviour to be pushed well beyond the operating frequency range while keeping moving mass low to improve efficiency. Carefully optimised coupling of the diaphragm to both the surround and Pistonik motor system pushes resonance frequencies higher still and reduces their magnitude.

Exakt Technology: Linn also applies its proprietary Exakt technology to each new drive unit. At the factory, every driver is measured by laser to identify its individual performance characteristics. That data is then used to create a dedicated Exakt profile for that specific unit.

Once the driver is installed in the loudspeaker, the system retrieves the profile and applies a correction filter that Linn says is accurate to within 0.0625dB of the reference. The practical goal is consistency: each 360 system should perform as closely as possible to Linn’s intended reference standard once it is in the customer’s home, not just in the factory listening room.

The new 6” upper bass and 8” woofer units redefine the state of the art—delivering deeper, cleaner, and more controlled bass, with total accuracy and the widest truly linear excursion of any low-frequency drive units.

Comparison

The Bottom Line 

Linn’s 2026 update for the 360 is not a replacement speaker, and that is the important part. New buyers get the upgraded Pistonik drive units as standard, while existing 360 owners can have the affected drivers replaced at home without starting over with a new pair of loudspeakers.

That is the smart move. It protects the 360 platform, keeps current owners in the ecosystem, and avoids the usual “your flagship is now yesterday’s news” routine. Very un-audio industry. Someone check the rulebook.

The eyebrow-raiser is the upgrade price: $23,620 to replace all of the affected drivers, according to Linn. That is not exactly loose change found behind the sofa, but compared with buying a new pair of 360s at $95,000 or $142,000, depending on configuration, it is the far less painful option.

For current Linn 360 owners who already love what they have, doing nothing remains a perfectly rational choice. For those chasing lower distortion, greater bass control, and the newest version of Linn’s flagship engineering, this upgrade gives them a path forward without replacing the entire loudspeaker. The only sane advice: hear the new drivers at a dealer before writing the check.

Pricing & Availability

The new Pistonik drive units are now standard in all newly built Linn 360 loudspeakers and are also available as an upgrade for existing 360 owners. Linn says the installation can be completed in the customer’s home and takes no more than two hours.

Linn has also added a new real-wood walnut veneer finish for the 360. The finish joins the Classic Collection and can be paired with either anodised black or silver machined aluminium trim. The walnut grain adds some visual warmth to a loudspeaker that has never exactly been shy about looking expensive.

• Linn Drive Unit Upgrade for currently owned 360s: $23,620
• New Linn 360s with Driver Upgrade built-in:
• 360 Exakt Integrated Active Loudspeakers (pair): $142,440
• 360 Passive with Active Bass (PWAB) Loudspeakers (pair): $95,920

Linn speakers and other products are available through authorized dealers

Related Reading:

For a brief moment, the internet genuinely believed Google had finally decided to kill off the original Chromecast, after multiple Gen 1 users reported casting failures and apps refusing to connect over the past few days. Honestly, considering the tiny streaming dongle is now more than a decade old, nobody would have been completely shocked, but thankfully, Google now says the issue has been resolved, and the aging Chromecast survives another day.

Google says your old Chromecast is still safe for now

According to updates shared on Reddit, the company says the issue impacting casting functionality has now been resolved, though some users are still reporting lingering problems after factory resets.

The situation immediately reminded longtime Chromecast users of last year’s infamous “Untrusted Device” outage, where Chromecast 2nd Gen and Chromecast Audio devices suddenly stopped functioning because of expired security certificates. Back then, Google had to rush out a server-side fix while also begging users not to factory reset their devices during troubleshooting.

And honestly, the panic this week makes sense. Google officially ended software and security updates for the first-generation Chromecast back in 2023, while the entire Chromecast lineup itself was discontinued in 2024 in favor of the newer Google TV Streamer hardware.

The original Chromecast surviving this long is already kind of ridiculous

Let’s be real, the original Chromecast was never supposed to last this long in the first place. Google launched the tiny $35 streamer back in 2013, and somehow people are still using it daily in 2026 despite the thing having less processing power than a modern smartwatch.

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That said, the original Chromecast did quietly changed the streaming industry forever. Before it arrived, turning a regular TV into a smart streaming screen was either expensive or painfully clunky, and Google’s tiny $35 dongle helped normalize cheap streaming devices long before Fire TV sticks and smart TV platforms took over. Honestly, the fact that people still panicked this hard over a decade-old Chromecast outage says everything about how successful that little gadget ended up being.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

For the past few decades, researchers have understood that quantum computers should eventually be able to crack the widely used codes that secure much of the digital world. To protect against this fate, they’ve spent years developing new codes that appear to be safe from future safecrackers armed with quantum computers.

At the same time, they’ve also devised ingenious ways to use the rules of quantum mechanics to keep communications secure. But quantum mechanics, just like the “classical” mechanics that preceded it, is just a theory of nature. What if it eventually gets superseded by a fuller theory, just as quantum mechanics supplanted Newtonian physics a century ago? Will these quantum communication techniques still be secure in a world where there’s an even more fundamental set of rules?

“In terms of these cryptographic protocols, it’s good to be paranoid,” said Ravishankar Ramanathan, a quantum information theorist at the University of Hong Kong who works on quantum cryptography. “Let’s try to minimize the assumptions behind the protocol. Let’s suppose that at some future date people realize that quantum mechanics is not the ultimate theory of nature.”

It’s a possibility worth considering. The difficulty of outstanding problems—like reconciling quantum mechanics and gravity—suggests that a post-quantum theory of nature might involve something quite unexpected.

To guard against the possibility that their protocols are based on faulty assumptions, some quantum cryptographers search for even more basic principles to build upon. Instead of starting from quantum mechanics, they dig deeper, down to the very concept of causality.

A Subtle Sabotage

One way to understand developments in this area is to consider quantum key distribution, which involves taking advantage of the rules of quantum mechanics to pass along a key—something that can be used to decode a secret message—in a way that cannot be covertly tampered with. Quantum key distribution makes use of quantum entanglement, which locks two particles together through one of their properties, like spin. Quantum entanglement contains something of a trip wire. If anyone tries to mess with the entanglement—as they would if they tried to steal the key—the intrusion will destroy the entanglement, revealing the sabotage. This is because of a fundamental quantum mechanical principle called the “monogamy of entanglement.”

But what if this principle no longer held? In such a case, if the people passing the message did not have complete control of their devices, an outsider could potentially subtly change the particles’ entanglement, disrupting the communication without leaving a trace.

This process is called quantum jamming, and efforts to understand it have surged in recent years.

For many scientists, jamming is appealing because it can help them better understand both quantum mechanics and the nature of cause and effect. They wonder: Are there deep principles that forbid jamming, that make it impossible? Or, if no principle forbids it, could jamming occur in the real world?

Jim the Jammer

Michał Eckstein, a theoretical physicist at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, likes to illustrate jamming with a story. Its protagonists are the classic characters from explanations of quantum mechanics, Alice and Bob.

“Suppose you have Alice and Bob, and they meet a magician, Jim the Jammer,” Eckstein said. “The magician says, ‘I have two balls; one is white, and one is black.’”

The balls stand in for a pair of entangled particles. If two particles are entangled, they have a property that is linked in some way—if you measure the first particle and find that its spin is up, for example, the other particle’s spin will inevitably be down, and vice versa. This holds true even if the other particle is halfway across the universe. Here the balls are linked such that if one is white, the other will always be black.

Buying a new pair of glasses can be expensive, but if you have frames you love and they’re still in good condition, you might be able to save money by simply replacing the lenses. This is something you can easily do online. I would know, as I’ve replaced lenses in 15 pairs of glasses myself and can confirm that the online lens replacement process is more affordable, easier and faster than you’d think.

Whether you have a new prescription or want to replace scratched lenses, many online lens replacement services let you mail in your glasses with a prepaid label or a shipping kit. Then, they’ll replace the lenses and send them back.

To help you find the best places to buy replacement prescription lenses, I tested different services by ordering midrange lenses, sometimes multiple times. I then evaluated the companies for lens quality, price, user-friendliness and turnaround time.

What’s the best online retailer for replacement prescription lenses overall?

We have Lensabl at the top of our roundup for the best place to buy replacement glasses lenses, thanks to its user-friendly interface and competitive pricing. Qualifying customers can even renew their eyeglass prescriptions online with them.

If you’re looking for fast service, Overnight Glasses is a great pick. I had good experiences with all the other online lens-replacement shops on this list. Note that all of them also sell frames and full prescription eyeglasses and sunglass packages.

Best places to buy replacement lenses for glasses of 2026

AI + ML

Limping Llama model needs a crutch made of surveillance tools

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears so determined to win the AI race that he is willing to sacrifice some employee privacy to make it happen.

In a leaked audio recording published by the worker advocacy group More Perfect Union, Zuckerberg purportedly answered an employee’s question about “device monitoring” with a six-minute monologue in which he said Meta employees are very smart and to win the most competitive technology race in history, he would need to collect their keystrokes, mouse clicks, and screenshots to make its own AI measure up to its rivals. 

“We are using this to feed a very large amount of content into the AI model, so that way it can learn how smart people use computers to accomplish tasks. I think that this is going to be a very big advantage if we can do it,” Zuckerberg purportedly said during an April 30 meeting in which an employee asked about the “top of mind” issue.  

Meta did not reply to an email from The Register seeking comment and has not confirmed the authenticity of the audio clip, but a company spokesperson confirmed in April that Meta would monitor employees to train AI. Meta’s tracking tool is called Model Capability Initiative, according to reports.

The audio was posted the same day Meta announced 8,000 job cuts. It captured Zuckerberg’s thoughts on the news, first reported by Reuters, that Meta planned to install software on employees’ computers to monitor activity for AI training. More Perfect Union did not reply to an email from The Register seeking comment. 

“So if we’re trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally build tools that or solve tasks that help teach the model how to code, we think, is going to dramatically increase our models’ coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do, who don’t have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company,” he purportedly said in the audio.

“So that’s one example. Another thing that our system needs to be very good at is using computers, so the way that you get a system to be good at using computers is by having it watch really smart people use computers. So that’s basically the essence of what we are trying to do here.”

In one part of the audio, Zuckerberg said the software would not be used to surveil employees’ actions on the job, though he stopped short of saying the data would be anonymized. Rather, he said the purpose was narrowly focused on making its AI work better than competitors. 

“The content is sort of, you know, stripped out in like as much as is possible,” he purportedly said in the leaked audio. “It’s like none of the data has been used for like looking at what people are doing, or surveillance, or performance tracking, or anything like that.” 

That aligns with what a Meta spokesperson told Reuters: that MCI data would not be used for performance assessments. European employees are reportedly exempt from the program because the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation likely prohibits this type of monitoring without explicit consent, according to multiple reports. 

Meta is not the only major technology company turning to its own workforce for AI training data. The Information reported this week that Microsoft and xAI are also leveraging internal employees to generate and refine training datasets. In a similar vein to what Zuckerberg purportedly said, Microsoft, which employs thousands of software engineers, reportedly views its workforce as a competitive advantage for improving GitHub Copilot.

In the recording, Zuckerberg purportedly said Meta settled on using its own employees over contractors because they were smarter. 

“One basic insight and hypothesis that we have is that a lot of data generation across the field is done by these like contract companies,” Zuckerberg purportedly said. “(B)ut in general, the average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks if you’re working through these contractors.” 

However, the contractor pipeline is also being watched. 

In January 2026, Wired reported that OpenAI’s data vendor, Handshake AI, began asking freelance contractors to upload real work products from past and current jobs, including contracts, financial models, presentations, and code repositories. OpenAI provided a tool to help contractors strip confidential information before uploading, but intellectual property lawyers warned the approach carries significant legal risk.

Zuckerberg said this sort of surveillance and the difficult conversations around it are the cost of competing at the frontier of AI. 

“How do we navigate running the company through what is just this incredibly dynamic period?” he said. “There’s lots of things that people would like more certainty on than we have.” ®

The AI-generated version of ‘Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico’ was on display at AIPAD’s The Photography show.