Kate Knibbs: So, you went twice?

Makena Kelly: Yes, Kate. I went twice.

Kate Knibbs: I missed that.

Zoë Schiffer: Wait, is the Pentagon Pizza thing a joke about the pizza predicting the war?

Makena Kelly: Yeah.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh, my God.

Makena Kelly: Because they had these Pentagon pizza trackers up. When I returned the second night, yes, I came back the second night. Everything was working for the most part. There were still some screens that were turned off, but I never saw any actual Bloomberg terminals. There were some monitory Bloomberg type terminal things that it looked like Polymarket had developed themselves, but the real $50,000 Bloomberg terminal was nowhere to be found. And yeah, the second night, again, it was mostly people looking to gawk at the event, except I did find a couple of people who placed some bets on platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi. One was named William, and he said he was a member of the military, wouldn’t give me his full name. And he last year got involved in this for the first time by putting in, I think, all of his tax return into Oklahoma City sports betting.

Makena Kelly, archival audio: So, you used Kalshi?

William, archival audio: Yes.

Makena Kelly, archival audio: When did you first start using the service?

William, archival audio: Probably when I got my tax return back.

Makena Kelly, archival audio: OK.

William, archival audio: So, I filed my taxes pretty early and I was like, “Oh, sweet. I got my tax return. What am I going to do with it?” So, I was like, “I’m going to just put it on Kalshi.”

Makena Kelly: He said that he goes up and down 100 dollars, but he hasn’t made any major winnings. Some of the stuff that we’ve heard. Some people making crazy insider bets making millions and millions of dollars. This is just a guy who was interested in this and just plays it for fun, it sounds like.

Brian Barrett: Kate, what do you see when you see a pop-up like this and Polymarket trying to—is it an attempt to legitimize itself to just a marketing stunt? And how does it tie into what you’re seeing with these companies anyway, that there’s the explosive growth that they’ve got trying to reach out to so many people and getting so many people hooked on what they’re offering?

Kate Knibbs: I mean, this particular event definitely seems like a very bald effort to woo DC-based journalists, if nothing else. One thing that Makena said sort of encapsulates what’s going on right now, the thing about the guys in the Palantir hoodies. So, I think it was the same week that this bar opened. Polymarket announced a partnership with Palantir and Palantir is helping them protect the integrity of their sports market. So, Palantir is going to be basically attempting to help Polymarket catch insider traders and market manipulators in all the sports games, which is kind of wild. I actually asked Polymarket last week whether they had any other deals with Palantir when I was trying to get them to say anything about whether they were investigating the Iran bets that have been raising a lot of eyebrows. And they said that Palantir was only helping them with sports, which I thought was freaking weird. And it speaks to how they’re rapidly expanding, but doing so in this really messy ad hoc way that doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Because I was like, “If you’re going to get Palantir involved, why wouldn’t you have them do this geopolitical stuff instead of March Madness?” Yeah, wild, wild times.

OpenAI announced Thursday that it had acquired the online business talk show TBPN for an undisclosed sum. The move comes as OpenAI struggles with its public image, which has taken a significant hit in recent months.

Since launching in 2024, TBPN has risen in popularity among Silicon Valley circles by offering a daily live stream about the technology industry that’s seen as more tech-friendly than traditional outlets. The show’s two hosts, John Coogan and Jordi Hays, offer real-time commentary on breaking news, cycle through viral social media posts, and interview executives from companies including Meta, Salesforce, Palantir and OpenAI. It’s become especially popular among OpenAI staff and other AI researchers, many of whom are addicted to the social media platform X.

It’s hard to understand how a media startup fits into OpenAI’s core businesses selling ChatGPT, Codex, and a new super app the company is developing to consumers and enterprises. Last month, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, told staff in an all hands meeting that the company needed to cancel its side projects and refocus around its core businesses.

In a memo to staff announcing the acquisition, Simo said the typical communications playbook does not apply to OpenAI. “We’re not a typical company,” she said in the memo, which was also published as a blog. “We’re driving a really big technological shift. And with the mission of bringing AGI to the world comes a responsibility to help create a space for a real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates—with builders and people using the technology at the center.”

TBPN is a small business compared to OpenAI. The media firm says it generated $5 million in ad revenue last year, and was on track to make more than $30 million in revenue in 2026, according to the The Wall Street Journal. The show reportedly reaches around 70,000 viewers per episode across a variety of platforms. A source close to OpenAI says the company doesn’t expect TBPN to contribute financially to the business, though it will help with OpenAI’s communications strategy.

OpenAI has fallen under increased public scrutiny in recent months. After the company signed a deal with the Department of Defense in February, Anthropic’s Claude surged in downloads and claimed the top spot among Apple’s free apps. OpenAI’s leaders are also dealing with a growing QuitGPT movement which is made up of people who vow to never use OpenAI’s products. OpenAI President Greg Brockman cited AI’s popularity issues as a core reason for his increased political spending.

The acquisition makes OpenAI the latest Silicon Valley player to try owning and operating a news business. In recent decades, there have been several notable examples of technology leaders purchasing media firms, including Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post, Marc Benioff buying Time Magazine, and Robinhood buying the newsletter company MarketSnacks. In each case, the acquisitions raised immediate questions about whether the outlets would remain truly independent. In her memo, Simo told staff that TBPN will retain editorial independence.

“TBPN is my favorite tech show. We want them to keep that going and for them to do what they do so well,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a post on X. “I don’t expect them to go any easier on us, [and I] am sure I’ll do my part to help enable that with occasional stupid decisions.”

OpenAI said TBPN will continue to “run their programming, choose their guests, and make their own editorial decisions,” according to Simo’s memo The company also said that TBPN will report directly to OpenAI’s VP of global affairs, Chris Lehane. WIRED previously reported how an economic research team under Lehane had struggled to report on AI’s negative impacts on the economy.

Cursor announced Thursday the launch of Cursor 3, a new product interface that allows users to spin up AI coding agents to complete tasks on their behalf. The product, which was developed under the code name Glass, is Cursor’s response to agentic coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, which have taken off with millions of developers in recent months.

“In the last few months, our profession has completely changed,” said Jonas Nelle, one of Cursor’s heads of engineering, in an interview with WIRED. “A lot of the product that got Cursor here is not as important going forward anymore.”

Cursor increasingly finds itself in competition with leading AI labs for developers and enterprise customers. The company pioneered one of the first and most popular ways for developers to code with AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—making Cursor one of these companies’ biggest AI customers. But in the last 18 months, OpenAI and Anthropic have launched agentic coding products of their own, and started offering them through highly subsidized subscriptions that have put pressure on Cursor’s business.

While Cursor’s core product lets developers code in an integrated development environment (IDE) and tap an AI model for help, new products like Claude Code and Codex center around allowing developers to off-load entire tasks to an AI agent—sometimes spinning up multiple agents at the same time. Cursor 3 is the startup’s version of an “agent-first” coding product. According to Nelle, the product is optimized for a world where developers spend their days “conversing with different agents, checking in on them, and seeing the work that they did,” rather than writing code themselves.

Cursor is launching its new agentic coding interface inside its existing desktop app, where it will live alongside the IDE. At the center of a new window in Cursor, there’s a text box where users can type, in natural language, a task they’d like an AI agent to complete—it looks more like a chatbot than a coding environment. Press enter, the AI agent sets to work without requiring the developer to write a single line of code. In a sidebar on the left, developers can view and manage all of the AI agents they have running in Cursor.

What’s unique about Cursor 3, compared to desktop apps for Claude Code and Codex, is that it integrates an agent-first product with Cursor’s AI-powered development environment. In a demo, Cursor’s other cohead of engineering for Cursor 3, Alexi Robbins, showed WIRED how users can prompt an agent in the cloud to spin up a feature, and then review the code it generated locally on their computer.

Nelle and Robbins argue it doesn’t matter which interface developers are spending their time in—they just want people using Cursor.

Competing With the AI Labs

I visited Cursor’s office in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood last week. The startup is reportedly raising fresh capital at a $50 billion valuation—nearly double what it was valued in a funding round last fall—and has expanded into an old movie theater. Cursor employees used to toss their shoes in a pile by the door upon entry, but now there’s a row of large shoe racks, signaling one way in which the company is growing up.

Yet Cursor still feels like a startup. Employees tell me that’s part of the appeal of working there; the company can ship quickly and doesn’t feel too corporate. But as it finds itself racing to catch up to Anthropic and OpenAI in the agentic coding race, that scrappiness may not be enough. This battle—the one to create the best AI coding agent—may be Cursor’s most capital-intensive chapter yet.