Good morning. Thoughts and prayers to the families of those who lost their lives on Sunday when an Amazon Air cargo plane overran the runway in Miami.
It’s a sobering reminder that all that one-tap, next-day e-commerce we love so much comes courtesy of real humans in real vehicles moving goods across real distances—easily forgotten in our frictionless virtual economy.
Just how many airplanes does Amazon have, anyway? Roundabout 100, most of them leased, flying more than double that number in flights each day to destinations across the globe. The biggest aircraft in the fleet, Boeing’s 767-300F, typically carries about 116,000 lbs. of cargo. That’s a lot of kitchen organizers.
Today’s tech news follows. Have a productive day. —Andrew Nusca
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U.S. regulators investigate Tesla’s Cybercabs
Do Tesla’s new robotaxis comply with U.S. safety rules if they don’t have steering wheels? Federal regulators would love to know.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, says it’s looking into the matter a day after Tesla made its Cybercabs—which lack not only steering wheels but mirrors and brake pedals, thanks to their autonomous driving system—available for rides in Austin, Texas.
Prior to the launch, Tesla said it self-certified the vehicles’ roadworthiness. In a filing, the NHTSA says it plans to “examine the process and technical data” Tesla used.
Like rivals Waymo and Zoox, Tesla hopes to roll out its robotaxi service nationwide. But there are many bumps along the way—including vehicular regulations written solely for human-operated vehicles.
A going concern: How can human passengers take over control of the vehicle in an emergency if there aren’t actual controls to do so?
This isn’t the first time a robotaxi operator ran into the issue. Three years ago, Amazon-owned Zoox self-certified its vehicles, which lack steering wheels. The company ultimately received approval from regulators, but not without a formal review.
It certainly doesn’t help that federal regulators have Tesla’s self-driving capabilities under a microscope in other contexts. One investigation is focused on the role software played in collisions involving fog, glare, and other conditions where sensor visibility is impacted. Another probe is looking at why dozens of partially self-driving-equipped Teslas were willing to run red lights or drive on the wrong side of the road. —AN
OpenAI’s agents secretly used a German wiki to communicate
OpenAI failed to disclose an incident in which a swarm of its AI agents hijacked a German wiki site earlier this year.
The incident closely paralleled the sequence of events that in July resulted in another group of OpenAI’s agents launching cyberattacks against the company Hugging Face.
OpenAI only confirmed the incident after Reuters first reported it. That story contained strong circumstantial evidence that OpenAI was aware of the wiki attack, as well as comments from unnamed OpenAI employees acknowledging that they had known of the agent swarm targeting the wiki for weeks but had been pressured by OpenAI executives to keep quiet about it.
OpenAI later issued a statement denying that any lawyers from the company had pressured the employees.
OpenAI said it considered the “wiki incident” to be an instance of misalignment—when an AI system fails to follow human intentions—similar to ones it had already disclosed and argued that the AI industry lacks a standard for disclosing incidents in which its models behave in unintended ways.
In the hijacking, OpenAI’s agents repurposed the wiki site to act as a message board where they shared tips about how to cheat on evaluation tasks OpenAI was assessing them on.
This is similar to the way AI agents in the Hugging Face incident used an OpenAI file sharing service as a message board to coordinate how to cheat on a cyber assessment, including finding ways to gain network and internet access they were not supposed to have, and then how to attack Hugging Face’s systems.
The incident has renewed scrutiny of how transparent AI companies are about their models’ failures. —Beatrice Nolan
The typical tech leader’s pay rose $810,000 since 2021
Technology leaders have spent nearly four years evangelizing about the ways AI will change every aspect of work life. One of the most measurable changes so far however has been to tech chiefs’ own paychecks.
Median reported compensation for executives with “technology” in the title reached $2.6 million in the most recent fiscal year, up a whopping 45.4% from 2021, according to data compiled for Fortune by executive pay analytics firm C-suite Comp.
The rising pay for tech execs was leagues above what their peers in the C-suite saw, with median compensation increasing 18.3% for COOs, 17.2% for CEOs, 15% for CFOs, and 9.2% for chief information officers.
The gain was larger in dollars, too, which is even more unusual. Median pay for chief technology officers rose $809,587 from 2021 to 2025 while median pay for CEOs—typically the C-suite leader most likely to reap massive pay rewards—only rose $698,399.
And that was from a starting point twice as high as CTOs. Operating, finance, and information chiefs gained $725,584 among all three roles combined at the median.
“Strategic CTOs are a real value-add for these companies,” said Dan Laddin, founding partner at consulting firm Compensation Advisory Partners, who advises boards on pay programs. “So people who can do that, and lead that side of the business—you are seeing a dramatic increase.”
CTOs are nowhere close to catching up to CEOs, but the outward signal about the priority of the role is clear. The typical CEO was paid $2.27 million more than the typical CTO in 2021, and about $2.16 million more in the most recent year. —Amanda Gerut
More tech
—Tired? Bifold phones. Wired? Trifold phones such as Huawei’s Mate XT 2.
—Liquid Network, a crypto settlement layer, halts new transactions after hackers drained $320 million worth of Bitcoin.
—Complaints of cryptocurrency investment fraud to the FBI rose by nearly 50% in 2025.
—Matt Clifford steps down as the chair of ARIA, the U.K. government's science and tech research group, after joining Anthropic.
—Indian space tech startup Pixxel raises $100 million from Temasek and others.
—Shein: One of the worst opening weeks after a major Hong Kong listing. It’s lost about $5 billion in market value since its IPO.
—Insilico, which uses AI to assist drug discovery, says the drug Rentosertib could slow aging.