The AI IPO Race Heats Up, DOGE Whistleblower Sues Elon Musk, and Instagram Gets Hacked

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 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 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.

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, Brian, 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 here. And 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. Ninety days is insane. Whatever you're looking at 90 days in advance won't be anything like what the 30 days 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 is squeezing the 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 in the government. But again, review versus regulation versus, like, “I just want access to the goods” is all very different things, as nitpicky as that sounds.

Zoë Schiffer: No, no, I think that's not a nitpick. It's important clarification. I mean, I think that from the industry's perspective, this type of working with the government is important. 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. And 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 the government an early taste of what they could later buy.” They're like, “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.”

Brian Barrett: 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. It'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.

Zoë Schiffer: 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 voluntary level so that more stringent regulation doesn't come down later.

Brian Barrett: Speaking of cybersecurity, but on a much smaller scale, Meta dealt with a pretty stressful series of hacks recently. This past weekend, several users on social media claimed that their Instagram accounts had 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 US Space Force's chief master sergeant, who we all know is John Bentivegna, 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. They 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, and 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.

Leah Feiger: It sounds like something that should have not happened. It's so simple you guys. This is crazy.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, but 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 on on crimes?" And 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.

Brian Barrett: It's the systematic part, because 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 for all of that we've already talked about today and all the concern and gnashing 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.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, you don't need to be that sophisticated for these.

Brian Barrett: You should be worried about how smart AI is and how dumb AI is, I guess is the point. It's on both ends of the spectrum.

Leah Feiger: 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. I'm thinking of transcription services, websites. It's just so much. It's everything now and everything is AI-agent-oriented. I'm really interested to see how this gets addressed. Are other companies freaking out right now following Meta's big gaffe? I don't know.

Brian Barrett: I think not enough to go back on any plans. 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?" As 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.

Zoë Schiffer: 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—

Leah Feiger: We don't have those anymore.

Zoë Schiffer: 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 a sigh. The company has just laid off a large portion of the workforce. We've written about that. We've talked about that. And I checked in with people being like, "Well, how's it going now?" The hack was kind of an excuse to 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.

Brian Barrett: I also, 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. We 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.

Leah Feiger: Can I bring us to a topic that has nothing to do with AI, guys?

Brian Barrett: Please.

Zoë Schiffer: Wow. I didn't know one existed, but yes, go off, queen.

Brian Barrett: Also, I think we can probably try to find a way to tie it back in.

Zoë Schiffer: We can. We can.

Leah Feiger: No, absolutely not. Well, OK. 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. This all really started last year. On April 14, 2025, Dan Berulis, 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.

Archival audio: 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, “Around 10 gigabytes of data, the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedia is worth if someone printed these files as hard copy documents.”

Leah Feiger: This 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. We were in the height of this last year in April. Berulis 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, Berulis 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 Berulis' whistleblower claim against DOGE was fake. This is a really intense claim for a variety of reasons, and what this all really harkens back to is Musk last year resharing an X post from a right-wing influencer claiming that DOGE had been cleared and that this whistleblower's testimony was fake basically. After that happened—

Brian Barrett: Here comes the AI part.

Leah Feiger: No, absolutely not. After that happened, Berulis 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 shitposting on X could have caused him injury.

Brian Barrett: And 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 and that 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. So there's a lot of stuff here that is verifiable that's really alarming. And I think obviously Elon Musk has a huge platform, and when he says inflammatory things, people listen.

Zoë Schiffer: 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. Yoel 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. This was—

Leah Feiger: Oh my god. Yeah.

Brian Barrett: The cave diver.

Zoë Schiffer: —the third example. Exactly. Of Elon Musk insinuating that one of the cave divers that helped save the team of Thai soccer players, the young 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.

Leah Feiger: I mean, I'm interested if that stayed with him at all. He was like, “I can actually just shitpost anytime I want.” There is something there, though. I mean, I'll never forget last year during DOGE, everything, he was posting up a storm. He was making inflammatory comments all the time that really freaked people out. David Gilbert, one of WIRED's reporters, had to do an entire debunker piece about know how no, 100-plus-year-olds were not filing for Social Security benefits, because Elon Musk was sharing claims to the contrary. And as a result, everyone started calling Social Security offices being like, "What the hell? This is where my tax dollars are going?” His actions have direct consequences, and I'm curious if he's actually going to have to learn a lesson from this.

Brian Barrett: I doubt it. I mean, even USAID, right? He texted so many conspiracies theories around USAID and then gutted the agency, which led to huge harms all over the world.

Leah Feiger: And is still.

Zoë Schiffer: But the one time that this has come back to bite him a little bit was with the SEC when he claimed without evidence and apparently falsely that he had funding secured to take Tesla private.

Brian Barrett: At $420 a share, Zoë?

Leah Feiger: Oh, yeah.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I was like, I know that there was a weed joke. And I think he had to pay, what was it, like a $20 million fine or something?

Brian Barrett: It was pocket change for him, whatever it was. It was pretty small. Yeah.

Leah Feiger: The man who's set to become a trillionaire next week, possibly.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He did tear up talking about it. I think he really did not appreciate this incident, but that happened before everything else we're talking about. So it doesn't feel like he's learned an enormous lesson.

Leah Feiger: I'm really curious to see where this one goes. Obviously, whistleblower protections are historically strong in this country. Things are a little bit different in Trump 2.0, but it's a pretty wild one. Again, from our reporter, Vittoria Elliott, go give it a read on WIRED.com. Let us know what you think.

Zoë Schiffer: That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Uncanny Valley is produced by Kaleidoscope Content. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. It was mixed by Amar Lal at Macro Sound. It was fact-checked by Daniel Roman. Pran Bandi is our New York studio engineer. Marc Leyda is our San Francisco studio engineer. Kimberly Chua is our senior digital production manager. Kate Osborn is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is WIRED’s global editorial director.