Beth Washington – Page 11

“Go generate a bridge and jump off it”: How video pros are navigating AI

AI, Features, Hollywood, Runway, video / Beth Washington / November 24, 2025

I talked with nine creators about economic pressures and fan backlash.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

In 2016, the legendary Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki was shown a bizarre AI-generated video of a misshapen human body crawling across a floor.

Miyazaki declared himself “utterly disgusted” by the technology demo, which he considered an “insult to life itself.”

“If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it,” Miyazaki said. “I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.”

Many fans interpreted Miyazaki’s remarks as rejecting AI-generated video in general. So they didn’t like it when, in October 2024, filmmaker PJ Accetturo used AI tools to create a fake trailer for a live-action version of Miyazaki’s animated classic Princess Mononoke. The trailer earned him 22 million views on X. It also earned him hundreds of insults and death threats.

“Go generate a bridge and jump off of it,” said one of the funnier retorts. Another urged Accetturo to “throw your computer in a river and beg God’s forgiveness.”

Someone tweeted that Miyazaki “should be allowed to legally hunt and kill this man for sport.”

PJ Accetturo is a director and founder of Genre AI, an AI ad agency. Credit: PJ Accetturo

The development of AI image and video generation models has been controversial, to say the least. Artists have accused AI companies of stealing their work to build tools that put people out of a job. Using AI tools openly is stigmatized in many circles, as Accetturo learned the hard way.

But as these models have improved, they have sped up workflows and afforded new opportunities for artistic expression. Artists without AI expertise might soon find themselves losing work.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve spoken to nine actors, directors, and creators about how they are navigating these tricky waters. Here’s what they told me.

Actors have emerged as a powerful force against AI. In 2023, SAG-AFTRA, the Hollywood actors’ union, had its longest-ever strike, partly to establish more protections for actors against AI replicas.

Actors have lobbied to regulate AI in their industry and beyond. One actor I talked with, Erik Passoja, has testified before the California Legislature in favor of several bills, including for greater protections against pornographic deepfakes. SAG-AFTRA endorsed SB 1047, an AI safety bill regulating frontier models. The union also organized against the proposed moratorium on state AI bills.

A recent flashpoint came in September, when Deadline Hollywood reported that talent agencies were interested in signing “AI actress” Tilly Norwood.

Actors weren’t happy. Emily Blunt told Variety, “This is really, really scary. Come on agencies, don’t do that.”

Natasha Lyonne, star of Russian Doll, posted on an Instagram Story: “Any talent agency that engages in this should be boycotted by all guilds. Deeply misguided & totally disturbed.”

The backlash was partly specific to Tilly Norwood—Lyonne is no AI skeptic, having cofounded an AI studio—but it also reflects a set of concerns around AI common to many in Hollywood and beyond.

Here’s how SAG-AFTRA explained its position:

Tilly Norwood is not an actor, it’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation. It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion and, from what we’ve seen, audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience. It doesn’t solve any “problem” — it creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry.

This statement reflects three broad criticisms that come up over and over in discussions of AI art:

Content theft: Most leading AI video models have been trained on broad swathes of the Internet, including images and films made by artists. In many cases, companies have not asked artists for permission to use this content, nor compensated them. Courts are still working out whether this is fair use under copyright law. But many people I talked to consider AI companies’ training efforts to be theft of artists’ work.

Job loss: If AI tools can make passable video quickly or drastically speed up editing tasks, that potentially takes jobs away from actors or film editors. While past technological advancements have also eliminated jobs—the adoption of digital cameras drastically reduced the number of people cutting physical film—AI could have an even broader impact.

Artistic quality: A lot of people told me they just didn’t think AI-generated content could ever be good art. Tess Dinerstein stars in vertical dramas—episodic programs optimized for viewing on smartphones. She told me that AI is “missing that sort of human connection that you have when you go to a movie theater and you’re sobbing your eyes out because your favorite actor is talking about their dead mom.”

The concern about theft is potentially solvable by changing how models are trained. Around the time Accetturo released the “Princess Mononoke” trailer, he called for generative AI tools to be “ethically trained on licensed datasets.”

Some companies have moved in this direction. For instance, independent filmmaker Gille Klabin told me he “feels pretty good” using Adobe products because the company trains its AI models on stock images that it pays royalties for.

But the other two issues—job losses and artistic integrity—will be harder to finesse. Many creators—and fans—believe that AI-generated content misses the fundamental point of art, which is about creating an emotional connection between creators and viewers.

But while that point is compelling in theory, the details can be tricky.

Dinerstein, the vertical drama actress, told me that she’s “not fundamentally against AI”—she admits “it provides a lot of resources to filmmakers” in specialized editing tasks—but she takes a hard stance against it on social media.

“It’s hard to ever explain gray areas on social media,” she said, and she doesn’t want to “come off as hypocritical.”

Even though she doesn’t think that AI poses a risk to her job—“people want to see what I’m up to”—she does fear people (both fans and vertical drama studios) making an AI representation of her without her permission. And she has found it easiest to just say, “You know what? Don’t involve me in AI.”

Others see it as a much broader issue. Actress Susan Spano told me it was “an issue for humans, not just actors.”

“This is a world of humans and animals,” she said. “Interaction with humans is what makes it fun. I mean, do we want a world of robots?”

It’s relatively easy for actors to take a firm stance against AI because they inherently do their work in the physical world. But things are more complicated for other Hollywood creatives, such as directors, writers, and film editors. AI tools can genuinely make them more productive, and they’re at risk of losing work if they don’t stay on the cutting edge.

So the non-actors I talked to took a range of approaches to AI. Some still reject it. Others have used the tools reluctantly and tried to keep their heads down. Still others have openly embraced the technology.

Kavan Cardoza is a director and AI filmmaker. Credit: Phantom X

Take Kavan Cardoza, for example. He worked as a music video director and photographer for close to a decade before getting his break into filmmaking with AI.

After the image model Midjourney was first released in 2022, Cardoza started playing around with image generation and later video generation. Eventually, he “started making a bunch of fake movie trailers” for existing movies and franchises. In December 2024, he made a fan film in the Batman universe that “exploded on the Internet,” before Warner Bros. took it down for copyright infringement.

Cardoza acknowledges that he re-created actors in former Batman movies “without their permission.” But he insists he wasn’t “trying to be malicious or whatever. It was truly just a fan film.”

Whereas Accetturo received death threats, the response to Cardoza’s fan film was quite positive.

“Every other major studio started contacting me,” Cardoza said. He set up an AI studio, Phantom X, with several of his close friends. Phantom X started by making ads (where AI video is catching on quickest), but Cardoza wanted to focus back on films.

In June, Cardoza made a short film called Echo Hunter, a blend of Blade Runner and The Matrix. Some shots look clearly AI-generated, but Cardoza used motion-capture technology from Runway to put the faces of real actors into his AI-generated world. Overall, the piece pretty much hangs together.

Cardoza wanted to work with real actors because their artistic choices can help elevate the script he’s written: “There’s a lot more levels of creativity to it.” But he needed SAG-AFTRA’s approval to make a film that blends AI techniques with the likenesses of SAG-AFTRA actors. To get it, he had to promise not to reuse the actors’ likenesses in other films.

In Cardoza’s view, AI is “giving voices to creators that otherwise never would have had the voice.”

But Cardoza isn’t wedded to AI. When an interviewer asked him whether he’d make a non-AI film if required to, he responded, “Oh, 100 percent.” Cardoza added that if he had the budget to do it now, “I’d probably still shoot it all live action.”

He acknowledged to me that there will be losers in the transition—“there’s always going to be changes”—but he compares the rise of AI with past technological developments in filmmaking, like the rise of visual effects. This created new jobs making visual effects digitally, but reduced jobs making elaborate physical sets.

Cardoza expressed interest in reducing the amount of job loss. In another interview, Cardoza said that for his film project, “we want to make sure we include as many people as possible,” not just actors, but sound designers, script editors, and other specialized roles.

But he believes that eventually, AI will get good enough to do everyone’s job. “Like I say with tech, it’s never about if, it’s just when.”

Accetturo’s entry into AI was similar. He told me that he worked for 15 years as a filmmaker, “mostly as a commercial director and former documentary director.” During the pandemic, he “raised millions” for an animated TV series, but it got caught up in development hell.

AI gave him a new chance at success. Over the summer of 2024, he started playing around with AI video tools. He realized that he was in the sweet spot to take advantage of AI: experienced enough to make something good, but not so established that he was risking his reputation. After Google released Veo 3 in May, Accetturo released a fake medicine ad that went viral. His studio now produces ads for prominent companies like Oracle and Popeyes.

Accetturo says the backlash against him has subsided: “It truly is nothing compared to what it was.” And he says he’s committed to working on AI: “Everyone understands that it’s the future.”

Between the anti- and pro-AI extremes, there are a lot of editors and artists quietly using AI tools without disclosing it. Unsurprisingly, it’s difficult to find people who will speak about this on the record.

“A lot of people want plausible deniability right now,” according to Ryan Hayden, a Hollywood talent agent. “There is backlash about it.”

But if editors don’t use AI tools, they risk becoming obsolete. Hayden says that he knows a lot of people in the editing field trying to master AI because “there’s gonna be a massive cut” in the total number of editors. Those who know AI might survive.

As one comedy writer involved in an AI project told Wired, “We wanted to be at the table and not on the menu.”

Clandestine AI usage extends into the upper reaches of the industry. Hayden knows an editor who works with a major director who has directed $100 million films. “He’s already using AI, sometimes without people knowing.”

Some artists feel morally conflicted but don’t think they can effectively resist. Vinny Dellay, a storyboard artist who has worked on Marvel films and Super Bowl ads, released a video detailing his views on the ethics of using AI as a working artist. Dellay said that he agrees that “AI being trained off of art found on the Internet without getting permission from the artist, it may not be fair, it may not be honest.” But refusing to use AI products won’t stop their general adoption. Believing otherwise is “just being delusional.”

Instead, Dellay said that the right course is to “adapt like cockroaches after a nuclear war.” If they’re lucky, using AI in storyboarding workflows might even “let a storyboard artist pump out twice the boards in half the time without questioning all your life’s choices at 3 am.”

Gille Klabin is an independent writer, director, and visual effects artist. Credit: Gille Klabin

Gille Klabin is an indie director and filmmaker currently working on a feature called Weekend at the End of the World.

As an independent filmmaker, Klabin can’t afford to hire many people. There are many labor-intensive tasks—like making a pitch deck for his film—that he’d otherwise have to do himself. An AI tool “essentially just liberates us to get more done and have more time back in our life.”

But he’s careful to stick to his own moral lines. Any time he mentioned using an AI tool during our interview, he’d explain why he thought that was an appropriate choice. He said he was fine with AI use “as long as you’re using it ethically in the sense that you’re not copying somebody’s work and using it for your own.”

Drawing these lines can be difficult, however. Hayden, the talent agent, told me that as AI tools make low-budget films look better, it gets harder to make high-budget films, which employ the most people at the highest wage levels.

If anything, Klabin’s AI uptake is limited more by the current capabilities of AI models. Klabin is an experienced visual effects artist, and he finds AI products to generally be “not really good enough to be used in a final project.”

He gave me a concrete example. Rotoscoping is a process in which you trace out the subject of the shot so you can edit the background independently. It’s very labor-intensive—one has to edit every frame individually—so Klabin has tried using Runway’s AI-driven rotoscoping. While it can make for a decent first pass, the result is just too messy to use as a final project.

Klabin sent me this GIF of a series of rotoscoped frames from his upcoming movie. While the model does a decent job of identifying the people in the frame, its boundaries aren’t consistent from frame to frame. The result is noisy.

Current AI tools are full of these small glitches, so Klabin only uses them for tasks that audiences don’t see (like creating a movie pitch deck) or in contexts where he can clean up the result afterward.

Stephen Robles reviews Apple products on YouTube and other platforms. He uses AI in some parts of the editing process, such as removing silences or transcribing audio, but doesn’t see it as disruptive to his career.

Stephen Robles is a YouTuber, podcaster, and creator covering tech, particularly Apple. Credit: Stephen Robles

“I am betting on the audience wanting to trust creators, wanting to see authenticity,” he told me. AI video tools don’t really help him with that and can’t replace the reputation he’s sought to build.

Recently, he experimented with using ChatGPT to edit a video thumbnail (the image used to advertise a video). He got a couple of negative reactions about his use of AI, so he said he “might slow down a little bit” with that experimentation.

Robles didn’t seem as concerned about AI models stealing from creators like him. When I asked him about how he felt about Google training on his data, he told me that “YouTube provides me enough benefit that I don’t think too much about that.”

Professional thumbnail artist Antioch Hwang has a similarly pragmatic view toward using AI. Some channels he works with have audiences that are “very sensitive to AI images.” Even using “an AI upscaler to fix up the edges” can provoke strong negative reactions. For those channels, he’s “very wary” about using AI.

Antioch Hwang is a YouTube thumbnail artist. Credit: Antioch Creative

But for most channels he works for, he’s fine using AI, at least for technical tasks. “I think there’s now been a big shift in the public perception of these AI image generation tools,” he told me. “People are now welcoming them into their workflow.”

He’s still careful with his AI use, though, because he thinks that having human artistry helps in the YouTube ecosystem. “If everyone has all the [AI] tools, then how do you really stand out?” he said.

Recently, top creators have started using more rough-looking thumbnails for their videos. AI has made polished thumbnails too easy to create, so top creators are using what Hwang would call “poorly made thumbnails” to help videos stand out.

Hwang told me something surprising: even as AI makes it easier for creators to make thumbnails themselves, business has never been better for thumbnail artists, even at the lower end. He said that demand has soared because “AI as a whole has lowered the barriers for content creation, and now there’s more creators flooding in.”

Still, Hwang doesn’t expect the good times to last forever. “I don’t see AI completely taking over for the next three-ish years. That’s my estimated timeline.”

Everyone I talked to had different answers to when—if ever—AI would meaningfully disrupt their part of the industry.

Some, like Hwang, were pessimistic. Actor Erik Passoja told me he thought the big movie studios—like Warner Bros. or Paramount—would be gone in three to five years.

But others were more optimistic. Tess Dinerstein, the vertical drama actor, said, “I don’t think that verticals are ever going to go fully AI.” Even if it becomes technologically feasible, she argued, “that just doesn’t seem to be what the people want.”

Gille Klabin, the independent filmmaker, thought there would always be a place for high-quality human films. If someone’s work is “fundamentally derivative,” then they are at risk. But he thinks the best human-created work will still stand out. “I don’t know how AI could possibly replace the borderline divine element of consciousness,” he said.

The people who were most bullish on AI were, if anything, the least optimistic about their own career prospects. “I think at a certain point it won’t matter,” Kavan Cardoza told me. “It’ll be that anyone on the planet can just type in some sentences” to generate full, high-quality videos.

This might explain why Accetturo has become something of an AI evangelist; his newsletter tries to teach other filmmakers how to adapt to the coming AI revolution.

AI “is a tsunami that is gonna wipe out everyone” he told me. “So I’m handing out surfboards—teaching people how to surf. Do with it what you will.”

Kai Williams is a reporter for Understanding AI, a Substack newsletter founded by Ars Technica alum Timothy B. Lee. His work is supported by a Tarbell Fellowship. Subscribe to Understanding AI to get more from Tim and Kai.

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Oops. Cryptographers cancel election results after losing decryption key.

Biz & IT, election systems, encryption keys, iacr, international associate for cryptological research, Security / Beth Washington / November 22, 2025

One of the world’s premier security organizations has canceled the results of its annual leadership election after an official lost an encryption key needed to unlock results stored in a verifiable and privacy-preserving voting system.

The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) said Friday that the votes were submitted and tallied using Helios, an open source voting system that uses peer-reviewed cryptography to cast and count votes in a verifiable, confidential, and privacy-preserving way. Helios encrypts each vote in a way that assures each ballot is secret. Other cryptography used by Helios allows each voter to confirm their ballot was counted fairly.

An “honest but unfortunate human mistake”

Per the association’s bylaws, three members of the election committee act as independent trustees. To prevent two of them from colluding to cook the results, each trustee holds a third of the cryptographic key material needed to decrypt results.

“Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share,” the IACR said. “As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election.”

To prevent a similar incident, the IACR will adopt a new mechanism for managing private keys. Instead of requiring all three chunks of private key material, elections will now require only two. Moti Yung, the trustee who was unable to provide his third of the key material, has resigned. He’s being replaced by Michel Abdalla.

The IACR is a nonprofit scientific organization providing research in cryptology and related fields. Cryptology is the science and practice of designing computation and communication systems that remain secure in the presence of adversaries. The associate is holding a new election that started Friday and runs through December 20.

Oops. Cryptographers cancel election results after losing decryption key. Read More »

Return to the year 2000 with classic multiplayer DOS games in your browser

gaming / Beth Washington / November 22, 2025

Chrono Divide is a fan-made project which aims to recreate the original “Red Alert 2” from the “Command & Conquer” series using web technologies. The result is a game client that runs in your web browser, with no additional plugins or applications installed.

The project initially started out as an experiment and was meant to prove that it was possible to have a fully working, cross-platform RTS game running in a web browser. Now, with a playable version already available, the end-goal is reaching feature parity with the original vanilla “Red Alert 2” engine.

It works with a client-server model (“say goodbye to port forwarding and firewall exceptions”), supports mods, offers both modern and classic mouse control schemes, and works “on any device and operating system, directly from your web browser,” including phones and tablets. You (understandably) have to have a copy of the game files to play, though.

Further, there are leaderboards and a Discord server, plus modern-game-style “seasons” (with no monetization, of course) that feature special rules and map rotations. So there’s a decent-sized community playing Red Alert 2 on the regular in 2025, which is pretty wild.

Chrono Divide joins a handful of similar projects in bringing older multiplayer PC games with modern bells and whistles to web browsers. One example: DOS Zone offers one-click joining of online matches of Doom, Quake 2 and 3, Unreal Tournament, and Half-Life: Deathmatch—again, with a Discord server for an extra community layer.

So if you want to spend your Friday night reliving the TCP/IP and LAN party multiplayer games of the early 2000s, well, there you go. I’ll see you there—I still think Unreal Tournament is the best multiplayer first-person shooter ever made.

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How to know if your Asus router is one of thousands hacked by China-state hackers

ASUS, Biz & IT, consumer routers, hacking, Security, state sponsored hacking / Beth Washington / November 22, 2025

Thousands of Asus routers have been hacked and are under the control of a suspected China-state group that has yet to reveal its intentions for the mass compromise, researchers said.

The hacking spree is either primarily or exclusively targeting seven models of Asus routers, all of which are no longer supported by the manufacturer, meaning they no longer receive security patches, researchers from SecurityScorecard said. So far, it’s unclear what the attackers do after gaining control of the devices. SecurityScorecard has named the operation WrtHug.

Staying off the radar

SecurityScorecard said it suspects the compromised devices are being used similarly to those found in ORB (operational relay box) networks, which hackers primarily use to conduct espionage to conceal their identity.

“Having this level of access may enable the threat actor to use any compromised router as they see fit,” SecurityScorecard said. “Our experience with ORB networks suggests compromised devices will commonly be used for covert operations and espionage, unlike DDoS attacks and other types of overt malicious activity typically observed from botnets.”

Compromised routers are concentrated in Taiwan, with smaller clusters in South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Russia, central Europe, and the United States.

The Chinese government has been caught building massive ORB networks for years. In 2021, the French government warned national businesses and organizations that the APT31—one of China’s most active threat groups—was behind a massive attack campaign that used hacked routers to conduct reconnaissance. Last year, at least three similar China-operated campaigns came to light.

Russian-state hackers have been caught doing the same thing, although not as frequently. In 2018, Kremlin actors infected more than 500,000 small office and home routers with sophisticated malware tracked as VPNFilter. A Russian government group was also independently involved in an operation reported in one of the 2024 router hacks linked above.

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Tech company CTO and others indicted for exporting Nvidia chips to China

chip export controls, NVIDIA, Policy / Beth Washington / November 22, 2025

Citing export controls that took effect in 2022, the indictment said the US is trying to disrupt China’s plan to build exascale supercomputers for military and surveillance use. “These capabilities are being used by the PRC for its military modernization efforts and in connection with the PRC’s weapons design and testing, including for weapons of mass destruction, as well as in connection with the PRC’s development and deployment of advanced AI surveillance tools,” the indictment said.

The Justice Department said the conspirators used Janford Realtor, LLC, a Florida-based company that was not involved in real estate despite its name, “as a front to purchase and then illegally export controlled GPUs to the PRC.” Ho and Li owned and controlled Janford Realtor, while Raymond operated an Alabama-based electronics company that “supplied Nvidia GPUs to Ho and others for illegal export to the PRC,” the Justice Department said.

Kickbacks, money laundering

The conspirators paid each other “kickbacks” or commissions on the sale and export of the Nvidia chips, the indictment said. The money laundering charges involve a variety of transfers from two Chinese companies to Janford Realtor and the Alabama electronics company, the indictment said. The indictment lists nine wire transfers in amounts ranging from $237,248 to $1,150,000.

Raymond was reportedly released on bond, while the other three alleged conspirators are being detained. “This is an extremely serious offense. At the time these were being exported, these were Nvidia’s most advanced chips,” US prosecutor Noah Stern told a magistrate judge in Oakland yesterday, according to Wired.

Stein also said in court that “text messages obtained by authorities show Li boasting about how his father ‘had engaged in similar business on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party,’” Wired reported. Stern said that in the messages, Li “explained that his father had ways to import” the Nvidia chips despite US export controls.

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HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops’ CPUs

Biz & IT, dell, HP, laptops, Tech / Beth Washington / November 21, 2025

The OEMs disabling codec hardware also comes as associated costs for the international video compression standard are set to increase in January, as licensing administrator Access Advance announced in July. Per a breakdown from patent pool administration VIA Licensing Alliance, royalty rates for HEVC for over 100,001 units are increasing from $0.20 each to $0.24 each in the United States. To put that into perspective, in Q3 2025, HP sold 15,002,000 laptops and desktops, and Dell sold 10,166,000 laptops and desktops, per Gartner.

Last year, NAS company Synology announced that it was ending support for HEVC, as well as H.264/AVC and VCI, transcoding on its DiskStation Manager and BeeStation OS platforms, saying that “support for video codecs is widespread on end devices, such as smartphones, tablets, computers, and smart TVs.”

“This update reduces unnecessary resource usage on the server and significantly improves media processing efficiency. The optimization is particularly effective in high-user environments compared to traditional server-side processing,” the announcement said.

Despite the growing costs and complications with HEVC licenses and workarounds, breaking features that have been widely available for years will likely lead to confusion and frustration.

“This is pretty ridiculous, given these systems are $800+ a machine, are part of a ‘Pro’ line (jabs at branding names are warranted – HEVC is used professionally), and more applications these days outside of Netflix and streaming TV are getting around to adopting HEVC,” a Redditor wrote.

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Google’s latest swing at Chromebook gaming is a free year of GeForce Now

chromebooks, gaming, GeForce Now, Google, NVIDIA / Beth Washington / November 20, 2025

Earlier this year, Google announced the end of its efforts to get Steam running on Chromebooks, but it’s not done trying to make these low-power laptops into gaming machines. Google has teamed up with Nvidia to offer a version of GeForce Now cloud streaming that is perplexingly limited in some ways and generous in others. Starting today, anyone who buys a Chromebook will get a free year of a new service called GeForce Now Fast Pass. There are no ads and less waiting for server slots, but you don’t get to play very long.

Back before Google killed its Stadia game streaming service, it would often throw in a few months of the Pro subscription with Chromebook purchases. In the absence of its own gaming platform, Google has turned to Nvidia to level up Chromebook gaming. GeForce Now (GFN), which has been around in one form or another for more than a decade, allows you to render games on a remote server and stream the video output to the device of your choice. It works on computers, phones, TVs, and yes, Chromebooks.

The new Chromebook feature is not the same GeForce Now subscription you can get from Nvidia. Fast Pass, which is exclusive to Chromebooks, includes a mishmash of limits and bonuses that make it a pretty strange offering. Fast Pass is based on the free tier of GeForce Now, but users will get priority access to server slots. So no queuing for five or 10 minutes to start playing. It also lacks the ads that Nvidia’s standard free tier includes. Fast Pass also uses the more powerful RTX servers, which are otherwise limited to the $10-per-month ($100 yearly) Performance tier.

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OnePlus 15 review: The end of range anxiety

Features, OnePlus, oneplus 15, Reviews, smartphones, Tech / Beth Washington / November 19, 2025

It keeps going and going and…

OnePlus delivers its second super-fast phone of 2025.

The OnePlus 15 represents a major design change. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

OnePlus got its start courting the enthusiast community by offering blazing-fast phones for a low price. While the prices aren’t quite as low as they once were, the new OnePlus 15 still delivers on value. Priced at $899, this phone sports the latest and most powerful Snapdragon processor, the largest battery in a mainstream smartphone, and a super-fast screen.

The OnePlus 15 still doesn’t deliver the most satisfying software experience, and the camera may actually be a step back for the company, but the things OnePlus gets right are very right. It’s a fast, sleek phone that runs for ages on a charge, and it’s a little cheaper than the competition. But its shortcomings make it hard to recommend this device over the latest from Google or Samsung—or even the flagship phone OnePlus released 10 months ago.

US buyers have time to mull it over, though. Because of the recent government shutdown, Federal Communications Commission approval of the OnePlus 15 has been delayed. The company says it will release the phone as soon as it can, but there’s no exact date yet.

A sleek but conventional design

After a few years of phones with a distinctly “OnePlus” look, the OnePlus 15 changes up the formula by looking more like everything else. The overall shape is closer to that of phones from Samsung, Apple, and Google than the OnePlus 13. That said, the OnePlus 15 is extremely well-designed, and it’s surprisingly lightweight (211g) for how much power it packs. It’s sturdy, offering full IP69K sealing, and it uses the latest Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on the screen. An ultrasonic fingerprint scanner under the display works just as well as any other flagship phone’s fingerprint unlock.

Specs at a glance: OnePlus 15
SoC	Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5
Memory	12GB, 16GB
Storage	256GB, 512GB
Display	2772 x 1272 6.78″ OLED, 1-165 Hz
Cameras	50 MP primary, f/1.8, OIS; 50 MP ultrawide, f/2.0; 50 MP 3.5x telephoto, OIS, f/2.8; 32 MP selfie, f/2.4
Software	Android 16, 4 years of OS updates, six years of security patches
Battery	7,300 mAh, 100 W wired charging (80 W with included plug), 50 W wireless charging
Connectivity	Wi-Fi 7, NFC, Bluetooth 6.0, sub-6 GHz 5G, USB-C 3.2 Gen 1
Measurements	161.4 x 76.7 x 8.1 mm; 211 g

OnePlus managed to cram a 7,300 mAh battery in this phone without increasing the weight compared to last year’s model. Flagship phones like the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and Pixel 10 Pro XL are at 5,000 mAh or a little more, and they weigh the same or a bit more. Adding almost 50 percent capacity on top of that without making the phone ungainly is an impressive feat of engineering.

OnePlus 15 in hand — The display is big, bright, and fast. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

That said, this is still a very large phone. The OLED screen measures 6.78 inches and has a resolution of 1272 x 2772. That’s a little lower than last year’s phone, which almost exactly matched the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s 1440p screen. Even looking at the OP13 and OP15 side-by-side, the difference in display resolution is negligible. You might notice the increased refresh rate, though. During normal use, the OnePlus 15 can hit 120 Hz (or as low as 1 Hz to save power), but in supported games, it can reach 165 Hz.

While the phone’s peak brightness is a bit lower than last year’s phone (3,600 vs. 4,500 nits), that’s not the full-screen brightness you’ll see day to day. The standard high-brightness mode (HMB) rating is a bit higher at 1,800 nits, which is even better than what you’ll get on phones like the Galaxy S25 Ultra. The display is not just readable outside—it looks downright good.

OnePlus offers the phone in a few colors, but the differences are more significant than in your average smartphone lineup. The Sand Storm unit we’ve tested is a light tan color that would be impossible to anodize. Instead, this version of the phone uses a finish known as micro-arc oxidation (MAO), which is supposedly even more durable than PVD titanium. OnePlus says this is the first phone with this finish, but it’s actually wrong about that. The 2012 HTC One S also had an MAO finish that was known to chip over time. OnePlus says its take on MAO is more advanced and was tested with a device known as a nanoindenter that can assess the mechanical properties of a material with microscopic precision.

OnePlus 15 keyboard glamour shot — The OnePlus 15 looks nice, but it also looks more like everything else. It does have an IR blaster, though. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

Durability aside, the MAO finish feels very interesting—it’s matte and slightly soft to the touch but cool like bare metal. It’s very neat, but it’s probably not neat enough to justify an upgrade if you’re looking at the base model. You can only get Sand Storm with the upgraded $999 model, which has 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM.

The Sand Storm variant also has a fiberglass back panel rather than the glass used on other versions of the phone. All colorways have the same squircle camera module in the corner, sporting three large-ish sensors. Unlike some competing devices, the camera bump isn’t too prominent. So the phone almost lies flat—it still rocks a bit when sitting on a table, but not as much as phones like the Galaxy S25 Ultra.

For years, OnePlus set itself apart with the alert slider, but this is the company’s first flagship phone to drop that feature. Instead, you get a configurable action button similar to the iPhone. By default, the “Plus Key” connects to the Plus Mind AI platform, allowing you to take screenshots and record voice notes to load them instantly into the AI. More on that later.

Alert slider and button — The Plus Key (bottom) has replaced the alert slider (top). We don’t like this. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

You can change the key to controlling ring mode, the flashlight, or several other features. However, the button feels underutilized, and the default behavior is odd. You don’t exactly need an entire physical control to take screenshots when that’s already possible by holding the power and volume down buttons like on any other phone. The alert slider will be missed.

Software and AI

The OnePlus 15 comes with OxygenOS 16, which is based on Android 16. The software is essentially the same as what you’d find on OnePlus and Oppo phones in China but with the addition of Google services. The device inherits some quirks from the Chinese version of the software, known as ColorOS. Little by little, the international OxygenOS has moved closer to the software used in China. For example, OnePlus is very invested in slick animations in OxygenOS, which can be a bit distracting at times.

Some things that should be simple often take multiple confirmation steps in OxygenOS. Case in point: Removing an app from your home screen requires a long-press and two taps, and OnePlus chose to separate icon colors and system colors in the labyrinthian theming menu. There are also so many little features vying for your attention that it takes a day or two just to encounter all of them and tap through the on-screen tutorials.

Mind Space OnePlus — Plus Mind aims to organize your data in screenshots and voice notes. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

OnePlus has continued aping the iPhone to an almost embarrassing degree with this phone. There are Dynamic Island-style notifications for Android’s live alerts, which look totally alien in this interface. The app drawer also has a category view like iOS, but the phone doesn’t know what most of our installed apps are. Thus, “Other” becomes the largest category, making this view rather useless.

OnePlus was a bit slower than most to invest in generative AI features, but there are plenty baked into the OnePlus 15. The most prominent AI feature is Mind Space, which lets you save voice notes and screenshots with the Plus Key; they become searchable after being processed with AI. This is most similar to Nothing’s Essential Space. Google’s Pixel Screenshots app doesn’t do voice, but it offers a more conversational interface that can pull information from your screens rather than just find them, which is all Mind Space can do.

While OnePlus has arguably the most capable on-device AI hardware with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, it’s not relying on it for much AI processing. Only some content from Plus Mind is processed locally, and the rest is uploaded to the company’s Private Computing Cloud. Features like AI Writer and the AI Recorder operate entirely in the cloud system. There’s also an AI universal search feature that sends information to the cloud, but this is thankfully disabled by default. OnePlus says it has full control of these servers, noting that encryption prevents anyone else (even OnePlus itself) from accessing your data.

OnePlus apps — The categorized app drawer is bad at recognizing apps. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

So OnePlus is at least saying the right things about privacy—Google has a similar pitch for its new private AI cloud compute environment. Regardless of whether you believe that, though, there are other drawbacks to leaning so heavily on the cloud. Features that run workloads in the Private Computing Cloud will have more latency and won’t work without a solid internet connection. It also just seems like a bit of a waste not to take advantage of Qualcomm’s super-powerful on-device capabilities.

AI features on the OnePlus 15 are no more or less useful than the versions on other current smartphones. If you want a robot to write Internet comments for you, the OnePlus 15 can do that just fine. If you don’t want to use AI on your phone, you can remap the Plus Key to something else and ignore the AI-infused stock apps. There are plenty of third-party alternatives that don’t have AI built in.

OnePlus doesn’t have the best update policy, but it’s gotten better over time. The OnePlus 15 is guaranteed four years of OS updates and six years of security patches. The market leaders are Google and Samsung, which offer seven years of full support.

Performance and battery

There’s no two ways about it: The OnePlus 15 is a ridiculously fast phone. This is the first Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 device we’ve tested, and it definitely puts Qualcomm’s latest silicon to good use. This chip has eight Oryon CPU cores, with clock speeds as high as 4.6 GHz. It’s almost as fast as the Snapdragon X Elite laptop chips.

Even though OnePlus has some unnecessarily elaborate animations, you never feel like you’re waiting on the phone to catch up. Every tap is detected accurately, and app launches are near instantaneous. The Gen 5 is faster than last year’s flagship processor, but don’t expect the OnePlus 15 to run at full speed indefinitely.

In our testing, the phone pulls back 10 to 20 percent under thermal load to manage heat. The OP15 has a new, larger vapor chamber that seems to keep the chipset sufficiently cool during extended gaming sessions. That heat has to go somewhere, though. The phone gets noticeably toasty in the hand during sustained use.

The OnePlus 15 behaves a bit differently in benchmark apps, maintaining high speeds longer to attain higher scores. This tuning reveals just how much heat an unrestrained Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 can produce. After running flat-out for 20 minutes, the phone loses only a little additional speed, but the case gets extremely hot. Parts of the phone reached a scorching 130° Fahrenheit, which is hot enough to burn your skin after about 30 seconds. During a few stress tests, the phone completely closed all apps and disabled functions like the LED flash to manage heat.

The unthrottled benchmarks do set a new record. The OnePlus 15 tops almost every test—Apple’s iPhone 17 Pro eked out the only win in Geekbench single-core—Snapdragon has always fallen short in single-core throughput in past Apple-Qualcomm matchups, but it wins on multicore performance.

The Snapdragon chip uses a lot of power when it’s cranked up, but the OnePlus 15 has battery to spare. The 7,300 mAh silicon-carbide cell is enormous compared to the competition, which hovers around 5,000 mAh in other big phones. This is one of the very few smartphones that you don’t have to charge every night. In fact, making it through two or three days with this device is totally doable. And that’s without toggling on the phone’s battery-saving mode.

OnePlus also shames the likes of Google and Samsung when it comes to charging speed. The phone comes with a charger in the box—a rarity these days. This adapter can charge the phone at an impressive 80 W, and OnePlus will offer a 100 W charger on its site. With the stock charger, you can completely charge the massive battery in a little over 30 minutes. It almost doesn’t matter that the battery is so big because a few minutes plugged in gives you more than enough to head out the door. Just plug the phone in while you look for your keys, and you’re good to go. The phone also supports 50 W wireless charging with a OnePlus dock, but that’s obviously not included.

OnePlus 15 side — There is somehow a 7,300 mAh battery in there. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

Unfortunately, only chargers and cables compatible with Oppo’s SuperVOOC system will reach these speeds. It’s nice to see one in the box because spares will cost you the better part of $100. Even if you aren’t using an official OnePlus charger/cable, a standard USB-PD plug can still hit 36 W, which is faster than phones like the Pixel 10 Pro and Galaxy S25 and about the same as the iPhone 17.

Cameras

OnePlus partnered with imaging powerhouse Hasselblad on its last several flagship phones, but that pairing is over with the launch of the OnePlus 15. The phone maker is now going it alone, swapping Hasselblad’s processing for a new imaging engine called DetailMax. The hardware is changing, too.

OnePlus 15 has new camera sensors despite featuring the same megapixel count. There’s a 50 MP primary wide-angle, a 50 MP telephoto with 3.5x effective zoom, and a 50 MP ultrawide with support for macro shots. There’s a 32 MP selfie camera peeking through the OLED as well.

Each of these sensors is physically smaller than last year’s OnePlus cameras by a small margin. That means they can’t collect as much light, but good processing can make up for minor physical changes like that. That’s the problem, though.

Taking photos with the OnePlus 15 can be frustrating because the image processing misses as much as it hits. The colors, temperature, dynamic range, and detail are not very consistent. Images taken in similar conditions of similar objects—even those taken one after the other—can have dramatically different results. Color balance is also variable across the three rear sensors.

Bright outdoor light, fast movement. Ryan Whitwam

By that token, some of the photos we’ve taken on the OnePlus 15 are great. These are usually outdoor shots, where the phone has plenty of light. It’s not bad at capturing motion in these instances, and photos are sharp as long as the frame isn’t too busy. However, DetailMax has a tendency to oversharpen, which obliterates fine details and makes images look the opposite of detailed. This is much more obvious in dim lighting, with longer exposures that lead to blurry subjects more often than not.

Adding any digital zoom to your framing is generally a bad idea on the OnePlus 15. The processing just doesn’t have the capacity to clean up those images like a Google Pixel or even a Samsung Galaxy. The telephoto lens is good for getting closer to your subject, but the narrow aperture and smaller pixels make it tough to rely on indoors. Again, outdoor images are substantially better.

Shooting landscapes with the ultrawide is a good experience. The oversharpening isn’t as apparent in bright outdoor conditions, and there’s very little edge distortion. However, the field of view is narrower than on the OnePlus 13’s ultrawide camera, so that makes sense. Macro shots are accomplished with this same lens, and the results are better than you’ll get with any dedicated macro lens on a phone. That said, blurriness and funky processing creep in often enough that backing up and shooting a normal photo can serve you better, particularly if there isn’t much light.

A tale of two flagships

The OnePlus 15 is not the massive leap you might expect from skipping a number. The formula is largely unchanged from its last few devices—it’s blazing fast and well-built, but everything else is something of an afterthought.

You probably won’t be over the moon for the OnePlus 15, but it’s a good, pragmatic choice. It runs for days on a charge, you barely have to touch it with a power cable to get a full day’s use, and it manages that incredible battery life while being fast as hell. Honestly, it’s a little too fast in benchmarks, with the frame reaching borderline dangerous temperatures. The phone might get a bit warm in games, but it will maintain frame rates better than anything else on the market, up to 165 fps in titles that support its ultra-fast screen.

OnePlus 13 and 15 — The OnePlus 13 (left) looked quite different compared to the 15 (right) Credit: Ryan Whitwam

However, the software can be frustrating at times, with inconsistent interfaces and unnecessarily arduous usage flows. OnePlus is also too dependent on sending your data to the cloud for AI analysis. You can avoid that by simply not using OnePlus’ AI features, and luckily, it’s pretty easy to avoid them.

It’s been less than a year since the OnePlus 13 arrived, but the company really wanted to be the first to get the new Snapdragon in everyone’s hands. So here we are with a second 2025 OnePlus flagship. If you have the OnePlus 13, there’s no reason to upgrade. That phone is arguably better, even though it doesn’t have the latest Snapdragon chip or an enormous battery. It still lasts more than long enough on a charge, and the cameras perform a bit better. You also can’t argue with that alert slider.

The Good

Incredible battery life and charging speed
Great display
Durable design, cool finish on Sand Storm colorway
Blazing fast

The Bad

Lots of AI features that run in the cloud
Cameras a step down from OnePlus 13
OxygenOS is getting cluttered
RIP the alert slider
Blazing hot

Ryan Whitwam is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering the ways Google, AI, and mobile technology continue to change the world. Over his 20-year career, he’s written for Android Police, ExtremeTech, Wirecutter, NY Times, and more. He has reviewed more phones than most people will ever own. You can follow him on Bluesky, where you will see photos of his dozens of mechanical keyboards.

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Bonkers Bitcoin heist: 5-star hotels, cash-filled envelopes, vanishing funds

Biz & IT, Security, syndication / Beth Washington / November 18, 2025

Bitcoin mining hardware exec falls for sophisticated crypto scam to tune of $200k

As Kent Halliburton stood in a bathroom at the Rosewood Hotel in central Amsterdam, thousands of miles from home, running his fingers through an envelope filled with 10,000 euros in crisp banknotes, he started to wonder what he had gotten himself into.

Halliburton is the cofounder and CEO of Sazmining, a company that operates bitcoin mining hardware on behalf of clients—a model known as “mining-as-a-service.” Halliburton is based in Peru, but Sazmining runs mining hardware out of third-party data centers across Norway, Paraguay, Ethiopia, and the United States.

As Halliburton tells it, he had flown to Amsterdam the previous day, August 5, to meet Even and Maxim, two representatives of a wealthy Monaco-based family. The family office had offered to purchase hundreds of bitcoin mining rigs from Sazmining—around $4 million worth—which the company would install at a facility currently under construction in Ethiopia. Before finalizing the deal, the family office had asked to meet Halliburton in person.

When Halliburton arrived at the Rosewood Hotel, he found Even and Maxim perched in a booth. They struck him as playboy, high-roller types—particularly Maxim, who wore a tan three-piece suit and had a highly manicured look, his long dark hair parted down the middle. A Rolex protruded from the cuff of his sleeve.

Over a three-course lunch—ceviche with a roe garnish, Chilean sea bass, and cherry cake—they discussed the contours of the deal and traded details about their respective backgrounds. Even was talkative and jocular, telling stories about blowout parties in Marrakech. Maxim was aloof; he mostly stared at Halliburton, holding his gaze for long periods at a time as though sizing him up.

As a relationship-building exercise, Even proposed that Halliburton sell the family office around $3,000 in bitcoin. Halliburton was initially hesitant, but chalked it up as a peculiar dating ritual. One of the guys slid Halliburton the cash-filled envelope and told him to go to the bathroom, where he could count out the amount in private. “It felt like something out of a James Bond movie,” says Halliburton. “It was all very exotic to me.”

Halliburton left in a taxi, somewhat bemused by the encounter, but otherwise hopeful of closing the deal with the family office. For Sazmining, a small company with around 15 employees, it promised to be transformative.

Less than two weeks later, Halliburton had lost more than $200,000 worth of bitcoin to Even and Maxim. He didn’t know whether Sazmining could survive the blow, nor how the scammers had ensnared him.

Directly after his lunch with Even and Maxim, Halliburton flew to Latvia for a Bitcoin conference. From there, he traveled to Ethiopia to check on construction work at the data center facility.

While Halliburton was in Ethiopia, he received a WhatsApp message from Even, who wanted to go ahead with the deal on one condition: that Sazmining sell the family office a larger amount of bitcoin as part of the transaction, after the small initial purchase at the Rosewood Hotel. They landed on $400,000 worth—a tenth of the overall deal value.

Even asked Halliburton to return to Amsterdam to sign the contracts necessary to finalize the deal. Having been away from his family for weeks, Halliburton protested. But Even drew a line in the sand: “Remotely doesn’t work for me that’s not how I do business at the moment,” he wrote in a text message reviewed by WIRED.

Halliburton arrived back in Amsterdam in the early afternoon on August 16. That evening, he was due to meet Maxim at a teppanyaki restaurant at the five-star Okura Hotel. The interior is elaborately decorated in traditional Japanese style; it has wooden paneling, paper walls, a zen garden, and a flock of origami cranes that hang from string down a spiral staircase in the lobby.

Halliburton found Maxim sitting on a couch in the waiting area outside the restaurant, dressed in a gaudy silver suit. As they waited for a table, Maxim asked Halliburton whether he could demonstrate that Sazmining held enough bitcoin to go through with the side transaction that Even had proposed. He wanted Halliburton to move roughly half of the agreed amount—worth $220,000—into a bitcoin wallet app trusted by the family office. The funds would remain under Halliburton’s control, but the family office would be able to verify their existence using public transaction data.

Halliburton thumbed open his iPhone. The app, Atomic Wallet, had thousands of positive reviews and had been listed on the Apple App Store for several years. With Maxim at his side, Halliburton downloaded the app and created a new wallet. “I was trying to earn this guy’s trust,” says Halliburton. “Again, a $4 million contract. I’m still looking at that carrot.”

The dinner passed largely without incident. Maxim was less guarded this time; he talked about his fondness for watches and his work sourcing deals for the family office. Feeling under the weather from all the travel, Halliburton angled to wrap things up.

They left with the understanding that Maxim would take the signed contracts to the family office to be executed, while Halliburton would send the $220,000 in bitcoin to his new wallet address as agreed.

Back in his hotel room, Halliburton triggered a small test transaction using his new Atomic Wallet address. Then he wiped and reinstated the wallet using the private credentials—the seed phrase—generated when he first downloaded the app, to make sure that it functioned as expected. “Had to take some security measures but almost ready. Thanks for your patience,” wrote Halliburton in a WhatsApp message to Even. “No worries take your time,” Even responded.

At 10: 45 pm, satisfied with his tests, Halliburton signaled to a colleague to release $220,000 worth of bitcoin to the Atomic Wallet address. When it arrived, he sent a screenshot of the updated balance to Even. One minute later, Even wrote back, “Thank yiu [sic].”

Halliburton sent another message to Even, asking about the contracts. Though previously quick to answer, Even didn’t respond. Halliburton checked the Atomic Wallet app, sensing that something was wrong. The bitcoin had vanished.

Halliburton’s stomach dropped. As he sat on the bed, he tried to stop himself from vomiting. “It was like being punched in the gut,” says Halliburton. “It was just shock and disbelief.”

Halliburton racked his brain trying to figure out how he had been swindled. At 11: 30 pm, he sent another message to Even: “That was the most sophisticated scam I’ve ever experienced. I know you probably don’t give a shit but my business may not survive this. I’ve worked four years of my life to build it.”

Even responded, denying that he had done anything wrong, but that was the last Halliburton heard from him. Halliburton provided WIRED with the Telegram account Even had used; it was last active on the day the funds were drained. Even did not respond to a request for comment.

Within hours, the funds drained from Halliburton’s wallet began to be divided up, shuffled through a web of different addresses, and deposited with third-party platforms for converting crypto into regular currency, analysis by blockchain analytics companies Chainalysis and CertiK shows.

A portion of the bitcoin was split between different instant exchangers, which allow people to swap one type of cryptocurrency for another almost instantaneously. The bulk was funneled into a single address, where it was blended with funds tagged by Chainalysis as the likely proceeds of rip deals, a scam whereby somebody impersonates an investor to steal crypto from a startup.

“There’s nothing illegal about the services the scammer leveraged,” says Margaux Eckle, senior investigator at Chainalysis. “However, the fact that they leveraged consolidation addresses that appear very tightly connected to labeled scam activity is potentially indicative of a fraud operation.”

Some of the bitcoin that passed through the consolidation address was deposited with a crypto exchange, where it was likely swapped for regular currency. The remainder was converted into stablecoin and moved across so-called bridges to the Tron blockchain, which hosts several over-the-counter trading services that can be readily used to cash out large quantities of crypto, researchers claim.

The effect of the many hops, shuffles, conversions, and divisions is to make it more difficult to trace the origin of funds, so that they can be cashed out without arousing suspicion. “The scammer is quite sophisticated,” says Eckle. “Though we can trace through a bridge, it’s a way to slow the tracing of funds from investigators that could be on your tail.”

Eventually, the trail of public transaction data stops. To identify the perpetrators, law enforcement would have to subpoena the services that appear to have been used to cash out, which are widely required to collect information about users.

From the transaction data, it’s not possible to tell precisely how the scammers were able to access and drain Halliburton’s wallet without his permission. But aspects of his interactions with the scammers provide some clue.

Initially, Halliburton wondered whether the incident might be connected to a 2023 hack perpetrated by threat actors affiliated with the North Korean government, which led to $100 million worth of funds being drained from the accounts of Atomic Wallet users. (Atomic Wallet did not respond to a request for comment.)

But instead, the security researchers that spoke to WIRED believe that Halliburton fell victim to a targeted surveillance-style attack. “Executives who are publicly known to custody large crypto balances make attractive targets,” says Guanxing Wen, head of security research at CertiK.

The in-person dinners, expensive clothing, reams of cash, and other displays of wealth were gambits meant to put Halliburton at ease, researchers theorize. “This is a well-known rapport-building tactic in high-value confidence schemes,” says Wen. “The longer a victim spends with the attacker in a relaxed setting, the harder it becomes to challenge a later technical request.”

In order to complete the theft, the scammers likely had to steal the seed phrase for Halliburton’s newly created Atomic Wallet address. Equipped with a wallet’s seed phrase, anyone can gain unfettered access to the bitcoin kept inside.

One possibility is that the scammers, who dictated the locations for both meetings in Amsterdam, hijacked or mimicked the hotel Wi-Fi networks, allowing them to harvest information from Halliburton’s phone. “That equipment you can buy online, no problem. It would all fit inside a couple of suitcases,” says Adrian Cheek, lead researcher at cybersecurity company Coeus. But Halliburton insists that his phone never left his possession, and he used mobile data to download the Atomic Wallet app, not public Wi-Fi.

The most plausible explanation, claims Wen, is that the scammers—perhaps with the help of a nearby accomplice or a camera equipped with long-range zoom—were able to record the seed phrase when it appeared on Halliburton’s phone at the point he first downloaded the app, on the couch at the Okura Hotel.

Long before Halliburton delivered the $220,000 in bitcoin to his Atomic Wallet address, the scammers had probably set up a “sweeper script,” claims Wen, a type of automated bot coded to drain a wallet when it detects a large balance change.

The people the victim meets in-person in cases like this—like Even and Maxim—are rarely the ultimate beneficiaries, but rather mercenaries hired by a network of scam artists, who could be based on the other side of the globe.

“They’re normally recruited through underground forums, and secure chat groups,” says Cheek. “If you know where you’re looking, you can see this ongoing recruitment.”

For a few days, it remained unclear whether Sazmining would be able to weather the financial blow. The stolen funds equated to about six weeks’ worth of revenue. “I’m trying to keep the business afloat and survive this situation where suddenly we’ve got a cash crunch,” says Halliburton. By delaying payment to a vendor and extending the duration of an outstanding loan, the company was ultimately able to remain solvent.

That week, one of the Sazmining board members filed reports with law enforcement bodies in the Netherlands, the UK, and the US. They received acknowledgements from only UK-based Action Fraud, which said it would take no immediate action, and the Cyber Fraud Task Force, a division of the US Secret Service. (The CFTF did not respond to a request for comment.)

The incredible volume of crypto-related scam activity makes it all but impossible for law enforcement to investigate each theft individually. “It’s a type of threat and criminal activity that is reaching a scale that’s completely unprecedented,” says Eckle.

The best chance of a scam victim recovering their funds is for law enforcement to bust an entire scam ring, says Eckle. In that scenario, any funds recovered are typically dispersed to those who have reported themselves victims.

Until such a time, Halliburton has to make his peace with the loss. “It’s still painful,” he says. But “it wasn’t a death blow.”

This story originally appeared on Wired.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

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Tesla safety driver falls asleep during passenger’s robotaxi ride

Cars, Tesla, Tesla robotaxi / Beth Washington / November 18, 2025

Later in the thread, another poster claims to have had the same safety driver who also fell asleep, this time on a traffic-choked drive from Temescal to San Francisco.

Being a human safety driver in an autonomous car is a relatively hard task, and Waymo insists on a lot of training before letting its employees loose in its cars on the road. It’s possible that Tesla is being far less diligent in this regard.

Tesla’s robotaxi experiment is proving to be more fraught than, say, Waymo’s. There have been at least seven crashes since the launch of its Austin trial in July, although Tesla continues to redact the data it provides to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Its operation in California may be even more shaky. Although Tesla Robotaxi LLC has a permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test autonomous cars on public roads with a safety driver, it has no permits from the California Public Utilities Commission for autonomous vehicles. CPUC permits are required to test or deploy an autonomous vehicle with or without a safety driver onboard. (In March, Tesla obtained a permit to operate a conventional ride-hailing service with human drivers.)

Ars has reached out to Tesla regarding the sleeping driver and the status of its California ride-hailing operation and will update this article if we hear back.

Tesla safety driver falls asleep during passenger’s robotaxi ride Read More »

The evolution of rationality: How chimps process conflicting evidence

Behavioral science, beliefs, Biology, chimps, evolution, Science / Beth Washington / November 16, 2025

In the first step, the chimps got the auditory evidence, the same rattling sound coming from the first container. Then, they received indirect visual evidence: a trail of peanuts leading to the second container. At this point, the chimpanzees picked the first container, presumably because they viewed the auditory evidence as stronger. But then the team would remove a rock from the first container. The piece of rock suggested that it was not food that was making the rattling sound. “At this point, a rational agent should conclude, ‘The evidence I followed is now defeated and I should go for the other option,’” Engelmann told Ars. “And that’s exactly what the chimpanzees did.”

The team had 20 chimpanzees participating in all five experiments, and they followed the evidence significantly above chance level—in about 80 percent of the cases. “At the individual level, about 18 out of 20 chimpanzees followed this expected pattern,” Engelmann claims.

He views this study as one of the first steps to learn how rationality evolved and when the first sparks of rational thought appeared in nature. “We’re doing a lot of research to answer exactly this question,” Engelmann says.

The team thinks rationality is not an on/off switch; instead, different animals have different levels of rationality. “The first two experiments demonstrate a rudimentary form of rationality,” Engelmann says. “But experiments four and five are quite difficult and show a more advanced form of reflective rationality I expect only chimps and maybe bonobos to have.”

In his view, though, humans are still at least one level above the chimps. “Many people say reflective rationality is the final stage, but I think you can go even further. What humans have is something I would call social rationality,” Engelmann claims. “We can discuss and comment on each other’s thinking and in that process make each other even more rational.”

Sometimes, at least in humans, social interactions can also increase our irrationality instead. But chimps don’t seem to have this problem. Engelmann’s team is currently running a study focused on whether the choices chimps make are influenced by the choices of their fellow chimps. “The chimps only followed the other chimp’s decision when the other chimp had better evidence,” Engelmann says. “In this sense, chimps seem to be more rational than humans.”

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.aeb7565

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US may owe $1 trillion in refunds if SCOTUS cancels Trump tariffs

Donald Trump, Policy, reciprocal tariffs, tariffs / Beth Washington / November 15, 2025

Tech industry primed for big refunds if SCOTUS rules against Trump tariffs.

If Donald Trump loses his Supreme Court fight over tariffs, the US may be forced to return “tens of billions of dollars to companies that have paid import fees this year, plus interest,” The Atlantic reported. And the longer the verdict is delayed, the higher the refunds could go, possibly even hitting $1 trillion.

For tech companies both large and small, the stakes are particularly high. A Trump defeat would not just mean clawing back any duties paid on imports to the US that companies otherwise can use to invest in their competitiveness. But, more critically in the long term, it would also end tariff shocks that, as economics lecturer Matthew Allen emphasized in a report for The Conversation, risked harming “innovation itself” by destabilizing global partnerships and diverse supply chains in “tech-intensive, IP-led sectors like semiconductors and software.”

Currently, the Supreme Court is weighing two cases that argue that the US president does not have unilateral authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Defending his regime of so-called “reciprocal tariffs,” Trump argued these taxes were necessary to correct the “emergency” of enduring trade imbalances that he alleged have unfairly enriched other countries while bringing the US “to the brink of catastrophic decline.”

Not everyone thinks Trump will lose. But after oral arguments last week, prediction markets dropped Trump’s odds of winning from 50 to 25 percent, Forbes reported, due to Supreme Court justices appearing skeptical.

Dozens of economists agreed: Trump’s tariffs are “odd”

Justices may have been swayed by dozens of leading economists who weighed in. In one friend of the court brief, more than 40 economists, public policy researchers, and former government officials argued that Trump’s got it all wrong when he claims that “sustained trade deficits” have “fostered dependency on foreign rivals and gutted American manufacturing.”

Far from being “unusual and extraordinary,” they argued that trade deficits are “rather ordinary and commonplace.” And rather than being a sign of US weakness, the deficits instead indicate that the US has a “foreign investment surplus,” as other countries clearly consider the US “a superior investment.”

Look no further than the tech sector for a prominent example, they suggested, noting that “the United States has the dominant technology sector in the world and, as a result, has been running a persistent surplus in trade in services for decades.” Citing a quip from Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow—“I have a chronic deficit with my barber, who doesn’t buy a darned thing from me”—economists argued that trade deficits are never inherently problematic.

“It is odd to economists, to say the least, for the United States government to attempt to rebalance trade on a country-by-country basis,” economists wrote, as Trump seems to do with his trade deals imposing reciprocal tariffs as high as 145 percent.

SCOTUS urged to end “perfect storm of uncertainty”

Trump has been on a mission to use tariffs to force more manufacturing back into the US. He has claimed that the court undoing his trade deals would be an “economic disaster” and “would literally destroy the United States of America.” And the longer it takes for the verdict to come out, the more damage the verdict could do, his administration warned, as the US continues to collect tariffs and Trump continues to strike deals that hinge on reciprocal tariffs being in play.

However, in another friend-of-court brief, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) and the Chamber of Commerce (CoC) argued that the outcome is worse for US businesses if the court defers to Trump.

“The current administration’s use of IEEPA to impose virtually unbounded tariffs is not only unprecedented but is causing irreparable harm” to each group’s members by “increasing their costs, undermining their ability to plan for the future, and in some cases, threatening their very existence,” their filing said.

“The tariffs are particularly damaging to American manufacturing,” they argued, complaining that “American manufacturers face higher prices for raw materials than their foreign competitors, destroying any comparative advantage the tariffs were allegedly meant to create.”

Further, businesses face decreased exports of their products, as well as retaliatory tariffs from any countries striking back at Trump—which “affect $223 billion of US exports and are expected to eliminate an additional 141,000 jobs,” CTA and CoC estimated.

Innovation “thrives on collaboration, trust and scale,” Allen, the economics lecturer, noted, joining critics warning that Trump risked hobbling not just US tech dominance by holding onto seemingly misguided protectionist beliefs but also the European Union’s and the United Kingdom’s.

Meanwhile, the CTA and CoC argued that Trump has other ways to impose tariffs that have been authorized by Congress and do not carry the same risks of destabilizing key US industries, such as the tech sector. Under Section 122, which many critics argued is the authority Trump should be using to impose the reciprocal tariffs, Trump would be limited to a 15 percent tariff for no more than 150 days, trade scholars noted in yet another brief SCOTUS reviewed.

“But the President’s claimed IEEPA authority contains no such limits” CTA and CoC noted. “At whim, he has increased, decreased, suspended, or reimposed tariffs, generating the perfect storm of uncertainty.”

US may end up owing $1 trillion in refunds

Economists urged SCOTUS to intervene and stop Trump’s attempt to seize authority to impose boundless reciprocal tariffs—arguing the economic impact “is predicted to be far greater than in two programs” SCOTUS previously struck, including the Biden administration’s $50 billion plan for student loan forgiveness.

In September, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned justices that “the amount to be refunded could be between $750 billion and $1 trillion if the court waits until next summer before issuing a ruling that says the tariffs have to be repaid,” CNBC reported.

During oral arguments, Justice Amy Coney Barrett fretted that undoing Trump’s tariffs could be “messy,” CNBC reported.

However, some business owners—who joined the We Pay Tariffs coalition weighing in on the SCOTUS case—told CNBC that they think it could be relatively straightforward, since customs forms contain line items detailing which tariffs were paid. Businesses could be paid in lump sums or even future credits, they suggested.

Rick Muskat, CEO of family-run shoe company DeerStags, told CNBC that his company paid more than $1 million in tariffs so far, but “it should be simple for importers to apply for refunds based on this tariff itemization.” If the IRS can issue repayments for tax overpayments, US Customs should have “no problem” either, he suggested—especially since the agency automatically refunded US importers with no issue during a 2018 conflict, CNBC reported.

If there aren’t automatic refunds, though, things could get sticky. Filing paperwork required to challenge various tariffs may become “time-consuming and difficult” for some businesses, particularly those dealing with large shipments where only some products may have been taxed.

There’s also the issue that some countries’ tariffs—like China’s—changed “multiple times,” Joyce Adetutu, a partner at the law firm Vinson & Elkins, told CNBC. “It is going to take quite a bit of time untangling all of that, and it will be an administrative burden,” Adetutu said.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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Author name: Beth Washington