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As AI agents grow ever more capable, enterprises racing to put them to work across applications, workflows, and products face a new challenge: ensuring an agent does what it’s supposed to do when it’s deployed across different environments. Microsoft is trying to solve this problem with a new open source standard called Agent Control Specification (ACS) that aims to give developers a more consistent and granular way to control what AI agents are allowed to do. The specification essentially lets developer, compliance, and security teams define their own policies for agents to follow. The rules can define what the agent…

Before Zack Eakin sold investors on his new startup, he practiced on Palmer Luckey. When Eakin left Luckey’s defense startup, Anduril, in 2024 to start a new composites company called Layup Parts, Luckey — along with Anduril co-founders Brian Schimpf and Matt Grimm — let him workshop the pitch. He got different feedback from each, Eakin told TechCrunch. Grimm helped him think about how to pitch VCs, Schimpf (Anduril’s CEO) pushed him on strategy, while Luckey — ever the fundraiser — guided him on the storytelling. This miniature boot camp appears to have worked. Two years ago, Eakin raised a…

Google announced on Tuesday that Android is launching fake call detection to protect against AI deepfake impersonation scams. The feature is rolling out globally in Phone by Google to Android 12+ devices this month, starting with Pixel devices. As people increasingly refuse to answer calls from unknown numbers, scammers are shifting their tactics by spoofing trusted phone numbers and using AI deepfake technology to sound like authority figures, family members, or employers. For example, a person may receive a phone call showing the caller ID “Mom,” and the voice may sound exactly like her, but the caller is actually a…

Martin Scorsese has signed on as a partner and adviser to AI image-generation startup Black Forest Labs, The New York Times reported on Tuesday. The caveat is that one of the world’s most famous living directors is using the tech solely for storyboarding. “For 70 years, I’ve been creating my own storyboards,” he said in a statement to the Times. The tool, he said, helps him communicate his vision to cinematographers and production designers far faster and more efficiently. Black Forest Labs is a 70-person outfit headquartered not in San Francisco, but in Freiburg, Germany, the closest major city to…

The Trump administration is navigating internal strife as officials try to figure out whether they can resurrect the executive order about AI regulation that President Donald Trump abruptly nixed last month, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.The conversations in the weeks since have been widely viewed as chaotic, by both key Silicon Valley players and administration officials. Some AI executives have privately told WIRED they are uncertain what a revised executive order might require, or whether one will end up being signed at all.On May 21, Trump canceled a planned signing ceremony for the order just hours before…

Data storage security company Cyera is finalizing a round led by Evolution Equity Partners of at least $300 million at a $12 billion valuation, according to four people with knowledge of the deal. Calcalist was first to report the funding deal, although TechCrunch’s sources added new details about the company and its financials. Cyera has surpassed $150 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), three people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch, though it remains far from profitable. The deal values Cyera at 80 times its ARR, a multiple that’s even higher than investors assign to many fast-growing AI startups. Sources…

More than 30 years after Adobe came up with it, the PDF file—portable document format—remains essential for archiving, sharing, and publishing. It’s a file type that can be opened by just about anyone on virtually any mobile or desktop device, while preserving the formatting, colors, and layout of the original document.Given the ubiquity and popularity of the PDF, it’s no surprise that commercial PDF software tools are in high demand. But you don’t necessarily have to pay to process these documents, especially for basic editing operations.A host of PDF tools are available on the web that will let you quickly…

For the past 10 years, Uber’s annual Lost & Found Index has provided a rather quirky anthropological snapshot of its riders — and even a few insights into society. The annual catalogue of millions of forgotten items ranges from mundane modern-day tools such as smartphones and laptops, to more eyebrow-raising objects like live fish, an ankle monitor, a toboggan, a package of live butterflies, and a single Louboutin shoe. This year, Uber is using the report to highlight the same old problem of lost items with a new twist: robotaxis. Thousands of items (it’s a bit too new for millions)…

A bipartisan group of UK politicians is sounding the alarm over the country’s partnership with the data analytics company Palantir.In a report published Tuesday, the 11 members of Parliament’s Science, Innovation, and Technology Committee warned that the country’s ballooning reliance on Palantir’s technology “represents an unacceptable point of weakness” that could hand the company overwhelming bargaining power in future negotiations.“We know that with vendor lock-in, over time, we’ll get more expensive and worse services,” Dame Chi Onwurah, chair of the committee and member of Parliament, tells WIRED. “It’s a trap that has to be avoided.”In a worst-case scenario, a deeply…

Audiobook, e-book, or both? Now, you won’t have to choose. The Scribd-owned reading subscription service Everand wants to make the choice unnecessary. On Tuesday, the company took the wraps off a combined subscription that brings together Everand’s catalog of over 1.5 million audiobooks and e-books with the social book club app Fable, which Everand acquired in 2025, into a single plan, directly challenging Amazon’s dominance in digital reading. The new subscription is available to the two apps’ 5 million combined readers and provides access to the over 1.5 million-title library of audiobooks and e-books, plus Fable’s nearly 200,000 online book…

A right-wing think tank responsible for the emergence of zero-tolerance policing in 1990s New York City and the Trump administration’s scorched-earth campaign against “diversity, equality and inclusion” programs is behind state-level legislative efforts to classify minor protest-related crimes as “civil terrorism.”The Manhattan Institute, cofounded in 1978 by former Central Intelligence Agency director William Casey, is in the midst of a yearlong campaign to pass state-level legislation reclassifying minor crimes like vandalism, blocking a roadway, or trespassing during a protest as felonies that would carry 18-month prison sentences as punishment.The Manhattan Institute’s push to criminalize forms of nonviolent disobedience as a…

AI researchers and labs have advanced by leaps and bounds in evaluating AI models for everything from safety and compliance to sycophancy and alignment. But it appears companies and developers are faced with a new, specific need: making sure their AI system behaves as intended for their specific product or service. In a bid to make that testing process simpler, Microsoft on Tuesday took the wraps off ASSERT, short for Adaptive Spec-driven Scoring for Evaluation and Regression Testing. The open source framework, Microsoft says, makes evaluating application-specific AI behavior easy by using AI to turn high-level, natural-language descriptions of goals,…

And you do what you do as a 13-year-old, you look immediately at what’s the most expensive thing you can buy.How much money are we talking about here?$3,050 I think it was, or $3,000.That’s not an insignificant sum of money.Went to the top of the list, which happened to be his and hers watches, which as it came out of my mouth was, what does a 13-year-old want with some very nice Cartier watches?Then I went back to the Long Beach Grand Prix in 1987 with my buddy in high school, met Mario Andretti, and I was very intimidated. Now…

Two weeks after announcing his departure from Omnicom Advertising, Javier Campopiano is joining Publicis Groupe as global chief creative officer (CCO) for Leo Constellation Americas and Iberia.The former McCann Worldgroup and McCann Worldwide CCO left Omnicom just six months after taking on his latest role following its acquisition of Interpublic Group (IPG) in December 2025.His appointment at Publicis follows the group’s $2.2bn purchase of LiveRamp. In a statement, Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun, said Campopiano’s appointment showed the holdco’s commitment to creativity alongside such investments.“Javier’s return is the latest demonstration of our commitment to investing in what remains a key differentiator…

When I reach out to the self-proclaimed “open source baddie” CC for an interview, I’m pretty sure she’s emailing me back from a pink mermaid purse. “I’m just having so much fun,” she tells me about her seashell cyberdeck. “It’s a Tamagotchi. It’s also an e-reader. It’s networked to my vault and my servers, so it has access to all of my server data, which has all my PDFs, and books, and notes, and everything… It’s also connected to my local AI setup at home.” CC has no background in software engineering or computer science, but she’s gotten good enough…

On April 14, 2025, Dan Berulis, an IT staffer at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), filed a Congressional whistleblower complaint with an extraordinary and urgent claim: The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had seemingly compromised the agency’s data and appeared to be exfiltrating it out of the NLRB entirely. Additionally, Berulis claimed that mere minutes after DOGE members had accessed the agency’s data, there appeared to be login attempts from an IP address in Russia.At the time, DOGE teams, orchestrated by billionaire Elon Musk, were sweeping across government, firing federal workers, and accessing sensitive data and technical systems…