AI IPO Frenzy, Trump's AI Order, and Instagram Hack

This week on Uncanny Valley, we discuss why the race among the top AI companies to go public has just gotten started but is already creating bizarre repercussions—including numerous San Francisco real estate listings preferring Anthropic’s stock instead of cash. They also get into why Donald Trump’s new executive order on AI safety is underwhelming, and how hackers were able to use Instagram’s AI chatbot to access high profile accounts like President Barack Obama’s. Plus, we report on how a DOGE whistleblower is suing Elon Musk for defamation after the billionaire publicly called him a liar—and the next thing he knew, his life was in danger.

Articles mentioned in this episode:

What’s Worth More Than Cash in San Francisco Real Estate? Anthropic Stock

This Is How Trump Finally Signed the AI Executive Order

He Blew the Whistle on DOGE. Then His Brakes Were Cut

You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer, and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger. Write to us at [email protected].

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Brian Barrett: 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. And second, if you have any questions related to tech, privacy, or politics that you would like me, Zoë, and Leah to take on, now is the time to submit them to [email protected]. It doesn't matter how big or how small, we want to hear from you and get you answers. OK, on to the show.

Zoë Schiffer: Hi guys.

Brian Barrett: Hi everybody. We are far-flung today.

Zoë Schiffer: I know. You're not even supposed to be here, but you're here.

Brian Barrett: 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.

Leah Feiger: That's pretty good stuff though. Who's winning?

Brian Barrett: Grandma. Grandma crushing it.

Zoë Schiffer: Wow.

Brian Barrett: A terror on the links.

Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, director of business and industry.

Brian Barrett: I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor.

Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.

Zoë Schiffer: Today on the show, we're diving into the 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.

Leah Feiger: 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. This 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.

Brian Barrett: 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.

Zoë Schiffer: So 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.

Brian Barrett: And they beat OpenAI.

Zoë Schiffer: 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. That'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."

Brian Barrett: Wow.

Zoë Schiffer: Which was—

Leah Feiger: That's a great response.

Zoë Schiffer: —so special. Yeah.

Brian Barrett: When they bust out the thesaurus, you know it's serious.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I just responded, "Wow!" and that was left on read. So yeah, I mean, this is a full on race, though 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. I think 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.

Brian Barrett: 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 and now they're just in the same AI mess as everybody else.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, they really, really are. So there've been a lot of interesting 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.

Brian Barrett: Incredible. Zoë, do we know if anyone has actually done a purchase like this yet or is that still—

Zoë Schiffer: No, there are so many questions. My major one was how are they deciding the value of the—these aren't public companies. Also, do you need board approval to give away a bunch of your stock in exchange for a house?

Leah Feiger: It feels like it's a handshake agreement to be honest. There can't be anything that official here.

Zoë Schiffer: WIRED freelancer Arielle Pardes wrote a story for us about this and she asked the real estate agents, "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 interests 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.

Brian Barrett: I think a couple things. One, it's also just a good marketing stunt 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.

Zoë Schiffer: Totally. I mean, a lot of these people like you insinuated are on paper millionaires or even billionaires, but once the IPOs happen, there'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, Brad, when we first saw a couple listings, I was like, "Nah, this feels like a gimmick." But then enough of them popped up that I was like, OK, there's something hearing 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.

Brian Barrett: You hinted at this earlier, Zoë, but Anthropic has basically said that if you try to sell your Anthropic shares without board approval, then that transaction is not valid, right? It is going to be interesting to see what kind of messes.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I mean, we have always seen, I think, employees selling stock on secondary markets. It's usually not advised. You don't want to do that because you're going to get a worse price unless you really, really have to. And 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 some scammy situations going down and that those transactions are not valid.

Leah Feiger: 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 the moment.

Zoë Schiffer: I think OpenAI has seen a few, but yeah, maybe no SpaceX quite yet. Although San Francisco's a crazy place, so I wouldn't be surprised.

Leah Feiger: I want to talk about something in the AI industry that is not having to do with IPOs. On 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.

Donald Trump, archival audio: I didn't like certain aspects of it. I postponed it. I think it gets in the way of—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. We 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.

Leah Feiger: 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 Sacks, 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. There'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.

Zoë Schiffer: I love all the marketing, sorry.

Brian Barrett: They can't do that 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 Zoë, what do you love about the marketing?

Zoë Schiffer: 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're like you need to set some ground rules because we're about to explode. It's going to be so crazy."

Leah Feiger: It's 100 percent. That's 100 percent what happened. I mean, so many people are like, "Are they furious? Are the AI companies?" No.

Zoë Schiffer: No.

Leah Feiger: They're behind the scenes. They're having meetings with all of these folks. This is voluntary. This is 100 percent fine.

Zoë Schiffer: 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 Sacks, the former AI and crypto czar, as you mentioned, did not get his full wish. He 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 delay their product launch cycle.

Brian Barrett: Even the 90 to 30 day thing is 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. 90 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 there's probably an element of truth to that, but also we've seen a lot of iterative releases from these companies. I think really what it 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.

Leah Feiger: And again, to be clear, this is all voluntary. There's calling this regulation is-

Zoë Schiffer: A stretch.

Leah Feiger: Yeah, I don't think I feel comfortable even really calling this a regulation. 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 Bessent is now exploring discussions with China to figure out about creating a similar cross-border framework for sharing advanced AI system information. And that's really interesting to me. So in some ways this is sort of a check mark. We had to say that we're doing something on this. What does that mean and how do we really go forward from there? And there are already some review processes for AI