Consequences of Musk's Online Rhetoric

This show is supported by Outshift, Cisco's incubation enngine Today's AI agents operate in silos, limiting their true potential. We've been focused on building bigger, smarter models, but scaling up is just one approach to reach super intelligence together, we need to do more We need to scale out And we actually have a blueprint from seventy thousand years ago Humans didn't just get smarter individually, the cognitive revolution transformed society because we began sharing knowledge, goals, and innovation aggents are now at that same inflection point They can connect, but they can't think together. That's why Outshift by Cisco is building the internet of cognition. transforming AI from isolated systems into orchestrated superintelligence By creating an open, interoperable infrastructure, Outshift by Cisco is enabling agents and humans to share intent, context, and reasoning Cognitive evolution for agents is here Explore the internet of cognition at outshift. com Oshift. com Brian. Before we start, two quick things. If you've been enjoying listening to the show, we would appreciate it if you took a second to rate it in your podcast app of choice. It really helps us reach more people. And second, if you have any questions related to tech, privacy, or politics that you would like me, Zoe, and Leah to take on, now is the time to submit them to uncannyvalley atwired d. com It doesn't matter how big or how small We want to hear from you and get your answers. Okay Oo the show Hi guys. Hi everybody. We are far flung today. I know. You're not even supposed to be here but you're here. Couldn't miss it. I am out this week technically beach with my parents and my family and we're playing a lot of mini golf That's basically it That's pretty good stuff though. Who's winning? Grandma, Grandma crushing it. Wow. a terror on the links Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Balley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Director of Business and Industry. I'm Brian Barret, Executive ditor. And I'm Leiaah Feiger, director of Politics and Science Today on the show, we're diving into the IPO bonanza that the top AI companies are embarking on, to the point where some real estate listings in San Francisco are looking for not just regular old cash, but something that is considered even more valuable right now, stock in Anthropic and openp AI The madness is honestly just beginning. And this week, the Trump administration announced an executive order asking AI companies to give the federal government access to their most advanced artificial intelligence models thirty days before their public release This decision did not come that smoothly. We're going to discuss all the inside fighting that has been going on inside the administration when it comes to AI regulation and whether this executive order actually makes any difference. We'll also get into how hackers tricked Instagram's AI chatbot to access some high profile accounts, including President Obama's former Whiteouse account And we'll talk about a doge whistleblower who says someone cut the brakes of his car a few days after Elon Musk boosted a claim, they called him a liar So You've You probably already heard this week that Anthropic officially submitted its paperwork to go public. It did this confidentially and then it shouted it from the rooftops. And they beat open AI and they beat openI, which we will get into in just a moment. The company has not set the exact date or the specific amount of money it's seeking to raise, but with its current valuation, which is a mind boggling nine hundred sixty five billion dollars, that's billion with a Be It is well on its way to becoming one of the largest IPOs in history. Anthropic is joining a pretty crowded field, SpaceX, which owns XAI already filed its paperwork to go public. That's probably happening in June. And OpenAI is also rumored to be announcing their own filing very, very soon. asked openenAI to weigh in after Anthropic filed and kind of whether they had already filed were planning to. And they said, we are not going to comment, confirm, deny, speculate, pontificate, or elaborate. Wow. Wh was great So special. Yeah. they bust out that theaurus, It's serious. Yeah, you know, I just responded, Wow, exclamation point. and that was left on red. So yeah, I mean, this is a full on race. although OpenAI has said it doesn't matter who goes public first. I think particularly in this moment when it feels like anthropic is really asceundant and at least from a PR perspective, they're doing incredibly well. You know, it matters that they have filed, that they're well on their way. But there's also a lot of stuff that needs to happen for SpaceX phanthropic for open AI for them to be able to go public. You need to be super buttoned up. you need to have all of your ducks in a row. and these are young And at times messy startups Well, and they and poor SpaceX, which is not as young and was not as messy until they sort of had a forced adoption of XAI. and all that goes with that. So I do feel bad for them that they were they were all of the things that you need to be Until right up to the moment that they needed to be them, and now they're just in the same AI mess as everybody else. Yeah, they really, really are. So there've been a lot of interesting kind of subthreads to this story as you might imagine. But one thing that I think you will both find very, very funny is that we have been seeing real estate listings in San Francisco say that they will accept stock in anthropic or open AI in exchange for a house. And this has happened not just one time, multiple times Incredible. Zoe, do we know if anyone has actually done a purchase like this yet, or is that still? No, There are so many questions. My major one was how are they deciding the value of the like these aren't public companies. Also, do you need board approval to give away a bunch of your stock in exchange for a house? It feels like it's a handshake agreement to be honest. L there can't be like anything that official here Wired freelcer Ariele Pardas wrote a story for us about this and she asked the real estate agents, how are you expecting how are your clients expecting these deals to go? And everyone was kind of like figure it out One of the agents did say that they've received a lot of interest and she claims specifically from anthropic employees. There was one listing in particular that said they were only accepting anthropic stock not open AI because the guy who is selling the house likes anthropics products A couple of things. One, it's also just a good marketing stunt. like we're talking about enlisting the addresses of these very expensive houses for sale, reggardless of how they buy them. It's just good on these realtors forgetting the word out there But also, it is a reminder of how many Billionaires are about to hit the streets in San Francisco even more than there already are too the point where I mean people can probably there I assume a lot of people at Anthropic are open Ee who can give away two million dollars worth of stock and still have a whole lot of stock left over. It's sort of like monopoly money at this point Totally. I mean, a lot of these people, like you insinuated, are like on paper, millionaires or even billionaires. But once the IPOs happen, they'll be actual millionaires, if not billionaires. It's interesting that even in the meantime, there's potential for them to convert their paper wealth into actual value in the form of a house. That's like a big if because again We haven't seen one of these transactions play out that we actually know of. But like you said, Brad, when we first saw a couple listings, I was like, Noah, this feels like a gimmick. but then enough of them popped up that I was like, okay, there's something hereing when Ariel reached out to speak to the agents again Some of them were taking it pretty seriously. It didn't feel like it was a pure marketing play, even if it does have that effect You hinted to this earlier, Zoe, but Anthropic basically said that if you try to sell your anthropic shares without board approval, then that transaction is not valid, right? Like it is going to be interesting to see kind of messes? Yeah. I mean, we have always seen, I think employees selling stock on secondary markets. It's usually not advised. L you don't want to do that because you're going to get a worse price unless you really, really have to. and sometimes you do have to. sometometimes people need liquidity and so they're willing to do it. But Anthropic, I think has insinuated that there's you know some scammy situations going down and that those transactions are not valid. Poor SpaceX and open AI, that's not happening yet. no houses for sale, no exchange of dog walking for stock. I'm waiting. I'm waiting for thatbe open AI has seen a few, but yeah, maybe no SpaceX quite yet. although, you know, San Francisco iss a crazy place so I wouldn't be surprised I wantan to talk about something in the AI industry that is not having to do with IPOs On Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that asked tech companies to voluntarily give the government early access. to new AI models before releasing them to the public, thirty days before they're set to be released, to be exact There had been reports of an executive order coming down the pipeline for weeks now, But after President Trump nixs the original proposal at the very last minute a few weeks ago, it wasn't clear if it was actually going happen. Here's his response when he was asked about his reasoning I didn't like certain aspects of it. I postponed it. I think it gets in the way of You know, we're leading China, we're leading everybody and I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that lead, we have a very substantial on AI. It's causing it's causing a tremendous good I really thought that could have been a blocker and I want to make sure that it's He said all of those things when he cancellled the executive order a couple of weeks ago now. But the other part of this is there were so many competing officials in the administration that were pulling him in different directions. We can't forget David Sachs, his former AIsar in all of this, who very much stopped the original executive order from happening While the most recent signed order doesn't have hugely substantial differences The big difference that we can point to is beforehand, the government was asking for ninety days for companies to voluntarily give as opposed to the thirty days which everyone apparently is now comfortable with There's been some really good reporting out there, including from Wi's, Hugo Lowell, and Maxwell Zeff. reported just on Wednesday that Trump's senior aides actually persuaded him to sign this new executive order by saying that he could not infinitely delay establishing a regulatory framework for the tech considering that it was just so advanced at this point. I love all the marketing So you can't do the sort of we'll do it in two weeks that I think Trump is so good at. You really do eventually need to get it BZoe What do you love about the marketing? I just feel like the AI companies do such a good job of being like, we're actually so good at what we do and so powerful that you're like, you need to set some ground rules because like we're about to explode. Like'. It's one hundred percent. That's one hundred percent what happen. I mean, so many people are like, are they furious? Are the AI companies? No. They behind the scenes. They're having meetings with all of these folks. They're like these are this is voluntary. This is one hundred percent fine I did think it was really interesting in Hugo and Max's article where they talked about the winners and the losers with the executive order because it does seem like Susy Wiles has kind of won this round, whereereas David Sachs, a former AI and cryptosar kind of You know, as you mentioned, did not get his full wish. He went on X shortly after this announcement dropped and kind of defended the order, tried to say he was behind it and really framed it as like the ninety to thirty day switch that we saw in the planned order and what actually was signed and came out was kind of the x factor for him, and it was going to make a huge difference Now AI companies could work in lockstep with the government and not like delay their product launch cycle. Even the ninety to thirty day thing is part of that market it is of a piece of the marketing thing, right? It's like we are iterating so quickly and we are so at the cutting edge. ninety days is insane. Whatever you're looking at ninety days in advance, won't be anything like what the thirty day in advance looks like whichich like there's probably an element of truth to that, but also we've seen a lot of iterative releases from these companies. I think it is a sort of, I think really what it is is squeezing the review amount of reiew time to the extent that there is any actual review in this thirty day window to be too short to really be meaningful in any way. And again, to be clear, this is all voluntary.. There's calling this regulation is a stretch. Yeah, I don't think I feel comfortable even really calling this a regulation. You know, lookook, already we're starting to see in so many ways that the Trump administration is already utilizing this to their benefit. Hugo and Max reported that now with the order in place The Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Basscent is now exploring discussions with China to figure out about creating a similar cross border framework for like sharing advanced AI system information. And that's really interesting to me. So in some ways, this is like sort of a checkm. like we had to say that we're doing something on this. What does that mean? And how do we really go forward from there? are already like some review processes for AI in the government. But again, review versus regulation versus like, I just want access to the goods is all like very different As nitpicky as that sounds. No, no, I think that that's not a nitpick. It's an important clarification. I mean, I think that from the industry's perspective, this type of working with the government is important. Like I'm thinking about the mythos thing where Anthropic was in this kind of head to head fight with the Pentagon, Th it comes out with a model that's so big and scary that intelligence agencies need to be really red in. Anthropic and theentag relations, I've heard from sources are still a little bit icy. Anthropic and intelligence agencies a little warmer, a little warmer. So I think I was almost reading the executive order being like, oh, they're giving, you know the government an early taste of what they could later buy. They're like, you know, check it out, try it before you buy it. then mayaybe they'll weigh in, maybe they'll have feedback. Maybe they'll just be like, this is really important. and we need to actually use it. and we see a contract later. And I'd say too, I think the anthropic situation also speaks to. I mean, the government does have some levers to force people to get into this thirty day window. It's voluntary, but they could say, We're not going to give contracts to anybody who doesn't actually submit their thing for review, submit their models for review And that's a lot of money. It's a lot of power. So there are things they can do. I agree that it's all for show on both sides in a lot of ways, but There are ways to make it work Yeah. no, I think most AI companies would be fearful to not play ball here because they are all trying to quite literally work with the goverment become government contractors, and they also just they don't want harder regulation. So they want to play ball on this like voluntary level so that more stringent regulation doesn't come down later. On masters of scale, iconic leaders reveal how they've beaten the odds. Asking really strong questions is a superpower. You want to show up with something radically different and how they've grown companies to incredible heights. The greatest rewards always come from the greatest risks. That's hit the gas. Airbnb, Zillow, Microsoft, liiquid deeath and more Hear from the founders who've changed the game. It's anything but business as usual Find Masters of scale on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you get podcasts Speaking of cybersecurity but on a much smaller scale Meta dealt with a pretty stressful series of hacks recently. This past weekend, several users on social media claimed that their Instagram accounts had been compromised. Some of these accounts were pretty high profile, including a verified account used by President Obama when he was in the White House the account of the U. S. Space Forces's Chief Master Sergeant who we all know is John Bentevegna also targeted in the hacking These accounts were typically flooded with pro Iran content before they were recovered Now hacking incidents like this are not new. They happen all the time But what was interesting and especially alarming in this case is how the hackers had done it, which is basically They asked Instagram's AI chatbot to help them get access It's really Basically that simple. There's a video on X that even shows the step by step process. Please don't try it at home Please don't do it But basically the hacker used allegedly a VPN to spoof the presumed location of their target. And then went ahead and just asked to add an email address to that account The AI chapet would say, sure, send a confirmation email to that email address, and all of a sudden, you've got access It's pretty remarkable that no one did some troubleshooting here, Maybe thought that that was possible. It sounds like something that should have not happened. Like this is it's so simple, you guys. This is great. Yeah, but they I mean, this is interesting because it says something about kinds of cybersecurity incidents we might see more of as more big companies offload the work that was previously done, the customer experience work by humans to AI agents. And I want to say that humans aren't infallible. We've seen many a simI swap take place because someone walked into an AT and T store and said Hey, do you want to get on crimes? And the person said, sure, we'll do that for money. And thus a Sim swap happened But of course, when you're transferring a lot of customer experience work to agents, you can see systematic problems play out that might have been slightly more preventable with a human staff. It's the systematic part, right? Because like one T mobile employee one time can do a lot of damage, but it's one person. Whereas if this is just how the agent works under these conditions, you can do it again and again and again, as many times as you want, across as many accounts as you want with no stop. I do think, know for all of that we've already talked about today and all the concern and national teeth over Methos and the cybersecurity implications of these models and how they can you do these very sophisticated findings of bugs There's the other end of it too which is that AI agents can be pretty dumb Yeah, you don't need to be that suphist good good for these Like you should be worried about how smart AI is and how dumb AI is, I guess at the point. Like it's on both ends of the spectrum. Dream small folks. It's not actually the most intense hacking moment. And and look, I mean, Meta has said that they have since resolved the problem Obviously, I'm thinking about all of these other websites out there and all of these other concerns about the impact of increasingly capable and common haacking attempts on AI systems that have to do with people's data in security Everything is switching over. I'm thinking of transcription services, websites. there's just it's just so much. It's everything now and everything is AI agent oriented I'm really interested to see how this gets addressed. Like are other companies freaking out right now following Meta's big gaff? I don't know. I think not enough to go back on any plans. And I think's it is going to be a classic scenario of put up a stop sign after someone gets run over. I think that's going to be what we're going to seeen over and over again because As much as you test internally, as much as you red teeam things, Rd teeam is the term for when you sort of put on your hacker hat and say if I were a bad guy, what would I do with this? As much as you do that There are going to be things that people think about at Meta, you are one company. it's you versus The entire world of deviance and freaks and people who just want to break things, which is a lot of people. Deviance and freaks, the new name of our podcast is I mean, just going back to Rd teaming, that's work that a trust and safety team typically does. And those teams we don't have' anymore. They're not as big as they used to be There's just not as much work. Yeah, I mean, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Obviously within Ma, we've been talking to folks this week who kind of met the news with like the company has just laid off a large portion of the workforce. We've written about that. we've talked about that. And you know, I checked in with people being like, well, how's it going now? The hack was kind of an excuse to kind of talk to people, see how they're doing, and they're like, I mean, as you'd expect, we're asked to do two jobs now instead of one. So you can imagine how that's playing out I also, you know, we were talking about AI regulation earlier and and all this emphasis on national security and these high level things, but again not as much on consumer facing products, which would be if you had, say, some sort of bureau that looked after consumer finances and protecting that, that would be helpful to have in this moment as well. We used to have one of those Technically, I guess we still do not really So all of this broader deregulation is coming at this moment when the tools that were once available are not theseese new tools are very fallible We're going to see a lot more of this Can I bring us to a topic that has nothing to do with AI, guys? Please. Wow, I didn't know one existed, but yes, go off Queen. Also, I think we can probably try to find a way to tie it back in. We can, we can. No, absolutely not. Well, okay, this story is something that we have been Thinking about covering, looking at for a long time, but it is all about a Doge whistleblower who just filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk This all really started last year. On april fourteenth, twenty twenty five, Dan Berillis, an IT staffer at the National Labor Relations Board, the NLRB filed a whistleblower complaint a massive claim. He said that Doge had compromised the agency's data and appeared to be exfiltrating it out of the NLRB A whistleblower is coming forward with claims that Doge not only accessed data from his agency, but also took a substantial amount of sensitive data with them Acording to a disclosure shared with Congress, quote, aroundround ten gigabytes of data the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedia's worth, if someone printed these files. as hard copy documents. This was a massive claim, especially at the same time, as you guys very much remember, Doge teams were firing federal workers and accessing sensitive data across the country. Like were we were in the height of this last year in April berillis went public and an NPR article, his name was attached to it, and he claimed a threatening note had been taped to his door, and he was already scared about speaking out Fast forward a little bit Burlis has now filed a defamation lawsuit in a DC court against Elon Musk. He said that Musk made him a target of further violence by falsely stating that Berlis' whistleblower claim against Doge was fake This is a really intense claim for a variety of reasons, and what this all really harkens back to is musk L year resharing an exp post from a right wing influencer claiming that Doge had been cleared and that this whistleblower's testimony was fake, basically After that happened, here comes the AI part. No, absolutely not After that happened Berilla says that he was driving his car and his brakes were cut And he believes that it is related So that is the crux of this defamation lawsuit against Elon Musk And it's kind of a big one. This is a whistleblower who says that Elon Musk's shit posting on X could have caused him injury. And it sounds so extreme, and I'm always a little bit inherently skeptical of claims like this because it sounds like it's out of a movie, but there are just some facts that are in part of this suit that he filed He has the actual documentation from the person who worked on his car who said that not only were the brakes cut, but the air bags were basically made not to work, right And the car had been rewired so that the sensors wouldn't go off to say that the airbags had been disabled He had received a threatening note on his door notot long before this happened. so someone knew where he lived and had gone out of their way to threaten them. So there there's a lot of stuff here that is verifiable that's really alarming. And I think there you know, obviously Elon Musk has a huge platform And when he says, inflammatory things People listen Yeah, I mean, I had two kind of historical incidents instantly come to mind when I was reading this piece. One was when Elon Musk reposted something on X insinuating that Yel Roth, the former head of trrust and saafety at Twitter was essentially a pedophile and Yoal had to leave his house where he lived with his husband, basically go into hiding, and they eventually sold that house because of the death threats that they received Y all never filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk due to this incident, but someone else did years prior. I don't know if you guys recall the Peto guuy incident on was Yeah. cave diver. Exactly, of Elon Musk insinuating that one of the cave divers that helped save the team of Thai soccer players Yeah Young boys was a pedophile, that man sued. I believe this was in the UK. and Elon Musk was actually victorious in that suit. The guy did not win the defamation case against him I mean, like I'm interested if that stayed with him at all. He was like, I can actually just ship post anytim I want. There is There is something there though. I mean, I'll never forget last year During Doge everythingverything, he was posting up a storm. He was making inflammatory comments like all the time that really freaked people out. like David Gilbert, one of Wred's reporters, had to do an entire debunker piece about, no, how hundred plus year olds were not filing for social seecurity benefits because Elon Musk was sharing claims to the contrary. And as a result, everyone started calling social security offices being like