This week on Uncanny Valley, the team discusses the launch of Nvidia’s splashy alliance to push for open-source AI security alongside companies like Microsoft, SpaceX, and Palantir. Notably absent? OpenAI and Anthropic. Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger break down what the split means for the industry, and the Trump administration’s own shifting opinions on AI. Plus, we discuss how Claude conversations turned up in Google and Bing search results, and the massive feat of how four whales were rescued and transported from Canada to Chicago.
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You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer, and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger. Write to us at [email protected].
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, contributing editor.
Brian Barrett: I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor.
Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.
Zoë Schiffer: Today on the show, we're diving into the open source versus closed AI debate that has been completely taking over Silicon Valley this past week. On Monday, Nvidia announced it was joining forces with a whole bunch of companies, including Microsoft, SpaceX, IBM, to build and share open source AI security tools. We're going to get into the debate why it's heating up and whether this could be an inflection point for how AI actually gets made in the United States.
Leah Feiger: And over at the White House, Trump administration officials have some different opinions about what to do when it comes to AI. We're going to talk about some of the key players influencing the Trump administration right now when it comes to AI policy and how they're actively shaping the conversation on this for the entire country.
Brian Barrett: We'll also break down why Claude chats were exposed in Google search and Bing searches. For those of you who are still on Bing, you are in this as well. For interesting reasons, we'll get into it.
Zoë Schiffer: Okay, you guys, we have to talk about this strange alliance that formed earlier this week. So, basically Nvidia announced was joining forces with more than 40 companies, including Microsoft, SpaceX, Palantir, and IBM to launch something called the Open Secure AI Alliance. Really rolls off the tongue. The stated goal is basically to build and share open source tools for AI-powered cybersecurity defense. But it's really interesting because Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are not on the list. And this news comes on the heels of this incident that happened last week where two OpenAI agents basically went rogue during a security test and breached the AI platform Hugging Face. And when Nvidia announced this alliance, they actually called out this incident by name and said, "It's a clear reminder that cyber defenders need open frontier agentic systems for self-defense." And it's kind of exposed this long-simmering debate, which we've talked about a few times on the podcast, which is that the US has really largely up until this point abandoned open weight and open source in favor of going all in on proprietary systems, and now that's becoming a bit of a problem.
Brian Barrett: This OpenAI incident has really kicked off so many intersecting issues. You've got open versus closed AI, you've got AI security and who's responsible for it. You've got US regulation. We're even at a point now where staffers from top intelligence firms, more than 1100 of them signed a petition calling on the US government to help deliberately pace "AI development" to prevent it from advancing too fast. They're saying, "Please slow us down because this stuff is getting a little out of control." On top of which it turns out that OpenAI's initial disclosure wasn't even the full story. It came out on Tuesday evening that one of its agents actually broke into four different platforms that weren't Hugging Face on its way to getting into Hugging Face. So, it's less of a, here's what this means, but it is really touching so many hot wires in the AI world right now and making a lot of conversations that have been put off for a while come to a head.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I was, I will say, pretty surprised to see that big open letter that you alluded to.
Archival audio: More than 1,000 workers from top AI firms have signed a petition calling on the US government to help, "deliberately pace AI development." The signatories of the letter include the CEO of Anthropic and the chief scientists from OpenAI and Meta Super Intelligence Lab.
Zoë Schiffer: My thought was basically, did we learn nothing from Dario Amodei saying that AI is really scary and dangerous? And then having the US government come down pretty hard on Anthropic asking you might actually receive, I don't know if they want the US government to do what it could do if they listen to the letter quite literally, but it does show that even people, I mean especially people working on AI systems are scared by what the race is doing.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, I mean we talked a lot about this last week for sure when we were talking about DC's reaction and what's going on from the White House perspective. I've been so curious about that split a little bit. Last week we talked about the rift that this has really created in Silicon Valley, the idea of open source versus proprietary AI. This is really touching every single sector right now, without a doubt.
Zoë Schiffer: I will say I was at this event on Saturday with a bunch of AI lobbyists from DC, Thinking Machines. Mira Moradi was there, Michael Kratsios from the White House was there. And I was really struck by how they seem to be operating in this kind of parallel AI world from the one that I see on the ground in San Francisco. They were talking a lot about open source versus closed source. When I talk to engineers in particular, I will say most of them experiment with a lot of open models, but they still find that Codex and Claude code, the coding models from OpenAI and Anthropic, are just far superior. And so, they end up using those even though they're a lot more expensive. Alex Karp was on TV earlier talking about this. He's the CEO of Palantir, basically making this a core issue for America winning the AI race. Palantir and Nvidia, they have a vested interest in pushing forward this plan. More AI, more systems mean more GPUs—that directly benefits Nvidia's bottom line. And Palantir is deploying AI systems on government systems and other places where security is really paramount and they need to do that on American technology, but it's much easier to do it with systems that you can tweak, play around with, modify, change.
Brian Barrett: It is interesting these strange, not strange, but the way that the, I'm going to say battle lines, I don't mean that, it's too dramatic, but that they're being drawn, the sort of argument lines are being drawn in this. To your point, Nvidia's Jensen Huang spoke with Axios recently and he spelled out exactly why the proliferation of open models would benefit his company.
Jensen Huang, archival audio: First of all, with great AI, open models, it's great for the whole industry. If there's great AI, even if it's open, wherever it comes from, there will be more use. Whenever there's more use, you'll have to sell a lot more Nvidia computers. We'll have to build more data centers, we'll have more services. The technology will diffuse into more industries. And so, starting point is great models lead to great use, which leads to great growth.
Brian Barrett: And I think the counterpoint of that too is great disasters in the cybersecurity space leads to more regulation, leads to clamping down on AI, which hurts Nvidia's growth. So, the sort of let's have a security consortium, let's slow everybody's role here, is I think a protective play to say, let's avoid those sort of extreme moments that are going to cause a real crackdown on this industry and really slow the growth, on which, as we've said many times before, a big part of the US economy depends at this point.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, it's like you could see this moment where OpenAI's agents kind of go rogue as a moment where the US government does clamp down and says, "This is really scary. We need to slow growth." I think that the open weight, open source push is really an opportunity to say, "Actually, we need more growth. We need more investment, but we need it in this other area." And basically the idea is these attacks are going to keep happening, whether intentionally or not, and US companies need every possible tool at their disposal to defend themselves.
Leah Feiger: So, kind of moving this to DC a little bit, I want to talk about all of the people that are involved with this kind of regulation right now. This week, Hugo published a really handy map on who's actually calling the shots on AI policy inside the Trump administration. It turns out it's not entirely a clear answer, and there's a couple of different influencing voices. And one senior official actually told Hugo, in one of my favorite quotes we've gotten in a while on this, "It's not an argument with two sides, it's an argument with 10 sides." So, the names that he's calling out here, you're not going to be super surprised, right? It's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. It's National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross. It's former AI Czar David Sacks. You have Arvind Raman, the acting director for Center for AI Standards and Innovation, who's Lutnick's top deputy there. It's a really, really interesting mix of people who all are trying very, very hard to get their own interests across. And from Hugo's reporting, it seems like Trump is listening to all of them.
Zoë Schiffer: Can I ask, Leah, what do these different people, what side of the debate are they coming down on when we think about open source, closed source? What do they want right now?
Leah Feiger: Everyone is kind of in different parts of this. I would say there's a very interesting split. Lutnick is trying right now, for example, to figure out ways to create incentives for US labs to just create their own open weight models to counterbalance China. He's not exactly taking a very, very harsh stance one way or the other. He's kind of straddling a middle ground on regulation. He imposed export controls on Anthropic famously, but he's been kind of freewheeling than others in the White House, which is sort of key here. So, if I'm an AI lab, I would be interested in having Lutnick's ear. And Hugo's reporting also found that he's been speaking to a number of leaders at AI Labs, so not hugely surprising there. And then on the other hand, you have national cyber director Sean Cairncross. He's taken a very hard line approach. He's had a huge role in attempts to regulate Chinese AI. He's pretty beloved as far as we can tell at the White House and has been working alongside some other folks to develop a policy to counter the potential national security risks of AI, especially from China. He was very involved in President Trump's June 2 executive order. Everyone's kind of trying to figure out what they want to say and how they want to pitch it to the president whose most consistent take here has been like, "We will not be stifling US innovation."
Brian Barrett: China definitely seems to be a common thread here and makes sense as a lens to view your AI policy through in general because you've got this, if you see it as this is a race between the US and China, we can't lose. But that does position you, I think, to maybe miss some other aspects of what's going on here. I think especially in terms of US companies saying, "Hey, maybe we don't actually want to win this race quite as fast," or employees at companies saying that. I don't know. Curious what you think about what they may not be taking into account here if they're so focused on China as the prism through which all of their AI policy is kind of reflecting out or most of it.
Leah Feiger: Such a good question. In so many ways, the Trump administration is focused on what is in front of their face at that moment in time. So, if the conversation of the week is China versus open weight versus US models versus all of these different conversations, that's what they're going to be weighing in on and also utilizing it to push some of their other positions. I'm thinking of Treasury Secretary Bessent who is very, very obsessed with distillation right now. He for sure has taken the most aggressive stance towards Chinese AI and its efforts to distill US models. But in a very public post on X last week talked about distillation as IP theft. He threatened Chinese labs with sanctions or inclusions on the entity list, this trade restriction list maintained by the US government. I guess all to say, these were already things that Bessent was really, really thinking about. So, now being able to apply it to the new lens is of course where he's heading. We're also kind of watching some people make their names in this right now, whether it's China or not. Someone that I'm very, very curious about on this list, not a household name by any means. The assistant secretary for financial institutions at the Treasury—say that five times fast—Luke Pettit, he has become the point person on AI at Treasury under Bessent. Who is this man? He was previously a senior policy adviser in the US Senate. And now you guys are going to enjoy this one: He's working alongside the Treasury's chief information officer and former DOGE member Sam Corcos.
Brian Barrett: Oh, I remember Sam.
Leah Feiger: Exactly. It's a fun reunion for all. It's this fascinating thing where people already had their preconceived, I'm kind of out here to blame China for a lot of regulatory issues. I'm out here to encourage US innovation. And then I'm out here to make a name for myself. How do you get involved in this? This is the topic of the moment. How do you make your mark?
Zoë Schiffer: It's so interesting. The distillation thing was really catching my eye. We talked about Moonshot AI's latest model coming out K3, I think it's called, and these immediate allegations that they had distilled models from top US labs. And then I was really struck by multiple Kimi researchers on X making jokes being like, "Oh yeah, within two weeks we distilled Fable." That's not even technically possible. As usual, AI drama plays out on X. I mean, the thing about that is we do have very good evidence that Chinese AI labs were distilling US models. There were times where you would talk to those Chinese open models and they would respond as Claude. I think that that evidence is pretty sound. Whether they did it this time around, I'm not sure, but it does feel like the US government has gotten involved in this debate pretty late. It's like a lot of this has already happened. It's not to say they shouldn't take action necessarily, but I'm a little bit curious. One, technically speaking, how do you plan to do that? I mean, it doesn't seem like necessarily sanctioning the labs would be that effective in terms of distillation. And then two, is it genuinely too late or can you stop significant distillation or “IP theft” from happening going forward?
Brian Barrett: I'll say though, I will say we have seen some movement even this week, right? The FCC has banned the import of foreign-made power inverter models, which is important for data center building. They've banned foreign-made humanoid robots, which is going to be huge. That's where China is leading the US. So, we haven't gotten to the point where they're doing other things, but they are taking steps and they do have some levers they can pull. I just want to add one more note on this whole conversation, which is we record this on Wednesday afternoon Eastern Time. And as we're talking now, Sam Altman is on Capitol Hill shaking hands, kissing babies, talking to senators, telling them why his AI models are good and not bad actually. So, we'll see if that turns into anything probably if they're just listening to the last voice they hear. Over the weekend, people were just surprised to discover that some chats that they had had with Claude could actually be found via search on the web. You could go to Google and you can search, put in a specific search term to find shared Claude chats, and it would show them back to you. You could go through several hundred of these at least. Google has been taking them down since then. But just to understand how this happened, basically Anthropic lets you share a Claude chat via what's known as a snapshot URL. It's basically if you want to share a specific conversation with somebody, it'll make a link for you and you can send that link to that person and they can look over it. It's not intended for public indexing, but Google basically ignored instructions that Anthropic had put on its sites and it was indexing these chats anyway. It's not a great thing. It's also not the first time this has happened. Google is blaming Anthropic saying that it's their fault, not theirs. So, there's a lot of messiness here too. While it may sound like, well, people were just sharing stuff, so they can't have been that private in the first place. Some of the stuff that was found in these chats includes erotic role-play. Some of it includes medical information being shared within a medical firm, right? So, "Hey, I've got this information about this patient." So, in that case, the person whose privacy is implicated had nothing to do with the chats in the first place other than being a patient at this place. So, some really private personal stuff in here.
Leah Feiger: Did either of you see this news and get nervous for yourselves?
Zoë Schiffer: Leah's looking right at me now. No, I don't—
Leah Feiger: I was like, "Zoë, do you need to tell me something?"
Zoë Schiffer: I know, I know. No, you would be the only person I would share such chats with, and I don't do that to you, to preserve our relationship. I've had people share their chats with me. Usually, it's sources being like, "I could explain it to you, but here's my conversation with Claude." And I'm like, "I think I would rather you just explain it to me." I mean, it's a little bit ironic, because who is very famous for ignoring the X robots tag header thingy that do not index this request? It's AI companies. So, the fact that it's now coming back to bite an AI company, a little bit ironic, a little bit funny. But I think it gets to this larger question around just the privacy of conversations with chatbots, which have been coming up in a variety of different ways, both cybersecurity related, legal, otherwise.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. People famously have had chats treating their chatbots like a lawyer, and the chatbot has told them, "Hey, this is inadmissible because you're getting legal advice." And then it winds up in court because of course you cannot claim attorney-client privilege with Claude or ChatGPT.
Zoë Schiffer: Did you guys read the New York magazine cover story a few weeks ago that was like, what if it all came out?
Leah Feiger: I loved it. My group chat was absolutely alight. We started asking each other, "What have you asked recently?" I think I'm the only one that escapes from this doomsday universe.
Zoë Schiffer: Leah's very like, "I have nothing to hide. Come at me, NSA."
Leah Feiger: Nothing to hide. Go check my receipts. But yeah, big takeaway for users. Manage this yourselves. Don't forget that the robots surveil you. Settings. Go to settings, then privacy, then shared chats. You can change this. Coming up after the break, we'll be sharing our WIRED/TIRED pics of the week.
Zoë Schiffer: All right, it's time for our WIRED/TIRED segment. In case you've forgotten whatever is new and cool is WIRED, whatever is uncool and lame and old is TIRED. Leah, what are yours for this week?
Leah Feiger: My TIRED is zoo. I struggle with this. I have friends with kids who are like, "Say this aloud to me one more time. We're going to have an issue." And I totally understand that. It's an amazing way for people to engage with the natural world, but I'm always thinking about the animals. You're at a zoo, you're at the aquarium, and it's incredibly sad. I'm really using this TIRED, which seems fairly irrelevant in a news to bring you into my WIRED, which is actual news. And that might be that not all zoos are bad. This week, WIRED's Kate Knibbs reported on this unbelievable rescue mission that ended up saving four beluga whales from probable death. This all started because this notorious aquarium and theme park in Canada called Marineland went bankrupt back in 2024. It's been sitting around since. And last year, Marineland finally announced that they might have to euthanize these belugas if no one stepped in to help transfer them to a new facility.
Zoë Schiffer: Oh my god, this is not where I thought that was going.
Leah Feiger: No, really, really awful. And honestly, the drone footage of this basically turned me into the Joker last year. I just remember watching from above these belugas just kind of bouncing off walls. It was so upsetting, totally abandoned amusement park vibes. I thought it was AI. Anyway, really, really awful story. But it ends OK, or parts of it are beginning to end OK. This past week, a team from Chicago's Shedd Aquarium, shout out Chicago, pulled off truly a logistical marvel, putting four belugas into custom stretchers, loading them into individual saltwater tanks, trucking them to the airport, flying them across an international border on a chartered 777. The whole thing took 72 hours.
Archival audio: A round of applause after a round-the-clock relocation effort. Shedd Aquarium staff have successfully moved four beluga whales from a facility in Niagara Falls, Ontario, to their new home.
Zoë Schiffer: Is their new home better?
Leah Feiger: I mean, their new home is not going to kill them? And also gives them food. But again, there's obviously still so much criticism of captivity for these large animals. I mean, everyone saw Blackfish. Everyone's aware of Tilikum, the really famous orca.
Brian Barrett: Leah, you're going to hit, I know, Free Willy, and that's where my orca knowledge ends.
Leah Feiger: This poor orca, who is this feature of this massive documentary about basically going crazy because these creatures are so, so smart and trapped in tanks and forced to perform tricks. So, very, very happy. The article is honestly very cool and interesting, and you were able to transport these creatures. But obviously, the slightly little sour note is these guys should be in the ocean. They should be hanging out. But that's still my WIRED.
Brian Barrett: Go read Kate's story and also look at the photos in it because they're amazing.
Zoë Schiffer: 100 percent. Brian.
Brian Barrett: All right, here's my TIRED. Wait for it. Beep, beep, beep. That's my impression of a microwave beep letting you know that something's done. It's annoying. It's loud. It's repetitive. It's tired.
Zoë Schiffer: I feel like I just got a glimpse of what you're like as a dad.
Brian Barrett: Oh, just barely scratching the surface, Zoë. My WIRED is a couple of sound designers who have a startup called Starling, or a company called Starling, have made it their quest to design a better microwave beep. One that sounds pleasant, one that's not annoying, one that works with technology that's not too expensive. And it's really fascinating. Jeremy White, senior writer at WIRED, spent some time talking to these folks, has a really interesting dive into why microwaves and other kinds of tech, just like we sort of settle for annoyances when we don't necessarily have to. I think there's so many things that are just like, it's a little thing, but it could be better, but no one's bothered to make it better because it maybe costs 50 bucks to make it better. These guys are trying. And I think it's interesting. I think it's fun when people expect more from their technology. So, a fun story from Jeremy.
Zoë Schiffer: I love that. I love that. I love taking a thing that's kind of vaguely annoying, but we've just accepted as part of life and then being like, "What if it was nice?"
Leah Feiger: Yeah, that's lovely. Big fan.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. OK, Zoë.
Leah Feiger: Take it away.
Zoë Schiffer: I'm going to loudly insert myself into this party. TIRED: Stripe's acquisition of OpenRouter, $10 billion, snore, heard it, whatever. WIRED is Midjourney, the AI image generator acquiring Co-Star, the astrology app. I was—
Leah Feiger: So, funny.
Zoë Schiffer: We don't know the terms of the deal. I'm waiting, someone tell me. But I just found this so funny. If you think about Midjourney at all, you've been thinking, what is this company up to? What is happening over there? They have talked about making a full-body scanner of sorts, some sort of physical, AI-powered product that they're going to put in spas, medical spas? Now they have this Co-Star thing going. The app has 4.3 million users. Now its CEO is going to be Midjourney's chief design officer. Midjourney hasn't had a consumer app, so maybe now they'll have one. They're apparently working on one. I just have so many questions. I was laughing when I read Mike Isaac's post about this on X. He said, "Could someone tell me why a generative AI company could buy an astrology app? Because I am not that smart." And I was like, "Me either, frankly. I don't know."
Brian Barrett: But for some reason, I just love that this Midjourney's journey into medical scanners, fortunes is happening against this backdrop of they've been staring down one of the biggest IP lawsuits from Disney, 20th Century Fox, Dreamworks, Universal that's just hanging ... I feel like they've got this big sword of Damocles hanging over their head and they're spending their time just doing the goofiest stuff they can imagine before that all comes due. It's great. It's fun.
Zoë Schiffer: They cannot be stopped. That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. It was mixed by Pran Bandi, who's also our New York studio engineer. It was fact-checked by Daniel Roman. Kate Osborn is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is WIRED's global editorial director.
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