WIRED Roundup: Unpacking OpenAI's Government Partnership

WIRED

3 days ago

By Zoë Schiffer and Jake Lahut Aug 11, 2025 2:32 PM On this episode of Uncanny Valley , we discuss the week's news, from bitcoin miners trying to beat Trump's tariffs to OpenAI's new deal with the US government. Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, listens as President Donald J Trump speaks about infrastructure and artificial intelligence to reporters in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on Tuesday, Jan 21, 2025, in Washington, DC. Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Photograph:All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Learn more.
On today's episode, our host Zoë Schiffer is joined by WIRED's senior politics writer Jake Lahut to run through five of the most important stories we published this week—from how bitcoin miners have been racing this year to beat the tariffs, to how AI was used to find a missing hiker in the Italian Alps. Then, Zoë and Jake discuss the details around OpenAI's latest partnership with the federal government.
Mentioned in this episode:
OpenAI Announces Massive US Government Partnership by Zoë Schiffer and Will Knight
Trumpworld Knows Epstein Is a Problem. But They Can't Solve It by Jake Lahut
Charter Planes and Bidding Wars: How Bitcoin Miners Raced to Beat Trump's Tariffs by Joel Khalili
Google Will Use AI to Guess People's Ages Based on Search History by Dell Cameron
US Coast Guard Report on Titan Submersible Implosion Singles Out OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush by Mark Harris
A Hiker Was Missing for Nearly a Year—Until an AI System Recognized His Helmet by Marta Abbà
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You can follow Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer and Jake Lahut on Bluesky at @jakelahut.writes.news‬. Write to us at [e-mail]. How to Listen
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Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Zoë Schiffer: Hey, this is Zoë. Before we start, I want to share some exciting news with you. We're doing a live show in San Francisco on September 9th in partnership with KQED. Uncanny Valley co-hosts Lauren Good and Michael Calore will sit down with our editor-in-chief, Katie Drummond and a special guest for a conversation that you really won't want to miss. You can use the link in the show notes to grab your ticket and invite a friend. We can't wait to see you there. Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley . I'm WIRED's Director of Business and Industry, Zoë Schiffer. Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week. And later we'll dive into our main topic, which is about how OpenAI just announced a massive partnership with the U.S. government to make its models available to federal employees. I'm joined today by WIRED's senior writer Jake Lahut. Jake, welcome to Uncanny Valley .
Jake Lahut: Hey Zoë. Good to be back.
Zoë Schiffer: Okay, so our first story is actually from your newsletter Inner Loop, and it's yet another Jeffrey Epstein saga. It just won't quit. So sources have been telling you that the damage done by the Jeffrey Epstein saga is just not going to go away anytime soon. As listeners may know, conspiracy theories around Epstein's death received a lot of fresh fuel in recent weeks when the DOJ released what they called raw footage from the night of his death, but then WIRED analyzed the video and found that it had been modified after all. These conspiracy theories have been at the core of the MAGA base for years now, and you wrote really smartly about how sources say there's simply nothing that can be done to salvage the ongoing catastrophe that is the MAGA base fraying over the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein. So tell us more. What is going on?
Jake Lahut: So the weird thing about reporting this one compared to the last time I had been calling around on Epstein with the White House and in people around Trump world, maybe three weeks or a month ago, was that people were much more scared to talk this time, but also no one really had any updates about what the plan is. And that's where I think this piece became more interesting is we just really zoomed into the expectations getting set out of whack here. And when you set these great expectations for the base, where one of my sources in this who's in Trump world, they also work in conservative media. So they had kind of an interesting perspective on this from an audience capture kind of the cart leading the horse perspective. And this source basically said that if the base doesn't get, not just the list, but if there's not a smoking gun for Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff abusing a baby over a fire like this isn't going to count. And clearly it didn't help to staff the FBI with Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, but there is an element that goes deeper to it that makes this a very American thing. One thing a lot of people have asked me and something I was asking myself reporting this, have a lot of Trump supporters in the base just not heard of his associations with Jeffrey Epstein before?
Zoë Schiffer: Right.
Jake Lahut: And this academic I talked to from the University of Miami, the U, he said, actually, they always have known this. But when you kind of think about it from the QAnon perspective of Trump's rise, this is like an as-chosen-by-God savior figure. But where the Epstein stuff starts to really pile up and where they think this is that point of no return is even if Trump's approval remains high among Republicans, even if this may not be the issue in the midterms, it does mark this before and after and a breaking of trust here. And yeah, people around Trump have really had it. They're not willing to say it publicly, they're not going to leave the administration or get off the Trump train for it, but they now see this as being Trump's fault. And I'm curious to see where it goes from here, but definitely the vibes couldn't be lower.
Zoë Schiffer: This is a classic situation of just setting expectations too high. I mean, in journalism, we see this all the time. You get journalists hyping things up on X, formerly Twitter and saying, "Huge scoop about to drop." And I always cringe when people do this because I'm like, unless you have the Pentagon papers, you're going to look like such a jackass in three minutes when you drop some exciting, but not that exciting story. I just think it's always better to under-promise and over-deliver. But Kash Patel and Trump himself did quite the opposite by making this a huge deal for years and then being like, "No, just kidding, there's no there there." And everyone's like, "Well, we think there is."
Jake Lahut: Yeah, this whole thing works just so much smoother when you're in the opposition. When you're Dan Bongino and you have the keys handed to you to be the heir to Rush Limbaugh, that's a pretty great gig. Being deputy director of the FBI, actual hard gig. You got people reporting to you, you have people to answer to, and you can't run that conservative media playbook of the drip, drip, drip, wait until this next batch of files comes out and we'll have a week's worth of content.
Zoë Schiffer: Right, exactly. Yeah, because you're the one with all the files. People are like, "Just release them."
Jake Lahut: You quite literally are the establishment, yeah.
Zoë Schiffer: Our next story is about another topic that has consistently been on the Trump administration's radar, which is tariffs. Specifically, this is quite the caper about how some Bitcoin miners raced to beat the sharp tariff increases that were initially put in place back in April around Liberation Day, our colleague Joel Khalili wrote about the grueling logistics efforts that US-based Luxor Technology embarked on to ship two packages of Bitcoin mining materials, both of them worth millions of dollars. These packages were coming from Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, and they were all subject to the way, way higher tariffs. So this was a huge problem. And at some point they were bidding 1.76 million for a charter plane only to be outbid overnight by another importer that was desperate to get their materials into the U.S. So I mean, this is another area where I feel like while the Trump administration has been very friendly to this industry, it is still true that I don't think they're in the weeds enough to realize that the really high tariff hike is going to impact the very industry that they're trying to promote.
Jake Lahut: Yeah. And this is where this kind of emerging culture of shut up and take it within the Republican Party is really interesting because their message to the crypto community, both if you're in your big Coinbase or Andreessen Horowitz, Kraken type space, or if you're someone who started donating to the Republican Party and you bought the meme coin, maybe you're personally wealthy off Bitcoin, but you're not an industry player. For all those people, if you have an ask or you're like, "Hey, we gave you a lot of money in the campaign, could you maybe not do the tariffs" or whatever else it is that they find objectionable, they're like, "Actually, why don't you sit down and shut up? Let us do the decision-making here and good luck getting anything with the Democrats," which I think is a very interesting whole realm for another discussion of the opening the Democrats may have here with just as more of a cultural wedge issue than a policy one with the crypto folks. But Joel's story is just crazy because of the sense of urgency and this scramble they had. And it's just kind of like, I think the game, Hungry Hippo is probably not the best comparison here, but you're just moving this stuff around for you to take this cost on the chin in some form, maybe just a little less depending on the rate coming out of a place like Singapore or wherever. And yeah, it has last chopper out of Nam vibes. It's a real doozy of a story.
Zoë Schiffer: 100%. Yeah, they're like at the airport at midnight. But the other thing that is so crazy is that Trump changes his mind about this stuff all the time. So there's this mad scramble. Maybe it'll be worth it. Maybe it really won't. In the meantime, you're kind of losing a lot of money either way.
Jake Lahut: Yeah. You're paying money to lose less money.
Zoë Schiffer: Right, exactly. So we're recording this on August 7th, and a fresh wave of tariffs have already been imposed on more than 90 countries, which includes the countries that Luxor Technology mainly ships from. So we wish them luck. Our next story is short, but it's also pretty juicy. WIRED contributor Mark Harris reported that this week the U.S. Coast Guard's Marine Board of Investigation issued a scathing report on the implosion of the Titan submersible in 2023. Oh my God. Do you remember the OceanGate fiasco? I feel like that was 1 billion years ago.
Jake Lahut: Yeah. If you had told me this had happened pre-pandemic or in 2018 or something, I would've believed you, but no, it was the summer of 2023 and this unmarked sub was trying to reach the wreck of the Titanic. It imploded and it instantly killed all five crew members. And they also insisted on calling all the crew members, researchers because they technically couldn't be passengers because of the legal gray area they were in. And the CEO was among them.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, exactly. So I mean, the report really places the blame on the CEO. He is the person responsible. He created such a culture of fear and had this looming threat that people who raised a hand or raised a red flag were going to be instantly fired. Very few people spoke up, even as there were all of these signs leading up to this specific trip that the submersible in question just simply wasn't safe. And apparently he had so much hubris that he didn't care and was actually on it himself and perished as a result.
Jake Lahut: And whether you're in the continental United States or international waters, it does kind of suck that you can't escape responsibility even in death from the recklessness of your CEO. But anyway, in all seriousness, do hope this report can be a warning for these expedition startups where you can find a lot of legal gray area to do whatever you want in the deep scary ocean.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, exactly. Okay, so next, our WIRED colleague, Dell Cameron recently reported that Google is going to use AI to guess someone's age based on their search history. This really made me laugh in fear and terror, but this means that they're going to look at "A variety of signals already associated with a user's account to determine that person's age regardless of their user provided birthday." Basically, the idea is that we don't trust people to tell us their actual age, but we're going to look at what they look at online and then choose whether they can see certain content. I mean, I feel like this is interesting. I will be genuinely curious to see if it's functional in practice. It seems like there's an opportunity for a lot of hilarious results where someone has such juvenile tastes that they're like an adult but not able to look at adult content or whatever.
Jake Lahut: Oh yeah. Watch out [inaudible 00:10:47] boys. I know that's going to be a tough one.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, exactly. I would love to know how the AI categorizes this, but it's kind of fascinating. I feel like there's a lot of age verification stuff going on in the United States, a lot of rules and regulations that are getting rolled out and each have their own kind of issue. But this is kind of the industry's response to that, or an attempt to try something new and see if it works. And we will be curious. Our next story deals with AI technology and it's being put to use in really, really fascinating ways in the real world. So WIRED contributor Marta Abbà reported this week that the Italian Rescue Corps relied on AI to find the body of a hiker that had been missing for nearly a year. They did it by using two drones that gathered thousands of image frames in the mountain area of Monviso where a 64-year-old, Nicola Ivaldo, I think is his name, went missing in September of last year in the Alps. So the Rescue Corps took the images that the drone had gathered and processed them with AI. So this would've taken humans many, many, many hours, days, if not weeks. The software identified pixels that were actually Nicola's helmet, and that's how the Rescue Corps knew where to go and find him. I think this is so fascinating because we're talking all the time about the amazing things AI will do, and maybe this isn't curing cancer or whatever we're hoping is going to happen in the very near future, but it also just seems like such a clear example of AI is good at this. AI can look at all of these images and really quickly identify ones that are unusual, and then humans can follow up on that. And ultimately, we can find this person and hopefully in the future we could do this in a way that would save people before they died.
Jake Lahut: Yeah, I feel like where so much of the smart money is going and we're so much of the general discussion around AI revolves around how would replacing a full-time worker's 40-hour work week look versus an AI agent? Instead, I think that these longer time horizons are way more interesting of things that humans feasibly could not have the time to get around to, that these could actually start to reveal a whole bunch of areas of life where we might actually be able to come up with solutions that just ... And it sounds very old school, Silicon Valley hopium in a lot of ways, but these are things that people didn't think they could do before or you would just give up way earlier.
Zoë Schiffer: Exactly. And I feel like it's a good example of humans and AI working together. In this example, you really do need both. You need the drones to take the images, you need the AI to process them, and then you need humans to figure out what to do with that information. So I think it's an example of AI augmenting what we can do rather than necessarily replacing us all together. Coming up after the break, we dive into our inside scoop on how OpenAI made a deal with the U.S. government to offer their services to federal employees. Stay with us. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley . I'm Zoë Schiffer. I'm joined today by WIRED's senior writer Jake Lahut to discuss OpenAI's latest partnership. The company is partnering with the U.S. government to make its models available to federal employees. In practice, this means that federal agencies can get access to OpenAI's models for $1, very nominal fee for the next year. This is the culmination of a bunch of stuff that has been happening at OpenAI. So first, Jake, as you probably saw earlier this week, they released 2 open-weight models, which is the first time the company has done so since 2019. And then yesterday it announced the release of the long-awaited new frontier model GPT-5. And since even before Trump retook the White House in January, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other OpenAI executives have been really trying to cozy up to the Trump administration, despite the fact that Sam Altman in the past was kind of vocally against Trump, but we're in a new era. No surprise. I reported this story alongside my colleague Will Knight, but I'm curious just to kind of get your impressions. Were you surprised to see OpenAI announce this? Is this kind of where the government is heading?
Jake Lahut: This seems like a great business move from OpenAI's perspective of using the federal government in effect as a way to kind of hedge off progress the competition could make and get the inside track for what could be really valuable contracts. Also, just getting a much more immediate sense of some of these ambiguities we've been talking about around what is woke AI and what better way to get an actual iterative understanding of what that is for your business than by working with the federal government directly. And then the longer term amplifications that I think are just interesting from a federal workforce DOGE perspective of to what extent is arming federal employees with these tools, kind of having them dig their own graves? Not for all of them by any means, but how may this end up turning into a years long experiment into what type of work at which agencies can be automated more effectively and in which areas are people going to be needed for the longer term?
Zoë Schiffer: Exactly. I mean, I think it's really clear from how DOGE, Trump, Elon Musk in his day were talking about federal employees, that it doesn't seem like they have a lot of respect for the people in these roles.
Jake Lahut: No.
Zoë Schiffer: And this is my conjecture, but would be happy to automate away a lot of these positions. I have so many questions about how this is actually going to play out in practice, and we're definitely going to keep reporting on it. But one aspect of this, and I'm really curious to get your take on it, is just Sam Altman's place in these negotiations. Because again, like we said at the beginning, he's been a fixture in the tech billionaires lineup of the current administration. He's announced the data infrastructure project Stargate alongside Trump earlier this year, and that project actually was started under Biden. But we know from talking to sources close to the project that OpenAI strategically kind of framed the announcement as being kind a Trump initiative and allowed the President to get up in front of the country and kind of talk about it, announce it officially for the first time as if it was something that he had done, which seems like a classic Sam Altman maneuver. He is such a politician, and this is something you hear from everyone close to him, but I'm curious if it'll work because unlike Elon Musk, Sam and Trump just seem like very different people, almost like oil and water in a way.
Jake Lahut: I was going to say oil and water also. Yeah, I mean, I think Sam Altman's really interesting to compare to someone like Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, where the NVIDIA CEO seems much more comfortable complimenting Trump, kind of glazing him appropriately and doing that song and dance in a way that doesn't seem too forced from him. And if you're Sam Altman, and if you're Jensen Huang, you have just these absolute juggernauts in your companies and your comp, and you're one of the most powerful people in the world by being CEO of these companies. So to what extent do you need to worry about political messaging and comm strategy? Fair point, maybe not much at all, but I think the learning curve with Sam Altman is not as much it seems from the behind the scenes maneuvering and trying to position himself well. It's more of like, you are going to remain the face of this company, and now you're going to have these closer and closer ties to the Trump administration. How are you going to talk about it if you're going to keep going on podcasts and stuff and try to do your chill, laid back bro routine, and someone asks you about masked men disappearing people off the street, are you going to give an answer like, "Oh, it's actually kind of really complicated?" Well then no, you got to do better than that.
Zoë Schiffer: Totally. Yeah. It's been really interesting to watch this play out in real time. One thing I heard from a couple of sources who are quite close to basically all of these tech billionaires is that at the inauguration, they didn't actually know that they were going to be positioned directly behind Trump for that photo op until the photo was being taken.
Jake Lahut: Yeah, that's crazy.
Zoë Schiffer: And there was a moment of panic where they were like, oh, I don't know. Do we want this to be ... And then it was happening, and I think everyone was just like, "No, we're going in. We have no choice."
Jake Lahut: And it's history.
Zoë Schiffer: Exactly.
Jake Lahut: It just lives forever now.
Zoë Schiffer: But you can just imagine, I think there were these opportunities to be like, do we distance ourselves? Do we not? And I'm sure they feel like they have no choice because they ultimately want their companies to win, but clearly they have made the call that there's almost no concession they aren't willing to make with the Trump administration if it means their firm comes out on top.
Jake Lahut: Yeah, it's just too key of a window for these companies of this next three to five year span and who is going to be in leading position. And also they should just be aware. This is a move in Trump's playbook. If you remember the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, when she was in the Oval Office and covered her face with a folder because she didn't know that she was going to be in there with the whole White House press pool, Trump and his people know this move really well. They basically just trap ... They set a trap for you and you can't leave at that point. And then you have quite literally a visual reminder of their association with you. And that gives the Trump administration and Trump himself more leverage over you in the medium and long term.
Zoë Schiffer: Right. I mean, ultimately it seems like it doesn't really matter for them. Maybe they'll get critiqued, but people are probably still going to use their tools. But an even bigger thing that they are getting, a bigger concession they're getting from the Trump administration is that, for example, we heard Trump recently talk about fair use and say really, really publicly in a press briefing in front of the nation, like, "Oh, you can't expect these AI firms to pay for every single piece of content that they're training on," basically in real time, trying to redefine the definition of fair use, which is currently being adjudicated in the courts. But we had the President coming out and saying, "Really firmly I side with the AI companies on this, not necessarily the content creators," which is a huge win. I mean, this is an existential issue for them if the President felt the opposite way. And so I think they're willing to put up with a lot because of that.
Jake Lahut: Totally. Just too much money to be made and Trump hates books too much.
Zoë Schiffer: That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Make sure to check out Thursday's episode of Uncanny Valley , which is about why premium chatbot subscriptions are suddenly priced around $200, and whether they can actually live up to this hype. Adriana Tapia produced this episode, Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode, Kate Osborn is our executive producer, Condé Nast Head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon and Katie Drummond is WIRED's Global Editorial Director.