Coffee is the original biohack and the nation’s most popular productivity tool. As we adjust to the changeover to daylight saving time, the caffeine-addicted WIRED Reviews team is writing about our favorite coffee brewing routines and devices. Today, reviewer Peter Cottell expounds on why espresso machines don’t have to be any fancier than a Casabrews 5700. Look out for other Java.Base stories about other WIRED writers’ favorite brewing methods.

There’s a slogan in the guitar world that claims “tone is stored in the fingers.” It’s a reductive notion that’s meant to urge upstart shredders to journey within for an ideal guitar sound that suits them best rather than spend a lifetime and tens of thousands of dollars on expensive pedals, amps, and a high-end guitar with a boomer’s signature engraved on the headstock. The irony of this phrase is that it’s usually muttered by the very geezers who can afford such gear; think Joe Bonamassa, John Mayer, and James Dolan, whom the guitar world refers to as “blues lawyers.”

Fancy coffee gear can get you pretty far, but it’s as useless as a $20,000 Les Paul without technique or inspiration. The punk boom of 1977 showed ambitious musicians that they could get pretty far with attitude and initiative. But it was amidst the egalitarian post-punk boom of the early ’80s that we learned practicing your instrument and keeping an open mind can lead to transcendence, financial circumstances be damned.

In the summer of 2008, I found myself unemployed with a communications degree from a large state college, so I took the next logical step and took a turn in the service industry. A local chain of coffee shops was the first employer to call me back, so off I went to become a barista despite having, until then, consumed a total of 2 cups of coffee in my entire life. I spent the first year drinking cold brew and working afternoon or evening shifts. Then I was moved to mornings, and I had to learn how to dial in an espresso machine. And everything changed forever.

I don’t recall the make or model of the machine, but you’ll get an idea of its form and function when you imagine a local second-wave shop with a ragged GVC aesthetic, a crowded bulletin board that’s overrun with business cards from sex pests turned yoga instructors, and a silly alliterative name like Jammin’ Java or Expresso Express. At the onset, “dialing in” consisted of jiggling the grind size on the grinder until it spit out a pile of grounds that yielded a shot anywhere between 20 and 40 seconds. There was no scale, and the temperature and pressure specs of the machine were a mystery, and no one cared about any of this because most of the espresso drinks we sold were doused in DaVinci syrup and 2 percent milk. It wasn’t until the hammer came down on everyone behind the counter’s overconsumption of expensive sugary drinks that I was forced to reckon with espresso. I spent the next three years figuring out how to coax something drinkable out of this cursed, faltering machine, and I finally reached the same conclusion as many before me: Espresso is universal. It is the base unit of caffeination. The binary code of the coffee world. The bottom brick of everything earthy, bitter, brown, and rich.

After my stint at the declining café in Ohio, I moved across the country and graduated to a bakery-coffee-shop hybrid in Portland, Oregon. While it wasn’t a bona fide third-wave shop, we were close enough to stalwarts on the scene like Heart and Stumptown, so we took coffee as seriously as we could. The morning crew was responsible for dialing in three different grinders: decaf, a blend, and a single origin. Walking to work before dawn in the silent fog was a meditative experience, no matter how hungover I was, and the process of taking notes while sipping shots and adjusting the grinder and extraction time ever so slightly is a morning ritual I would return to daily if I could. Then your coworker arrives, the stereo turns from ambient techno to Electric Wizard, the customers slowly trickle in, and all hell breaks loose. You become one with the machine.

Anthropic filed a federal lawsuit against the US Department of Defense and other federal agencies on Monday, challenging its designation of the AI company as a “supply-chain risk.”

The Pentagon formally sanctioned Anthropic last week, capping a weeks-long, publicly aired disagreement over limits on use of its generative AI technology for military applications such as autonomous weapons.

“We do not believe this action is legally sound, and we see no choice but to challenge it in court,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a blog post on Thursday.

The lawsuit, which was filed in a federal court in California, requested that a judge reverse the designation and stop federal agencies from enforcing it. “The Constitution does not allow ​the government to wield its enormous power to punish a company for its protected speech,” Anthropic said in the filing. “Anthropic turns to the judiciary as a last resort to vindicate its rights and halt the Executive’s unlawful campaign of retaliation.”

The AI startup, which develops a suite of AI models called Claude, is facing the possibility of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue from the Pentagon and the rest of the US government. It also may lose the business of software companies that incorporate Claude into services they sell to federal agencies. Several Anthropic customers have reportedly said they are pursuing alternatives due to the Defense Department’s risk designation.

Amodei wrote that the “vast majority” of Anthropic’s customers will not have to make changes. The US government’s designation “plainly applies only to the use of Claude by customers as a direct part of contracts with the” military, he said. General use of Anthropic technologies by military contractors should be unaffected.

The Department of Defense, which also goes by the Department of War, and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment about Anthropic’s lawsuit.

Attorneys with expertise in government contracting say Anthropic faces a difficult battle in court. The rules that authorize the Department of Defense to label a tech company as a supply-chain risk don’t allow for much in the way of an appeal. “It’s 100 percent in the government’s prerogative to set the parameters of a contract,” says Brett Johnson, a partner at the law firm Snell & Wilmer. The Pentagon, he says, also has the right to express that a product of concern, if used by any of its suppliers, “hurts the government’s ability to effectuate its mission.”

Anthropic’s best chance of success in court could be proving it was singled out, Johnson says. Soon after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that he was designating Anthropic a supply-chain risk, rival OpenAI announced it had struck a new contract with the Pentagon. That could be instrumental to Anthropic’s legal argument if the company can demonstrate it was seeking similar terms as the ChatGPT developer.

OpenAI said its deal included contractual and technical means of assuring its technology would not be used for mass domestic surveillance or to direct autonomous weapons systems. It added that it opposed the action against Anthropic and did know why its rival could not reach the same deal with the government.

Military Priority

Hegseth has prioritized military adoption of AI technologies, with posters recently seen in the Pentagon showing him pointing and that read, “I want you to use AI.” The dispute with Anthropic kicked up in January after Hegseth ordered several AI suppliers to agree that the department was free to use their technologies for any lawful purpose.

Anthropic, which is the only company currently providing AI chatbot and analysis tools for the military’s most sensitive use cases, pushed back. It contends that its technologies are not yet capable enough to be used for mass domestic surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons. Hegseth has said Anthropic wants veto power over judgments that should be left to the Defense Department.

The Trump administration has set out its long-awaited cyber strategy at the weekend, pledging to “sustain superiority” in emerging areas of security such as post-quantum cryptography and artificial intelligence.

The White House said that securing US innovation and protecting its current intellectual advantage will be paramount.

“We will build secure technologies and supply chains that protect user privacy from design to deployment, including supporting the security of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. We will promote the adoption of post-quantum cryptography and secure quantum computing,” the White House said.

While the so-called ‘Q Day’ that the cyber industry dreads has yet to come to pass, the era of quantum computing – which promises to brick many traditional cyber defences – may be closer than anybody thinks, and work is ramping up around the world to prepare for it, with the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) among the bodies leading the charge.

On AI, the Trump White House pledged to secure the entire technology stack powering AI, including datacentres, and promote innovation in the area. The US will swiftly implement AI-enabled cyber tools to detect, divert and deceive threat actors, it said, as well as adopting and promoting agentic capabilities to scale network defence. On the global stage, it said it will work alongside its allies to ensure both agentic and generative AI are used in ways that address innovation and “global stability” while securing the data and models than underpin US leadership in the area. “And,” the White House said, “we will call out and frustrate the spread of foreign AI platforms that censor, surveil, and mislead their users”.