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This week, Zoë Schiffer dives into why some researchers at top AI companies have been resigning and publicly voicing their concerns about AI safety. Brian Barrett tells us why Rent-A-Human—a website where AI agents hire humans to perform various tasks—has gathered attention and controversy. Leah Feiger shares her experience attending a party for the conservative magazine Evie, and how the culture around the publication could shape the upcoming election cycle.

wired

The Blake Lemoine incident is remembered today as a high‑water mark of AI hype. It thrust the whole idea of conscious AI into public awareness for a news cycle or two, but it also launched a conversation, among both computer scientists and consciousness researchers, that has only intensified in the years since. While the tech community continues to publicly belittle the whole idea (and poor Lemoine), in private it has begun to take the possibility much more seriously. A conscious AI might lack a clear commercial rationale (how do you monetize the thing?) and create sticky moral dilemmas (how should we treat a machine capable of suffering?). Yet some AI engineers have come to think that the holy grail of artificial general intelligence—a machine that is not only supersmart but also endowed with a human level of understanding, creativity, and common sense—might require something like consciousness to attain. In the tech community, what had been an informal taboo surrounding conscious AI—as a prospect that the public would find creepy—suddenly began to crumble.

wired

Oura announced on Tuesday that it’s launching its first proprietary AI model to enable its AI chatbot, Oura Advisor, to deliver personalized insights around women’s health. The company says the model supports questions spanning the full reproductive health spectrum, from early menstrual cycles through menopause. 

techcrunch

Going online in 2026 means subjecting yourself to a relentless bombardment of generative AI tools. How about a few AI agents to get you started? Do you want to use this chatbot sidebar? Would you like every search query to be answered with an AI summary? While there’s no off switch to avoid this smorgasbord of AI tools entirely, there is one keyboard trick you can use to dodge Google’s AI Overviews for a brief respite.

wired