Something that never was a problem for years suddenly became a thing after Trump’s return to office. As his administration ramped up its cruelty towards non-white people, Democratic leaders suddenly became much more interested in seeing how ICE was handling this influx of detainees.
Not that they were wrong to do so. The history of ICE detention is extremely ugly, with detainees regularly treated like the subhumans ICE (and their subcontractors) seem to believe these human beings are. But with ICE and the DHS making all the wrong kinds of headlines as the administration carried out its racial cleansing programs, DHS started to pretend congressional members were no longer allowed to perform inspections of ICE detention facilities.
In some cases, this refusal to comply with the law resulted in the arrest of politicians trying to engage in their legally ordained oversight duties. When that intimidation failed to stem the flow of congressional reps to ICE facilities, DHS started issuing its own limitations on inspections — exactly zero of which were supported by current law.
Kristi Noem issued “guidance” last year pretending that Trump’s budget bill freed ICE from having to open their facilities to congressional inspection. Noem’s theory was that while normally DHS couldn’t make congressional reps give ICE 72 hours to seven days advance notice of inspections, the “Big Beautiful Bill” concocted by the GOP created pathways for pretending existing law didn’t exist.
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That guidance specifically noted the DC Appeals Court had already ruled against the DHS by stating its current demands for advance notice were “inconsistent” with existing law. No doubt we’ll see similar misleading “guidance” issued by the DHS again in the near future as the DC Appeals Court has (again) rejected the government’s attempts to violate the law while litigation over these new policies continues.
A federal appeals court on Friday required the Trump administration to continue allowing lawmakers to inspect immigration detention facilities without advance notice, ruling unanimously that the impromptu visits posed minimal problems for the government.
The decision by a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit preserved, for now, the ability of Democrats in Congress to make unannounced visits to detention centers and check on the conditions inside.
The one-page order [PDF] (and its 10-page explanation by Judge Rao) is inexplicably absent from the New York Times reporting. But it’s embedded below (and linked above).
Judge Rao says the government does have some interest in controlling access to its facilities for several, mostly credible reasons. But its belief that these concerns override existing law allowing congressional inspections is misplaced.
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The government is entitled to deference on how it maintains the security of detention facilities, but the current record does not substantiate the government’s claim that oversight visits without advance notice impose harms beyond administrative inconvenience. While a close call, particularly because of the strong likelihood of success on the merits, I concur in denying a stay.
As Noem pointed out in her memo, the Big Beautiful Act created a flow of funding that was (theoretically) outside of the purview of existing appropriations laws governing ICE facility inspection. This order points out that this is no longer the case as that particular rider attached to the Act lapsed along with the rest of the DHS’s funding during the shutdown. The dead rider has not been re-attached, so the DHS’s insistence this means this particular funding can be used to thwart congressional oversight isn’t exactly a foregone conclusion.
That’s not to say this decision will ultimately lead to the DHS abandoning its demands for advance notice before inspections. While the government has failed to show it will suffer irreparable harm if congressional reps are allowed on-demand access to detention facilities, the plaintiffs here are legislators — people who aren’t generally allowed to sue the same government that employs them to obtain relief.
Judge Rao says the administration is likely to emerge victorious because the Democratic congressional reps don’t have standing. But that doesn’t mean the government has presented solid arguments about its own interests in denying access to detention facilities.
The government has credibly alleged inconvenience and disruption caused by congressional visits. But the government has not shown that these harms arise from congressional visits undertaken without seven days’ advance notice, as opposed to congressional visits generally. The government cites a single security incident involving the unauthorized presence of the Mayor of Newark in the secured area of an ICE facility and the alleged obstruction of the Mayor’s arrest by Representative McIver. But the government does not explain how this incident resulted from a lack of prior notice of the Representative’s oversight visit.
To be sure, the mayor of Newark is not allowed to access ICE facilities without advance notice or explicit permission. But that doesn’t extend to everyone else ICE wishes to keep out of its facilities — a list that seems to include every congressional rep that actually might want to perform an inspection.
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In addition, this never used to be a problem. The Appeals Court isn’t convinced that it’s suddenly a problem now, just because this version of the DHS wants to pretend it is.
By contrast, the Members have provided numerous declarations attesting to congressional visits made with less than seven days’ notice that were conducted without incident since 2019. The government does not meaningfully dispute these accounts and responds only that the pending litigation incentivizes the Members to conduct their visits in a nondisruptive manner. Even if that is true, this pending appeal will continue to provide the same incentives for good behavior.
For now, congressional reps don’t need to give ICE a heads up before engaging in an inspection. That may change (at least temporarily) if the administration can show these congressional reps don’t have standing to pursue this litigation. But we can hope that any final dispensation of this case only grants the administration its argument about standing. The law is still the law, no matter how the DHS might feel about the law. When this all wraps up, the status should be reset to quo: Congressional reps have a legal right to inspect facilities without advance notice. Everything else is just mud in the water.
[Dennis] is on YouTube with his channel “Made By Dennis,” but for the record he is a maker, not a V-tuber. On the other hand, his latest project– creating a profesisonal-level tracking rig with DIY IR cameras and a whole lot of moxie–does mean he’s now equipped to make the move to the prestigious, high-status world of pretending to be an anime girl.
That is of course not why he did it. Like most projects around here, the motivation was more a case of “I wonder if I can…”– in this case [Dennis] wondered what it would take for him to pull off the same sort of optical motion capture, or MoCap, that is used in Hollywood studios. Optical mocap has the advantage of being very precise, able to track things at high speeds, and not being in any way limited to the human form like the slew of AI-assisted methods hitting the market right now. The disatvantage is that you need to place markers on any part of your subject you want tracked, film them from all angles, and process a whole lot of pixels. In [Dennis]’s case, it ended up being about four billion. Keeping in mind that actually locating those points in 3D space is dependent on knowing exactly where your cameras are: if you want sub-millimeter precision, your cameras need to be fixed with sub-millimeter tolerance. It’s a big project, hence a long video, which is embedded below.
The DIY cameras use a AR0234 MIPI camera on a custom PCB with M12 lenses and IR filters. To improve the signal-to-noise ratio on optical MoCap, it’s standard to use near-IR light. The camera boards, as you might expect given the MIPI interface, hook into Raspberry Pi compute modules– the cheapest CM4 should work, though he’s using CM5s. The compute modules sit on custom boards that provide PoE, and some other niceties– like a small microcontroller driven by the pulse-per-second pin to help trigger the cameras in sync.
Each camera gets a ring light of near-IR LEDs that pulse at 160 W, which would be way more than PoE is specced to provide, but since the LEDs are only on when the camera is taking a frame, the average power is well within allowable limits. With 16 cameras each having their own ring light, that’s a lot of near-IR photons. Don’t forget your safety squints!
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Rather than process the images with OpenCV, he has his own custom solution optimized for this use-case that [Dennis] reports is 300x faster. Luckily, he’s put his implementation on GitHub, along with the rest of the project. Even if you don’t have any v-tubing ambitions, this project is very impressive and worth checking out in its entirety.
Following its 2024 acquisition of McIntosh and Sonus faber, Bose is making another calculated move in connected audio with the acquisition of StreamUnlimited Engineering GmbH, a Vienna-based company that supplies streaming software platforms, hardware modules, app frameworks, certifications, and engineering support for audio and smart home manufacturers.
This is not just Bose buying another parts supplier. StreamUnlimited gives Bose something far more useful: the software plumbing and certification backbone needed to build, support, and potentially license connected audio products across multiple brands and categories. That matters for Bose, but it may matter even more for McIntosh and Sonus faber, two premium audio brands that need stronger streaming ecosystems if they are going to compete in a market increasingly shaped by BluOS, Sonos, HEOS, WiiM, AirPlay, Google Cast, Spotify Connect, TIDAL Connect, Qobuz Connect, and Roon.
The deal also gives Bose a broader path to embed its proprietary audio technologies, including Sound by Bose and the Bose WaveForm Audio Engine, into more products beyond its own speakers and headphones. That could include smart speakers, soundbars, multiroom systems, mobile devices, wearables, automotive audio, and third-party connected products. In other words, Bose is not just chasing another box for the shelf. It is buying the infrastructure needed to make its audio technology travel farther.
Sound by Bose is featured in Epson Lifestudio Projectors
Two current examples of Bose’s Sound by Bose strategy already exist in the wild: Epson’s Lifestudio projector lineup and Skullcandy’s Method 360 ANC earbuds. In both cases, Bose is not selling a finished Bose-branded speaker or headphone. It is licensing its audio tuning, acoustic design, and performance credibility into third-party products that need better sound to stand out.
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That makes the StreamUnlimited acquisition more interesting. If Bose can combine Sound by Bose with StreamUnlimited’s streaming software, app frameworks, hardware modules, certification work, and connected-audio engineering, the company gains a much wider path to expand beyond its own products. Epson and Skullcandy show the basic strategy. StreamUnlimited could help scale it.
“As connected ecosystems scale and become more complex, how devices work together is a central driver of value,” said Nick Smith, president of Bose Audio Technology and chief strategy officer. “StreamUnlimited has built a trusted position at the center of this coordination layer, where interactions between devices are defined and orchestrated. We’re excited to welcome their team to Bose as we bring our capabilities to more partners, products, and experiences.”
“We look forward to joining with Bose as we expand StreamUnlimited’s offerings and accelerate the development of next-generation intelligent audio experiences for our customers,” said Frits Wittgrefe, CEO at StreamUnlimited. Markus Rutz, CTO at StreamUnlimited, added, “There is a significant opportunity to further advance the orchestration capabilities at the core of our platform, enabling more seamless, adaptive, and AI-driven audio ecosystems. This will unlock broader access to new streaming technologies, services, and capabilities, positioning us for continued growth as the market evolves.”
StreamUnlimited will continue to support both current and new customers, while extending its expertise into new markets. Its solutions will remain fully supported, interoperable, and open to integration with third-party technologies, products, and ecosystems.
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Additional information about the acquisition, including financial and other transaction terms, remains confidential at this time.
The Bottom Line
Bose’s acquisition of StreamUnlimited is not about turning McIntosh and Sonus faber into Bose-branded lifestyle products. So far, both brands have continued on their own legacy paths. What this deal really gives Bose is something more strategic: the software, streaming, app, certification, hardware-module, and engineering infrastructure needed to compete in connected audio at a much larger scale.
That matters across the portfolio. Bose gets more control over the platform layer behind smart speakers, soundbars, headphones, wearables, automotive systems, and third-party products using Sound by Bose. McIntosh could benefit from stronger connected amplifiers, streamers, preamps, and in-car systems without losing its identity. Sonus faber gains a clearer path toward active, wireless, and lifestyle products that still feel like Sonus faber, not another anonymous app-controlled box.
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The AI angle is part of the story, but not the whole story. StreamUnlimited gives Bose a foundation for more adaptive, personalized, voice-enabled, and software-driven audio experiences. That does not mean Bose bought an AI company or that a Bose rival to BluOS, Sonos, HEOS, or WiiM appears tomorrow. It means Bose now owns more of the plumbing required to build one, license one, or embed its technology more deeply into other companies’ products.
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Bose is no longer just chasing the next speaker or headphone. It is building a broader audio technology ecosystem that can live inside its own products, its luxury brands, and the products of third-party partners. That is the real move.
Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence (RDI), alongside an advisory committee of over 300 domain experts, have launched Agents’ Last Exam (ALE)—a grueling new benchmark built to measure whether artificial intelligence can actually execute economically valuable, long-horizon professional workflows.
In a shocking upset, OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 from April, operating through the Codex harness, secured the absolute top spot on the new ALE Leaderboard with a 24.0% pass rate, beating Anthropic’s highly anticipated, brand new Mythos-class Claude Fable 5 model released just yesterday, which came in third with a score of 22.0%.
Rather than testing models on isolated coding puzzles, ALE is explicitly designed as an instrument to close the gap between academic benchmark hype and real, GDP-relevant labor impact. And right now, the data proves the most advanced models in the world are fundamentally failing the exam.
ALE Leaderboard full chart. Credit: Agents’ Last Exam/UC Berkeley RDI
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ALE Leaderboard. Credit: Agents’ Last Exam/UC Berkeley RDI
Ending the Era of ‘Cheating’ and Brittle Graders
The fundamental shift in ALE lies in its evaluation architecture and the demands it places on the agent.
Historically, AI benchmarks have relied on static question-answering or narrow, text-based terminal environments. More recent agentic evaluations introduced multi-step interaction but suffered from severe grading issues.
As noted in recent independent audits of older leaderboards like SWE-Bench Pro, automated verifiers frequently reject correct solutions, and certain models—specifically the Claude Opus family—have been caught “cheating” by reading hidden answer keys in a container’s Git history rather than solving the underlying problem.
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ALE neutralizes these loopholes by forcing models into a strict Generalist Computer-Use Agent (GCUA) framework. To pass, an agent cannot merely execute terminal commands.
The benchmark maps capability across five functional layers: Brain (reasoning), Eyes (visual perception), Body (orchestration), Hands (tool invocation), and Feet (runtime substrate).
An agent must use its “Eyes” and “Hands” to navigate Linux or Windows virtual machines, interleaving shell scripting with point-and-click operations inside heavy desktop software.
Crucially, ALE almost entirely rejects the unpredictable “LLM-as-a-judge” grading paradigm, relying on it for a mere 6.8% of its workflows. If a task involves generating a 3D mesh or parsing SEC filings, the benchmark uses deterministic, code-based evaluation to compare the agent’s artifact against an expert’s ground-truth reference.
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Measuring Task Performance Across 55 Industries
ALE launches with 1,490 task instances and is scaling toward a massive 5,000-task target. What makes the product remarkable is its authenticity. The tasks are strictly anchored in the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy (O*NET / SOC 2018), covering 55 non-physical industry sub-domains.
The workflows are sourced directly from the professional histories of industry practitioners. Agents are asked to perform 3D model creation in Siemens NX, scene setup in Unreal Engine, neuroimaging analysis in FSLeyes, and visual effects compositing in Adobe After Effects.
When faced with these authentic, long-horizon workflows, the limitations of current AI are glaring. ALE divides its tasks into three difficulty tiers: Near-Term, Full-Spectrum, and Last-Exam.
Top 5 Agentic Harnesses on the ALE Leaderboard
Rank
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Agent Harness
Underlying Model
Pass Rate
Mean Score
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1
Codex
gpt-5-5
24.0%
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42.8%
2
Ale Claw
gpt-5-5
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23.0%
45.8%
3
Claude Code
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claude-fable-5
22.0%
40.5%
4
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OpenClaw
gpt-5-5
21.1%
41.0%
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5
Cursor CLI
composer-2-5
20.4%
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38.5%
The victory of GPT-5.5 aligns with recent third-party analysis suggesting that OpenAI’s models are currently superior at strictly adhering to multi-part, complex prompts. Conversely, users report Anthropic’s Claude architecture can sometimes be “forgetful” with multi-part instructions, abandoning required steps mid-workflow — a fatal flaw in ALE’s rigorous pipeline.
And while hitting a 24.0% pass rate is enough to claim the crown, the absolute performance ceiling remains remarkably low.
On the hardest “Last-Exam” tier — representing the frontier of professional difficulty — most configurations, including Anthropic’s older Claude Opus 4.8 and Google’s Gemini CLI, record a devastating 0.0% pass rate.
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Solving Benchmark Contamination
A core vulnerability in modern AI evaluation is “benchmark contamination”—the phenomenon where test questions inevitably leak into the massive data lakes used to train next-generation models. Once a model memorizes the benchmark, the evaluation becomes entirely useless.
ALE solves this through a dual-use deployment strategy. The project operates as an open-source research initiative, but it closely guards its evaluation data. Only about 10% of the dataset (roughly 150 tasks) is released publicly on platforms like GitHub and Hugging Face. The remaining 1,300+ tasks are kept strictly private.
For developers and enterprise evaluators, this means ALE functions as a “living benchmark”. Private tasks are systematically rotated into the public pool over time, while retired public tasks are swapped out.
This rolling release ensures that the evaluation surface remains uncontaminated across successive model generations, giving enterprise buyers confidence that an agent’s high score is earned, not memorized.
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Additionally, ALE provides transparency by tracking both “Full” and “Unlicensed” scores. Because real professional work often requires paid, proprietary software, the “Full” leaderboard incorporates tasks that rely on commercial CAD tools, paid APIs, or licensed datasets.
The “Unlicensed” tier drops these license-gated tasks to provide a clean, like-for-like comparison using only freely available tools, ensuring models aren’t simply rewarded for having access to paid enterprise software.
Bottom Line: ALE Shows Even the Highest-Performing Models and Harnesses Have Room for Improvement
For developers frustrated by the gap between marketing claims and actual production performance, ALE’s brutal grading curve is highly validating.
Zengyi Qin, an MIT PhD researcher and data contributor to the project, took to X to announce the launch, sharing images of the paper and the staggering 100+ institution contributor list.
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“Introducing Agents’ Last Exam (ALE),” Qin wrote. “Built by 300+ domain experts from 100+ institutions. Covering 55 industry domains. Claude Opus 4.8 has 0.0% pass rate on the hardest subset. Glad to have contributed to this benchmark”.
In a follow-up post highlighting the Hugging Face ArXiv paper link, Qin added:
“Very solid work from project leads @YiyouSun @Xinyang_Han_ @dawnsongtweets and @BerkeleyRDI”.
As businesses deploy billions in capital betting on AI agents, they desperately need a compass that points true north. If an agent can eventually conquer the gauntlet of Agents’ Last Exam, it won’t just be passing a test—it will be proving it is ready to join the workforce. Until then, the sobering pass rates on the leaderboard serve as a necessary reality check for the entire AI ecosystem.
Multiple reports indicate that Chinese operatives continue using every tech tool at their disposal – including American AI – to amass data on and manipulate everyone from security-clearance holders to everyday US citizens. And they’re trying to influence public opinion on building datacenters for AI, albeit without success so far.
One of these reports found a “significant resurgence” of a botnet linked to Chinese government-backed goons, including Volt Typhoon, which previously used a covert network of connected devices to burrow deep into critical US networks and preposition for future destructive attacks.
In January 2024, the FBI said it killed Volt’s KV-botnet, comprised of hundreds of end-of-life routers and other internet-connected devices. At the time, KV-botnet consisted of four clusters, with the KV cluster primarily being used as a covert data transfer network, and the JDY cluster used for scanning and reconnaissance.
In a Wednesday report, Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs said that while the KV cluster became largely defunct after the law enforcement takedown, the JDY cluster remains an active threat, and has since surged to more than 1,500 compromised routers and IoT devices.
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“Analysis of this activity shows a clear focus on identifying vulnerable infrastructure shortly after public vulnerability disclosures, suggesting that reconnaissance output is rapidly operationalized by China-nexus advanced persistent threat (APT) actors,” the threat intel team wrote. “This targeted focus has been observed across a range of sectors, with the US military and associated entities as the most prominent.”
Using American AI for covert ops about … American AI
OpenAI in a Wednesday report said it banned ChatGPT accounts likely originating from China after they used the American AI company’s models to generate content for covert operations about – wait for it – American AI. While neither of the two clusters seemed to have much success in sowing chaos or swaying opinions, the fact that they tried at all is significant, according to Ben Nimmo, principal investigator on OpenAI’s Intelligence and Investigations team.
“Neither campaign appears to have gained much authentic engagement,” Nimmo told reporters. “They’re important for what they reveal about the intentions of influence operators from China and the narratives they’re testing and seeking to amplify.”
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The first cluster used ChatGPT to generate social media content and images for an operation claiming datacenters and AI applications are increasing electricity demand and causing higher costs for ordinary Americans.
“For example, they asked for comic strips about a power grid operator’s capacity auction prices based on reporting from a legitimate regional paper,” the report says. “They asked ChatGPT to focus the comments on rising capacity prices as a consequence of peak electricity demand, framing the new demand as coming from data centers and AI applications and argued that these costs were ultimately passed to ordinary households.”
The operators then posted these comments and images on X, likely using fake accounts, with links to real news stories about datacenters.
OpenAI suspects the operators are part of a social-media team at a private Chinese tech company that provides services for Chinese provincial-level government clients.
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“This was not a case of an influence operation creating a debate,” Nimmo said. “The debate existed already. This was an influence operation from China trying to interfere in it. We didn’t see any signs that they succeeded.”
The second cluster of banned ChatGPT accounts also likely originated in China and used OpenAI’s models to write comments and draw political cartoons criticizing US tech policies and tariffs. “Interestingly, the operators specified in their prompts that the content should not include cartoons of Xi Jinping in the output and should only include President Trump,” Nimmo said.
These accounts, all writing prompts in simplified Chinese and using VPNs to access the AI systems, also used ChatGPT to edit work reports and help design social media monitoring systems. “This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen actors in China trying to come up with ideas for social media monitoring,” Nimmo said.
In February, OpenAI said it banned ChatGPT accounts believed to be linked to Chinese government entities attempting to use AI models to surveil individuals and social media accounts.
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If AI doesn’t work, bribery might?
If Chinese agents can’t use AI systems to unearth sensitive information, there are always fake websites and job offers promising cash for state secrets. We’ve seen Beijing-linked government snoops use these tactics in the past, and according to the US Justice Department, they’re still using this scam (because it works).
On Wednesday, the feds said they obtained a warrant for and seized 13 fake consulting company websites used to target US persons, including current and former security clearance holders with access to classified and sensitive government information.
The domains include centrikglobalconsulting.com, rightinfoconsult.com, finnaclevesperconsulting.com, cydfconsulting.com, pulsewaveglobal.com, catalystglobalsolutions.com, thehorizzen.com, geoindopacific.com, gpf-ina.org, safesec-group.com, thetruthinfo.com, Vandercons.com, and gulfpeace.org.
Since November 2023, these websites and associated job postings on social media, LinkedIn, and other hiring platforms advertised “consulting” jobs, including “Senior Analyst” and “International Affairs Consultant” positions.
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Suspected PRC operatives used the sites and job listings to recruit applicants and bribe them for sensitive information, DOJ alleges. “The conspirators have encouraged applicants and recruits to share confidential and sensitive information in violation of their official duties and of particular interest to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government,” according to the court documents. “The recruiters pressured candidates to share confidential information and reports from ‘insider sources’ in violation of their official duties.”
The court documents allege the conspirators then paid the recruits for these reports using online accounts in the names of fictitious individuals, and cryptocurrency to hide their identities and the source of the payments. ®
The Mobi Fold is a compact wireless mouse designed to fold flat when not in use. Early impressions are positive for its surprisingly comfortable shape, quiet clicks, and multi-device Bluetooth support.
Palantir’s Karp predicts full AI nationalization in two years. He says Sanders’ 50% proposal will look moderate. Trump, Sanders, and Karp agree the shift is coming.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp says full nationalization of AI companies is coming, and that Senator Bernie Sanders’ proposal for 50% public ownership will soon look moderate. “In two years, they’re not going to think Bernie Sanders is progressive,” Karp told CNBC on Wednesday. “They’re going to be like, ‘Bernie Sanders, you only want 50%? What is this 50%?’”
Karp said he has spent six months privately warning top AI executives about the threat. “The momentum is on the side of people who want to nationalise them,” he said. He described himself as a “card-carrying progressive” and argued that the most important political decisions in the country will be driven by whether politicians understand AI.
The prediction lands in an increasingly crowded political space. Sanders has outlined his American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would impose a one-time 50% tax on stock, not profits, from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. Trump has said he plans to meet AI company leaders to discuss some form of public ownership, calling it a “partnership with the American public.” The two sides disagree on nearly everything else.
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“The question is not whether AI will change the world, it will,” Sanders said in a video this month. “The question is who will own and control that future.” Trump said at the White House: “If we do that, the public will become very rich, the people in our country.”
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Not everyone in Trump’s orbit agrees. David Sacks, the former White House AI and crypto czar, warned that Republicans who adopt the Sanders position will regret it. “Conservatives are right to fear where this is all headed but ought to think more carefully about how regulations they are flirting with now will be used against them the next time a Democrat administration is in power,” Sacks wrote.
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Karp framed the debate differently. He said Americans are asking what will happen to them as AI eliminates jobs, “and the answers aren’t all good or bad.” He predicted the US would need to “retrain and retool” and said it is better positioned to do so than Europe. He did not address how Palantir, which sells AI to governments and militaries, would be affected by nationalization.
The bipartisan convergence on public ownership of AI is remarkable. A year ago, the idea of the US government taking equity stakes in AI companies would have been dismissed as fringe. Now a socialist senator, a Republican president, and a defence contractor CEO all agree it is likely. The disagreement is only about how much and how fast.
Whether any of it happens depends on legislation, which has not been introduced yet, and on whether AI companies voluntarily offer equity, as OpenAI has proposed through its Public Wealth Fund concept. But Karp’s prediction is the most extreme version yet from a sitting CEO: not 10%, not 50%, but full nationalization, and within two years.
Listen up, nerds. Newegg currently has promo codes and deals on gently used, refurbished, new and hard-to-find electronics, gaming products and more. Remaining one of the biggest online-only retailers in the US for the last 20 years, Newegg is a leading global online retailer for PC hardware, home appliances and all things tech, as well as providing help with businesses’ e-commerce needs. In the last decade, Newegg has expanded its online retail presence, selling everything from PC parts to refurbished vacuum cleaners. So, whether you’re wanting to build your own PC or just looking to upgrade your laptop, Newegg has something for every type of tech lover. Plus, WIRED has found several Newegg discount codes (and other deals) for new and existing customers. Don’t wait too long—save big money on those big (and small) tech purchases in 2026.
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Like I said before, be sure to check Newegg often for their seasonal sales throughout 2026, like the ultimate-capitalism-extravaganza that is Black Friday (and now, Cyber Monday, too), where Newegg has major discounts on a wide range of electronics for the few days leading up to Black Friday (through Cyber Week). Along with these peak holiday sales, they also have their own sales, like their Anniversary sale and FantasTech sale, which is essentially their version of Amazon Prime Day, where thousands of deals run for several days. It’s a good bet that if you check Newegg around Back to School time and during Memorial and Labor Day, there will be tons of end-of-season sales, too. After Christmas, they usually clear out a substantial amount of inventory with huge discounts on computer-related products like monitors and hard drives. Snag one of our Newegg promo codes above to save on your next tech purchase, some of which can be used on already discounted items.
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The model will reportedly be made available to enterprise customers and paid subscribers.
Just two months after rolling out Mythos to a limited pool of high-level users, Anthropic has announced the release of Claude Fable 5, an AI model similar to Mythos but with significant safeguards and blocks to prevent deliberate misuse and security breaches, according to the company.
Unlike Mythos, which is currently only available to a select number of organisations and institutions due to major concerns about securing critical infrastructure, Claude Fable 5 will be made available to enterprise customers and paid subscribers.
The model has built-in barriers that aim to block responses in high-risk areas such as cybersecurity, chemistry and biology, with such interactions automatically handled instead, the company said, by its Opus 4.8 model.
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Fable 5, Anthropic claimed, shows strong capabilities in software engineering, knowledge work, vision, scientific research and similar fields.
In a statement, Anthropic explained that over the course of the past few months, the organisation has worked to improve safeguards that would make Claude Fable 5 “robust enough for a general release”, adding that in prioritising safety, some measures are “stricter than would be ideal” and some benign requests may be classified as risky. However, there are plans to further refine the model’s regulation systems.
Anthropic has also announced an updated version of the Mythos model, Claude Mythos 5, reportedly similar to Fable 5 but with the cyber safeguards lifted.
The organisation said, “In consultation with the US government, we plan to steadily expand access to Claude Mythos 5, continuing our periodic addition of new partners, as well as pursuing a trusted access programme that allows cybersecurity organisations to apply in a more systematic manner.”
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In early June, Anthropic unveiled plans for a historic initial public offering that could take the company’s valuation soaring above $1trn. The proposal came less than a week after Anthropic overtook OpenAI’s valuation with a $65bn Series H funding round that valued it at $965bn.
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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Solar generated more U.S. electricity than coal for the first month on record in May 2026, according to new analysis from global energy think tank Ember. Solar supplied 12.8% of U.S. electricity during the month, while coal dropped to 12.2%. That’s a dramatic shift in the U.S. power mix. Just five years ago, coal generated 19.7% of U.S. electricity in May, while solar accounted for only 5.4%. U.S. solar generation hit a record 45.5 terawatt-hours (TWh) in May 2026, up 17% from May 2025 and higher than the previous record set last July. Ember says another record could be broken again this summer.
Solar output usually peaks in June or July, but its share of the electricity mix is often highest in spring, when strong sunshine lines up with milder temperatures before summer cooling demand ramps up. May was also the first time solar became the third-largest individual source of electricity in the U.S., behind only natural gas and nuclear. (If solar is included with all other renewables, then they’re the second-largest source of electricity as an overall category of electricity.) Meanwhile, coal keeps sliding (and will continue to slide). Coal generation hit an all-time monthly low of 39.3 TWh in April 2026. Output rose slightly in May to 43.4 TWh, but it was still 11% lower than May 2025 levels. Even with that small rebound, coal couldn’t keep pace with solar’s rapid growth.
While the deal could be signed in ‘the coming days’, talks are ongoing and it may not materialise at all, sources told Reuters.
Nuvei, a payments company based in Montreal, Canada, is reportedly in “advanced talks” to acquire Payoneer Global for $2.7bn, according to Reuters.
The purchase price – which includes Payoneer’s cash holdings – implies an enterprise value of about $2.3bn, according to two sources familiar with the matter that spoke with the publication.
While the deal could be signed in “the coming days”, talks are ongoing and it may change or not materialise at all, the sources added.
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If the deal was signed, the resulting acquisition would combine Nuvei’s payment processing business with Payoneer’s cross-border payments solution.
Nuvei, which provides payment processing, risk management and payout solutions to merchants globally, was founded in 2003 by Philip Fayer, who is also the company’s chair and CEO.
Nuvei is backed by Canadian investment group CDPQ and private equity firms Novacap and Advent International – the latter of which took Nuvei private in 2024 through an all-cash transaction that valued the payments company at approximately $6.3bn.
Payoneer, which is based in New York, was founded in 2005 by Yuval Tal with $2m in seed funding from Tal and other private investors.
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The company – which processes cross-border payments for freelancers, sellers and businesses – supports 70 currencies and has a number of high-profile customers, including Google, Ebay, AirBnB, Fiverr, Visa and Walmart.
Since Reuters’ report on the potential acquisition, Payoneer shares have risen significantly, jumping by more than 24pc. Its market capitalisation at the time of writing is currently $2.13bn.
Boundless enables businesses to handle cross-border payroll, taxes, benefits and compliance, with the aim of simplifying complexities surrounding international employment to make it easier for companies to hire and support talent globally.
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The acquisition was expected to help Payoneer access and manage its talent spread globally, especially as limited staff and varying local regulations make payroll compliance difficult, the company said at the time.
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