Tech
UK to launch cyber fraud squad in April | Computer Weekly
The UK government has announced the formation of a new Online Crime Centre – which will commence operations in April – to form a nexus in the fight against cyber fraud and disrupt the gangs behind the nation’s most pervasive crime.
The £30m project will comprise experts from the government, police forces, intelligence community, financial services industry, mobile networks, and large tech firms, coming together to work side-by-side, sharing crime data in real time, and building a unified picture of global fraud networks. Its inauguration comes amid a new, expanded strategy that will see Westminster plough £250m into anti-fraud activities between now and 2029.
Its core remit will be to identify accounts, websites and phone numbers being used by organised cyber crime gangs, and take them down at scale. The government said it means to block scam texts, freeze cyber criminal accounts, remove social media accounts dedicated to scams, and disrupt such operations at their source. Where possible it will also target the offenders who cause the most harm to the British public – one in every 14 adults in the UK, and a quarter of businesses, have fallen victim to fraud in the past year, with the cost to the economy set at about £14bn.
“Fraudsters are exploiting new technology, industrialising their operations and targeting the British public at scale,” said fraud minister Lord Hanson.
“That’s why we’re bringing together the key players in the system – police, intelligence agencies, banks, mobile networks, regulators and tech companies – to shut down the channels scammers rely on, wherever they operate from.
“Our new fraud strategy sets out how we will use every tool at our disposal to disrupt and dismantle criminal operations, bring fraudsters to justice and strengthen protection and support for victims,” said Hanson.
Fraud factories
The government’s new strategy comes in the wake of the highly-publicised exposure of overseas at-scale scam compounds that target tens of thousands of victims with scripted attack formulae. These fraud centres operate all over the world, although many are concentrated in the border region between Myanmar and Thailand.
The UK government believes that about two-third – possible more – of scams that target Brits originate from outside the country, and even though it is harder for the UK authorities to bring prosecute criminals working out of foreign jurisdictions, the government has in-place intelligence-sharing agreements with Nigeria and Vietnam to share intelligence that has already resulted in multiple arrests and takedowns.
The Online Crime Centre will help the government pursue further opportunities with other countries where cyber fraudsters have made their homes – and to this end home secretary Shabana Mahmood will be attending the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC’s) Global Fraud Summit in Austria later in March.
Fighting fraud on many fronts
Beyond the Online Crime Centre’s activities, the government’s wider fraud strategy also establishes plans to help law enforcement better use artificial intelligence (AI) to spot fraud patterns, stop suspicious bank transfers quicker, and even trick scammers with scam-baiting chatbots, tying up their resources and distracting them from targeting real people.
The strategy also promises more support for those who fall victim to cyber fraud, with plans to set up a set of national standards – a victims’ charter, in essence – to guarantee police response times, minimum standards of care, and consistent advice on reimbursement no matter where in the UK they are located.
Supporting this, a cross-force network of police officers will be set up to help those found to be most vulnerable to fraud, targeting support to areas that emerge as hotspots, and relying on data from a new fraud reporting service to run campaigns of targeted prevention. At the individual level, this could see home visits to offer doorstep advice, or to help install call-blocking devices and services.
For fraudsters themselves, the government said the strategy will bring swifter justice and harsher financial penalties, with legal reforms under consideration to speed up court proceedings, and strengthen the use of civil enforcement powers.
National Crime Agency (NCA) director general for threats, James Babbage, said: “Over the last three years, the NCA has been building a stronger response to fraud. However, the threat will continue to grow globally, and the launch of the Fraud Strategy provides the basis for a further step change in our collective work to protect the UK public from these criminals.
“We have worked intensively with partners to pilot a range of new approaches to fraud and cyber crime: sharing data, stopping and blocking more online crime at source, and helping to design out vulnerabilities through more resilient industry processes,” said Babbage. “We are looking forward to working with partners across the public and private sectors as part of the new Online Crime Centre to continue this.”
Rachel Andrews, corporate security and fraud director at mobile network operator VodafoneThree, said: “It’s encouraging to see the government’s commitment to combatting fraud. Tech-enabled scams not only exploit connectivity and undermine trust in the UK’s digital network, they also cause significant amounts of financial and emotional distress for victims.
“VodafoneThree’s dedicated fraud team blocked over 139 million fraudulent SMS in 2025 and continues to block around 1.7 million fraudulent calls every day. As fraudsters’ tactics change, we’re investing in technology and teams to prevent fraud at each step of the customer journey. Continuing to protect consumers and businesses requires increasing amounts of collaboration with industry, government, partners and law enforcement. This strategy marks a major milestone in that journey and we look forward to collaborating more on it.”
Nathaniel Gleicher, Meta global head of counter fraud, added: “Fighting fraud and scams is a top priority for Meta – both on our platforms and across society. We welcome the UK government’s focus on tackling fraud and its recognition that addressing it requires an international focus given scams are often a transnational threat.
“With fraudsters operating in global, organised networks, the new Online Crime Centre will play a vital role in disrupting them. We’re committed to working with governments, law enforcement and industry partners worldwide to stop scammers. Our recent collaboration with the UK National Crime Agency and the Nigerian Police Force, which led to the disruption of an alleged scam centre targeting UK victims, shows the impact these partnerships can deliver. By sharing intelligence and strengthening partnerships, we can better protect people online.”
Tech
Nvidia Is Planning to Launch an Open-Source AI Agent Platform
Nvidia is planning to launch an open-source platform for AI agents, people familiar with the company’s plans tell WIRED.
The chipmaker has been pitching the product, referred to as NemoClaw, to enterprise software companies. The platform will allow these companies to dispatch AI agents to perform tasks for their own workforces. Companies will be able to access the platform regardless of whether their products run on Nvidia’s chips, sources say.
The move comes as Nvidia prepares for its annual developer conference in San Jose next week. Ahead of the conference, Nvidia has reached out to companies including Salesforce, Cisco, Google, Adobe, and CrowdStrike to forge partnerships for the agent platform. It’s unclear whether these conversations have resulted in official partnerships. Since the platform is open source, it’s likely that partners would get free, early access in exchange for contributing to the project, sources say. Nvidia plans to offer security and privacy tools as part of this new open-source agent platform.
Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment. Representatives from Cisco, Google, Adobe, and CrowdStrike also did not respond to requests for comment. Salesforce did not provide a statement prior to publication.
Nvidia’s interest in agents comes as people are embracing “claws,” or open-source AI tools that run locally on a user’s machine and perform sequential tasks. Claws are often described as self-learning, in that they’re supposed to automatically improve over time. Earlier this year, an AI agent known as OpenClaw—which was first called Clawdbot, then Moltbot—captivated Silicon Valley due to its ability to run autonomously on personal computers and complete work tasks for users. OpenAI ended up acquiring the project and hiring the creator behind it.
OpenAI and Anthropic have made significant improvements in model reliability in recent years, but their chatbots still require hand-holding. Purpose-built AI agents or claws, on the other hand, are designed to execute multiple steps without as much human supervision.
The usage of claws within enterprise environments is controversial. WIRED previously reported that some tech companies, including Meta, have asked employees to refrain from using OpenClaw on their work computers, due to the unpredictability of the agents and potential security risks. Last month a Meta employee who oversees safety and alignment for the company’s AI lab publicly shared a story about an AI agent going rogue on her machine and mass deleting her emails.
For Nvidia, NemoClaw appears to be part of an effort to court enterprise software companies by offering additional layers of security for AI agents. It’s also another step in the company’s embrace of open-source AI models, part of a broader strategy to maintain its dominance in AI infrastructure at a time when leading AI labs are building their own custom chips. Nvidia’s software strategy until now has been heavily reliant on its CUDA platform, a famously proprietary system that locks developers into building software for Nvidia’s GPUs and has created a crucial “moat” for the company.
Last month The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia also plans to reveal a new chip system for inference computing at its developer conference. The system will incorporate a chip designed by the startup Groq, which Nvidia entered into a multibillion-dollar licensing agreement with late last year.
Paresh Dave and Maxwell Zeff contributed to this report.
Tech
Anthropic Claims Pentagon Feud Could Cost It Billions
Anthropic executives allege that current customers and prospective ones have been demanding new terms and even backing out of negotiations since the US Department of Defense labeled the AI startup a supply-chain risk late last month, according to court papers that also revealed new financial details about the company.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in expected revenue this year from work tied to the Pentagon is already at risk for Anthropic, the company’s chief financial officer, Krishna Rao, wrote in a court filing on Monday. But if the government has its way and pressures a broad range of companies from doing business with the AI startup, regardless of any ties to the military, Anthropic could ultimately lose billions of dollars in sales, he stated. Its all-time sales, since commercializing its technology in 2023, exceed $5 billion, according to Rao.
Anthropic’s revenue exploded as its Claude models began outperforming rivals and showing advanced capabilities in areas such as generating software code. But the company spends heavily on computing infrastructure and remains deeply unprofitable. Rao specified that Anthropic has spent over $10 billion to train and deploy its models.
Anthropic chief commercial officer Paul Smith provided several examples of partners who have privately raised concerns to the AI startup in recent days. He said a financial services customer paused negotiations over a $15 million deal because of the supply-chain label, and two leading financial services companies have refused to close deals valued together at $80 million unless they gain the right to unilaterally cancel their contracts for any reason. A grocery store chain canceled a sales meeting, citing the supply-chain-risk designation, Smith added.
“All have taken steps that reflect deep distrust and a growing fear of associating with Anthropic,” Smith wrote.
The executives’ comments are part of statements from six Anthropic leaders in support of a preliminary order that would allow the San Francisco company to continue doing business with the Department of Defense until lawsuits about the supply-chain-risk issue are resolved.
Anthropic has sued the Trump administration in two courts. A lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court on Monday alleges the government violated the company’s free speech rights. A separate case filed Monday in the federal appeals court in Washington, DC, accuses the Defense Department of unfairly discriminating and retaliating against Anthropic.
The company is seeking a hearing as soon as Friday in San Francisco for a temporary reprieve. The legal battle and sales fallout follows a weeks-long dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon over the potential use of AI technologies for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous lethal weapons. Anthropic contends AI is not yet capable of safely undertaking the tasks, while the Pentagon wants the right to make that judgment on its own.
By law, the supply-chain designation prevents a narrow set of companies that do business with the Pentagon from incorporating Anthropic into their systems. But Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has cast a wider net. He posted on X late last month that “effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.”
Rao wrote that the Pentagon reinforced the message by reaching out to several startups about their use of Claude, which he said he learned had happened from speaking with an investor that Anthropic and the smaller companies all share. They “have grown worried and uncertain about their ability to use Claude,” Rao wrote.
The Pentagon declined to comment on the lawsuits and did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Rao’s allegation about the outreach.
Tech
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Is Stepping Down
Jay Graber is stepping down as head of Bluesky, the social media platform exclusively announced to WIRED. Venture capitalist Toni Schneider will be the interim CEO until a permanent replacement is found.
“As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things,” Graber wrote in a statement about the personnel change.
Graber joined Bluesky in 2019, when it was a research project within Twitter focused on developing a decentralized framework for the social web. She became the company’s first chief executive officer in 2021, when it spun out into an independent entity. She oversaw the platform’s remarkable rise and the growing pains it experienced as it transformed from a quirky Twitter offshoot to a full-fledged alternative to X.
Schneider tells WIRED that he intends to help Bluesky “become not just the best open social app, but the foundation for a whole new generation of user-owned networks.”
Schneider, who will continue working as a partner at the venture capital firm True Ventures while at Bluesky, was previously CEO of the WordPress parent company, Automattic, from 2006 to 2014. He also served as its CEO again in 2024 while top executive Matt Mullenweg went on a sabbatical. During that time, Schneider met Graber and became an adviser to Bluesky’s leadership. In a blog post announcing his new role, Schneider said he plans to emphasize scaling, describing his job as “to help set up Bluesky’s next phase of growth.”
This isn’t the end for Graber and Bluesky. She will transition to become the company’s chief innovation officer, a role focused on Bluesky’s technology stack rather than its business operations. The position was created for her. Graber, who began her career as a software engineer, has always sounded the most enthusiastic when discussing Bluesky’s technology rather than its revenue streams.
Bluesky’s board of directors will appoint the next permanent CEO. The members include Jabber founder Jeremie Miller, crypto-focused VC Kinjal Shah, TechDirt founder Mike Masnick, and Graber. (Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was originally part of the board but quit in 2024.) This means Graber will have input on her successor. The talent search is still in early stages.
It’s a pivotal moment for Bluesky. The company found success by positioning itself as a progressive replacement for Elon Musk’s X. That helped fuel the platform’s rise as X’s hard-right ideological turn prompted some users to seek new social networks. In 2025, Bluesky grew from 25 million users to over 40 million, according to its annual Transparency Report. Its team is optimistic it can continue expanding while staying true to its roots. Masnick says Schneider’s tenure at Automattic “proves you build a real business around open software.”
As far as social platforms go, though, it’s still a niche offering, and one perpetually subject to pundit-class grumblings about how it’s too woke or not woke enough. (Just last week, in a conversation with WIRED, Dorsey said he wasn’t happy with the platform because of “ideology.”) Meta’s competing app, Threads, has roughly 400 million users, or approximately 10 times more active accounts than Bluesky. Even if it’s not interested in chasing the type of hockey-stick growth traditionally favored in Silicon Valley, the company does need to convince more people and institutions to use its platform if it wants to stake a claim to the role of digital commons.
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