The Department of Homeland Security has been quietly demanding tech companies turn over user information about critics of the Trump administration, according to reports. In several cases over recent months, Homeland Security has relied on the use of administrative subpoenas to seek identifiable information about individuals who run anonymous Instagram accounts, which share posts about ICE immigration raids in their local neighborhoods. While administrative subpoenas cannot be used to obtain the contents of a person's emails, online searches, or location data, they can demand information specifically about the user, such as what time a user logs in, from where, using which devices, and revealing the email addresses and other identifiable information about who opened an online account. Administrative subpoenas are not new; the use of these self-signed demands by Trump officials to seek identifiable information about people who are critical of the president's policies has raised alarm. Bloomberg reported last week that Homeland Security sought the identity of an anonymous Instagram account called @montocowatch, which says its goal is to share resources to help protect immigrant rights and due process across Montgomery County in Pennsylvania. This comes amid an ongoing federal immigration crackdown across the United States, which has drawn widespread protests and condemnation. Homeland Security lawyers sent an administrative subpoena to Meta demanding it turn over personal information of the person who runs the account, citing a non-Homeland Security employee who claimed to receive a tip that ICE agents were being stalked. Tech companies have in recent years published transparency reports that detail how many government demands for data they receive. But most do not break out how many judicial and administrative subpoenas they receive over a period of time, even though the two kinds of demands are fundamentally different. When asked by TechCrunch, Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan did not say if Meta provided Homeland Security any data involving @montcowatch or if the company was asked to provide information about the account another way. A new report by The Washington Post on Tuesday found that an administrative subpoena was also used to seek information from Google about an American retiree within hours of him after sending a critical email to Homeland Security's lead attorney Joseph Dernbach. The Post described the retiree as someone critical of Trump during his first term, who attended a No Kings rally last year, regularly attends gatherings and protests, and wrote criticisms to lawmakers, all actions protected under the First Amendment. Two weeks later, Homeland Security agents were on his doorstep, asking him questions about the email that he sent to Dernbach, which the agents conceded broke no laws. When asked by TechCrunch, Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin would not say why the U.S. was seeking information about people who have been critical of the Trump administration and accounts documenting ICE activity, or say for what reason the subpoenas were withdrawn. Not all companies are able to hand over data about their customers. For instance, information that is end-to-end encrypted and can only be accessed by obtaining a person's phone or devices. That said, many companies are still able to provide large amounts of information about their users, including where they log in, how they log in, and from where, which may allow investigators to unmask anonymous accounts. End-to-end encrypted messaging apps, like Signal, have long championed how little data it collects about its users. The reliance on U.S. tech giants is another reason why European countries and ordinary consumers are seeking to rely less on American tech giants, at a time when chief executives and senior leaders at some of the largest U.S. tech companies are overtly cozying up to the Trump administration. He also authors the weekly cybersecurity newsletter, this week in security. He can be reached via encrypted message at zackwhittaker.1337 on Signal. You can also contact him by email, or to verify outreach, at zack.whittaker@techcrunch.com. Hear from 250+ tech leaders, dive into 200+ sessions, and explore 300+ startups building what's next. Fintech CEO and Forbes 30 Under 30 alum has been charged for alleged fraud Nvidia CEO pushes back against report that his company's $100B OpenAI investment has stalled OpenClaw's AI assistants are now building their own social network Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

On Tuesday, the company announced the release of Xcode 26.3, which will allow developers to use agentic tools, including Anthropic's Claude Agent and OpenAI's Codex, directly in Apple's official app development suite. This latest update comes on the heels of the Xcode 26 release last year, which introduced support for ChatGPT and Claude within Apple's integrated development environment (IDE) used by those building apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple's other hardware platforms. The integration of agentic coding tools allows AI models to tap into more of Xcode's features to perform their tasks and perform more complex automation. At launch, the agents can help developers explore their project, understand its structure and metadata, then build the project and run tests to see if there are any errors and fix them, if so. To prepare for this launch, Apple said it worked closely with both Anthropic and OpenAI to design the new experience. Specifically, the company said it did a lot of work to optimize token usage and tool calling, so the agents would run efficiently in Xcode. That means that Xcode can now work with any outside MCP-compatible agent for things like project discovery, changes, file management, previews and snippets, and accessing the latest documentation. Developers who want to try the agentic coding feature should first download the agents they want to use from Xcode's settings. A drop-down menu within the app allows developers to choose which version of the model they want to use (e.g. GPT-5.2-Codex vs. GPT-5.1 mini). For instance, they could direct Xcode to add a feature to their app that uses one of Apple's provided frameworks, and how it should appear and function. As the agent starts working, it breaks down tasks into smaller steps, so it's easy to see what's happening and how the code is changing. This transparency could particularly help new developers who are learning to code, Apple believes. To that end, the company is hosting a “code-along” workshop on Thursday on its developer site, where users can watch and learn how to use agentic coding tools as they code along in real time with their own copy of Xcode. Plus, if developers are not happy with the results, they can easily revert their code back to its original at any point in time, as Xcode creates milestones every time the agent makes a change. Hear from 250+ tech leaders, dive into 200+ sessions, and explore 300+ startups building what's next. Nvidia CEO pushes back against report that his company's $100B OpenAI investment has stalled OpenClaw's AI assistants are now building their own social network Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica Tiny startup Arcee AI built a 400B-parameter open source LLM from scratch to best Meta's Llama

“Demand for ground autonomy has moved decisively from experimentation to operational integration,” said Stephanie Bonk, co-founder and president of Overland AI, in a news release Tuesday. “This funding allows us to scale alongside the units adopting our technology.” Overland completed the DARPA RACER program (Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency) last November after three years testing and iterating its platform autonomy. Overland AI is working closely with the U.S. Army, Marine Corps, and SOCOM, including the 82nd Airborne Division, 1st Cavalry Division, 173rd Airborne Brigade, 36th Engineer Brigade, and 2nd Marine Logistics Group. The goal is to deliver autonomous maneuverability across complex off-road, GPS-denied environments at tactically relevant speeds, especially for dangerous “breaching missions” in ground combat operations. Last month Overland announced a partnership with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), which is testing the use of Overland's technology for wildfire response. CAL FIRE used two of Overland's self-driving 4-wheelers for resupply (food, water, battery delivery) and wildfire logistics missions at Camp Pendleton in Southern California. The company has 101 employees, up from 58 people a year ago, according to LinkedIn data. Have a scoop that you'd like GeekWire to cover? Seattle startup Overland AI partners with CAL FIRE to use self-driving 4-wheelers for wildfire response Overland AI unveils self-driving vehicle for military that goes 35 MPH and navigates off-road terrain Seattle startup Overland AI lands $32M to help U.S. military with off-road autonomous driving tech Overland AI opens new factory in Seattle to manufacture off-road autonomous vehicles

A month after the Trump administration began its immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis, right-wing creators are turning their attention to a new target in search of fraud: California. They're already getting support from some of President Donald Trump's key allies too. Nick Shirley, the right-wing influencer whose viral YouTube video claimed to uncover a purported $100 million fraud scheme involving Somali childcare centers in Minnesota, posted to Instagram over the weekend announcing his arrival in California. Shirley is working with Amy Reichert, a private investigator and failed politician who claims to be investigating “ghost daycares” in California. He appears to be applying the same method in San Diego. Reichert posted a picture with Shirley to X on Saturday, writing “California, here we come! Johnson teamed up with two Republican gubernatorial candidates, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and Steve Hilton, a former adviser to UK prime minister David Cameron, in the video, which they claimed was an attempt to uncover fraudulent uses of federal funding to support California's unhoused. Johnson also claimed that the state was “using these federal dollars to rig national elections.” Johnson's most recent video attempts to claim that California's homeless shelters are primarily filled with undocumented immigrants. The same week Johnson announced that he would be traveling to California to uncover “fraud,” Trump called California “more corrupt” than Minnesota in a post on Truth Social. Last week, Trump named a new assistant attorney general, Colin McDonald, to focus on fraud investigations at the Justice Department. Other large pro-Trump accounts and news outlets, like Real America's Voice, are boosting Johnson's recent video. Larry Elder, talk radio host and former presidential candidate, reposted the video on X on Tuesday, writing “Fraud in California makes that of Minnesota look like a starter kit.” Elon Musk, who Shirley thanked for initially boosting his December Minnesota video, has also been elevating news coverage related to California fraud. “Truly insane levels of fraud!” Musk said, reposting a story from Fox News earlier this week. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Mehmet Oz published his own documentary-style video on alleged health care fraud in California last week, featuring an Armenian neighborhood. In January, WIRED reported that California and New York were “next,” as the Trump administration appeared ready to leverage the same playbook used in Minnesota to go after other blue states. It's a state where he received historic Republican support, and he has long called out [Governor Tim] Walz for his incompetence and terrible leadership,” a senior White House official told WIRED last month. In your inbox: Maxwell Zeff's dispatch from the heart of AI

Experience management software giant Qualtrics on Tuesday named Jason Maynard as its new CEO. Maynard previously spent a decade at Oracle, where he was executive vice president of revenue operations. Maynard replaces former longtime Qualtrics exec Zig Serafin, who stepped down as CEO in October. The company, which employs more than 4,500 globally, has a pending $6.75 billion deal to acquire Press Ganey Forsta. — Jenny Lay-Flurrie is taking a new role at Microsoft, moving from chief accessibility officer to head of the company's Trusted Technology Group. “In every role, one principle has grounded me: – do the right thing,” she wrote on LinkedIn. Don't worry, I'll remain deeply engaged with my beloved #accessibility community, while learning so much more from other passionate communities I'm honoured to lead.” Microsoft CVP Teresa Hutson previously led the Trusted Technology Group, which focuses on privacy, safety, regulatory, responsible AI use, and other related topics. Mathradas led Bellevue-based Nintex for three years and was previously COO at Avalara. The Seattle-area company recently laid off most of its staff. — Seattle-based cleantech nonprofit VertueLab hired Kris Licciardello as partnerships and alliances lead for Washington state and named Leo Ochoa in the same role leading Oregon efforts. — Seattle-based edtech company Gravyty added two execs: Former TalkingPoints and Instructure exec Matt Carlson as chief sales officer and former Uptempo CFO Ashley Jones Lee as chief financial officer. — Seattle startup Yoodli hired Alan Camperson as its new head of global customer support. Great teams still win, and finding them is harder than ever. Prime Team Partners blends AI-powered recruiting with deep human expertise. Together, we help employers cut through the noise and hire smarter, faster. Learn more about GeekWork: Contact GeekWire co-founder John Cook at [email protected]. Tech Moves: Amazon Leo VP departs; Madrona investor jumps to Anthropic; Convera names exec Tech Moves: Truveta hires president; Veeam bolsters exec lineup; Fortive names HR chief; Heard taps CTO Tech Moves: Amazon employee retiring after 20 years; former Oracle and Microsoft execs take new roles Tech Moves: Avanade CEO to join Microsoft; Seattle gaming vet's new project Tech Moves: Nintex CEO to depart; Raikes Foundation names leader; Qualtrics exec now at Workday Tech Moves: Qualtrics taps Microsoft vet as CFO; F5 names innovation chief Qualtrics to acquire healthcare data giant Press Ganey Forsta in $6.75B deal

As immigration enforcement has grown more extreme — even detaining school children seeking legal asylum — tech workers have called on their leaders to speak up. But as President Trump took office last year, his industry connections have grown. “We know our industry leaders have leverage: in October, they persuaded Trump to call off a planned ICE surge in San Francisco,” ICEout.tech, a group of tech industry workers opposing ICE, wrote in a statement on January 24, the day of ICU nurse Alex Pretti's death. “Big tech CEOs are in the White House tonight,” the statement added, referring to a screening of a documentary about Melania Trump where Cook, Amazon's Andy Jassy, and Zoom's Eric Yuan were in attendance. Some of tech's biggest players have since spoken out, to mixed reception from their employees and the industry. Below, we are keeping an ongoing list of what tech leaders have had to say. “We in Silicon Valley can't bend the knee to Trump,” Hoffman wrote. “We can't shrink away and just hope the crisis will fade. We know now that hope without action is not a strategy — it's an invitation for Trump to trample whatever he can see, including our own business and security interests.” He said he's been encouraged to see more tech leaders speaking out, saying: “it's a good start to something America needs much more of right now.” Altman added, “We didn't become super woke when that was popular, we didn't start talking about masculine corporate energy when that was popular, and we are not going to make a lot of performative statements now about safety or politics or anything else. First, Amodei reaffirmed that Anthropic does not have any contracts with ICE, despite its relationship with the Defense Department, and emphasized his concern about “the need to protect democracies against autocracies” like China and Russia. “I'm a big believer in, carefully, with guardrails, arming democracies to defend against these countries,” Amodei said, adding that these values persist in the context of internal American politics. “We need to be really careful about making sure democracies are worth defending. We need to defend our own democratic values at home,” he said. “I want everyone in tech who's ever intoned about freedom, or their love of privacy, or their commitment to liberty, to join me in an unequivocal condemnation,” Whittaker wrote on X. In another post, she said, “Masked agents of the US state are executing people in the streets and powerful leaders are openly lying to cover for them. As an end-to-end-encrypted messaging app, Signal is often used by activists to organize community actions. Stubblebine also pointed out that Medium's approach to its role as a web publisher reflects the greater values of the company — “for example, that we don't allow things like hateful content or racist slurs on Medium.” Jeff Dean has spoken out about his reaction to the killings in Minnesota. “This is absolutely shameful,” Dean wrote on X, responding to a video of federal agents shooting Alex Pretti. James Dyett posted on X about what he sees as hypocrisy in the tech industry. “There is far more outrage from tech leaders over a wealth tax than masked ICE agents terrorizing communities and executing civilians in the streets,” Dyett said. While Khosla Ventures partner Keith Rabois has publicly expressed support for ICE and the Trump administration's practices, others at the firm have publicly opposed these views. Rabois made incendiary comments on X after border patrol agents killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, prompting one founder to respond that that if he were a founder in Khosla Ventures' portfolio, he would give the money back, calling Rabois “an embarrassment.” “I want to make it clear that Keith doesn't represent everyone's views here at [Khosla Ventures], at least not mine,” Choi wrote, adding: “What happened in Minnesota is plain wrong. “The video was sickening to watch and the storytelling without facts or with invented fictitious facts by authorities almost unimaginable in a civilized society,” Khosla wrote. Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. Hear from 250+ tech leaders, dive into 200+ sessions, and explore 300+ startups building what's next. Fintech CEO and Forbes 30 Under 30 alum has been charged for alleged fraud Nvidia CEO pushes back against report that his company's $100B OpenAI investment has stalled Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

Fitbit founders James Park and Eric Friedman have announced the launch of a new AI startup called Luffu that aims to help families proactively monitor their health. Two years after their exit from Google, Park and Friedman are betting on AI to help lighten the mental burden of caregiving. According to a recent report, 63 million, or nearly 1 in 4, U.S. adults are family caregivers, up 45% from 10 years ago. “I was caring for my parents from across the country, trying to piece together my mom's health care across various portals and providers, with a language barrier that made it hard to get complete, timely context from her about doctor visits. Luffu is the product we wished existed—to stay on top of our family's health, know what changed and when to step in—without hovering.” The pair note that today's consumer health market is filled with tools for individuals, but that real life health is shared across partners, kids, parents, pets, and caregivers. Family information is scattered across devices, portals, calendars, attachments, spreadsheets, and paper documents. With Luffu, people will be able to track the whole family's details, including health stats, diet, medications, symptoms, lab tests, doctor visits, and more. Users can log health information using voice, text, or photos. The pair told Axios that people can ask questions using plain language to ask about their family's health, such as “Is Dad's new meal plan affecting his blood pressure?” or “Did someone give the dog his medication?” Prior to joining the publication in 2021, she was a telecom reporter at MobileSyrup. Hear from 250+ tech leaders, dive into 200+ sessions, and explore 300+ startups building what's next. Nvidia CEO pushes back against report that his company's $100B OpenAI investment has stalled Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica Tiny startup Arcee AI built a 400B-parameter open source LLM from scratch to best Meta's Llama

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Although NAND memory has replaced traditional hard disk drives in the vast majority of client PCs, HDDs can still offer capacities at costs not achievable by solid-state drives today, particularly in the data center space. In a bid to retain the relevance of hard drives for years to come, Western Digital on Tuesday announced two distinct families of HDDs: one aimed at applications that require maximum performance and decent IOPS-per-TB, another designed for power-optimized applications that value limited power consumption and predictable performance. The whole concept of Western Digital's High-Bandwidth HDD stems from reading data from the media using more than one head and transferring it to one or two hosts. The company showcases two types of High-Bandwidth HDDs at its Innovation Day: one uses more than one head for reading and writing at the same time to achieve 2X bandwidth compared to conventional HDDs, and another one features a second fully independent actuator to achieve 2X bandwidth and 2X sequential I/O performance. Over time, High-Bandwidth HDDs are projected to scale up bandwidth by eight times and I/O by four times when both approaches are combined within a single HDD. WD's original dual-actuator High-Bandwidth HDD architecture — which is already being validated by the company's clients — allows multiple heads on multiple tracks to read and write simultaneously, thus exploiting internal parallelism to deliver 2X bandwidth of traditional 3.5-inch HDDs. The next step for Western Digital is its Dual-Pivot High-Bandwidth HDD architecture is to add a second, fully independent actuator on a separate pivot inside the same 3.5-inch drive. Each actuator controls its own set of heads and enables two independent read/write operations at once, thus delivering up to 2X sequential I/O performance without reducing capacity. Western Digital positions Power-Optimized HDDs for 'active cold' storage tier for AI workloads that generate massive volumes of data — such as datasets, checkpoints, and logs — which must remain quickly accessible (which rules out tape), but cannot be stored on traditional high-capacity HDDs or SSDs due to cost concerns. The company says that these power-optimized 3.5-inch HDDs use a 'minimal random IO' for 20% less power than conventional drives, which reduces ownership costs and makes 'active cold' storage cheaper to run. WD expects the first power-optimized HDDs to enter customer qualification in 2027. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Although High-Bandwidth and Power Optimized HDDs serve completely different purposes, they are paradoxically designed to rival the wide product category — data center-grade 3D QLC NAND-based SSDs. However, by tailoring features and performance of hard disk drives for particular applications, Western Digital believes it can offer better value than QLC NAND-based SSDs. Tom's Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. This next-generation memory is designed to compete against High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) used in the latest AI data centers, but offers higher capacity, greater bandwidth, and lower power consumption. The two companies started building a prototype of this new memory standard in mid-2025, leveraging Intel's packaging technologies and key Japanese patents. It's also the first time a Japanese company has attempted to produce cutting-edge memory in decades. Japan was a major memory manufacturing region in the ‘80s, but the rise of Korean and Taiwanese manufacturing saw it fall out of favor. As the world scrambles for more memory, both Softbank and Intel see a clear opportunity to provide it. Saimemory will try to hit these lofty goals by vertically stacking more DRAM and using Intel's Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) to reduce latency between the individual chips. “Intel's Next Generation DRAM Bonding (NGDB) initiative has demonstrated a novel memory architecture and revolutionary assembly methodology that significantly increases DRAM performance, reduces power consumption, and optimizes memory costs,” said Dr. Joshua Fryman, Intel Fellow and CTO of Intel Government Technologies. “Standard memory architectures aren't meeting AI needs, so NGDB defined a whole new approach to accelerate us through the next decade.” In developing the NGDB for ZAM, Intel and Sandia had to design a new stacking approach and a different way of organizing the DRAM chips. Early prototypes confirmed it was possible to increase capacity through new stacking techniques, while recent developments have demonstrated that the necessary high performance is there. That's why Intel and partners are now able to move forward with developing the first real prototypes of Z-Angle memory. Gwen Voskuilen, principal member of technical staff at Sandia, said, “This is an exciting technology that we anticipate will lead to a wider adoption of higher bandwidth memories in systems that are currently unable to take advantage of high bandwidth memory due to its limited capacity and power constraints.” This venture isn't designed to suddenly bring new DDR5 or HBM production online, though. Saimemory is slated to produce its first ZAM prototype sometime in 2027, with plans to develop a mass production line for the new memory by 2029. In its release, it said, “SAIMEMORY's development of next-generation memory technologies represents one of SoftBank's key initiatives to support next-generation social infrastructure.” Alongside potentially rebuilding Japan as a key player in the memory industry, Softbank appears to see key technologies like next-generation memory as a core component of building aspects of the future that go beyond the raw hardware itself. In the same way that access to memory, silicon, and rare earth materials are increasingly considered an important asset for strategic defence, there's an argument to be made that they're also keystones in developing the components for social change in the decades to come, and the partnerships that will enable it. Intel and Softbank want to be a part of powering that. Jon Martindale is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. Tom's Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher.

It's set to referee (and repeatedly antagonize) players in the upcoming Mario Tennis Fever as well. Now, the $35 Wonder Flower is trying to grow space for itself in the living room and perturb you with random rejoinders at various intervals. There's not much to talk about with the Wonder Flower. “We kind of look alike, huh?” “Did you know the planet is spinning?” It rapped at me with repeated button presses, though the device is built to speak up when you least expect it to. It's unclear how many voice lines are actually contained within this little toy. Yes, I couldn't stop pressing it because, as irritating as the flower toy can be, its form of annoying is the kind I find endearing—probably because I do the same thing to my closest friends. The toy should know the weather and time of day, although it was very adamant that it's “perfect weather for a nap, huh?” If I had to choose between the Wonder Flower and Alarmo, the latter would be more useful as an actual alarm clock. But some things aren't made to be useful. There may be a side of me that has bought into the whimsy presented by Nintendo. I can talk to the moon and back about the Switch 2 hardware, its successes and foibles, but the games are always a surprise when I'm just trying to do my job. RAM is getting more expensive, which could force Nintendo to raise console prices. The company doesn't have any specific tentpole game that will prove a real system mover for the next few months. Instead, we have games like Mario Tennis Fever ($70) and Super Mario Bros. Wonder Switch 2 Edition + Meetup in Bellabel Park ($60 or $20 for the upgrade pack). I played both for about 30 minutes, running through various multiplayer sessions. It's a game about positioning, both your character for returns and the ball. The top attack is a “Fever” stroke that will introduce an effect on the court, depending on your racket. A Pokey racket will do the same with the cactus-like critter, who will spill into various hazards once struck with a ball. The number of rackets on offer is also incredible. Nintendo places such a premium on local multiplayer that playing the game 2v2 was a blast that reminded me of ye olden days huddling around the CRT TV and smacking the buttons on my N64 controller. Meetup in Bellabel Park takes a similar tack with its obsession for local multiplayer, even at the expense of online play. Bellabel Park is full of various minigames, playable in both co-op and versus modes. These can range from players racing each other on floating pinwheels to a team mode where players have to create the blocks for other players to platform on. On the other hand, Nintendo's online-specific modes have far less player interaction. Characters are ghosts that can see each other move but rarely interact with them. Nintendo told me the online modes are not available for local play, and vice versa. The upgrade doesn't make Super Mario Bros. Wonder any worse of a game. If you have friends who long to play on the couch, it's an excellent option for an evening of controller-throwing thrills. There are other titles arriving early this year, including Resident Evil: Requiem and Pragmata, which I also got to try for the first time on Nintendo's handheld console. These games certainly sported subdued graphics capabilities compared to what devs have shown running on PS5 and PC. There were missing reflections in the mirrors in my Requiem demo and a little bit of shimmering around characters' hair. Both games ran perfectly fine at their 1080p resolutions in handheld mode as well. The Switch 2 keeps proving that as long as developers optimize their games properly, Nintendo's handheld is capable of playing demanding titles. What that may mean for the Switch 2's future is another question entirely. Mario Tennis Fever is out Feb. 12, while the Bellabel Park expansion will arrive Mar. I only wonder how many more games Nintendo can stuff the Wonder Flower into before we see it in our dreams. Subscribe and interact with our community, get up to date with our customised Newsletters and much more. The HP HyperX Cloud Alpha 2 costs extra for a base station and one standout feature. Will a PlayStation Portal with an OLED screen tide you over? I know you're desperately wondering about the floppy drives in this Maingear Retro98 desktop. The latest RTX 50-series is hundreds or thousands of dollars more expensive than at launch.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices of RAM, SSD storage, and even graphics cards have all been affected by the recent surge in demand for AI data centers. Some manufacturers, like Crucial, have chosen to drop their consumer products altogether to capitalise on profit margins from the AI build-out, unfortunately leaving PC enthusiasts with even less choice and competition in the market. The RAM-pocalypse is still here, with inflated prices looking to stay for the meantime, but they do seem to have leveled off a little in recent weeks. If you're looking for speedy DDR5-6000 RAM with decent timings, then this is a bit of a public service announcement, as B&H Photo is offering the cheapest 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5-6000 RAM kit available. Checking PC Partpicker, we can see that this is the cheapest set of 32GB DDR5-6000 memory available, and significantly cheaper at B&H Photo than at other retailers. With a minimal silhouette, they don't have RGB and aren't the flashiest set of RAM, but they are available in either black or white color schemes, although the white kit costs more. The Crucial Pro Overclocking kit is AMD EXPO and Intel XMP ready. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Stewart Bendle is a deals and coupon writer at Tom's Hardware. A firm believer in “Bang for the buck” Stewart likes to research the best prices and coupon codes for hardware and build PCs that have a great price for performance ratio. Tom's Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. © Future US, Inc. Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, New York,

There has also been a significant surge in folks packing 16GB VRAM GPUs. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Your eyes don't deceive – AMD's only Steam Hardware Survey (SHWS) charted card is the RX 9070 non-XT. Does this show that AMD's cheaper, slightly lower-tier model may be a sleeper hit for its amazing efficiency? I have a plain vanilla RX 9070 in my personal desktop, and am very pleased with its quiet, cool performance, so praise of this SKU might show a little bias. It has now disappeared from view (under the 0.15% threshold for charting). It has been approaching a year since the first RX 9000 graphics cards became available. These 16GB VRAM cards were praised for strong mainstream performance at good MSRPs, with worthwhile improvements in AI and ray tracing performance. AMD released its RX 9060 XT (8 and 16GB VRAM) models in June last year, and also saw largely positive feedback (for the 16GB version, anyway). It is worth repeating that, despite AMD's mass market strategy and general positivity in reviews and on discussion forums, people are still buying into the GeForce ecosystem by default. Another change that seems remarkable in the last month is the observed increase in Steam gamers backing GPUs with 16GB of VRAM. As per the numbers shown, those gaming on 16GB GPUs went up an impressive 5.85% in January 2026. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. So, 16GB of VRAM looks set to move into second place in the graphics card memory charts, as early as February's results. Unless there is another inflection or bump in the trends... They are just an indicator of trends among active Steam gamers, snapshotted that month. Other factors, like seasonality and big game releases, can also impact the data. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds. Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason. Tom's Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher.

Sorry, Good Omens fans, but this isn't the Neil Gaiman-adjacent news you were waiting for. While devotees of the Prime Video series wait and wait for an update on that “finale special” that replaced season three, the series' controversial co-creator has emerged for a fresh denial of the sexual misconduct allegations against him. In addition to forcing Good Omens to recalibrate its final season, those allegations also led to what sure felt like the cancellation of Netflix's The Sandman, depending on who you ask, among other suspended projects. Variety calls attention to a new statement from the author, which is very defensive but also couches a sly reveal of a new book he calls “the biggest thing I've done since American Gods.” Presumably he's had a lot of time for writing since he hasn't been in the TV sphere for a few years now. Going by this newest communication, he hasn't wavered one bit on maintaining his innocence, despite the accusations made by a former babysitter and other women, investigated in a New York Magazine Vulture article as well as a seven-episode Tortoise Media podcast series. Prior to Monday, his most recent address on the subject came on January 14, 2025, in a blog post entitled “Breaking the Silence.” “It's been a while since I've posted anything anywhere, but I didn't want to let any more time go by without thanking everyone for all your kind messages of support over the last year and a half,” it begins. “I've learned firsthand how effective a smear campaign can be, so to be clear: The allegations against me are completely and simply untrue. There are emails, text messages and video evidence that flatly contradict them. These allegations, especially the really salacious ones, have been spread and amplified by people who seemed a lot more interested in outrage and getting clicks on headlines rather than whether things had actually happened or not. He goes on to write that he thought “the truth would, eventually, come out,” citing a pro-Gaiman Substack author who has defended him. “It's been a strange, turbulent and occasionally nightmarish year and a half, but I took my own advice (when things get tough, make good art) and once I was done with making television I went back to doing something else I love even more: writing. Whether or not folks will embrace a new novel from Gaiman remains to be seen. For now, most everything he was involved with in the adaptation sphere has either ended or been cancelled. There are also two in-flux projects: the previously mentioned Good Omens send-off and a Prime Video series based on Anansi Boys. Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. The adaptation of Gaiman's fantasy DC Comics series will conclude with the upcoming season 2, after Gaiman was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women.

As a screenwriter, he's worked on several of his brother Christopher Nolan's films, from Interstellar to the Dark Knight movies. Partnered with his wife Lisa Joy, he created HBO's Westworld and executive produced Amazon Prime's Fallout. But before that, he cut his TV teeth creating Person of Interest, a CBS procedural about a solitary tech billionaire who creates a piece of surveillance software aimed at stopping crime before it happens. With Fallout, now in its second season, Nolan also has his sights on the future. Based on the video game series of the same name, it's about a postapocalyptic America where everyone must survive in any way they can. It's also wickedly funny and full of 1950s-era retrofuturism. So, what does Nolan see happening in the coming decades? For one, he doesn't think AI is going to replace human filmmakers. In fact, he thinks it could help aspiring directors get a foot in the door. He'd also like to see the demise of (most) social media—but understands that may never happen. For this week's episode of The Big Interview podcast, I asked Nolan about all of those things and more. Below you'll find his thoughts on writing Batman movies, classic cars, and what he'd actually bring to his own doomsday bunker. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. KATIE DRUMMOND: Jonathan Nolan, welcome to The Big Interview. JONATHAN NOLAN: Thank you for having me. I'm from Canada so my barometer is a little off, but … I tend to think of New York as wimpy cold. I've been in LA for 25 years. It's going to be a great conversation. We always like to start these discussions with a little warmup. Actually, this might help today of all days. But this is just a warmup for your brain, some very fast questions. The reason I became a writer is because I was no good at answering fast questions. So I'm going to flub this. What is the most overused sci-fi trope? Because it's a sort of story convenience, and I guess we used it in Interstellar, but we use it in a slightly backhanded way, which is a wormhole. It's just a way to skip the boring bits. Years ago, I was looking for positive portrayals of AI in science fiction. We're going to talk about this. It's kind of James Cameron on one side, and no one on the other side of the roster and Iain Banks, who wrote those books over the course of 20 years, starting in the late '80s, I think, until his death in the early 2010s. But they are the most fully realized and brilliant depiction of a hybrid civilization where you've got people and you've got AI and they have sort of figured it out. What is the weirdest app on your phone right now? The one that has captured the most of my attention—and it's disastrous—is an app called Bring a Trailer. This did not come up in my research. Classic old cars, those sorts of things. You know, I love electric cars. I've driven electric cars for years. But it's very clear we're in this moment, like, I miss the Cretaceous cell phone age, when you had like a million different shapes. You know, there is no diversity of shape or function. Like Trump is trying to hold on and, I mean, you look at China and the barn door's wide open. … older, internal combustion cars with manual transmissions. I walked into JJ Abrams' office one day, and we talked about movies for a while and I walked out as a showrunner, kind of. I liken the experience to getting my tie caught in a shredder. It was sort of like, “Oh, I'll do a little bit of this …” Then, 15 or 16 years later, here I am. But writing pilots was a maddening experience. With TV it's like I have a hundred cool things and I'm going to show you four, and I have to pick the most strategically sound combination of those things. We like to have fun with these. You know, and we're both parents, but being able to access, honestly, these years right now, where your kids are still so close and they're relying on you for everything. It's wonderful the whole way through. But you never quite get this moment again. Well, don't make me cry. So you would want to live in a digital simulation of your reality with relatively young kids, who still love and adore you and think you're the best thing. Well, let's not get carried away. I would love to live in that world forever. Do you have any tattoos and what are they? My sister-in-law, Emma, and I, who produced that film, were talking during the production about getting tattoos. I am a blank slate, as they say. What is the most Luddite part of your creative workflow? I wouldn't categorize it as Luddite, but we're still shooting everything on film. I mean, we can come back to this later, because it relates to the AI of it all, but the promise of digital cameras was that they would save enormous amounts of money. My contention is, and this relates to AI as well, there is no technology that I've ever been presented with, and I've been doing this for 25 years, that has made anything that we do for television cheaper, ever. If you plot the economics of film or television over the last 50 years, I would challenge anyone to point to the inflection point where digital cameras came in and democratized it. Lastly, what is one must-have for your doomsday bunker? Do you have a doomsday bunker? If you have a doomsday bunker, I think it's like Fight Club: The first rule is you don't tell people you have a doomsday bunker. Let me ask you: When I was getting ready to meet you, I was looking back at your career and looking at Person of Interest. Reading about that really took me back. You have stuck with these themes. What keeps you coming back to those subjects? I wrote a film for my brother and David Hayman at Warner Bros. that never got made, that had enough overlap with Inception and then with Person of Interest. We never quite circled back to it. And is this sort of early 2000s? And it didn't go, but I got fascinated by the subject. I did a lot of research; I did a lot of looking into it. I went from one project to the next and I was like, “Wouldn't it be fun to write robots?” You know, the tension of the robot crew member, whether it's Alien or pretty much any version of this, is that they will eventually mutiny and murder everyone, and they have a secret agenda. But what if they didn't? What if they were just all of the virtues that we found the most beautiful, right? What if they were brave, self-sacrificing, sarcastic, and funny. What if they just embodied those values the whole way through? Maybe you'd give the audience a slight discomfort at first. It's not written that the path has to be this sort of human form of xenophobia. I'd also gotten fascinated with this idea of what happens when you have this fire hose of data that's out there. That proved to be very prescient, I must say. Actually, sorry, I missed a piece there. In The Dark Knight, there is a plot twist about mass surveillance. Bruce Wayne builds this ethically-challenged system of stealing information, doing echo location from everyone's cell phone and giving him the ability to map the city all at once. That was sort of wrestling with this idea of how much do we trust the people protecting us, with the government surveilling us, and what good could they put that to? So the idea of mass surveillance being organized into and filtered into something that could help people is something I've been fascinated with, and that is an origin point for AI, a natural one. When we were trying to put together Westworld, which is obviously where we got closest to this subject, Anthony Hopkins was interested. Then, as always happens, the studio and the agents kind of battled back and forth for a little bit too long and we started to get a sense that we were going to lose Tony on this one. So I wrote him a letter. The letter had a line, it was a thought that had occurred to me walking home one night, and it went like this: “We lived before, before.” What is a little harder to define, but you can feel it, you can feel this bump in the road, this inflection point. You can't quite picture a big wave like Interstellar. You don't know what's on the far side of it, but you know it's coming. For me, that has been about this moment that we're now standing in the middle of. So, we started writing these films and watching what was happening in the series. And this is the story of our time. So the question for me would be like, “Why would you write about anything else, really?” When you think about writing that letter and of feeling like you were on the precipice of something that I think a lot of people had no idea they were on the precipice of, how do you feel standing in the middle of it, having been someone who years ago was pointing at it? What is that experience like for you? I think we're in the middle of that wave, but a lot of what's happening right now with salesmanship … a lot of what's happening right now is hype. We're dealing with that in our business. We were very scared, in film and television, about what was right around the corner. A lot of that was hype. We're two years into it, now we're up against the next contract negotiation and it's like, OK, well, how much fruit has that borne? How much does that really change what we do? I think when we actually sit down to use these tools and think about what these tools do, I'm almost completely riven between two totally opposing worldviews. One, that these tools are really just sort of a glorified browser search function with the right economic activity and brilliance being applied to them. I don't believe that there's something specific or privileged about human consciousness. This is something, you know, we spent a lot of time thinking about for Westworld. The flip side of that belief is that something as simple as an LLM could give rise to cognition on a level that becomes increasingly hard to distinguish from human cognition. At which point we are certainly in the middle of the thing that I was seeing. Because there've been so many false starts with AI over a hundred years. These moments where it's like, “here it comes,” and everyone kind of braces for it, and we have a lot of conversations like this, and then a couple of years later it peters out a little bit. Right around when I started my job here at WIRED, so like two-and-a-half years ago, it was all of a sudden the only thing anyone could talk about. Of course a lot of that was genuinely fascinating advances in this research and in these tools. There's a need for some of these companies to show a return on their investment. How do you educate yourself when this is all moving so quickly? One of the ways, and it wasn't anything we set out to do, but because of the success of Westworld—HBO at the time was positioning itself as a tech company to try to get sold and compete with Netflix—so the first time we showed that pilot to any large group of people was an event that [former HBO CEO] Richard Plepler arranged with [investor] Yuri Milner at his enormous house in Mountain View. He had all his Y Combinator folks there watching. So from the beginning we were picked up and tossed into that group of people; over the course of making that show we wound up becoming quite close with some of the people leading the charge here. So I was hearing stories 15 years ago about what was happening at DeepMind before Google acquired it. There's sort of a criteria for when to terminate an experiment, and that went straight into Westworld. And weirdly, [we] unintentionally had a front-row seat to a lot of what has transpired in the last 10 to 15 years. We're in such a frothy moment. It usually means a bubble burst or a sleight of hand rather than [something] genuine. We're still invited to these conversations, these closed-door conversations with people who are leading the charge here. So you are still very close to that industry. I know these are closed-door meetings. I assume they're off the record. But has anything come out of them, even a notion or something that nudged you in a certain direction or changed the way you were thinking about the technology? I think an observation that I started, and then was bounced back and forth with a friend who's leading one of the leading companies, was we'd spent a day working with this team talking about what you can do with these things. You know, where's it all going? Because I think that is one of the bigger questions. I think for the first time in a very long time, there may be moments like in the middle of the Second World War with so many technologies just kind of pouring out of the war effort. You know, the amount of brilliance over 40 years to get to this place, you don't want overnight success, right? The actor, singer, who finally gets the Oscar, Grammy, whatever, has been doing this for 20 years. Not an overnight success, but pretty much to your point, two-and-a half years ago, suddenly went from an obscure talking point for computer scientists to an everyday fact for all of our kids. It occurred to me that unlike some of these technologies over the years, the applications for which were slightly more clear, this is more like an alien spaceship crash-landed on the face of the planet. We kind of walk into one room and we're like, “Oh shit, I can do teleportation.” Go to another room and it's like, “OK, I can make movies.” It's less like we're making these things and more like we're sort of stumbling upon them, because we've created something so powerful and so recursive that it can spew out, almost weekly or monthly, these wonders. I remember the first time I saw videos from Veo, the first launch where you kinda looked at it and you went, “Oh boy.” Because this is what I do for a living. And we spend an awful lot of money to build shots, with effects that look good. I have a lot of friends in the gaming space, I know how much money they're spending to do stuff. You know, it is this extraordinary moment where instead of thinking of an application and then chasing it down over the course years using a handful of advanced degrees, it's more like, here is this giant morass and, and you're going to dig around in it and you're going to pull out something from here and something from there. Beyond the hype, these technologies are genuinely transformative. They're going to transform education and medicine, all the usual things that everyone talks about. We haven't reckoned with the social consequences. I'm sure that's top of mind in the context of your industry, but even more broadly than that. You're thinking about what this means for your kids in 20 years. Certainly some of these products give you lots of good reasons to be cynical, but I've had a couple of conversations with people who were at the forefront of these things who really have a very clear and very compelling humanist perspective on this. They think about kids who are disadvantaged, who don't have access to the kinds of things that our kids may have access to. We saw this in a pandemic, right? We were able to take our kids and make a little school in the back of our house and hire a teacher. The idea that these tools could be, say, a tutor that never forgets a question they've asked you. That, while you're sleeping, researches scholarships. That might be a perfect way to get these things, especially for kids who don't have those advantages. It might really be leveling the playing field. So the paradox of this thing is you say, “Who has the keys to these things?” You know, I'm very—I am very concerned about that. One of the interesting comments that you made about AI, this was in an interview in Semafor last year, was about how you use it. Do you see uses for it? Do you draw a hard line in the sand and just say “absolutely not.” Where do you see AI in terms of art and creativity? I guess there's one way to take that quote, which is that it is sort of a political thing. There are writers who love to write. There are writers who suffer through writing. There's nothing like the feeling of having written something and feeling that you got it. How does that look for you? Because if the script was good … I think many writers, if you're listening to this, you know exactly what he's talking about. I managed to quit cold turkey halfway through the script, so that I could never point to that script if it was a good script, if it worked, and think like, “I really gotta go back.” It would just pull you in every time. I think about AI the same way. I just think if I let it into my creative process, which is already so fraught, that I would never find my way back. Like, “Tell me where in the book series such-and-such character first talked about their childhood.” It's a way to speed through some of those harder aspects of corralling. There is a wonderful notion that we're going to save money somehow. I was talking to [Fallout video game director] Todd Howard about this on the gaming side of things. Those games are just like big movies. Digital cameras didn't make it cheaper. The digital postproduction process didn't make it cheaper. So you think the idea that artificial intelligence could wipe out a bunch of jobs and take costs down for film and TV production is nonstarter nonsense? There's this wonderful quote from The New Yorker a few months ago where it basically said that it's about the gullibility of management of these companies if they think these tools can replace everyone. It's because they've been overhyped, right? It managed to scare all of us during the strike. If they made bad decisions, the consequences would be catastrophic. But assuming that people still want a certain number of big movies every year and a certain number of big shows every year, the applications for these tools … You know, there's been a lot of hand-wringing, a lot of arguments, a lot of conversations in my town. And God bless them, that technology companies will come down to sort of make nice. It's literally like the delegation from Northern California comes to visit with the Southern California delegation. I mean, they barely bother with the New York delegation of journalism anymore, so I'm glad to hear they're still talking to you guys. Last time I was at one of those, someone sort of trotted out this metaphor that they were Uber drivers and we were taxi drivers. But maybe you're Uber and we're Formula One drivers.” Uber has no relevance to, you know, Ferrari. Those technologies have nothing to do with the race. What these technologies will do, and I think they're incredible in this, is give access to the next generation of filmmakers who don't even have it. There's a generation of filmmakers who would never have got to Hollywood. I hope that Hollywood will remain an important epicenter of culture creation and filmmaking, because these people will eventually get fed up with the prompt version of filmmaking and they'll come, as so many of us have done for a hundred years now, and try to convince someone to give them some money to hire a proper Hollywood crew and go make a real movie. I would point to Sean Baker, a terrific filmmaker. After he made Tangerine famously on an iPhone, the next year I was watching The Florida Project and I was taken aback. I was like, “I gotta reconsider my whole position on film, because this movie's beautiful.” Then I got to the end and I Googled it and, of course, he shot it on 35 millimeter. He got there with an iPhone, and his last three films have been shot on film, because you use the tools that allow you to raise your hand and say, “Hey, look at me. Look at what I'm doing.” This is my fervent hope. Because film is ultimately a collaborative medium. That's maybe the scariest part of these technologies, they're not collaborative. Filmmaking's amazing because it's me and 800 of our friends. So it's this idea of ,“Well, how did you get your big break?” “Oh, I made a film with AI and someone saw it.” As long as it doesn't replace [anyone] and as long as we don't go through this moment where people think, “Oh, we can do all this content for peanuts.” It's like, “Well, no, you've always had the ability to do that. And independent films, which is where I started. You've always been able to make the lower-cost version of it. But then there has always still been the AAA version of it. And the people part is important. I think that matters a lot. Then I started working in television and the bond that people have with television actors is different and much deeper. This is a long-lost member of their family. You seem very sensitive about cost and the idea of spending less money to produce great work. You gave a speech at the Saturn Awards and said, quote, “As producers, we are not just here to save people money.” You were speaking in the context of bringing production back to California, which you did with the second season of Fallout. What do you think about the financial pressures of your industry? It's a great question, and it reminds me that there is one technology over the years that has radically altered the economics of film. I'm not sure if you'd say it's actually materially changed the trend line, but it definitely altered the economics and that technology is the tax rebate. That's not a technology, but it is an innovation. As the recipient of funds from the great state of New York, the great state of California, the United Kingdom, Utah—everywhere we go, if there's a rebate, we'll try to take advantage of it. Part of the reason I was so worked up in that speech was not just that a fire had destroyed the homes of 10 of our crew members on Fallout and a dozen of our friends. It was that I had just started to get an idea from my crew. A lot of them worked with us on Westworld, so we've worked with some of these folks for a decade or more. These are folks who are the best at what they do, and usually when we have a wrap party, not so many people can make it because they're in such high demand. They're already on to the next thing. I was like “Oh no, this is a problem.” They haven't been hired. Also, the complicity of studios, and studio production heads and producers being willing to go along with, “Well, look, we could make this in California or New York, but we're going to make it in Hungary because we'll be able to do it for $30 or $40 million less." I think that's been an incredibly shortsighted and foolish thing for us to do. The New York Times story where I found that quote, by the way, is actually about you bringing the second season of Fallout to California. You moved production back, and you were really vocal about pushing for the industry to do the same with more projects. I think it's very easy to be cynical about state politics. But they were incredibly thoughtful and smart. In a year in which you have enormous challenges from the incoming Trump administration, enormous challenges for the state of California's budget, they cleared a much bigger incentive to try to make sure that California remained competitive. But it was a huge shot in the arm. It'll take a while to undo some of the damage, but I'm hopeful that what the state legislators and the governor was able to pass will give us the best shot for keeping Hollywood Hollywood for another hundred years. I have to ask you about Fallout. The show is, of course, based on a video game franchise that has many decades of history. The second season of the show premiered about a month ago, and new episodes are now coming out on Amazon every week. How do you describe the show to people who aren't familiar with the game, who maybe don't have the years of lore and history and maybe haven't watched it yet? I don't think I ever quite dialed in the elevator pitch, but it is along the lines of: What if the world ended but it didn't completely end? I started as a fan of the games … You've said you played, I think, Fallout 3 and it destroyed a year of your life, consumed a year of your life. It's the Annie Hall thing, right? One of the things they had, I thought, that was very unique about them—and this was a bit of a stretch for me as a filmmaker—was that they are this combination of darkness and violence and interesting questions about technology and identity, but they're also really weird and funny and gonzo and strange. But these ones are weirdly optimistic. It feels like they're more about the beginning of a new world. They're more about, OK, well, culture would rebuild itself. Let's play in the mess that ensues. You didn't make that choice. It was inherent in the franchise, but why do you think it's set in that time period, which I think is not representative of the experience of all Americans. I think it was actually a very dark time. But there's this fixation on 1950s Americana as this perfect moment for the United States, at least in hindsight. How have you thought about that in working on the show? Each of the games have different characters, they have a different setting, but they're all connected by this world, the world that was before. Look, you've seen a whole political movement built out of the nostalgia for that world, right? That world had a coherence and an appeal, even if it was rooted in all kinds of ugly, terrible shit. There was an unadulterated vision of America as the victor in the Second World War, and this force for good. You know, they hadn't yoked the entire world under a Pax Americana; they hadn't taken over all these countries. They found maybe a sneakier way to do it. They pulled everyone into the Bretton Woods system. They pulled everyone into this kinda like free-to-play, free-trade system, which was powerful, and it created a world where you didn't have another world war for a very long time. American culture predominated and American culture had a lot of darkness in there, but largely spoke to values that I think a lot of us can get behind in terms of freedom and equity. And eventually, even if it was hypocrisy in the beginning, all these wonderful things that it's easy to be nostalgic about, and I think is therefore kind of ripe fruit. If you're going to think about America's fall from grace, you'd probably fall from that moment. What if you extended that for a hundred years and you took the promise of nuclear technology seriously? I always thought that was such a lovely and incisive and satirical place to start. Was anything surprising to you about how the show has been received? When it's based on this franchise that has such a fandom and lore and such history—it's a lot of pressure. I sort of trained at the DC school of fan pressure with the three Batman movies that I worked on with my brother. I learned a lot of lessons there in terms of approaching something because you love it, not because you're trying to figure out why someone else loves it. But if you come at it from a place of genuine respect and love, I think you'll probably do OK. There's going to be some people who are pissed off at you, and you just have to be OK with that. Just don't read the comments. I think when you talked to GQ, you said your disappointment with the internet over the last 20 years is “fucking bottomless.” So I had to assume that you were no longer reading Reddit threads about your show. Because I really love that community. I wanted to make sure to ask you a little bit about the politics of it all, which is to say that there are a lot of political themes that emerge in Fallout. When you are working on a show and you're weaving these themes in, how do you make determinations about how overt and obvious to be as opposed to doing it in a more nuanced way? Look, fundamentally, philosophically for me, I do not feel qualified to tell anyone how to believe. I'm much more interested in poking and asking questions and saying, “Well, should we believe this? Should we question this?” Working on Batman, I made this analogy to a friend with regards to politics and engaging with it. Working on Batman felt like being a Yankee, right? Taking a 60-year-old American icon and pressing that character into service for a specific, timely political point felt like a very fast path to losing relevance for the story. If you're reading Dante's Inferno, it's stood the test of time, but it's kind of amazing how much regional politics is still laced into the first three chapters. He's still pissed off with his landlord in the third level of hell, right? It's like, OK, come on, let's get onto the next part. So, for me, there was always a bit of responsibility to be asking questions, not giving answers. But I have strong political beliefs, and I think as the world has started to feel more incoherent, and making sense of things has become so hard to wade through, and it's so hard to just talk to each other, it was really nice to work on a project like Fallout. From the very beginning, Graham Wagner, one of our showrunners, was joking that the first season, or the first game rather, could have been written by Adbusters. There's a strong point of view there, and it's a strong political point of view. Poking at things, this is the beauty of working in speculative fiction or in apocalyptic fiction. The world is gone, so we're not talking about this president, we're not talking about that. We're talking about a fictitious world a hundred years in the future, and 200 years after that, where everything has been blown to hell. But you get to pick up the bits, the detritus of our present political situation, potentially, and kind of look at it. You know, I would challenge anyone to watch both seasons of Fallout and not find a group that doesn't come in for a drubbing. There's this slightly nativist progressivism of the Vault, where it's like “freedom and safety for everyone, except we're not letting anyone in.” You know, it's kinda the lifeboat, progressivism. Then you have the wild libertarianism, if you want to call it anything, of the Wasteland. So we get to look at all these different things. Again, I don't have any answers, but it's really fun at this moment in time to be able to poke a little more aggressively at some of these things. I don't want to put too much on you, but we're looking at this show that's about the world after a collapse at the hands of very powerful conglomerates. Is it hard for you, as someone who describes themselves as an optimist, not to see collapse everywhere? It's kinda what we do, right? I'm hopeful that we will pull ourselves back from the edge. I thought my brother's movie Oppenheimer ends brilliantly with that warning: It's not over yet. We haven't solved this problem yet. We may still yet destroy the world. I think it's incredibly important for us to always remember that. That's why working on a show like Fallout, the timing sadly felt good as a gentle reminder that OK, it may be amusing to live in the wasteland that follows. I don't think any of us watch that show and wish to live in that world, or hope no one wishes to live in that world. But, I think with some thoughtfulness and a little compassion and maybe some slightly better heuristics for our social media, we might make it. Before we end, I would love to play a very quick game. It's a game we came up with. So, what piece of technology would you love to control? What would you love to alt, so alter or change, and what would you love to delete? I would control AI generated video. Like I said, I'm so excited not necessarily for what we can do with it—I think it's limited for us—but what it can do for the next generation of filmmakers all over the world. I think it's going to be incredible. It's going to unleash a group of new voices. However, one of these conversations with the [tech] folks who come down occasionally and check in with us to let us know how the end of our world is going in very nice ways pointed out, “We watermark very carefully. Every piece of video we generate. But it's totally invisible and no one can see.” I said, “Probably the biggest social problem right now is that you need to make it extremely visible.” You go back to Blade Runner, and I always thought to myself, “God, it's so weird that they don't want the replicants to live on Earth. It was so tragic.” Now I totally understand. Like if you can make a video of the president saying whatever you want, and it's indistinguishable from reality, that has to be regulated yesterday. If we don't get a handle on that imminently, we're in very, very serious trouble. Lisa and I are very engaged with someone very close to us in our lives who has a condition caused by a novel nonsense gene. That's not how it's going to happen. You have these catastrophic diseases where the tool will be there, but the funding won't be there, the resources won't be there. Or abandoning the business model and saying, OK, is the government going to start funding some of these things? I would say all of it, but I have conversations with friends who have kids with special needs and this is their community. Trans fats, ringtones, and the algorithmic feed—Jonathan Nolan's three agents of destruction. You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We're on Spotify too. In your inbox: Maxwell Zeff's dispatch from the heart of AI Big Story: Your first humanoid coworker will be Chinese What to do if ICE invades your neighborhood Special edition: You're already living in the Chinese century WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.

For decades now, people have been wondering: Who is Melania Trump? The First Lady opens her 2024 memoir with a story about leaving her family in Slovenia to immigrate to America as a 26-year-old model. Ten years later, she became an American citizen. “It was not an easy process,” she writes. “And my personal experience dealing with the trials of the immigration process opened my eyes to the difficulties faced by all who wish to become US citizens.” OK, but what does that mean, exactly? Her husband, in both his terms as president, put harshly enforcing immigration policy at the center of his domestic agenda. The director, Brett Ratner, previously accused of sexual misconduct by six different women, is currently in the news thanks to his appearance in a photo included in the most recent dump of Epstein files. (Ratner has previously denied sexual misconduct allegations.) What is Melania like behind closed doors? The trailer—a monument to editing wizardry—reveals little except that Mrs. Trump perhaps didn't attend her husband's inauguration (ultimately she did). It turns out, I'm not the only one who wanted to watch. While a WIRED analysis found only two movie theaters had sold out opening day screenings, local Republican groups across the country arranged parties to support the film, helping opening weekend reach $7 million or so in ticket sales. WIRED attended two such events, in Florida and California, to ask people what they love about the First Lady, what they make of her recent foray into artificial intelligence, and what, ultimately, they too want to find out about her. Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity. Immigration is leading the news, and Mrs. Trump was born in Slovenia. What do you think the media gets right and wrong about the Trumps' attitudes toward immigration? Oh, that's a hot topic for me. And I don't want to be cocky, but it's the truth. What are you most excited to see revealed in the film? I want to see the Melania that nobody else sees. What made you fall in love with Melania Trump? The five virtues of a successful woman. Melania is prudent, sincere, elegant, has a remarkable memory because she doesn't forget her origins, and is a great partner for a great leader. Where do you think she's had the biggest impact as First Lady? Her ability to speak up when she disagrees with decisions, without getting into controversies with her husband—that's a very important balance. She's always by his side, supporting him, accompanying him, and pursuing a very important social agenda. Ozzy Perez (far right) at a Miami screening party. Where do you think Melania has had the biggest impact as First Lady? She has an incredible love for the military. And she's a naturalized citizen—she wasn't naturally born here. I was part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Three Christmases in a row, missed both my kids' births. What do you love most about Melania? She's the best-looking first lady we've had. Where do you think she's had the biggest impact as First Lady? Do you agree with her that artificial intelligence opens up the imagination? Do you use AI in your own life? But for my kids and grandkids, I love it. Immigration is leading the news, and Mrs. Trump was born in Slovenia. What do you think the media gets right and wrong about the Trumps' attitudes toward immigration? All the media is wrong about immigration. What do you love most about Melania? I like her style and the fact that she always carries herself well and is very well-spoken. As an immigrant and a model, it comes with all these preconceptions of that “dumb blonde," but she's really very smart and has a good heart. Where do you think she's had the biggest impact as First Lady? If you look at Melania, she lives her own life. She's not totally dependent on being in the White House. She's got a life in New York. She's got a son going to NYU. So I think the fact that she can come and still do her work there but still have another life is unprecedented, really, if you look at First Ladies from the past. What do you love most about Melania? I love that she doesn't need anybody's approval. She truly just stands on her own. There's so much criticism around her because she's not your cookie-cutter First Lady. She's not this person who's running around trying to people-please and smile and be super friendly. I love that she's true to herself. Where do you think she's had the biggest impact as First Lady? I think her biggest impact has been on children and hunger, children who need education, who need homes. What are you excited to see revealed in the movie? I really just want to see her perspective on the madness, because I think [Donald Trump] loves the madness. I think he's lived his life in this limelight. I don't see her like that, so I'm interested in seeing what her perspective is, just having to deal with all the photographers, and all of the people, and the rumors, and the talking. Where do you think she's had the biggest impact as First Lady? As First Lady, especially this second term, it's that she cares about kids and she's helping a lot of kids to be released from Russia to Ukraine. And she has done flights, many of them. Do you agree that AI unlocks the imagination? But in the end it's going to help a lot of people to do things faster. So we have to wait until it develops. What do you think the media gets right and wrong about the Trumps' attitudes toward immigration? Sometimes he tells jokes and then they take it seriously. So they don't understand him, really. I was a political prisoner in Cuba. So I suffered a lot with communists. So I'm 100 percent backing him and Marco Rubio, so they get rid of the communists in Cuba. What do you love most about Melania? Mayra Joli: That she knows what it's like to raise a family. And sometimes to turn a deaf ear to people who don't give proper or accurate information. Where do you think she's had the biggest impact as First Lady? And besides that, she's a super intelligent woman. She doesn't speak just one language—she speaks more than four languages. Mayra Joli: She's an immigrant, just like me. Mayra Joli: I'm from the Dominican Republic. Your sister mentioned how well she presents herself … But a lady is class, clothing, carrying yourself properly, walking correctly. Otherwise her son wouldn't be who he is today. Name: Madeline Abernathy, member of Kern County Young Republicans Where do you think Melania has had the biggest impact as First Lady? I was a little bit hesitant about what she would do in the first election—we didn't really know too much about her. And after she came on as the First Lady, the second time, I feel like we've learned more. She has different initiatives that she's coming out with, AI, technology, and for children as well. Her big passion for foster care and AI in science is very important. Do you use AI in your own life? Yes, ChatGPT mainly, like if there's different types of bills or legislation or rules, regulations in oil and gas, just to be able to research it more in depth, to explain it. Name: Jared Vegas, administrative vice chair of Kern County Young Republicans What do you love most about Melania? The biggest thing that I think of when I think of her is that we're not against immigration in this country. I think that's a good kind of dynamic to have when our president is constantly viewed right now as the guy who's just deporting everybody. It's like, well, no, he's not against legal immigration. His wife wouldn't be here if he was against legal immigration. So I like that aspect of it. I mean, she's got to be the prettiest First Lady we've ever had. Was there a particular moment that stands out to you about her, that shaped your view of her? I don't know if it's really a particular moment per se. It's more like every time I've seen her in public or heard her speak, she's just very graceful and respectful to everybody she talks to. Her husband, who I like in many ways, can sometimes be disrespectful. But I've never seen a moment where she's very blatantly disrespectful to those around her. The First Lady has talked a lot about AI recently. Do you use AI in your own life? We sell electrified security fencing to businesses to protect them from criminals that come in and steal their stuff. So the thing is, there are so many people I talk to throughout the day, because I'm going into businesses and talking to owners and I'm looking at the sites. And obviously there's a lot of things I have to remember. It's a super helpful tool in my day-to-day. Well, I think the media often tries to victimize criminal behavior, in the sense that they want to feel bad for people because they come from such hard countries, and then say, “Oh, well, then that justifies the bad behavior to get here,” like in the sense of breaking the law. Look, if you come here illegally, that in and of itself is a crime and justifies deportation. That being said, there are some people that are more dangerous to our current society that not only broke the law of coming into the country illegally but also committing other heinous crimes. So let's focus on those people primarily, which has been the primary focus of the Trump administration. But is the primary focus those that are breaking multiple laws? Addy Eggers (left) and Sarah Fanucchi at a Bakersfield, California, party. What do you think has been Melania's biggest impact as First Lady? Addy: She's just been such a good supporter of Trump. She's supported all the things that he's put into action, all the things with ICE. She's just been there through it all, supporting him. And I think that's the main role of a First Lady, to be there for the president. Melania has been promoting the adoption of artificial intelligence, including in schools. Do you think she's right that AI can unlock the imagination? Addy: I think with the use of AI, now that it's been invented and now that it's being used, we have to adapt to it. There's no way to get around it. I think it can be super helpful. I think it can make processes quicker. But I do agree that if it's overused, then obviously there's an issue that's a little scary. What college student doesn't use AI? Literally that's how I'm getting most of my assignments done because it's to the point, it's quick. Immigration obviously is a big issue in the news right now. What do you think the media is getting right or wrong about President Trump's attitude towards the issue? And if there were people that came here legally and they came here to work, they came here the right way, he wouldn't mind. [Editors: Even before the 2026 crackdown, individuals with no criminal convictions reportedly made up two-thirds of the people being deported through the first half of last year]. Where do you feel Melania's had the biggest impact as a First Lady? Well, when I say she carries herself well, I don't mean physical, although she does that too. She's not just holding teas in the White House, she's actually going to be out there in the community and helping children. I was going to say tall, dark, and handsome. No matter what Mom says or Dad, and your dad's the president of the United States! This might be a hot button topic, but immigration is obviously in the news right now, and Mrs. Trump is born in Slovenia. What do you think the media is getting right or wrong about the Trumps' attitude towards immigration? My family's Armenian, we all came legally. And if they're criminals, either native Americans or from a foreign country and came here illegally, we got to get them out. Because it's not only dangerous, but they broke the law getting here. And just to clarify, did you say including native Americans or not including native Americans? When I say native Americans, that's all of us born here. So that's what native Americans really mean. Melania has been promoting the adoption of artificial intelligence, including in schools. Do you think she's right that AI can, in her words, unlock the imagination? You see, artificial intelligence is revolutionizing all industries, supply chain, agriculture here in the Central Valley. It's very resource-intensive, but I can see the return being tenfold, depending on how well we educate our children on prompt engineering and really taking advantage of information systems. I do use AI strategically, whether it be for my own self-enrichment—I'm trying to learn a couple of languages like Punjabi, Spanish, and Italian—or whether it be for cooking. I enjoy cooking in my personal life. Immigration has been in the news lately. Considering that Mrs. Trump is from Slovenia, what do you think the media has gotten right or wrong about Trump's attitude towards immigration? I think the media has correctly identified that Trump wants to make this a priority because he's feeling the pressure from his base. We're seeing the collapse of software engineering as an industry because we have a plethora, and possibly an excess, of H-1B visa recipients taking jobs in Silicon Valley. So Trump understands at this very point that immigration and the full boat that is our country, it's handling a lot of weight, and he needs to prioritize American interests in our economy by putting Americans first. What I think the media could be more generous to Trump on, what I think they got incorrect, is the way that the administration has been targeting different populations. In your inbox: WIRED's most ambitious, future-defining stories Big Story: China's renewable energy revolution might save the world Watch our livestream replay: Welcome to the Chinese century WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.

Sustainability: News about the rapidly growing climate tech sector and other areas of innovation to protect our planet. Seattle startup Avalanche Energy on Tuesday announced $29 million in funding to support its push toward fusion power and to help launch a commercial-scale testing facility for fusion technologies. The new capital is largely earmarked for FusionWERX, a test facility in Richland, Wash., that is a public-private partnership offering shared R&D resources to companies, government labs and universities to develop the sector's supply chain and to produce radioactive materials. The fusion sector has attracted massive investments in recent years as energy-hungry data centers expand nationally to meet burgeoning AI needs. Avalanche is targeting slightly different use cases, but still benefiting from the insatiable appetite for clean power. While local rivals Helion Energy, Zap Energy and General Fusion are aiming for large devices to feed electrons to the electrical grid, Avalanche is going small. The company has its sights on desktop-sized machines well-suited for space or defense applications — environments where portability and power density are more critical than sheer grid-scale output. Avalanche founders Robin Langtry and Brian Riordan have likewise taken a less conventional path to founding the company, coming not from physics labs in academia but from Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin where they worked on rocket propulsion. Their iterative, builder-focused approach has led them to unlikely sources of inspiration — most recently, decades-old research from Russia's Mir space program that helped them reorient some misbehaving plasma. “There's a little bit of archeology going on, digging up old Soviet papers from the '80s that are not necessarily well digitized,” said Langtry, the company's CEO. Since launching in 2018, the team has grown to 50 employees and notched recent advances: None so far have succeeded, but some companies claim they're getting close. It's really all about who can build these machines in the next couple years and really demonstrate record-breaking plasmas and then commercialize that,” Langtry said, adding, “we're going to be right there with them.” Avalanche lands $10M state grant to build fusion energy R&D site in Washington Fusion R&D hub aims to break ground in Eastern Washington this summer

Ever since this merger of two Musk companies became a rumor, crazy numbers like $1.5 trillion started being thrown around when discussing the total valuation of SpaceX, so you might sum it up by saying “Combining SpaceX and xAI gets you the biggest IPO of all time!” and yeah, that's more plausible now than ever. For reference, SpaceX's valuation was estimated at around $800 billion less than two months ago. But is this merger as silly as it sounds?The combined company will be a “vertically-integrated innovation engine,” according to a new SpaceX press release with Elon Musk's personal signature on it. SpaceX will now own, for instance, Grokipedia, the AI-written, anti-woke parody of Wikipedia. Yes SpaceX, which possesses billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts and is responsible for crewed NASA missions, now owns the rights to Vine too. Musk claims he's bringing it back “in AI form.” As many have pointed out before me, SpaceX became a genuinely indispensable player in humanity's aerospace and space travel efforts through an iterative process involving an extraordinary number of spectacular and public rocket explosions that almost certainly would not have been tolerated if SpaceX were a government agency. It has always walked a delicate tightrope, keeping boring people happy, while also subject to the silly stuff and horrors that go along with being run by Elon Musk.Gwynne Shotwell, the president and COO of SpaceX, has been described by the Wall Street Journal as “a Musk translator, especially for officials who depend on SpaceX but are occasionally unnerved by his activities.” In that same Journal article, former NASA administrator Bill Nelson—also a Democratic ex-Senator—called Shotwell, “the steady hand” at the company, and added, “I have a great deal of confidence in her. Because of that, I have a great deal of confidence in SpaceX.”Back in 2022, when Musk was in the middle of buying Twitter in as chaotic a fashion as possible, Nelson says he called Shotwell, and said, “Tell me that the distraction that Elon might have on Twitter is not going to affect SpaceX.” “I assure you, it is not,” he says she told him. “You have nothing to worry about.” Now imagine being Shotwell four years later. Last year, the proprietary AI chatbot on X briefly started calling itself “MechaHitler” at one point, and then it generated tons of scantily-clad pictures of children. And imagine Shotwell having to handle this merger while Musk, the attention-starved celebrity CEO of this conglomerate has spent the last few days trying to post his way out of any consequences or disapprobation brought about by the public disclosure of emails in which he repeatedly asked Jeffrey Epstein if he could party on his private island. So one can only speculate what Musk's mental state was when he finalized the plans for this merger. But what stands out to me is that he wants investors in xAI and SpaceX—and perhaps starting in June, future holders of publicly traded SpaceX stock—to believe that this merger creates a company that gels and has a unified agenda. But you might want to take as big of a bong rip as you can before you try and get your head around that agenda as Musk describes it in his press release: This rocket and AI company will actually be an AI-in-space company, you see, because, according to Musk's estimate, “within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.” After all, “in the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale.” Obviously. But training models with space compute is just the beginning, because Musk claims that by combining these two concepts, they'll be “scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe.” Companies don't have to always make sense. Sometimes these incongruities are prosperous leftovers from a different era for a company, but sometimes they reveal the caprice or frivolity of company leadership, which can be no big deal.But then again, it's not farfetched to think that Elon Musk's caprice—and the fact that an economically powerful subset of Wall Street bulls think that caprice is tantamount to wisdom—may soon control the world's best-funded AI company at a time when AI is the load bearing structure propping up the whole economy. If the IPO goes well (the New York Times' sources say Musk hopes it will raise $50 billion), that AI company is going to be in your 401(k) while it's also in charge of the lives of astronauts. In other words, we're headed for a time when the Wall Street bulls will have to be right. AI had better not be a bubble if this IPO goes well, and the value of Musk himself had better not be inflated either. Elon Musk and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino have also been summoned for questioning. Sorry, but what is the correct interpretation supposed to be? How many award-winning writers are desperate enough to train Grok? Epstein wrote an email to Musk in 2013 discussing a visit with four "assistants," newly released DOJ documents show.

“We also did this while supporting, in critical manner, some of the most interesting, intricate, unusual operations that the U.S. government has been involved in, many of which we can't comment on, but were the highlight of last year and were highly motivating to all of us at Palantir,” CEO Alex Karp said on the investor call. Most of that revenue was driven by the company's work for the Department of Defense, “as well as accelerating momentum in civil agencies,” Palantir's chief revenue officer Ryan Taylor said. Just a few months later, an Amnesty International report claimed that Palantir's AI software was used to target non-citizens who speak out in favor of Palestine. Karp himself has been outspoken in favor of Trump's immigration policy, going so far as to say that he will use his “whole influence to make sure this country stays skeptical on migration.” But Palantir's partnership with Washington goes far beyond just immigration. Many parts of the government rely on Palantir software, most notably the Pentagon and particularly through a $480 million deal for an AI-powered target identification system called Maven. “Our weapons software is in every combat situation [that] I'm aware of,” Karp said. In fact, the CEO claims it's been so effective that his chief technology officer Shyam Sankar's “phone rings off the hook all day, and what they want from him is ‘how do I do this same thing across government? He has used this reasoning when defending the use of Palantir software in Caribbean boat strikes that many experts believe to be war crimes, and he used it again in the investor call to ward off fears of Palantir-driven mass surveillance. But what happens when those “laws and ethics” themselves become questionable? Take Palantir's work for the Department of Health and Human Services. For roughly the past year, Palantir has supplied AI tools to attack government programs, contracts, and grants that don't fit with the Trump administration's views on gender, environment, and race, according to a recently published report on AI use cases at HHS. The Department has been using Palantir AI to make sure that all grants and jobs comply with Trump's executive orders targeting DEI and “gender ideology.” Since they were signed a year ago, both executive orders have led to many federal layoffs, including some targeting non-DEI-related positions, and major cuts to funding for crucial research. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even had to scrub any mentions of words like “gender,” “LGBT,” or “environmental justice,” retracting and even pausing some research submissions, while Trump cut more than 1,600 research grants at the National Science Foundation. Protesters are cancelling subscriptions from ten major tech and AI companies. ICE is enlisting ten companies for a widespread immigrant surveillance program. It's like you can't even trust the Facebook page "Man Stuff" for investigative journalism anymore. Workers want it to help get us out, starting with canceling ICE contracts. Don't bother trying to figure out how that makes any sense.

Peter Thiel—the billionaire venture capitalist, PayPal, and Palantir cofounder, and outspoken commentator on all matters relating to the “Antichrist”—appears at least 2,200 times in the latest batch of files released by the Department of Justice related to convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. The new files show that Thiel arranged to meet with Epstein several times between 2014 and 2017. Thiel did not immediately return a request for comment from WIRED. One piece of correspondence stands out for being particularly bizarre. On February 3, 2016, Thiel's former chief of staff and senior executive assistant, Alisa Bekins, sent an email with the subject line “Meeting - Feb 4 - 9:30 AM - Peter Thiel dietary restrictions - CONFIDENTIAL.” The initial recipient of the email is redacted, but it was later forwarded directly to Epstein. However, two other files from what appears to be the same set of messages have less information redacted. Only one actual meal was explicitly outlined: “egg whites or greens/salad with some form of protein,” such as steak, which Bekins included “in the event they eat breakfast.” It's unclear if the February 4 meeting ultimately occurred; other emails indicate Thiel got stuck in traffic on his way to meet Epstein that day. According to a recording of an undated conversation between Epstein and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak that was also part of the files the DOJ released on Friday, Epstein told Barak that he was hoping to meet Thiel the following week. He added that he was familiar with Thiel's company Palantir, but proceeded to spell it out loud for Barak as “Pallentier.” Epstein speculated that Thiel might put Barak on the board of Palantir, though there's no evidence that ever occurred. “I've never met Peter Thiel, and everybody says he sort of jumps around and acts really strange, like he's on drugs,” Epstein said at one point in the audio recording, referring to Thiel. In 2015 and 2016, Epstein put $40 million in two funds managed by one of Thiel's investment firms, Valar Ventures, according to The New York Times. Epstein and Thiel continued to communicate and were discussing meeting with one another as recently as January 2019, according to the files released by the DOJ. Below are Thiel's dietary restrictions as outlined in the February 2016 email. In your inbox: Maxwell Zeff's dispatch from the heart of AI Special edition: You're already living in the Chinese century WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.