The AI IPO Race Gets Weird; Elon Musk Sued By DOGE Whistleblower; Instagram's Hacking Incident

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1:22Shortwave spends each episode answering one big one, like, why do we have nightmares? How does AI affect my energy bill? And how can trash be good for the environment? Science isn't just for the PhDs of the world. It's for everyone, including those of us who didn't realize we love science. In under 15 minutes, Shortwave follows a question wherever it leads and brings you along for the ride. It's science, but not the kind you remember from school. It's surprising, playful, and full of wonder. News podcasts are great, but sometimes you want to experience the world in a different way. shortwave gets you out of your head and in touch with the world around you personally i loved hearing about janet jones horse trainer and neuroscientist teach me about horse and human relationships throughout history follow npr shortwave podcast and exercise your right to wonder hey this is brian before we start two quick things if you've been enjoying listening to the show we would appreciate it if you took a second to rate it in your podcast app of choice It really helps us reach more people.

2:27And second, if you have any questions related to tech, privacy, or politics that you would like me, Zoe, and Leah to take on, now is the time to submit them to uncannyvalleyatwired.com. It doesn't matter how big or how small, we want to hear from you and get you answers. Okay, on to the show. Hi, guys. Hi, everybody. We are far flung today. I know. You're not even supposed to be here, but you're here. Couldn't miss it. I am out this week. Technically, I'm at the beach with my parents and my family, and we're playing a lot of mini golf. That's basically it. That's pretty good stuff, though. Who's winning?

3:01Grandma. Grandma crushing it. Wow. A terror on the links. Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Director of Business and Industry. I'm Brian Barrett, Executive Editor. And I'm Leah Feiger, Director of Politics and Science. Today on the show, we're diving into the IPO bonanza that the top AI companies are embarking on. To the point where some real estate listings in San Francisco are looking for not just regular old cash, but something that is considered even more valuable right now. Stock in Anthropic and OpenAI. The madness is honestly just beginning. And this week, the Trump administration announced an executive order asking AI companies to give the federal government access to their most advanced artificial intelligence models 30 days before their public release.

3:51This decision did not come that smoothly. We're going to discuss all the inside fighting that has been going on inside the administration when it comes to AI regulation and whether this executive order actually makes any difference. We'll also get into how hackers tricked Instagram's AI chatbot to access some high-profile accounts, including President Obama's former White House account. And we'll talk about a doge whistleblower who says someone cut the brakes of his car a few days after Elon Musk boosted a claim that called him a liar.

4:26So you've probably already heard this week that Anthropic officially submitted its paperwork to go public. It did this confidentially, and then it shouted it from the rooftops. And they beat OpenAI. And they beat OpenAI, which we will get into in just a moment. The company has not set the exact date or the specific amount of money it's seeking to raise, but with its current valuation, which is a mind-boggling$965 billion. That's billion with a B. It is well on its way to becoming one of the largest IPOs in history. Anthropic is joining a pretty crowded field. SpaceX, which owns XAI, already filed its paperwork to go public.

5:06That's probably happening in June. And OpenAI is also rumored to be announcing their own filing very, very soon. I asked OpenAI to weigh in after Anthropic filed and kind of whether they had already filed, were planning to. And they said, we are not going to comment, confirm, deny, speculate, pontificate, or elaborate. Wow. Which was so special. When they bust out the thesaurus, you know it's serious. Yeah, you know, I just responded, wow, exclamation point. And that was left on read. So, yeah, I mean, this is a full-on race, although OpenAI has said it doesn't matter who goes public first. I think particularly in this moment when it feels like Anthropic is really ascendant, and at least from a PR perspective, they're doing incredibly well.

5:56I think, you know, it matters that they have filed, that they're well on their way. But there's also a lot of stuff that needs to happen for SpaceX, for Anthropic, for OpenAI for them to be able to go public. You need to be super buttoned up. You need to have all of your ducks in a row. And these are young and at times messy startups. Well, and poor SpaceX, which is not as young and was not as messy until they sort of had a forced adoption of XAI and all that goes with that. So I do feel bad for them that they were all of the things that you need to be until right up to the moment that they needed to be them.

6:32And now they're just in the same AI mess as everybody else. Yeah, they really, really are. So there've been a lot of interesting kind of sub threads to this story, as you might imagine. But one thing that I think you will both find very, very funny is that we have been seeing real estate listings in San Francisco say that they will accept stock in Anthropic or OpenAI in exchange for a house. And this has happened not just one time, multiple times. Incredible. Zoe, do we know if anyone has actually done a purchase like this yet or is that still? No, there are so many questions. My major one was, how are they deciding the value of the, like, these aren't public companies.

7:13Also, do you need board approval to give away a bunch of your stock in exchange for a house? It feels like it's a handshake agreement, to be honest. Like, there can't be like anything that official here. Wired freelancer Arielle Pardes wrote a story for us about this. And she asked the real estate agents, how are you expecting, how are your clients expecting these deals to go? And everyone was kind of like, no, we'll figure it out. But one of the agents did say that they've received a lot of interest, and she claims specifically from Anthropic employees. There was one listing in particular that said they were only accepting Anthropic stock, not OpenAI, because the guy who was selling the house likes Anthropic's products better.

7:52I think a couple things. One, it's also just a good marketing stunt. Like we're talking about and listing the addresses of these very expensive houses for sale, regardless of how they buy them. It's just good on these realtors for getting the word out there. But also, it is a reminder of how many billionaires are about to hit the streets in San Francisco, even more than there already are, to the point where, I mean, people can probably, I assume a lot of people at Anthropic or OpenAI who can give away$2 million worth of stock and still have a whole lot of stock left over. It's sort of like monopoly money at this point.

8:22Totally. I mean, a lot of these people, like you insinuated, are like on paper millionaires or even billionaires. But once the IPOs happen, they'll be actual millionaires, if not billionaires. It's interesting that even in the meantime, there's potential for them to convert their paper wealth into actual value in the form of a house. That's like a big if, because again, we haven't seen one of these transactions play out that we actually know of. But like you said, Brian, when we first saw a couple listings, I was like, no, this feels like a gimmick. But then enough of them popped up that I was like, okay, there's something here.

8:56And when Ariel reached out to speak to the agents again, some of them were taking it pretty seriously. It didn't feel like it was a pure marketing play, even if it does have that effect. You hinted at this earlier, Zoe, but Anthropic has basically said that if you try to sell your Anthropic shares without board approval, then that transaction is not valid, right? Like it is going to be interesting to see what kind of messes. Yeah, I mean, we have always seen, I think, employees selling stock on secondary markets. it's usually not advised. Like you don't want to do that because you're going to get a worse price unless you really, really have to.

9:29And sometimes you do have to. Sometimes people need liquidity and so they're willing to do it. But Anthropic, I think, has insinuated that there's, you know, some scammy situations going down and that those transactions are not valid. Poor SpaceX and OpenAI. That's not happening yet. No houses for sale. No exchange of dog walking for stock. I'm waiting. I'm waiting for their moment. I think OpenAI has seen a few, But yeah, maybe no, SpaceX quite yet. Although, you know, San Francisco is a crazy place, so I wouldn't be surprised. I want to talk about something in the AI industry that is not having to do with IPOs.

10:06On Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that asked tech companies to voluntarily give the government early access to new AI models before releasing them to the public, 30 days before they're set to be released, to be exact. There had been reports of an executive order coming down the pipeline for weeks now. But after President Trump nixed the original proposal at the very last minute a few weeks ago, it wasn't clear if it was actually going to happen. Here's his response when he was asked about his reasoning. I didn't like certain aspects of it. I postponed it. I think it gets in the way of, you know, we're leading China, we're leading everybody, and I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that lead.

10:48We have a very substantial on AI. It's causing tremendous good. I really thought that could have been a blocker, and I want to make sure that it's not. He said all of those things when he canceled the executive order a couple of weeks ago now. But the other part of this is there were so many competing officials in the administration that were pulling him in different directions. We can't forget David Sachs, his former AI czar in all of this, who very much stopped the original executive order from happening. While the most recent signed order doesn't have hugely substantial differences, the big difference that we can point to is beforehand the government was asking for 90 days for companies to voluntarily give, as opposed to the 30 days, which everyone apparently is now comfortable with.

11:33There's been some really good reporting out there, including from Wired's Hugo Lowell and Maxwell Zeff, who reported just on Wednesday that Trump's senior aides actually persuaded him to sign this new executive order by saying that he could not infinitely delay establishing a regulatory framework for the tech, considering that it was just so advanced at this point. I love all the marketing. Sorry. You can't do the sort of, we'll do it in two weeks that I think Trump is so good at. You really do eventually need to get it. But Zoe, what do you love about the marketing? I just feel like the AI companies do such a good job of being like, we're actually so good at what we do and so powerful that you need to set some ground rules because we're about to explode.

12:12It's going to be so crazy. Right. It's 100%. That's 100 % what happened. I mean, so many people are like, are they furious? Are the AI companies? No, they're behind the scenes. They're having meetings with all of these folks. They're like, these are, this is voluntary. This is 100 % fine. I did think it was really interesting in Hugo and Max's article where they talked about the winners and the losers with the executive order, because it does seem like Susie Wiles has kind of won this round, whereas David Sachs, the former AI and crypto czar, kind of, you know, as you mentioned did not get his full wish.

12:44He went on X shortly after this announcement dropped and kind of defended the order, tried to say he was behind it and really framed it as like the 90 to 30 day switch that we saw in the planned order and what actually was signed and came out was kind of the X factor for him. And it was going to make a huge difference because now AI companies could work in lockstep with the government and not like delay their product launch cycle. Even the 90 to 30 day thing as part of that market. It is of a piece of the marketing thing, right? It's like we are iterating so quickly and we are so at the cutting edge.

13:1690 days is insane. Whatever you're looking at 90 days in advance won't be anything like what the 30 day in advance looks like, which like there's probably an element of truth to that. But also we've seen a lot of iterative releases from these companies. I think it is a sort of, I think really what it is, is squeezing the review amount of review time to the extent that there is any actual review in this 30 day window to be too short to really be meaningful in any way. And again, to be clear, this is all voluntary. There's calling this regulation is a stretch. Yeah, I don't think I feel comfortable even really calling this a regulation.

13:48You know, look, already we're starting to see in so many ways that the Trump administration is already utilizing this to their benefit. Hugo and Max reported that now with the order in place, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Besant is now exploring discussions with China to figure out about creating a similar cross-border framework for, like, sharing advanced AI system information. And that's really interesting to me. So in some ways, this is, like, sort of a checkmark. Like, we had to say that we're doing something on this. What does that mean? And, like, how do we really go forward from there?

14:18And there are already, like, some review processes for AI in the government. But again, review versus regulation versus, like, I just want access to the goods is all like very different things, as nitpicky as that sounds. No, no, I think that that's not a nitpick. It's an important clarification. I mean, I think that from the industry's perspective, this type of working with the government is important. Like I'm thinking about the mythos thing where Anthropic was in this kind of head-to-head fight with the Pentagon, then it comes out with a model that's so big and scary that intelligence agencies need to be really read in.

14:55And while anthropic and the Pentagon relations I've heard from sources are still a little bit icy, anthropic and intelligence agencies a little warmer, a little warmer. So I think I was almost reading the executive order being like, oh, they're giving, you know, the government an early taste of what they could later buy. They're like, you know, check it out, try it before you buy it. And then maybe they'll weigh in, maybe they'll have feedback. Maybe they'll just be like, this is really important and we need to actually use it and we see a contract later. And I'd say too, I think the anthropic situation also speaks to, I mean, the government does have some levers to force people to get into this 30-day window.

15:36It's voluntary, but they could say, we're not going to get contracts to anybody who doesn't actually submit their thing for review, submit their models for review. And that's a lot of money. It's a lot of power. So there are things they can do. I agree that it's all for show on both sides in a lot of ways, but there are ways to make it work. Yeah, no, I think most AI companies would be fearful to not play ball here because they are all trying to quite literally work with the government, become government contractors. And they also just, they don't want harder regulation. So they want to play ball on this like voluntary level so that more stringent regulation doesn't come down later.

16:14speaking of cybersecurity but on a much smaller scale meta dealt with a pretty stressful series of hacks uh recently this past weekend several users on social media claimed that their instagram accounts have been compromised some of these accounts were pretty high profile including a verified account used by president obama when he was in the white house the account of the u.s space force's chief master sergeant who we all know is john bentivegda also targeted in the hacking. These accounts were typically flooded with pro-Iran content before they were recovered. Now, hacking incidents like this are not new.

16:48They happen all the time. But what was interesting, and especially alarming in this case, is how the hackers had done it, which is basically, they asked Instagram's AI chatbot to help them get access. It's really basically that simple. There's a video on X that even shows the step-by-step process. Please don't try it at home. Please don't do it. But basically, the hacker used, allegedly, a VPN to spoof the presumed location of their target. And then went ahead and just asked to add an email address to that account. The AI chatbot would say, sure, send a confirmation email to that email address.

17:26And all of a sudden, you've got access. It's pretty remarkable that no one did some troubleshooting here, maybe thought that that was possible. It sounds like something that should have not happened. Like this is, it's so simple, you guys. This is crazy. Yeah, but they, I mean, this is interesting because it says something about the kinds of cybersecurity incidents we might see more of as more big companies offload the work that was previously done, the customer experience work by humans to AI agents. And I want to say that humans aren't infallible. We've seen many a SIM swap take place because someone walked into an AT &T store and said, hey, do you want to get done on crimes?

18:09And the person said, sure, we'll do that for money. And thus, a SIM swap happened. But, of course, when you're transferring a lot of customer experience work to agents, you can see systematic problems play out that might have been slightly more preventable with a human staff. It's the systematic part, right? Because like one T-Mobile employee one time can do a lot of damage, but it's one person. Whereas if this is just how the agent works under these conditions, you can do it again and again and again as many times as you want across as many accounts as you want with no stop. I do think, you know, for all of that we've already talked about today and all the concern and gnash of teeth over mythos and the cybersecurity implications of these models and how they can do these very sophisticated findings of bugs, there's the other end of it, too, which is that AI agents can be pretty dumb.

18:58Yeah, you don't need to be that sophisticated for these. Like, you should be worried about how smart AI is and how dumb AI is, I guess, is the point. Like, it's on both ends of the spectrum. Dream small, folks. It's not actually the most intense hacking moment. And look, I mean, Meta has said that they have since resolved the problem, but obviously I'm thinking about all of these other websites out there and all of these other concerns about the impact of increasingly capable and common hacking attempts on AI systems that have to do with people's data and security. Everything is switching over.

19:30I'm thinking of transcription services, websites. Like, there's just, it's just so much. It's everything now and everything is AI agent oriented. ended. I'm really interested to see how this gets addressed. Like are other companies freaking out right now following Meta's big gaffe? I don't know. I think not enough to go back on any plans. And I think it is going to be a classic scenario of you put up a stop sign after someone gets run over. I think that's going to be what we're going to see over and over again. Because as much as you test internally, as much as you red team things, red team is the term for when you sort of put on your hacker hat and say, if I were a bad guy, what would I do with this?

20:06As much as you do that, there are going to be things that people think about. At Meta, you are one company. It's you versus the entire world of deviants and freaks and people who just want to break things, which is a lot of people. Deviants and freaks, the new name of our podcast. And this is, I mean, just going back to red teaming, that's work that a trust and safety team typically does. And those teams, we don't have those anymore. They're not as big as they used to be. There's just not as much work. So yeah, I mean, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Obviously, within Meta, we've been talking to folks this week who kind of met the news with like a sigh.

20:47The company has just laid off a large portion of the workforce. We've written about that. We've talked about that. And, you know, I checked in with people being like, well, how's it going now? The hack was kind of an excuse to kind of talk to people, see how they're doing. And they're like, I mean, as you'd expect, we're asked to do two jobs now instead of one. So you can imagine how that's playing out. I also, you know, we were talking about AI regulation earlier and all this emphasis on national security and these high level things. But again, not as much on consumer facing products, which would be if you had, say, some sort of bureau that looked after consumer finances and protecting that, that would be helpful to have in this moment as well.

21:28We used to have one of those. Technically, I guess we still do. Not really. So all of this broader deregulation is coming at this moment when the tools that were once available are not. These new tools are very fallible. We're going to see a lot more of this. Can I bring us to a topic that has nothing to do with AI, guys? Please. Wow. I didn't know it existed, but yes, go off, Queen. Also, I think we can probably try to find a way to tie it back in. We can. We can. No, absolutely not. Well, okay. This story is something that we have been thinking about, covering, looking at for a long time, but it is all about a Doge whistleblower who just filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk.

22:12This all really started last year. On April 14th, 2025, Dan Barulis, an IT staffer at the National Labor Relations Board, the NLRB, filed a whistleblower complaint with a massive claim. He said that Doge had compromised the agency's data and appeared to be exfiltrating it out of the NLRB. A whistleblower is coming forward with claims that Doge not only accessed data from his agency, but also took a substantial amount of sensitive data with them. According to a disclosure shared with Congress, quote, around 10 gigabytes of data, or the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedias worth if someone printed these files as hard copy documents.

22:52This was a massive claim, especially at the same time, as you guys very much remember, Doge teams were firing federal workers and accessing sensitive data across the country. Like we were we were in the height of this last year in April. Barilas went public in an NPR article. His name was attached to it and he claimed a threatening note had been taped to his door and he was already scared about speaking out. Fast forward a little bit, Burles has now filed a defamation lawsuit in a DC court against Elon Musk. He said that Musk made him a target of further violence by falsely stating that Burles' whistleblower claim against Doge was fake.

23:34This is a really intense claim for a variety of reasons. And what this all really harkens back to is Musk last year resharing an ex post from a right wing influencer claiming that Doge had been cleared and that this whistleblower's testimony was fake, basically. After that happened. Here comes the AI part. No, absolutely not. After that happened, Barilla says that he was driving his car and his brakes were cut. And he believes that it is related. So that is the crux of this defamation lawsuit against Elon Musk. And it's kind of a big one. This is a whistleblower who says that Elon Musk's shit posting on X could have caused him injury.

24:13And it sounds so extreme, and I'm always a little bit inherently skeptical of claims like this because it sounds like it's out of a movie. But there are just some facts that are in part of this suit that he filed. He has the actual documentation from the person who worked on his car who said that not only were the brakes cut, but the airbags were basically made not to work, right? And the car had been rewired so that the sensors wouldn't go off to say that the airbags had been disabled. He had received a threatening note on his door not long before this happened. So someone knew where he lived and had gone out of their way to threaten him.

24:47So there's a lot of stuff here that is verifiable that's really alarming. And I think there, you know, obviously Elon Musk has a huge platform. And when he says inflammatory things, people listen. Yeah, I mean, I had two kind of historical incidents instantly come to mind when I was reading this piece. One was when Elon Musk reposted something on X insinuating that Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, was essentially a pedophile. and Yoel had to leave his house where he lived with his husband, basically go into hiding. And they eventually sold that house because of the death threats that they received.

25:29Yoel never filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk due to this incident, but someone else did years prior. I don't know if you guys recall the pedo guy incident. Oh my God, yeah. The cave diver. Exactly, of Elon Musk insinuating that one of the cave divers that helped save the team of Thai soccer players, the young boys, was a pedophile. That man sued. I believe this was in the UK. And Elon Musk was actually victorious in that suit. The guy did not win the defamation case against him. I mean, like, I'm interested if that stayed with him at all. He was like, I can actually just shitpost anytime I want.