This week on Uncanny Valley, the team discusses the surprising reports of the Trump administration seemingly reversing its stance when it comes to AI safety and regulation. We also look into what exactly is going on with the hantavirus outbreak, and whether you should be worried. Also, we get into the story of how a former federal employee who was ousted by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency is now running for office. Plus, a Spirit Airlines laid-off employee shares with us how they experienced the company’s shutdown news last weekend and what they’ll miss most about the job.
Articles mentioned in this episode:
- A Federal Worker Was Fired for Filming DOGE. Now She’s Running for Congress
- What the Spirit Airlines Implosion Means for Your Vacation
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.
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 recent reports that the Trump administration is considering an executive order that would establish some sort of federal oversight over new AI models. And we're going to talk about whether this move actually signals a meaningful shift in future regulation of this technology.
Leah Feiger: In another surprising turn of events, we're also going to get into how a federal worker who was fired earlier this year for filming DOGE operatives entering her workplace is now running for a House seat.
Brian Barrett: We're also going to check in with a Spirit Airlines worker who was laid off after the company shut down. And last but not least, we'll also talk through just how worried you should be about hantavirus. Spoiler: probably not as concerned as Leah is.
Leah Feiger: I'm very concerned.
Brian Barrett: She's very concerned.
Leah Feiger: A good week, you guys.
Zoë Schiffer: OK. So it's been an interesting week for the AI industry. On Monday, we heard that the Trump administration announced what, on its face, seems like a pretty big about-face in its approach to AI regulation. The New York Times initially reported that there is an executive order being considered, just at that stage right now, that would create a group of tech executives and government officials who would essentially review AI models before they are released to the public. At the time that this was reported, it wasn't totally clear, at least to me, whether they would just get access to the models and be able to look at them and evaluate them or whether they would be able to say whether a model could be released or not. But it does seem like a pretty significant reversal of the very loose and pointed lack of regulation that the Trump administration has had until now toward the AI industry.
Brian Barrett: It's been really interesting to see how as AI models get more powerful, they've sort of hit their limit. I think the Anthropic showdown we've talked about a lot. We're in a new era of, "Oh wait, actually this could be useful to us or terrible for us. We actually do need to set aside some of those free-market principles and get a heads-up here." Maybe going to be an executive order. I feel like in the past, those have typically panned out to become the thing. I feel like this administration is pretty leaky. So I think this seems likely to happen. I don't know. Zoë, how are companies taking this?
Zoë Schiffer: It's interesting because it's happening right as a bunch of these companies, Google, Microsoft, xAI, Anthropic, OpenAI already said that they would give the government early access to their models. And so I mean, I think it's quite interesting, particularly when we think back to JD Vance not that long ago, telling a group of regulators in Europe that the administration was going to take a very different approach than the Biden administration in terms of regulating this technology and really trying to frankly not regulate it.
JD Vance, archival audio: The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety. It will be won by building, from reliable power plants to the manufacturing facilities that can produce the chips of the future.
Zoë Schiffer: So even the possibility that this could change, I think is worth paying a lot of attention to.
Leah Feiger: I was pretty shocked by this news for such a deregulatory-focused government at the moment. And the administration very much prides itself on that. That is part of campaign ads. That's part of internal conversations with their tech cohort. It's really, “we're making this a comfortable place for you to do business and you should feel comfortable here.” So this is, again, we don't know exactly how detailed this regulation or "oversight" is actually going to look, but I was surprised. I was surprised. I'm rarely surprised. I was surprised.
Zoë Schiffer: But this is my question for you. Leah, when we're talking about who is going to be part of this oversight committee or who is even drafting this supposed regulation or executive order, David Sacks is no longer in the mix, at least in the kind of official way that he was. My read was that it was Michael Kratsios and Susie Wiles who are now managing his former portfolio. I'm like, "Sorry, I don't want to be rude," but I'm like, "You're telling me Susie Wiles is the person deciding whether Mythos is too dangerous to release to the public? Come on."
Brian Barrett: Known AI expert, Susie Wiles.
Zoë Schiffer: No. No. No. No.
Leah Feiger: Here's my bad take—is like, maybe I like that. Maybe I like the idea of Susie having to be on her little computer going, "I don't get this. This seems bad." Anything there?
Zoë Schiffer: Mm-mm.
Leah Feiger: OK.
Zoë Schiffer: No. I hear your take and I want to yes and no. Yes and no is what I do with that.
Leah Feiger: It's half-baked, and I'm not sure I'm actually fully committed to it. But yeah, it's one thing to say we're going to have oversight, and then who are the overseers, I suppose.
Brian Barrett: Well, and I think so many people who traditionally have cooler heads who are in the Trump administration sphere, who are AI experts, I think there was a real break around the Anthropic Pentagon stuff where they said this administration has gone way too far. This is really hurtful to the American AI industry and progress. So I think you're not going to have those people in the mix. And if you don't have those people, the people who are left, I think you're not going to have that. No matter who it is, I think you're running short on people who actually know a lot about what's going on and actually have long-term best interests of both the industry and human people who might be subsumed by it at heart.
Leah Feiger: I also wonder how much of this is a play, is being able to say, "Look, we are doing this." Because there is just increasing public concern, no matter which way you slice it, about AI threatening jobs, energy prices, privacy, mental health, what have you. This is in the news right now in a very big way. And if the Trump administration is able to even slightly go, "OK, OK, OK, we hear you. Don't worry. We've got Susie Wiles on the case."
Zoë Schiffer: Oh my God. But let's think back to when they said not too long ago in an executive order, correct me if I'm wrong, that they were going to de-woke AI. And we should look back at that. Did anything come from it? But what I had heard at the time was nary a reach-out. It was an order that came out and then utter silence, no AI companies got a prod about it.
Brian Barrett: I think that's the right question though, too, because even though they haven't done anything yet, I am old enough to remember, because it was three years ago or whatever, when GOP ire was focused on News Feeds and Facebook's algorithms, and it said, “Well, if you don't have the same amount of liberal and conservative 'content,' then it's biased,” which is not how anything works. I wouldn't be surprised if this panel, at least some element of it was, "No, you have to make sure that you train it on Breitbart as much as you're training on the New York Times or Wikipedia or whatever." I mean, again, who knows? It's a report of an executive order that might happen, but I don't know that that's gone away. Even though nothing's happened yet, it still feels like a very real possibility that that is still a wave of culture war that we're headed for.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I did text Sam Altman about it. My text did say we can talk off the record, but since he didn't respond, I'm going to tell you about it right now, which is that I said, "We should chat. Curious to hear what you think." That man used to be really responsive and chatty, but boy, is he either very media trained or very much in court this week. So he is not answering his texts, at least from me.
Leah Feiger: So talking about the US government, there's another really interesting story that's happening right now that I am watching so, so closely as someone who was a big part of WIRED's DOGE coverage. And we all went, "What happened to these federal employees after they were DOGE'd? What happened to the people who spoke out?" So we have one person that Makena Kelly, our senior politics writer, spoke with last week, Alexis Goldstein, a former employee from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, who was put on leave after she recorded how Elon Musk's so called DOGE members were actually seemingly accessing equipment at the CFPB very early on in their takeover without telling employees, without any sort of notice. So Goldstein filmed them. She quite literally went up to them and filmed them. Here she is now recalling exactly what happened in her own words in an interview with Democracy Now!
Alexis Goldstein, archival audio: I came in like I normally do. I drop off my toddler at daycare. There isn't stroller parking, so I wheel in my stroller, my empty stroller to the CFPB headquarters in Washington, DC. And I noticed a number of people who I had never seen before, who were not wearing the required CFPB badges, and they were accessing what appeared to be CFPB equipment. So I wanted to take a closer look. I wanted to try and investigate. We are told over and over again that we are supposed to report suspicious activities, that we are supposed to defend the sensitive data that we hold of American people.
Leah Feiger: I mean, it's so surreal to even hear someone speaking about this as an experience, to watch people go into your place of work and just really turn it upside down. And one of the things that Alexis also said is just how much people trust them with this technology. These are very, very important bits and bobs that were all of a sudden in the hands of people that weren't actually government employees. She has a little bit more to say. Let's listen up.
Alexis Goldstein, archival audio: Millions of people trust us with their vulnerable moments if they're scammed by their financial company, if they're having trouble with their mortgage. The technical term we use for it is personally identifying information, and we have a lot of very specific training about how to handle it. And so I was very concerned that the people that I had never seen before were there, appeared to have CFPB equipment. So I tried to take a look. They moved from one conference room to the other, when they saw me, into a conference room that didn't have a window. And so I decided to go into that conference room.
Leah Feiger: Goldstein told Makena that she had tried to approach these DOGE members. They refused to share their names with her. A security guard eventually escorted her out, and later that day she found out she was being put on administrative leave. Then earlier this year, a long time after, she was officially fired from the CFPB. The plot twist now, though, is that Goldstein is running for office. She's a candidate in a race for the US House of Representatives in Maryland's 6th Congressional District. And a lot of her platform is about really exposing what happens in the federal government and the machinations that have been going on in the Trump administration to the common voter. She had a lot of really interesting things to say, and frankly, her story of what it looked like to really confront DOGE in a federal way and have that be entirely shut down and turned around was fascinating. This was a really, really interesting look for us.
Zoë Schiffer: I just think there's a lot of deep irony to the fact that she's running on exposing what's really happening in the federal government when Elon Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency were all about supposedly shining light on what was really going on and finding fraud, waste, and abuse and showing the general public what that looked like.
Leah Feiger: Absolutely. I mean, that's so much of this, is that these individuals that she also found went on to be part of so many other agencies throughout the federal government. These weren't like one-off folks. She was interacting with some of the big leagues.
Brian Barrett: Leah, how is her message resonating, do we know, with voters? It makes total sense she would run on this platform of like, "Hey, I've seen the worst of what happens when you are a government employee and DOGE comes in and breaks the systems that we rely on," especially CFPB, which got gutted and which plays a very valuable role, or did, in this ecosystem. Are people buying it? Is she doing well?"
Leah Feiger: Honestly, it's hard to say because it's a little bit early and it's a very, very crowded race. The 6th Congressional District in Maryland, crowded, lots of folks in there. From what we've been seeing online though, federal workers love her. And a lot of federal workers, both current and former, live in this district. So she has a shot.
Brian Barrett: I found it fascinating, she's also not the only former government worker who was affected by DOGE to be running for office now. There are more than three dozen people who quit or lost their jobs in the wake of those cuts who are out there running for office now, trying to change the system, and good luck to them, trying to change the system from Congress instead of from their federal purchase.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, absolutely. And look, Goldstein, she's running as a Dem. She's been very critical of how Democrats have taken a passive approach to like, "We'll get in there once we take back the House." And so I'm very interested to see how that messaging plays in the midterm environment as well. She's said, for example, that it's a priority to continue the CFPB's work. And it's going to take though quite some time, which she recognizes, to undo a lot of these damages, especially when it comes to agencies like the CFPB that were just so monumentally gutted. I'm really going to be following this one closely. I'm excited to see where she goes.
Brian Barrett: Before we go to break, I have one more firsthand testimony to share with listeners. This one comes from Julian Richardson, who's a flight attendant, one of the more than 17,000 Spirit Airlines members who were affected by the company shutdown. Last weekend, Spirit announced it was ceasing operations after 34 years, which I was shocked it had been around that long, and after filing for bankruptcy twice in the last two years. That I was less shocked by. Still, among all the rumors and the uncertainty, workers like Julian were caught off guard.
Julian Richardson, archival audio: I woke up early in the morning to go to the gym, like around 4:00-ish. And like most people do, I check my phone and I saw an email that came in around 2:00 AM and it was from the company. So I looked over it and it definitely wasn't good news. And I was very, very surprised. I was like, "Man, I know this was in the back of a lot of our minds, but it's actually real now."
Brian Barrett: Workers like Julian were well aware, in case you were wondering, that Spirit had a reputation of being budget friendly, but not always the most reliable. But he also said that as an employee, he saw a different side of that.
Julian Richardson, archival audio: As a flight attendant, you see people come on flights. You realize a lot of people with families, they depend on that particular brand because of their prices. If you have like three or four kids all over the age of 2, that means you have to buy plane tickets for everybody. And if the plane tickets are cheaper, it helps you to be able to travel somewhere. So I really saw that when I started to work for the airline.
Brian Barrett: As I have two kids, I feel that deeply. And also at a time when air safety is on a lot of people's minds, Julian also was particularly proud of the safety record that Spirit maintained.
Julian Richardson, archival audio: I mean, over the past, they've been in business now 34 years, they never had any fatal crash or anything like that. And I think that's huge, especially in an industry where you kind of have a job where your life is at risk every single day, where most of these airlines, they've had at least one within their lifetime. I think that's a big deal.
Brian Barrett: Julian and his former colleagues are now having to reenter and navigate the uncertainty of the job market. But one thing he is at least not worried about, surprisingly enough, is AI.
Julian Richardson, archival audio: There are things that happen on a plane there where you need an actual person. I can remember during Covid, that was the time when everyone had to wear a mask. Some people wanted to wear it, some people didn't want to wear it. So almost every week, there's a viral video of fights or something happening where maybe a baby's crying and this person's upset because the baby's crying. And then they say something to the mom, then the mom says something back. This is almost like a every other flight scenario on the airplanes. I don't know how AI would be able to help that situation.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, we don't need a Grok.
Brian Barrett: Grok would just say that it's sick.
Zoë Schiffer: Grok mitigating the fight between the mom and the person who's yelling at her about her baby.
Leah Feiger: I really, really feel for these workers, and I really, really feel for all of these customers that were stranded. Spirit in so many ways, like something that we love to make fun of just a little bit, like you take Spirit when you have to, but also it was actually available and it worked and it wasn't nearly as expensive as anyone else. It's kind of sad, especially when I look at the shrinking airline industry in the US, when I look over at Europe and I'm like, "You guys have so many low-cost carriers." And especially with all of the deals, everything back and forth between JetBlue and Spirit that got squashed, it was just a little bit sad to see that happen.
Brian Barrett: And Leah, when you say stranded, I want to be clear, that's literal. I think some of these employees, they were not in their home cities when Spirit shut down. So they had to rely on other airlines offering them a jump seat or a travel pass to get home. Fortunately, it's apparently a very communal industry. Other airlines helped them out. Other airlines are offering preferential employment interviews to Spirit Airline employees. But can you imagine, I'm in London right now, and if WIRED shut down and I had to find another way home. I mean, I'd be OK, but—
Leah Feiger: No, but it would also just be ridiculous. This is wild. I think of that 30 Rock episode when Liz Lemon is like, "Oh yeah, this is my flight." And they're like, "Sorry, we're out of flights now. We just make popcorn," which was incredible to see, but that's so real.
Brian Barrett: I think from a consumer level, if you were going to book tickets for the summer, do it soon because now it's a supply and demand thing, right? A whole airline is gone. That's a lot of seats that aren't there, so there's more scarcity. Prices are going up basically at the worst possible time for people like myself who are thinking about planning some time for summer travel with, again, two kids.
Zoë Schiffer: Coming up after the break, we'll be getting into the news of the hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship. Should we be concerned, or are we panicking for no reason? We'll find out.
Leah Feiger: So in recent days, there have been more and more headlines of a hantavirus outbreak happening on the MV Hondius, a Dutch-flagged cruise ship. The cruise departed from the south end of Argentina over a month ago, making stops in Antarctica, the island of Saint Helena, among other stops. The trouble started when a man started showing symptoms like a fever, a headache, and eventually this became a respiratory illness. He died on board and a few weeks later, his wife did as well. She was later confirmed to have the hantavirus too. As of this week, seven cases have now been confirmed and the ship is currently carrying 147 passengers and crew. To help us understand what on earth is going on, we are joined by WIRED staff writer Emily Mullin.
Emily Mullin: Thanks for having me.
Brian Barrett: Emily, thank you for being here. Before we get into how worried we should be, because I want to keep Leah in suspense, when we hear virus and respiratory illness, obviously we are a little panicked, conditioned to be, rightly so. But can you just tell us a little more about what hantavirus actually is before we get into the nitty-gritty of whether it's going to ruin the next several years of our lives?
Emily Mullin: So this is a respiratory virus and it's quite rare. It's usually spread through the droppings and urine of rodents.
Zoë Schiffer: Well, that's disgusting and terrifying. But the couple on the ship were the first ones to show symptoms and then it seems like it's spread out further. So I guess, Emily, do we know how it spreads and how it gets transmitted between people?
Emily Mullin: Right. So as of Wednesday, we know that three passengers have died, this Dutch couple and a German national. The World Health Organization on Wednesday confirmed that these deaths occurred due to the Andes strain of hantavirus. And this is significant because the Andes strain can spread through human to human transmission. This is not the usual way in which hantavirus spreads. So hantaviruses are actually a family of viruses and they're found all over the world. They're typically carried by rodents, as I said before. The virus is spread to humans usually when people breathe in air and dust particles that contain rodent droppings or urine. And here in the US, most of the hantavirus cases over the years have been in the Southwest, so New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and California. And there are some occasional cases in the state of Washington as well. In the case of the Dutch couple, one theory as to how they were initially infected is that they were apparently birdwatching in the city of Ushuaia in Argentina before boarding the ship. I spoke with a hantavirus expert this morning who said the virus has previously been found in rodents there. And he said all it really takes is the virus to be present in animals in a particular location for there to be a risk for humans.
Leah Feiger: So are there any steps being taken right now to have this outbreak contained? Has it already left the ship? I've been seeing some reporting. I'd love for you to spell that out a little bit more for us.
Emily Mullin: So authorities from several countries are coordinating this very complicated response right now. Passengers are being monitored for symptoms and of course asked to isolate if they develop any symptoms. And in the early days of these symptoms, this looks like really any other respiratory virus. So you can have fever, muscle aches, fatigue, dizziness. But then the disease progresses to some pretty serious stuff, which includes coughing, shortness of breath, and difficulty breathing. So as of Wednesday, two patients with hantavirus and one suspected of being infected are being evacuated from the ship and are on their way to Europe for treatment. We also know that a man who returned to his home in Switzerland from a trip to South America who traveled on the same cruise ship, he has tested positive for the virus and is receiving treatment in a hospital in Switzerland. The patient's wife did travel with him on the trip. She has not yet shown any symptoms, but she is self-isolating as a precaution. And so now, Swiss public health officials are working to trace people that this person might have come into contact with.
Brian Barrett: This is the first time I've thought about contact tracing in many years, and I was so happy not thinking about it for so long, because it is such a complicated process and something that is really hard work to do. Emily, given all of that, what is the level of concern here, given what the World Health Organization has said and other organizations? It sounds like cautious about it, but maybe not freak out time yet, but I defer to you because maybe that's just me trying to make myself feel better.
Emily Mullin: No, I think you're right. The hantavirus expert I spoke with said there have been past clusters of the Andes strain before, but not big outbreaks. And these clusters have tended to involve prolonged close contact with people suffering from the disease. This is a virus that does not spread nearly as efficiently as other respiratory viruses that we're used to like Covid or flu, for instance. Hantavirus symptoms are also typically pretty severe. So this is not a virus, again, like Covid where lots of people are going around infected with the disease, spreading it asymptomatically without knowing about it. So that's at least a little bit of comfort, even though the flip side of that is that the disease is quite severe. So the World Health Organization says the risk to the general public is currently low, and this is probably not another Covid situation.
Brian Barrett: Leah, how we feeling?
Leah Feiger: Not good, you guys. I don't know. Are you kidding? How are you feeling? Maybe this is my moment to go, "Are you with me yet?"
Brian Barrett: No, I was good, but then Emily hit that probably pretty hard in a way that I suddenly felt a little more anxious.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, it was the swallowing of the probably.
Emily Mullin: That was me editorializing. The World Health Organization did not include the probably.
Brian Barrett: OK. What if they had it just in italics or big quotation marks? Like it's "probably" fine.
Leah Feiger: I don't know, guys. I think, one, I'm fascinated that there's different strains of this. And it brought me back so early on to the armchair scientists in early Covid who were like, "No, no, no, this is totally fine." So for there to officially be announced, yes, this is the strain that can get passed between humans, I think is notable at the very least. Got to give me that.
Brian Barrett: Oh, I think that's true. And I think my open questions are, how long do these people have to stay on this ship before everyone says, "OK, you can go now," or do they send them back to shore and just have them isolate for a certain amount of time? The contact tracing is concerning because again, I'm having flashbacks. But I do think the things that, Emily, that you said about how this is different from Covid in important ways in terms of how quickly it can spread, how easily it can spread, especially now that we have the mechanisms in place to do these contact tracing things, I'm going to remain on my not too worried yet.
Zoë Schiffer: Until we start to see the random tech people who are becoming expert epidemiologists overnight and doing really long tweet threads about the likelihood of a pandemic, I think I'm not going to panic because that was—
Brian Barrett: Oh, how many people are asking Grok about hantavirus right now?
Zoë Schiffer: Oh, actually, no, a fair amount. I did do a little search this morning. And Grok was very measured, I have to say. First time I've liked a Grok response. Grok is not worried.
Brian Barrett: That's it. If Grok's not worried, I'm not worried.
Emily Mullin: I think even if you are planning on taking a vacation on a cruise ship, if you've got a cruise booked for this summer, I think there are probably other things to worry about like norovirus, even Covid we know has been shown to spread pretty effectively on cruise ships. But I think hantavirus is pretty low on your list of risks unless you're departing from a part of the world where hantavirus is known to be found and recently seen in animals like in this case.
Brian Barrett: Yeah, just don't go bird watching in Argentina—
Emily Mullin: Exactly.
Brian Barrett: —and you're in good shape. Emily, thank you so much for joining us. This was really, really helpful.
Emily Mullin: Thank you.
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.
