This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
The “steroid olympics” were a circus—and a window into our culture
—Amit Katwala
A couple of weeks ago, at a $50 million arena built in a casino parking lot in Las Vegas, I witnessed a libertarian thought experiment come to life. The inaugural Enhanced Games were the first sporting competition where participants were encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs.
For supporters of the event, the Enhanced Games offered a glimpse of a future in which medical advances push the human race to new heights—and they never have to get old. As I watched the games unfold, two questions bounced around my head: were they right? And what does that mean for the rest of us?
MIT Technology Review Narrated: a reality check on the AI jobs hysteria
Despite the growing hysteria over AI’s threat to white-collar jobs, there’s still scant evidence that the technology has had a large-scale impact on the labor market.
Analysis of US labor data shows that unemployment in occupations most exposed to AI is actually lower than in less-exposed jobs. There are also no signs that large numbers of workers are shifting from AI-threatened professions into supposedly safer manual-labor jobs.
This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Anthropic has released a “safe” version of Mythos It promises it has enough guardrails and user limitations to be safe. (BBC) + It has a price tag twice as high as the previous flagship system. (NYT $) + Anthropic previously claimed Mythos was too dangerous to release. (CNBC) + But critics suspect that was a marketing play. (Guardian) + Selective access has become a key strategy for AI labs. (Axios)
2 Seattle has banned new data centers for a year It’s the largest US city to have passed such a moratorium.(Guardian) + Its biggest tech firm, Amazon, has tried to stop the ban. (The Verge) + The movement to stop data centers is growing. (NYT $)
3 Democratic senators are pushing for a military AI restriction law They want a human commander to have the final say. (Gizmodo) + But humans in the loop in an AI war is an illusion. (MIT Technology Review)
4 SpaceX plans to launch space data center tests by late 2027 Orbital compute is central to the company’s growth pitch. (Reuters $) + It’s also shared new designs for its space data centers. (BI) + We’d need these four things to put them in orbit. (MIT Technology Review)
5 China has been accused of escalating AI espionage A report claims Beijing is hacking tech firms to catch up with the US. (CNBC) + There are no winners in a US-China AI arms race. (MIT Technology Review) 6 The Trump family has made about $2.3 billion from crypto While investors lost about the same amount. (Gizmodo) + The Trumps risked next-to-nothing on their crypto ventures. (Reuters $)
7 Apple isn’t launching Siri AI in the European Union It’s blaming EU interoperability requirements. (The Verge) +Brussels says Apple didn’t try to find a compliance solution. (Reuters $)
8 China’s new drone rules have spooked its thriving industry Drone firms face new commercial barriers. (Financial Times $) + China’s drone sector leads the world. (NYT $)
9 A judge has cancelled a trial after finding both legal teams used AI The case descended into GenAI tools arguing against each other. (404 Media) + Courts have been flooded with AI-generated lawsuits. (MIT Technology Review)
10 The dinosaur-killing asteroid created a thriving new ecosystem Microscopic life flourished in the extended heat. (New Scientist $)
Quote of the day
“AI technologies today are designed by and for WEIRD societies—Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.”
—Aditya Vashistha, an assistant professor at Cornell University, tells Rest of World why AI systems don’t serve global needs.
One More Thing
LAUREN SIMKIN BERKE
Why the definition of design might need a change
The word “design” once carried a far wider set of meanings than it does today. They ranged from the literal and material (like tracing) through the tactical (to contrive and achieve a goal) to the organizational and institutional—the “designation” of people and objects.
Over centuries, as designing became increasingly separated from making, that broader understanding faded. But now there is a growing case for reclaiming the word’s original sense: not just the search for a more beautiful shape, but the shaping of a more beautiful and sustainable world.
Testosterone. Methenolone. Nandrolone. Human growth hormone and EPO. Meldonium, modafinil, and mixed amphetamine salts. Clomiphene, anastrozole, levothyroxine, and liothyronine. Patches and capsules, creams and pills. A whole galaxy of steroids, metabolic modulators, and synthetic hormones coursing through the blood of a few dozen swimmers, sprinters, and weightlifters. And millions of dollars up for grabs for athletes who could break world records and usher in the age of superhumanity.
On Sunday, May 24, at a $50 million arena built in a casino parking lot in Las Vegas, I witnessed a libertarian thought experiment come to life. The inaugural Enhanced Games were the first sporting competition where participants were encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs. The founders say they’re challenging dated sporting norms and helping to build a world where we can all live better, longer lives. Critics say the event is an embarrassment, that it glamorizes the use of dangerous substances and puts lives at risk.
The open-air venue was compact and decked out in bright blue, with a six-lane, 100-meter track down one side, a four-lane Olympic-length swimming pool down the other, and a weightlifting platform and stage at the front. You could see the golden façade of the Trump Hotel looming in the background. The scene had all the trappings of an NFL game, with the too-loud music and crowd work on the big screen—a “flex cam” gave the well-muscled an excuse to unveil their biceps. Between events, adverts flashed up for the line of performance products sold by Enhanced, the company behind the event: injectable peptides that supposedly support cellular energy and skin elasticity, daily supplement powders with names like “Stronger” and “Longer.”
SAEED RAHBARAN
SAEED RAHBARAN
Australian swimmer James Magnussen was the first athlete to sign up with Enhanced but hasn’t broken any world records. He finished last in his two events in Las Vegas.
The day started with the weightlifters, under the blazing sun. But by 4 p.m., only one of them had even attempted a world-record lift. Two had pulled out injured. Some athletes were competing without taking drugs because of the money on offer, and as the competition went on, they had the better of their enhanced peers: Hunter Amstrong, a 25-year-old American swimmer and triple Olympic medalist, won the backstroke by more than a second. In the men’s 100-meter sprint, the non-enhanced US athlete Fred Kerley romped to an easy victory. “Man, they gotta do better than that,” he said of his doped opponents in his post-race interview. “They need to train a little harder, get on that shit a little bit more.”
At the bar, bodybuilders swapped before-and-after pictures and talked about their stacks, and VCs and finance bros traded LinkedIn details. Lukas Lakutsin, a 6-foot-10, 354-pound Russian bodybuilder who was milling around the entrance to the VIP suites, initially told me he didn’t use any performance-enhancing drugs. Except testosterone replacement therapy, of course. But he didn’t think that really counted. “I’m almost 34 years old,” he said. “I need to do this to stay strong.”
The “protocol” for Enhanced athletes only includes FDA-approved drugs. While Enhanced’s team might make recommendations, individuals have the final say on what they want to take, if anything.
SAEED RAHBARAN
Jeremy Sigal, an influencer and author, wore a USA tank top that showed off hugely muscled arms adorned with prison tattoos. He told me he was proudly natural, in both his health and his personal life. “I’ve got an exceptional credit score,” he said. He has written 12 books on marketing and leadership. Later, I looked up his most recent book online. It’s called Simp to Pimp: 10 Steps to Fix Why She’s Not Banging You and lists AI as a coauthor.
What I saw in Las Vegas probably wasn’t the future of sport. But it was a perfect encapsulation of our present moment, as Silicon Valley biohackers, alt-right looksmaxxers, Make America Healthy Again boosters, and longevity-obsessed scientists all vie to remake reality in their own image. For them, the Enhanced Games offered a glimpse of a future where medical advances push the human race to new heights, and where they never have to get old.
I’ve tracked Enhanced’s journey from a crazy idea scribbled on a napkin to a public company valued at $1.2 billion. Behind the scenes, there have been power struggles, life-changing victories, and moments of total farce. As I recently, finally, watched the games unfold, two questions bounced around my head: Were they right? And what does that mean for the rest of us?
In December 2022, the Australian entrepreneur Aron D’Souza flew to Miami to spend New Year’s Eve with his friend and mentor Peter Thiel. A decade earlier, D’Souza had helped Thiel orchestrate the lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker—a stunning revenge against the gossipy New York media blog that had outed him as gay. Now he was armed with a disruptive idea that he thought Thiel, the billionaire cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, would love. It was inspired by the buff bodies he’d been seeing at the gym, highlighting a disconnect between a workout culture where the use of steroids was an open secret and a sporting establishment where it was, at least on paper, an inviolable taboo.
His initial pitch was provocative and confrontational: a grand sporting event to rival the Olympic Games, where competitors could take any substance they wanted—their body, their choice. The first time I met D’Souza, in the spring of 2024, he had founded the company and attracted some initial investment but seemed obsessed with taking on the fat cats at the International Olympic Committee and reinventing sports (even though he didn’t seem to be a huge sports fan himself). On Enhanced’s Discord server, I found a folder full of memes with names like IOC Clowns.jpg. The whole thing felt very unserious.
That would change.
D’Souza told me that Thiel had previously introduced him to Christian Angermayer, a German biotech billionaire, who would come onboard at Enhanced. He’s funded clinical trials of psychedelics through his company Atai Life Sciences and is helping bring them into the medical mainstream as a treatment for depression and anxiety. Angermayer says he spotted an opportunity to do the same thing for steroids. What he really wants is to redefine medicine, he told me. Its focus has already changed from treating disease to trying to prevent it; actively enhancing people’s health, he says, is just the next logical step.
By early 2024, Angermayer had brought his own people into key roles. The team included Michael Sagner, an anti-aging expert and private doctor who works with many of Hollywood’s leading men, and Max Martin, who has the jawline and cheekbones of an Instagram looksmaxxing influencer and the boundless enthusiasm of a puppy. (He started his own enhancement program a few years ago, when he was just 27.) Sagner would head up Enhanced’s medical commission, making sure the games were safe for the athletes. It was Martin’s job to make sure they actually happened.
In early May, Enhanced began trading on the New York Stock Exchange with an initial value of $1.2 billion. Christian Angermayer stands far right with Max Martin to his left (front row), and Aron D’Souza next to him.
LEV RADIN/ZUMA PRESS WIRE VIA ALAMY
Tensions sparked as D’Souza’s freewheeling style clashed with the more sensible image that Sagner and others were now keen to present. “It was not just his personality and his abrasive way of talking,” Sagner told me recently. “Even when he was briefed on a scientific fact, he would just completely ignore it and say something outrageous.”
But the more outrageous D’Souza got, the more attention his idea received. In February 2024, James Magnussen, a retired Australian swimmer, became the organization’s first official athlete, and Enhanced promised to pay a million dollars to him, or anyone else, who could break the world record in the 50-meter freestyle.
The notion of a “steroid olympics,” as many have dubbed the Enhanced Games, had been kicking around for decades—for instance, in a Wiredarticle from the early 2000s and an SNLsketch from the 1980s. Two things helped finally make the Enhanced Games a reality. First, in November 2024, Donald Trump was again elected president of the United States. The Biden administration had been actively hostile to the games, but the founders saw a more receptive political environment in Trump world. Not long after the election, Enhanced announced a new tranche of funding led by 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm whose partners include Donald Trump Jr.
And second, in February 2025, an enhanced swimmer finished the 50-meter freestyle faster than anyone in human history. It wasn’t Magnussen, though. He had been injecting himself with testosterone to grow muscle, plus a cocktail of peptides that aimed to speed up recovery—but his journey hadn’t quite worked the way he’d planned.
A combination of reputational issues (no pools wanted to host his training) and physical complications (the regimen did help him get stronger, but he packed on so much muscle that it slowed him down in the water) meant he watched from the sidelines as the Bulgarian-Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev—who had finished fifth at the Paris Olympics in 2024—came in two-hundredths of a second under the record and won a million-dollar payout from Enhanced. The idea has always been that breaking records would effectively prove the legitimacy of this enhancement project: Look what we can do now.
Enhanced swimmers like Magnussen (right) wore supersuits to compete, though they’ve been banned by World Aquatics since 2010.
SAEED RAHBARAN
SAEED RAHBARAN
Gkolomeev, though, had a different motivation for participating: “One successful year in the Enhanced Games and I could make as much as I would in almost 10 careers,” he told me not long after setting the new record (notably, wearing a kind of “supersuit” that’s been banned by World Aquatics since 2010). Enhanced was paying its athletes a regular salary, on top of any potential bonus. And he had a young family to support and feared that the four-year stretch to the next Olympics would be long and precarious.
In May 2025, with a world record in the bag and a friendly administration in the White House, Enhanced was ready to announce its first games: They’d take place in May 2026 at Resorts World in Las Vegas.
At the same time, D’Souza made another big reveal: Enhanced Performance Products, a line of supplements available for a monthly subscription. The Enhanced Games now seemed less like a sporting event and more like a loss leader for selling testosterone injections, GLP-1s, or a range of peptides that are claimed, with little scientific evidence, to improve sleep or skin elasticity. Perhaps it was all a brilliantly executed marketing stunt.
“The games themselves now seem almost secondary to what appears to be an online marketplace for hormones, peptides, and other performance-enhancing compounds,” says Astrid Kristine Bjørnebekk, a steroids expert at Oslo University Hospital. “From my perspective, this significantly changes the nature of the project. It is one thing to organize a closed sporting event built around controversial principles, but openly marketing and commercializing substances such as testosterone, hGH, GLP-1 drugs, peptides, and other pharmacological compounds is something else entirely.”
As the games approached, more athletes joined. Some were genuinely elite. The US sprinter Kerley—who is serving a two-year ban for missing three drug tests—had won silver in the 100 meters in the Tokyo Olympics and a bronze in Paris. Ben Proud, a British swimmer, had won silver at the Paris Olympics and dozens of medals at world and European championships and the Commonwealth Games. He had been mulling over joining the Enhanced Games ever since the idea first emerged, but the tipping point seemed to come when Gkolomeev’s record was announced.
Some participants, like Magnussen and another swimmer, Megan Romano, had been tempted out of retirement. Romano hadn’t swum competitively for almost a decade. Others were at the start of their careers but ready to cash in their chips and bid goodbye to Olympic dreams for a potential six-figure payday. The $1 million payouts were reserved for records in the two flagship events—the 50-meter freestyle and the 100-meter sprint—but winning any other event would mean a prize of $250,000, with an additional $250,000 bonus for setting a world record.
Athletes would get paid even if they just showed up and finished last—as much as $50,000. This is all on top of the salaries that stretched into six figures in some cases, making the payout from the games more than many athletes make in a year.
Sport’s governing bodies reacted to each new athlete announcement with fury. World Aquatics threatened to ban for life any athlete who participated in the games, even if they didn’t take any drugs. Enhanced responded with an $800 million antitrust lawsuit against the global swimming organization, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and USA Swimming, alleging misuse of monopoly power.
American Fred Kerley (right) won the 100-meter sprint without performance enhancing drugs.
SAEED RAHBARAN
In November 2025, a court in New York dismissed the case. Three days later, D’Souza, the mind behind the entire project, was out. A notice on Enhanced’s website said he had “transitioned out of the company’s day-to-day operations.” Martin would take over as CEO. “The investors basically said we need someone a bit more serious,” Sagner told me. In conversations, execs at Enhanced played down any suggestion of a feud—D’Souza was simply the ideas man, with little interest in the day-to-day dreariness of actually running a company. (Enhanced spokesperson Chris Jones wrote in a statement that “there is no tension between Aron and Enhanced that I’m aware of.” D’Souza did not respond to a request for comment.)
I got the sense that Enhanced, in its new iteration as a pharmaceutical subscription company, was almost embarrassed by the games. When I visited enhanced.com a couple of months before the event, they had been relegated to a sub-heading on the home page. D’Souza’s showmanship had helped get attention for what was becoming a run-of-the-mill telehealth business like Hims & Hers—albeit one well timed to take advantage of a shifting regulatory landscape around peptides, which Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the US secretary of health and human services, has been pushing the FDA to approve despite a lack of evidence that they’re actually effective.
Sagner is still loosely involved with Enhanced, but he says the medical commission was not consulted before it launched its line of performance products. (Jones did not respond to a question regarding this claim.) Sagner is scathing about what he sees as the “hype” around peptides. “I can tell you already, peptides do nothing,” he says—with the exception of human growth hormone and GLP-1. “The peptides that people use, black-market peptides that they buy online—they do nothing. We have tested them; 80% of them contain nothing. It’s saline solution, salt water, and some of them are contaminated.”
At the end of January 2026, a group of around 40 swimmers, weightlifters, and sprinters arrived in Abu Dhabi to start their individualized enhancement “protocol,” as Enhanced calls it. Officially, they would be taking part in a clinical trial, pending approval by the Abu Dhabi government and overseen by Guido Pieles, a Qatar-based cardiologist who has taken over the reins of Enhanced’s medical commission from Sagner.
The day started with the weightlifters, but by late afternoon, only one of them had even attempted a world-record lift.
SAEED RAHBARAN
They would be allowed to choose only from a menu of specific FDA-approved drugs. Pieles broke them down into five categories: testosterone variants and growth hormones, which can both boost muscle mass; metabolic modulators that can tweak how the body burns fat; stimulants like Adderall to improve focus; and EPO, which can increase the amount of oxygen the blood is able to carry. While Enhanced’s team might recommend particular things, the athletes would have the final say on what they wanted to take, if anything. (As Oslo University’s Bjørnebekk points out, FDA approval “does not mean the substances are inherently safe, particularly not when used for enhancement purposes.”)
There would be regular blood tests, heart scans, and brain scans and access to the best training facilities money could buy. Pieles and others say the clinical trial will help inform the line of supplements Enhanced is offering consumers, but there’s actually very little overlap between the drugs the athletes were taking and the substances the company is currently selling.
Not long after they arrived in the Middle East, the athletes were awakened by the sound of explosions at a military base near their hotel. The US and Israel had struck Iran, and the Iranian regime was responding by peppering the region with missiles. “It wasn’t a pleasant situation,” says Andrii Govorov, the world record holder in the 50-meter butterfly, who a year earlier had become one of the first swimmers to join Enhanced. Govorov had some experience in these matters—back in Ukraine, he’d had a business selling cars that helped fund his swimming career, but he’d lost it after the Russian invasion.
SAEED RAHBARAN
SAEED RAHBARAN
SAEED RAHBARAN
Swimming, sprinting, and weightlifting were the focus of the first Enhanced Games but in many ways the sports were the sideshow.
The conflict exacerbated delays in getting approval for the clinical trial and sourcing the drugs, and as a result, what was supposed to be a 12-week enhancement protocol got cut down to eight weeks. The athletes didn’t actually start taking the drugs until toward the end of March. For those who had always been clean, that represented the irreversible crossing of a line. “The first injection was very emotional, very tricky to navigate,” says Proud. “For me, that was the day I went from the Ben Proud that I always knew to a new person.”
Proud was joined in the enhancement program by his girlfriend, Emily Barclay, who had swum at college level without ever appearing at a major international event; she was working as a swimming teacher at a school in England. After that first injection, they left Abu Dhabi and spent a few days in Dubai as they reckoned with what they had done. “I just couldn’t be around the team,” Proud says. “I wanted to be by myself and feel those feelings, because it is a big deal to make that step, and I felt it.”
Those feelings were soon forgotten, though, as the drugs kicked in. Proud says he had incredible energy, and a drive to train that he hadn’t experienced before. Shania Collins, an American sprinter, says she had “increased strength, increased recovery, and increased mental clarity at practice.” Sagner and several athletes admitted there were some side effects: acne and some swelling around the joints; unwanted hair growth for the women, unwanted hair loss for the men.
Like Kerley, sprinter Tristan Evelyn from Barbados competed without taking any drugs. She too won big in Vegas, besting her Enhanced peers in two events.
SAEED RAHBARAN
One thing the athletes wouldn’t talk about, though, is what drugs they were actually taking. They all had the same reason: not wanting to encourage copycats who might take enhancements without a doctor on hand to tailor programs to their needs.
The one exception was Thor Björnsson (testosterone, deca-durabolin, anastrozole, halotestin), a hulking Icelandic deadlifter and former World’s Strongest Man who played The Mountain on Game of Thrones. Björnsson first heard about the games on Joe Rogan’s podcast and was immediately interested. The rules for strongman competitions are somewhat less stringent than those for Olympic sports, though, and he actually had to reduce the number of substances he was taking to meet Enhanced’s FDA requirements.
Icelandic strongman Thor Björnsson actually had to reduce the number of substances he was taking to meet Enhanced’s FDA requirements.
SAEED RAHBARAN
There is some debate over how much doping some of the athletes were actually doing. In a conversation last year, Gkolomeev told me he’d only really been “microdosing,” and he confirmed that his 2026 enhancement program was largely the same. Sagner says the doses the athletes were taking were a fraction of the amounts some Olympic athletes had been caught using in the past. I heard that a few athletes had decided not to take steroids or growth hormones and were only using modafinil, a narcolepsy medication that’s thought to improve focus.
The day before the games, I asked Angermayer what it would mean if clean athletes like Kerley and Armstrong won their events—what impact it would have on Enhanced’s business model of using sports as a showcase for its line of performance products if the people using those products didn’t actually win anything. “I know what you mean, but mostly our business model is headlines to drive attention,” he said. “Any debate is good for us.”
In early May, Enhanced began trading on the New York Stock Exchange with an initial value of $1.2 billion.
That same week, it was finally go time. The athletes and coaches left Abu Dhabi and flew to Las Vegas, where they were put up in five-star luxury at the Conrad hotel inside Resorts World while they made their final preparations.
When I got there a few weeks later, toward the end of May, I found it jarring to see these hulking presences walking around the casino in their Enhanced sportswear, weaving their way through packs of half-drunk tourists, with slot machines flashing in the background and cigarette smoke hanging in the air. I had expected the games to be a bigger deal within the city itself, but they were just one of a thousand things happening in Vegas that weekend—drowned out by a series of BTS shows at the football stadium, by the Golden Knights in the NHL playoffs, by No Doubt’s residency at the Sphere.
If this was a sporting earthquake, it was one whose tremors were mainly being felt online, where bodybuilding influencers livestreamed to their followers on Kick and Twitch, and where thousands watched on YouTube and Rumble. (D’Souza once told me he’d had “every major sports broadcaster” vying for the rights; in the end, Enhanced struck an exclusive streaming deal with Roku in the US.)
No tickets were sold, so the crowd was a mix of invited guests, investors, and influencers, some of whom had reportedly been flown in on a chartered jet.
SAEED RAHBARAN
On the morning of the games, Enhanced held a medical symposium that was supposed to provide a taste of the company’s long-term objectives. The first speaker was Bryan Johnson, the longevity-obsessed entrepreneur famous for plowing his personal fortune into wild attempts to reverse his aging: receiving transfusions of his teenage son’s plasma, measuring his nighttime erections, taking more than 100 supplement pills a day. He spends $2 million per year on all this, but he looked pale and vampiric as he delivered the slightly off-brand message that, really, the most important thing was getting a good night’s sleep: “You don’t need to chase IV infusions; you don’t need to chase crystals. You don’t really need to do much of anything.”
At 2 p.m., I took two escalators from the conference room down to the arena, where spectators were filtering in. Though it had cost $50 million, it had been constructed in just three and a half weeks, and it showed; on the media tour the previous day, there were still loose screws on the floor of the bleachers.
There were a few thousand seats in an open grandstand down one side, and two rows of VIP suites on the other. No tickets were sold, so it was a strange mix of invited guests, investors, and influencers, some of whom had reportedly been flown in from Los Angeles on a chartered jet. The rapper Tyga was the biggest name to grace the “blue carpet,” although I did also spot Fabio James, a Michael Jackson look-alike who has had surgery to make the resemblance even stronger. Rumors swirled that Peter Thiel might show up; they proved unfounded.
In attendance was Fabio James, a Michael Jackson look-alike who has had surgery to make the resemblance even stronger.
SAEED RAHBARAN
A few hours before the doors opened, journalists got a stern message from the organizers trying to bar us from interviewing guests. Still, I talked to a Cambridge professor who wanted to use Enhanced as a case study in innovation for his MBA students, a retired Brazilian swimmer with the Olympic rings tattooed on his forearm, and a biotech investor wearing an Enron hat. Proud’s family and friends were sheltered from the blazing sun in the shadow of the big screen.
D’Souza was nowhere to be seen. Nor was he really mentioned at all—not during the introductory press conference, where Martin was introduced as the “founder of the Enhanced Games,” nor during the event itself, where the athletes showered praise on Angermayer and Martin. But the tens of millions D’Souza had banked from the stock listing likely softened any blow. Plus, he’s already moved on to his next provocative venture: an AI-powered arbitration platform designed to scrutinize the work of journalists on behalf of the rich and powerful.
As the sun set behind the hills, casting the arena in soft gold light, there were still no world records. That and the wins for clean athletes seemed to put the whole Enhanced project in jeopardy—the knives were already being sharpened online. I asked the organizers whether this threatened the legitimacy of the project.
German swimmer Marius Kusch was among the dozen or so athletes who hit personal bests in Vegas.
SAEED RAHBARAN
“Our response is that enhancements help athletes improve and, in some cases, break records. And yes, some non-enhanced athletes also won—because talent and ability also matter,” Enhanced’s Jones emailed last week. “Breaking world records is incredibly hard as the margin is infinitesimal, as we witnessed. Ignoring that 13 athletes some of whom 10 years later broke personal bests is disingenuous and selective reporting.”
Megan Romano was one of them, swimming faster in the 50-meter freestyle at 35 than she had at 22. And Emily Barclay knocked two seconds off her fastest time in the 100-meter freestyle, coming in second in that event and winning the 50-meter freestyle; she went home with a check for $375,000. “No one’s ever heard of this girl,” said Enhanced swim coach Brett Hawke afterwards. “She’s retired; she’s a nobody. She comes out tonight and swims a time that would have got a bronze medal in Paris.” For all the talk of “superhumanity” and pushing the boundaries of performance, making a 35-year-old feel 22 again is probably the perfect marketing message for the products Enhanced wants to sell.
Angermayer cheers on swimmer Megan Romano, who swam faster in the 50-meter freestyle at 35 than she did at 22.
SAEED RAHBARAN
Enhanced’s executives say people should take enhancements only with medical supervision, but price could be a barrier to heeding that advice. The battery of health tests the company was giving its athletes in the run-up to the games cost $25,000 per athlete per month. The drugs themselves start at $75 a month and go up toward $200. While Jones says the products “are in line with industry price points,” there were almost certainly people watching who saw the drug-altered physiques of athletes like Gkolomeev or Magnussen and decided to find cheaper, less safe alternatives on unlicensed websites.
“Many of these substances require medical supervision and prescriptions, and several are associated with potentially serious long-term health consequences,” says Bjørnebekk. “Presenting them in this lifestyle-oriented and commercial format risks normalizing use while downplaying the medical risks and uncertainties.”
Although his world record-breaking time won’t stand as the official record, swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev will walk away from the Enhanced Games with a million dollar prize in the 50-meter freestyle.
SAEED RAHBARAN
Before the night was over, Gkolomeev again had the chance to right the Enhanced ship. The final event of the night was the men’s 50-meter freestyle swim. His 2025 time had been surpassed by the Australian swimmer Cam McEvoy (without a supersuit) at the China Swimming Open a couple of months before, so he needed to lose another two-hundredths of a second to beat the new record of 20.88 seconds.
Gkolomeev was wearing the same supersuit he’d used the previous year, and he’d shaved off his mustache for a little extra streamlining. But he messed up his start—doing four kicks instead of five—and was trailing Proud at the halfway mark. His long arms levered him forward, though, and he reached the wall in 20.81. The spectators were on their feet as “WORLD RECORD” flashed red on the big screen. Martin vaulted over the glass partition from the VIP suites, beaming, to embrace Gkolomeev. They had their record.
Or did they? Online, people shared screenshots from the video feed, purporting to show that the clock had stopped before Gkolomeev’s hand touched the pressure sensor at the end of the pool. An Enhanced spokesperson gave a statement to the Guardian dismissing this as “completely unfounded internet drivel.” But hey—live by the sword, die by the sword. It’s quite possible Gkolomeev didn’t care. He had another million in the bank.
It remains to be seen if it’ll work out so well for the other athletes. Enhanced organizers recently announced a prize of $10 million for anyone who can break Usain Bolt’s 100-meter world record in 2027. They are adamant that the games will happen again next year. If they don’t, dozens of sporting careers will be over, and the athletes will join the long list of victims of VC-backed disruption.
My personal prediction is that Enhanced will pivot away from the risk and uncertainty of a flagship event—the company’s valuation plunged by almost $800 million when markets opened after what was perceived as an underwhelming set of results in Vegas. I expect you’ll see individual stunts and challenges, tightly controlled and filmed for virality and probably featuring your favorite YouTubers—think Björnsson bench-pressing Jake Paul.
D’Souza’s initial idea has served its purpose by capturing the world’s attention. But that won’t necessarily translate into success either. Though the company has had plenty of hype over the last 12 months, SEC filings published as part of its stock exchange listing reveal that it generated only $2,755 in revenue from its enhancements business in the first three months of 2026. Would what happened in Vegas be enough to juice sales?
Martin, Enhanced’s CEO, cheers on athletes from the stands. Company leadership insists the competition will take place again next year.
SAEED RAHBARAN
As the athletes gathered on the stage to receive their prizes, Martin took the microphone and addressed the crowd. “Enhanced is culture,” he said. “We are at the pulse of where the world is going.” On this, at least, he’s probably right. Testosterone replacement therapy is rapidly moving into the mainstream, and while the science may still not be there on peptides, they have certainly exploded in popularity in the two years since Enhanced launched. And there are undoubtedly more substances yet to be discovered that will promise to improve people’s lives, or at least hold their appearance in stasis. The enhanced age is upon us, whether we want it or not.
As the fireworks went off and the Killersclosed out the event with “When You Were Young” (“Congratulations to … whoever deserves it,” said frontman Brandon Flowers), I wondered what that might mean for us mere mortals. Invoking Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in a story about drugs and Las Vegas may be a cliché, but it struck me that fear played a big part in all of this. Fear of missing out. Fear of getting old. Fear of never making a dime on your life’s pursuit. Fear of waking up one morning and seeing your flabby, sunken face in the mirror while everyone around you shines and grins and thrives with white-toothed, alien smiles.
Before joining Enhanced, Romano had not swum competitively in almost a decade.
SAEED RAHBARAN
But the big problem with Enhanced’s vision of superhumanity is the question of who gets to join in. “People will be able to enhance themselves if they have enough money,” Sagner had told me the night before the games. The rest of us, I fear, will just have to function as normal human beings.
Amit Katwala is a journalist and author covering science, culture, and where they collide. His latest book is Tremors in the Blood: Murder, Obsession and the Birth of the Lie Detector. He is based in London.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
David Sinclair plans to test whole-body rejuvenation drugs in the XPrize competition
The outspoken longevity scientist David Sinclair has predicted that, one day, you’ll go to the doctor and get a prescription that will make you 10 years younger. MIT Technology Review has learned of his latest step toward this: human tests of a “reprogramming” drug.
Sinclair, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, plans to launch the tests in a $101 million competition organized by the XPrize Foundation. The winners will “restore” a person to an earlier apparent age, as measured by improvements in immune, cognitive, and muscle function.
The grand prize goes to any team able to show a 10-year (or greater) relative improvement after one year of treatment.
At SXSW London last week, I gave a talk called “Five things you need to know about AI,” in which I shared what I think are the biggest themes in AI right now.
I pulled a few things from our first AI10 list, an annual guide to the top trends in this buzzy world, but I also veered off on several tangents. In my half-hour slot, I tried to cover the key talking points that I think help to make sense of what’s going on in tech—and thus the economy—today.
Five key thoughts emerged: AI is everywhere all at once, it’s getting scary, a backlash is growing, it’s becoming a big deal for science—and I didn’t even need to show up at the talk. Read the full story for all the details.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 OpenAI has confidentially filed for a US IPO The listing could come as early as September. (Reuters $) + OpenAI is targeting a valuation of up to $1 trillion. (Financial Times $) + The IPO will test investor appetite for AI companies. (WSJ $) + The move follows IPO filings from Anthropic and SpaceX. (CNN)
2 The US claims BYD, Baidu, Alibaba, and others are aiding China’s military The Pentagon added them to a list of military-linked companies. (WSJ $) + The designations limit their operations in the US. (BBC) + The new additions also include humanoid firm Unitree. (TechCrunch) + The Pentagon is adapting to China’s tech rise. (MIT Technology Review)
3 Apple’s long-awaited AI overhaul of Siri is finally here “Siri AI” promises to be a more conversational assistant. (NYT $) + It includes a standalone app and screen-reading features. (Reuters $) + And arrives after two years of repeated delays. (Axios)
4 The White House and Congress are working to limit state AI laws A new deal would curb state rules for federal legislation. (Axios) + AI regulation has divided US politicians. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Meta is launching a “workforce academy” for building data centers The five-week program is free of charge and guarantees a job. (WSJ $) + It arrives shortly after Meta laid off 8,000 employees. (NPR) 6 Taiwan is mulling curbs on AI chip exports to China The new controls would further align with US restrictions. (Bloomberg $) + Future AI chips could be built on glass. (MIT Technology Review)
7 Meta has quietly removed face-recognition code from its smart glasses app The code identified by investigators has disappeared. (Wired $)
8 Humanoid robots are edging towards the battlefield American and Chinese militaries are pursuing the tech. (BBC)
9 The world’s first wind-powered underwater data center has launched It uses less power and water than land-based equivalents. (Guardian)
10 You could get some benefits of sleep without having to nod off If new brain stimulation works as well on humans as on mice, that is. (New Scientist $)
Quote of the day
“You’re on the train, but you know that there’s no destination.”
—Clara Shih, a former top AI executive at Salesforce and Meta, tells the New York Times that AI training can’t keep up with the field’s advances.
One More Thing
ILLUSTRATIONS BY AMRITA MARINO
Inside the race to make human sex cells in the lab
An embryo forms when sperm meets egg. But what if we could start with other cells—if a blood sample or skin biopsy could be transformed into “artificial” sperm and eggs? What if those were all you needed to make a baby?
That’s the promise of a radical approach to reproduction. Scientists have already created artificial eggs and sperm from mouse cells and used them to create mouse pups. Artificial human sex cells are next.
The advances could herald the end of infertility, but they raise major scientific and ethical challenges.
As adoption of AI agents looks set to surge by as much as 300% in the next two years, leadership teams are carefully considering the implications of a hybrid human-AI workforce.
Unlike existing enterprise-level automation that relies on manual input, AI agents are capable of autonomously coordinating complex tasks, interacting with multiple tools and environments across an organization. In early applications that center on customer service, HR, and sales, adoption of agentic AI has led to productivity gains of 30-50%.
Their autonomy positions agents more as collaborators than tools, working side-by-side with human employees in blended teams that look poised to upend traditional workplace dynamics.
More than three-quarters of HR leaders believe that the deployment of AI agents will transform existing workplace norms, driving a complete reappraisal of how roles and responsibilities are distributed, how skills are prioritized, and how workplace culture is shaped.
Though many admit they’re in the early or preparatory phase of this shift, 86% of chief HR officers predict that navigating digital labor shaped by agentic AI will be a central component of their role in the years ahead.
Fluency in the change management aspect of agentic AI adoption will be a crucial differentiator when it comes to unlocking the full potential of the technology going forward, believes Ateet Jayaswal, chief culture and employee experience officer at Wipro, a leading technology services and consulting company. This moment is one that he says, “calls for a mindset shift in how HR leaders would enable their organizations.”
Redeploying roles to enable higher-value work
As AI agents assume ownership of more complex and integral tasks, the distribution of roles and responsibilities within an organization will undergo significant change. It’s estimated that three-quarters of current roles will require redesign, reskilling, or redeployment by 2030 as a result of agentic AI.
For leadership, this shift should be about reskilling employees toward higher-value work in order to optimize the potential of an agent-human hybrid workforce, says Jayaswal.
For example, Wipro is a complex organization of 240,000 employees across 65 countries. It previously had multiple policies, documents, and knowledge fragmented across different systems, which delayed response to employee queries.
But the company has recently integrated a custom agentic AI assistant—an agent co-created in partnership with enterprise agentic AI platform Ema Unlimited—that can swiftly navigate this complex system, assuming responsibility for 50 HR tasks that had previously fallen to human employees. With the help of an AI agent, average response time to queries has lowered from 48 hours to five seconds.
Human employees have more time to focus on work “that requires a creative and imaginative mind and cross-functional collaboration, leveraging diverse ideas and thoughts to problem-solve,” says Jayaswal. The AI agent, meanwhile, handles rote administrative tasks like sorting timesheets or helping employees navigate policies and take actions in the flow of work.
When reallocating employee responsibilities, though, it is imperative that humans remain in the loop, Jayaswal caveats. When agentic AI is incorporated into enterprise technology, it must work with sensitive and personal data and therefore needs even more stringent guardrails and constraints than consumer applications. “When you expose an AI agent to organizational data, when you integrate it into multiple enterprise systems, then pathways around the AI agent become extremely important,” he says. “It’s an evolving space that leadership needs to have front-of-mind.” Governance should include robust data privacy rules and the establishment of governance layers, such as an AI council, he suggests.
At a fundamental level, the adoption of AI agents will force a re-evaluation of human roles, believes Jayaswal. Rather than employees primarily performing repetitive tasks or troubleshooting, a significant proportion of their time will shift to designing, teaching, and optimizing an AI agent that can do this work for them with far greater speed and predictability and without the agent getting bored.
“The nature of your job changes from being the hero who comes in to solve the problem to designing the hero who can solve the problem,” he summarizes. “The individuals who I have seen thrive in this environment are the ones who make this shift.”
An evolving employee skillset
Just as roles and responsibilities will be reconfigured to reflect the input of AI agents, the core skills of human employees will be reprioritized. More than four in five HR leaders say they’re planning to reskill workers to become more competitive in a market shaped by AI agents.
Technical skills will be increasingly important. Leading employers such as Salesforce, Danone, and Walmart are already rolling out dedicated AI and digital skills programs that aim to equip everyone from frontline workers to C-suite executives with a baseline level of AI literacy in response to the pervasiveness of the technology.
But desirable soft skills will also evolve, Jayaswal points out. Employees who assign tasks to an AI agent need to plainly articulate what modular steps may be needed to accomplish a task, what the desired outcome should be, and what parameters or guardrails need to be in place to ensure the agent doesn’t access or share confidential data.
As HR executives adapt to a blended workforce, three skills are emerging as top priorities during recruitment, according to a recent survey: relationship building, like forging constructive partnerships and account management; collaboration; and adaptability.
Maintaining a healthy workplace culture
In freeing up human employees to focus on higher-value tasks, the hope is that AI agents can elevate the employee experience, deepening fulfilment and satisfaction in the workplace.
“At Wipro, our vision is to improve the life of Wiproites,” says Jayaswal. “We are taking away non-value added work by embracing modern ways of collaborating, engaging, and transacting, leaving associates with higher order work content.”
But leadership teams embracing agentic AI will also need to plan for the new pressures and stressors that the technology can place on a workforce.
There is already confusion and knowledge gaps, with 73% of HR leaders reporting their employees don’t yet understand how digital labor will impact their work. Many organizations have opted to define AI agents as teammates or colleagues on org charts, but new research says this could erode trust and a sense of professional identity. It also raises new questions around accountability and ownership.
The role of management in addressing these concerns is critical, says Jayaswal. To maintain healthy dynamics, managers need to become skilled at orchestrating blended systems, splitting their focus between supervising AI agents and motivating human employees as they also build and supervise AI agents.
Upgrading employee well-being programs will be a core part of maintaining a robust workplace culture. “As there are more interactions with AI agents, you are losing some of the human touch that was provided by service delivery partners or leaders, or often even by colleagues and peers,” Jayaswal says. Employee services that encourage social connection and empathetic communication may help teams navigate this.
A breakneck transformation
Agentic AI looks set to scale at breakneck speed across many enterprises, and it will significantly transform how these organizations operate.
Carefully considering and deciding how to adapt to this newly blended workforce is now a top priority for leadership teams. Reviewing and refining organizational strategies is essential for optimizing both technological gains and the employee experience.
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.
The outspoken longevity scientist David Sinclair has been predicting that one day, you’ll go to the doctor and get a prescription that will make you 10 years younger.
Now MIT Technology Review has learned that he has plans to launch human tests of an oral “reprogramming” drug as part of a $101 million competition organized by the XPrize Foundation.
The foundation is offering cash awards to teams able to “restore” a person to an earlier apparent age, as measured by improvements in immune, cognitive, and muscle function.
The grand prize goes to any team able to show a 10-year (or greater) relative improvement after one year of treatment.
Reached by phone, Sinclair, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, confirmed that he plans to give an oral drug mixture to volunteers in a bid to seek “evidence for age restoration in humans.”
The trial, if it goes forward, will be a significant new development in the race to harness so-called epigenetic reprogramming. That technology is based on the discovery, 20 years ago, of powerful genes able to turn an adult cell into a stem cell similar to those found in embryos.
The age-reversal effect is believed to occur via a resetting of molecular controls on DNA known as epigenetic marks, which help determine a cell’s overall metabolism and identity.
Companies are now racing to use that phenomenon for a new form of rejuvenation medicine. Only this January, one of Sinclair’s companies, Life Biosciences, made news by winning approval to launch an initial human trial using a set of powerful reprogramming genes. The company announced today it had treated its first patient.
But that test involves a complex gene therapy and is limited to patients’ eyes, where it could treat conditions like glaucoma.
Sinclair’s new plan is bolder: a reprogramming drug you’d swallow in order to promote such effects across the body.
“What we’re aiming to do is to epigenetically restore the animal and eventually the person,” he says. “It is true that we’ve been doing extensive animal studies with the oral agent and are looking to compete in the XPrize.”
This alternative method, chemical reprogramming, uses drugs to mimic the effects of the embryonic genes. That is significant because drug compounds can travel through the bloodstream, reaching most or all cells in a person’s body.
Some experts expressed caution, saying the chemical process, at least as used in labs, is extremely harsh and not even particularly effective. “Who doesn’t dream of whole-body rejuvenation? I think it’s a great goal,” says Sergiy Velychko, founder of Soxogen, a stealth reprogramming company in Boston. “But these chemicals are used in very, very high concentrations for cell reprogramming.”
Sinclair declined to describe the exact makeup of the drug candidate, code-named SL-100, calling its contents “highly, highly confidential.”
However, he has previously published lab studies of what he called “epigenetic age-reversal cocktails,” which mixed powerful chemicals with known supplements and commercially available medicines.
It’s those latter components that would be easiest to test on people, since doctors are free to prescribe them, even for unusual objectives like age reversal. James Clement, head of Betterhumans, an organization that specializes in life-extension studies using existing drugs, said in a message that he is “running clinical trials” of an oral reprogramming cocktail for Sinclair’s XPrize team.
Sinclair’s team is competing in the XPrize Healthspan Competition, launched in 2023. It follows several previous competitions that focused on commercial spaceflight, lunar landings, and other goals. The XPrize Foundation is led by executive chairman Peter Diamandis, also an active promoter of longevity research.
“If two teams are equivalent, they would split the award,” says Jamie Justice, a doctor and executive director for the contest, which was bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s Hevolution Foundation, “But it will be incredibly hard to even get to one winner.”
Justice says a judging panel is now in the process of picking 10 finalists from 65 teams that have been exploring health foods, lifestyle interventions, digital trackers, and drug compounds.
Sinclair’s team, Justice says, was a late entrant to the contest, but like all teams, it would be required to move into wider human tests starting this year. “You have to be ready and in trials,” she says.
The race to harness the reprogramming phenomenon and apply it to living people is heating up, even outside the XPrize competition. On June 2, a startup called NewLimit, founded by the crypto billionaire Brian Armstrong, said it had raised a further $435 million, from investors including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, to support what it calls “age reprogramming.”
The company says it is working toward delivering genetic reprogramming instructions to the liver, to treat diseases of that organ.
But Sinclair has been saying that whole-body rejuvenation is a possibility too. And for that, chemicals, rather than gene therapy, could be the most practical strategy.
Sinclair says his lab has been searching for such compounds and is starting to use AI “to improve the oral agents that we’re testing.”
Chemical reprogramming cocktails, as used in labs, typically involve a mix of vitamins, approved drugs, and experimental molecules. For instance, one recipe Sinclair filed a patent on includes the supplement forskolin, the antidepressant tranylcypromine, and an experimental chemical, laduviglusib, which has been tested against Alzheimer’s, among other ingredients.
“In those days it was a six-factor cocktail,” Sinclair says of his earlier research. “But we’ve come a long way. I can’t disclose what’s in it, but it’s an improvement and an advance on that, and we’ve done a number of animal studies. They are not published, but we’ve been doing them for a long time, and we want to make sure that we’ve done a full investigation of safety and efficacy before we release any of the data.”
While Sinclair’s results aren’t published, other teams say attempts to reverse the age of entire animals using chemical drugs haven’t worked yet. Last year, the lab of Vadim Gladyshev, another Harvard biologist and a member of a different XPrize team, reported on its attempt to rejuvenate mice by installing pumps in their bodies that released controlled doses of seven compounds.
Gladyshev says the procedure proved to be toxic. “The idea was to see if we could rejuvenate whole animals. Unfortunately, we have not found [the right] conditions,” he says. “At low concentrations there was no effect, and high concentrations were toxic.”
Gladyshev says he doesn’t know what is in Sinclair’s cocktail, but says that “trying to improve the combinations makes sense.”
Sinclair, who is the author of several books on aging and has a large social media following, has frequently been criticized by other scientists for making unproven rejuvenation claims.
In 2024, he resigned as president of the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research after claiming that a supplement developed by a company his brother runs had “reversed” the age of dogs, a claim for which there was so little evidence that one scientist called it a “lie.”
Part of the problem is that scientists still disagree on how to measure aging. And they don’t have a reliable way to measure age reversal, either, should it ever be achieved.
Justice, the XPRIZE director, says a primary purpose of the competition is to solve that problem by encouraging the development of standardized measures of aging. That is so that anti-aging drugs can be assessed reliably, and, one-day, approved by regulators if they work.
“We as a scientific field have been forced to ask, ‘If a medicine improves how we age, how would we know?” Justice said during a public meeting with FDA officials in May. “If something worked, what would convince us as scientists, what’s meaningful to the general public?”
Finalists in the Healthspan competition will be announced in August.
At SXSW London last week I gave a talk called “Five things you need to know about AI,” in which I shared what I think are the biggest themes in AI right now.
I pulled a few things from our first AI10 list, an annual guide to the most important trends in this buzzy world, but I also veered off on a number of tangents. In my half-hour slot, I tried to cover the key talking points that I think help to make sense of what’s going on in tech—and thus the economy—today.
So: This is how I’m thinking about AI midway through 2026. Let me know if you would pick different points!
1. Strictly speaking, I didn’t need to show up to give this talk.
Tongue in cheek? Maybe. But generative AI tools have already become mundane, used by millions to automate everyday office tasks (including producing and delivering talks). It’s no surprise that one of the biggest questions out there right now is what this all means for jobs. People are confused and scared.
The frustrating answer is that despite the hype coming from the top about the potential for AI to join the workforce soon—and viral social media posts yelling that something big is happening—there is almost no data to say either way what kind of effect this technology will have on employment and the economy overall. That’s not to say it won’t have an impact, even a huge one, but it’s just too soon to tell.
In theory, teams of agents working together toward common goals could become assembly lines for white-collar work, doing to offices this century what Henry Ford’s innovations did to factories in the 20th century.
In theory. Because in order to know what will happen to jobs, we need to know what will happen inside the companies that create those jobs. But most companies are still figuring that out.
What’s happened instead is that many of the worst near-term, real-world fears have come true.
Take deepfakes, AI-generated images or videos of people doing things they didn’t actually do. Deepfakes have been used to incite violence, swing votes, and sow distrust. Trump’s White House is among those creating and publishing fake images.
Many deepfakes are also used to abuse women and girls. One study found that 98% of deepfakes are pornographic and 99% involve women.
Another concern is the rise of dangerous and delusional relationships with chatbots. Many people turn to chatbots to seek private advice and to feel heard. But there are now multiple lawsuits against AI companies alleging that the technology encouraged or aided suicides and other forms of self-harm.
AI is also being used in warfare in new and worrying ways. LLMs are now giving advice, not just being used for analysis. One US defense official told my colleague James O’Donnell that you could now give a military chatbot a list of targets and ask which one to hit first. Anyone who uses AI knows that its output needs to be reviewed carefully. In fact-paced, high-stress active conflict, the risk that corners get cut is high.
3. A lot of people really hate AI.
I checked out an anti-AI protest in London earlier this year and found a very broad mix of complaints. Banners proclaiming the end times bounced along to chants of “Stop the slop! Stop the slop!” Protests are getting more organized and drawing larger crowds.
There’s pushback from fans of films and video games, who object to the use of generative AI in their favorite titles. In one notable case, the acclaimed 2025 game Clair Obscur was stripped of an award when the developers admitted to using AI in just one small, specific part of its production.
And there’s the data center backlash. The US has more than 5,400 data centers and counting. With the energy demands of AI growing, people are unhappy about the environmental impact and their rising electricity bills. Activists are managing to stall development in a number of places.
Regulation is becoming politically popular. Grassroots movements like QuitGPT have gained momentum. A small number have turned to violence; a few weeks ago somebody threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house. It’s not clear where all this leads. But the apocalyptic hype from tech leaders is not helping people stay calm.
4. AI for science is a very big deal.
It’s early days yet, but the potential for AI to help make a genuine and important scientific discovery is greater than ever.
Mathematicians are excited too. Fundamental math underpins many everyday technologies, from internet security to video streaming. The last few months have seen a string of claims that AI has cracked unsolved math problems. And software that can solve really hard math problems will be able—so the argument goes—to solve more general-purpose real-world problems too.
What are the downsides? Some scientists are warning that an overreliance on AI tools could narrow the scope of research because scientists may choose problems that are most suited to AI assistance. There are also concerns that AI-assisted research will lead to a flood of inaccurate or fake results: science slop.
5. AI is everywhere all at once.
So where does that leave us? There are a lot of exciting things, a lot of worrying things, and a lot of hot air. It can be exhausting to keep up, and yet it all feels inescapable. Some people will tell you we’re in a race to the top; some will tell you we’re in a race to the bottom. But it’s really not clear where we’re headed.
Something is happening. Maybe even something comparable to the invention of electricity or the internet. But technologies like that take time to settle and bring lasting change.
Get ready for a marathon, not a sprint.
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Why this year’s World Cup ball may not fly as far
Much is new about this month’s FIFA World Cup tournament. It hosts more teams than ever before. It’s the first to occur in three different host countries.
And, like every World Cup for over half a century, it will employ a football with a brand-new design.
Through wind-tunnel experiments, researchers found that long-distance kicks with Adidas’s new Trionda ball might not travel as far as they did in the past. The payoff is a more predictable flight path, something players have not always enjoyed from World Cup balls.
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 OpenAI plans to turn ChatGPT into a ‘super app’ before its IPO The revamp would combine coding tools and AI agents. (Financial Times $) + The super app ambitions first emerged last year. (Fast Company) + OpenAI is also building a fully automated researcher. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Trump wants the US government to take a stake in AI companies He will meet AI leaders to discuss the plan. (BBC) + Which would create “a partnership with the American public.” (Reuters $) + He wants a slice of the AI boom. (Axios)
3 Google has agreed to pay SpaceX $30 billion for AI computing power The $920 million-a-month contract runs through June 2029. (NYT $) + Google will use about 110,000 Nvidia GPUs owned by SpaceX. (CNBC) + It comes days after Anthropic struck a SpaceX data center deal. (WSJ $)
4 AI is set to make everyday life more expensive Its insatiable thirst for resources is likely to push up inflation. (WP $) + We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Europe is accelerating its withdrawal from US Big Tech New analysis reveals dozens of moves to alternative providers. (Wired $) + Last week, the EU launched a “made in Europe” drive. (Reuters $)
6 ICE plans to give local police a new facial recognition app It would allow them to verify a person’s immigration status. (404 Media) + Is the Pentagon allowed to surveil Americans with AI? (MIT Technology Review)
7 Silicon Valley’s lure is fading for India’s tech talent Due to Trump’s immigration policies and AI-driven layoffs. (Rest of World)
8 ‘Recursive self-improvement’ has sparked fears of AI escaping control Nobody is sure about the consequences of RSI. (The Economist $) + Here are five ways that AI is learning to improve itself. (MIT Technology Review)
9 Gene-edited embryos are getting closer, but a key safety gap remains Current techniques still fail to edit every cell. (New Scientist $) + “Base-edited baby” is one of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2026. (MIT Technology Review)
10 NASA astronauts will wear high-tech Prada underwear on their moon trips Ventilation tubes are knitted into the garments. (The Verge)
Quote of the day
“Chat is dead.”
—A senior OpenAI employee tells the Financial Times why the company is shifting focus from chatbots to AI agents.
One More Thing
BETH HOECKEL
How AI is helping historians better understand our past
The digitization of historical records is making it possible to study the past in new ways. Historians are now using machine learning—particularly deep neural networks—to analyze everything from centuries-old astronomy textbooks to ancient Greek inscriptions.
The technology is helping researchers uncover new patterns in the historical record. But it also introduces risks, including the possibility that machine learning will slip bias or outright falsifications into our understanding of the past.
Much is new about this month’s upcoming FIFA World Cup tournament, which will be held in the US, Canada, and Mexico. It hosts more teams than ever before. It’s the first to occur in three different host countries. And, like predecessor cups for over half a century, it will employ a soccer ball with a brand-new design.
One group of researchers that has been testing the physics of World Cup balls for the past 20 years recently studied this new entry, called the Trionda. Made by Adidas, the Trionda features four red, green, and blue panels textured with deep grooves and maple leaf, green eagle, and star emblems to represent the three host countries. Through wind-tunnel experiments, the research team found that this ball improves over previous versions in some ways, but long-distance kicks might not go as far as they did in the past.
“The simple picture is that Trionda may very slightly punish extreme distance, but it should reward clean technique and predictable flight,” says team member John Eric Goff, who researches sports physics and is an incoming professor of engineering practice at Purdue University. “Goalkeepers, defenders hitting long passes, and long-range shooters are where I would look first for visible differences.”
Researchers used a wind tunnel to study the Trionda ball at the University of Tsukuba.
TAKESHI ASAI, SUNGCHAN HONG, AND RICHONG LIU
Adidas has been designing new balls for each World Cup since the 1970s. Some of the design changes in the first few decades were aesthetic: The 1986 ball featured graphics inspired by Aztec temples for the Mexico tournament, and 1994’s had space graphics in honor of the moon landing’s 25th anniversary. There were some structural differences too, such as upgraded foam cores and improved water resistance. But by and large, the balls used the same design of 32 pentagonal panels stitched together.
That changed in the 2006 World Cup in Germany, when Adidas introduced the +Teamgeist ball. It featured just 14 curved panels, which were thermally bonded together rather than stitched. The design helped keep moisture out so the ball wouldn’t grow heavier throughout the game, Goff says. It was around this time that he started studying soccer balls. In the years since then, he and his colleagues have followed the transformations as Adidas has released balls with different surface textures and even fewer panels—design changes significant enough to affect game play.
In-flight motion
Goff discovered early on that by analyzing a ball’s trajectory data, he could derive its drag coefficient—a number that determines the air resistance it experiences midflight at a given speed. Shortly after, he began working with a team in Japan to analyze how the World Cup ball’s in-flight behavior changes with each new design.
The experiments, carried out at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, have been purposely consistent over the years because “maintaining continuity is important for comparing new data with historical data sets,” says Takeshi Asai, a professor therewho works on the experiments. They entail attaching the ball to a metal rod connected to an instrument called a force balance, which measures aerodynamic forces such as drag and lift as the ball is exposed to the same wind speeds it would experience in a real soccer game—seven to 35 meters per second.
The team tests the ball in different orientations, “but you can only do a few because the Trionda ball is $170,” Goff says, and each new test effectively destroys it. The experiments show the team how the drag coefficient changes with speed, and Goff then writes code to simulate the ball’s overall trajectory as it flies through the air.
The team’s analysis has shown how recent World Cup balls evolved since the eight-panel Jabulani ball for the 2010 event. The Jabulani faced much criticism from players—particularly goalkeepers, who said it had a deceptive trajectory that “dipped wickedly,” as one player told the Guardian.
ALAMY
ADOBE STOCK
TAKESHI ASAI, SUNGCHAN HONG, RICHONG LIU
The 2010 Jabulani ball (left) had eight panels and a smooth texture that translated into unpredictable performance. Later balls, like the 2014 Brazuca (center) and this year’s Trionda (right), have fewer panels but more roughness.
The ball had one key flaw: It was too smooth. Even though its drag coefficient was relatively low at high speeds, once the ball slowed to a certain point the coefficient would ratchet up, causing it to lose speed quite fast and behave as the 2010 players complained. This sudden transition—called the drag crisis—occurs at higher speeds for smoother balls, but with added texture like seams and grooves, the transition can be avoided until a ball reaches lower speeds. This allows the ball to travel farther and generally behave in a more predictable way during typical play.
“It’s the same reason why golf balls have dimples and baseballs have those nice 108 double stitches. If those rough features of those balls were not there, you would not get anywhere near the kind of distance when those balls are thrown or hit that you see now,” Goff says. “There has to be some kind of a roughness on the ball to move this transition to a smaller speed.”
New grooves
Subsequent designs have been able to push the drag crisis to lower speeds, according to the analysis by Goff and his colleagues. The Brazuca ball used in 2014, for instance, has only six panels, but their total seam length is much longer, adding to the surface’s roughness. And this year’s Trionda ball contains just four panels, but each panel also has three deep grooves for more texture.
There’s a trade-off to this roughness, though. While Goff and his colleagues found that the Trionda ball experiences the drag crisis at the slowest speed since 2010, its drag coefficient is also higher than that of the other balls at high speeds. That means that even though the most dramatic change doesn’t happen until the ball is moving quite slowly, the ball will still slow down faster than its recent predecessors during the faster portion of its flight. So the trajectories of long kicks may be a few meters shorter, Goff says. Adidas did not respond to a request for comment.
Fortunately, players in the upcoming World Cup should already be familiar with these added nuances, as they’ve had access to the new ball for at least a few months. The ball, Goff notes, is quite similar to Nike’s Flight ball in design, so players who’ve spent more time with that ball may have an added advantage.
Meanwhile, Goff continues sending the group’s papers to his colleagues FIFA and Adidas in hope of providing some new insights, and he’s been sent balls by Adidas in the past. Adidas does perform its own unpublished tests of each new ball. The New York Timesreported last year that the Trionda’s 3.5-year testing process included robotics designed to kick the ball at specific speeds as well as testing in seven of the 16 host locations.
But as Goff sees it, soccer is “the world’s most popular sport, [this is] its most important tournament, and the most important piece of equipment in that tournament is this ball right here,” indicating the the Trionda ball that he had on camera with him during our Zoom call. “I think they’re interested in what some external testing looks like.”
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
The Meta hack shows there’s more to AI security than Mythos
On Monday, reports emerged that attackers had used Meta’s AI customer support agent to steal Instagram accounts. Their approach was simple: they asked the agent to link the accounts to email addresses they controlled, and it complied.
Since Anthropic announced that its Mythos model was too good at hacking for a general release, cybersecurity concerns have focused on the risk of superpowered AI systems overwhelming computer infrastructure. But the Instagram hack shows that far simpler exploits can still cause damage.
As companies offload more work to AI, these comparatively unsophisticated attacks are becoming harder to ignore. Read the full story to understand why.
—Grace Huckins
Are AI chatbots making us lose control of our brains?
Gloria Mark, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, fears that digital technologies are weakening our cognitive abilities.
Her research suggests attention spans have fallen sharply over time, leading to higher stress and lower performance. She now believes AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude may accelerate this shift. “You’re deferring your cognitive work to AI,” she said. “And it’s not good for us.”
Mark argues this could weaken critical thinking and emotional intelligence. Luckily, she thinks we can course-correct by changing our relationship with these technologies.
This story is from The Checkup, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things biotech. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Anthropic has called for a global slowdown in AI development It flagged the risk of models “self-improving.” (WSJ $) + And wants a coordinated plan to stop them. (Reuters $) + Skeptics note that the timing is awfully convenient. (The Register)
2 In a first, scientists have precisely edited human embryo genes They relied on a newer gene-editing technique. (NYT $) + Genetically-modified babies could be on their way. (Guardian) + Companies have big plans for the technology. (MIT Technology Review)
3 US officials have discussed taking financial stakes in the AI firms They’ve held talks about the government acquiring shares. (Reuters $) + Sam Altman pitched the idea to the White House last year. (WSJ $)
4 Bot web traffic has overtaken human web traffic Cloudflare said 57.4% of traffic now comes from bots. (NBC News) + Its CEO expected the milestone at the end of 2027. (CNET)
5 The White House plans to bring AI doctors into American medicine It wants chatbots to diagnose illness and prescribe medicine. (WSJ $) + But we don’t even know if healthcare AI actually helps patients. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Meta quietly added facial recognition code for smart glasses to its app The exploratory feature would identify people via biometric data. (Wired $) + Smart glasses are also entering warfare. (MIT Technology Review)
7South Korea’s labour minister wants tech firms to share AI profits Kim Young wants staff and suppliers to get a share. (Reuters $) + He helped avert a huge strike over AI profit-sharing at Samsung. (NYT $)
8 Canada’s highly-anticipated AI strategy has launched It promises over $2 billion in funding and aims to create 250,000 jobs. (BBC) + AI could strengthen democracy. (MIT Technology Review)
9 Investment in agricultural tech is booming That’s good news at a time when we’re facing unprecedented levels of food market volatility. (The Economist $)
10 Bumblebees can use tools to solve problems, new research shows Not just busy—they’re clever too! (Guardian)
Quote of the day
“Welp, that happened faster than I predicted.”
—Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, one of the largest internet hosting services, reacts on X to reports that bots have overtaken humans in driving web traffic.
One More Thing
CHRISTOPHER PAYNE
Inside the machine that saved Moore’s Law
In a Connecticut clean room, the Dutch company ASML is developing the world’s most advanced machine for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, a crucial process for manufacturing microchips.
The system has become vital to Moore’s Law—the observation that the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every two years as components shrink, driving gains in performance and efficiency. “Without this machine, it’s gone,” says Wayne Lam, a director of research at CCS Insight. “You can’t really make any leading-edge processors without EUV.”
This week I’ve been at SXSW London. There’s been music, film, and a lot—and I mean a lot—of talk about AI. I also had the opportunity to sit down with Gloria Mark, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who has spent the last 30 years studying how people interact with digital technologies.
Early in her career, the biggest concerns were the potential impacts of internet and email use on our brains. We may laugh those concerns off today, but it’s true that as the technologies became more ubiquitous and ingrained in our daily lives, our attention spans began to shrink.
Mark is worried that things are only getting worse. The title of our session was “Have we lost control of our brains?” Unfortunately, Mark told me, the answer is yes.
Around two decades ago, Mark started wondering about how our use of devices might affect our attention spans. She set up what she calls “living laboratories,” using sensors and trackers to monitor adult volunteers’ attention, mood, and behavior when they were using devices.
In 2003, she found that the average user had an attention span of around two and a half minutes. That’s how long people could spend focused on one thing before moving on to something else. “That surprised me at the time,” she told me during our session on Wednesday. “I thought: Wow, this is really short.”
But when she repeated the experiment in 2012, she found that attention spans had shrunk—all the way down to around 75 seconds on average, she said. In research she conducted between 2014 and 2020, attention spans shrank further still—to a mere 47 seconds, on average. Yikes.
And it’s not good for us. Mark told me that she’s found switching our attention so frequently is stressful. “We would have people wear heart rate monitors, and … we would see direct correlation between switching attention fast and stress going up,” she told me.
All this distraction makes it harder for us to get stuff done, too. “It just takes longer to do any single task if you’re switching your attention,” she told me. “It’s not great for performance. It’s not great for our emotional well-being.”
And that’s for adults. What about the effects of digital technologies on children? A few months ago, Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) and Google’s YouTube were ordered to pay millions of dollars in damages to a 20-year-old woman who had accused the companies of creating products that led her to develop a childhood addiction.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Meta settled another lawsuit, this one brought by a rural school district in Kentucky. The district had also accused the company of designing addictive products that were harmful to students and had sought more than $60 million to cover the costs of their mental-health needs. Around 1,200 other school districts are taking similar legal action against social media companies.
But social media isn’t all bad, all the time. It can provide opportunities for some people, including those from marginalized groups, to form connections that might otherwise be difficult. A 2024 survey of LGBTQ+ teenagers found that while some described social media as a place of rejection and fear, others described it as a place where they felt a sense of belonging, where they could develop friendships and cultivate their identity.
In truth, we can’t definitively say what effects using social media is having on children across the board, says Mark. “There have been lots and lots of studies, and the evidence is to date inconclusive,” she told me. (Despite what you might read in best-selling books on the subject.)
Mark is hopeful that large, long-term studies might finally start shedding a bit more light on this question. An effort of this nature is underway in Australia, which enacted a social media ban for under-16s at the end of last year.
Given this uncertainty over a 20-year-old technology, I wondered if Mark had any thoughts on the potential impacts of AI—an obviously much newer offering that within the space of a couple of years appears to have become deeply integrated into our digital lives.
She told me she’s worried.
When we put in effort to do something—such as evaluating or summarizing content—we’re doing what’s known as “depth of processing,” she told me. “When you’re actively engaged with information, you’re processing it on a very deep level,” she said. “Then you’re more likely to learn it, to understand it, [and] to retain it.”
That’s not happening when most people use AI bots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. When we ask these tools to write, summarize, or evaluate for us, we’re no longer doing that depth of processing. “You’re deferring your cognitive work to AI,” she said. “And it’s not good for us.”
The risk is that our cognitive abilities will weaken over time. “If you’re not constantly exercising your muscles, they can atrophy,” Mark said. “And that’s exactly what can happen with our minds.” People with weaker critical thinking skills are more likely to fall prey to misinformation, she added.
Interactions with AI-powered “synthetic companions” can be just as harmful. Relationships between human beings take work—time, effort, and understanding. None of that is needed if you’re forming a relationship with a sycophantic bot. The “muscle” we risk atrophying here is emotional intelligence, which surveys suggest is already on the decline, said Mark.
She’s not painting a particularly rosy picture.
“If we continue on this trajectory, attention spans are diminished, loneliness is rising, boredom is rising, emotional intelligence decreasing, and actually our sense of purpose, according to studies, is also decreasing,” she said.
Luckily, she thinks we can course-correct by changing our relationship with these technologies. The key factor is effort.
The more effort we put into something, the deeper the satisfaction we stand to gain, Mark told me. That means making an effort to read a book rather than skimming its summary, and to meet with friends in person when you can. Try not to use GPS in places where you can probably manage without it.
“I love technology; we can’t give it up,” she told me. “[But] we have to learn how to create new life routines.”
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
On June 5, 404 Mediareported that attackers had been using Meta’s AI customer support agent to steal Instagram accounts. Their approach was simple: They asked the agent to link the accounts to email addresses that they controlled, and the agent complied. One attacker broke into the dormant Obama White House account and made pro-Iran posts; others took over accounts with valuable, single-word handles, possibly in order to sell them.
AI cybersecurity concerns are nothing new. Since Anthropic announced in April that its Mythos model was too good at hacking to be released to the general public, commentators, researchers, and federal officials alike have fixated on the idea that superpowered AI systems could lay waste to our computer infrastructure. That’s not quite what this Instagram hack was: There, AI was the target rather than the attacker, and the method was far simpler than anything Mythos would cook up. But as companies offload more work to AI, these comparatively unsophisticated attacks could wreak their own havoc.
“As AI becomes more and more widely used—especially when AI is more and more widely used to automate our work flows, like account recovery—I think attackers are going to be more and more motivated to attack AI itself,” says Neil Gong, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University.
Gong and other scholars have been issuing warnings about the security vulnerabilities of AI agents for a while. They publish papers and blog posts detailing exploits such as indirect prompt injection, which involves hijacking agents using commands hidden in websites, emails, or other seemingly anodyne data sources. Compared with these techniques, the Meta hack was practically mindless. The only complication that hackers had to overcome was using a VPN that matched the true account owner’s location; then they directly asked the support agent to change the account’s email address, and it complied.
Meta has not commented publicly on how this vulnerability slipped through the cracks. But given the simplicity of the exploit, Gong says, it should have been uncovered easily, before the agent was deployed. “It’s really surprising,” he says. “I don’t understand why they didn’t find this simple problem.”
Jessica Ji, a senior research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, agrees. “It raises questions like: Were there even guardrails in place?” she says. “Did anyone think to test for this kind of scenario?” She notes that the oversight is particularly striking coming from a company like Meta, which has extensive expertise in both AI and cybersecurity. Meta did not respond to a request for comment for this article, but on Monday a Meta spokesperson said on X that the vulnerability had been resolved.
As embarrassing a moment as this might be for Meta in particular, it also highlights some core vulnerabilities shared by all AI agents. Unlike traditional software, agents can respond in flexible—and unexpected—ways to new circumstances, which is why they might be able to substitute for human customer support agents. But AI agents can also be tricked in ways that humans wouldn’t be, and because they can take real-world actions, those mistakes have consequences. “A human would say, ‘Okay, why do you want to change the email address?’ and maybe respond with a security question,” says Somesh Jha, a professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “What is going on with these agents is they’re very eager to finish the task. It’s almost like some elementary school student who just wants to please the teacher.”
There are ways to mitigate the risks. Companies can use traditional software to build guardrails that make sure agents follow strict rules, such as always asking for answers to security questions before sending sensitive account information to a new email address. And the experts consulted for this article all agree that agents should undergo rigorous red-teaming, a process in which developers try their best to attack a system in order to discover its vulnerabilities before it is deployed.
But there are also countervailing forces. Companies want to deploy capable agents, and the more power an agent has—and the fewer guardrails it is subject to—the more work it can potentially take on. “Security and utility always have a trade-off,” says Bo Li, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. And adequate red-teaming can be expensive. Defenders have to expend more resources than attackers do, because attackers only need to discover a single exploit, while defenders try to discover and patch as many as they can. When attackers are working toward something as valuable as a single-word Instagram handle, they’ll pour resources into finding exploits, so defenders have to spend even more money to protect that prize.
As AI models continue to improve, hardening their defenses might actually get easier. Though the probabilistic nature of large language models means that LLM agents will always be vulnerable to some forms of attack, a more sophisticated model might have identified an attempt to change the email associated with the Obama White House account as suspicious. And AI systems can be used for agent red-teaming, much as participants in Anthropic’s Project Glasswing use Mythos to identify vulnerabilities in their software.
Still, experts expect that the problem of securing AI agents will only become more pressing in the future. As agents grow more capable, companies that adopt them may want to give them more power, both to provide more services with fewer humans and to avoid being left behind by their competitors. In the fast-moving world of AI, the time needed to carefully secure risky agentic systems might seem like an unconscionable delay.
“Everybody wants to be the first to do something and just push things out without careful scrutiny and red-teaming,” Jha says. “I think it’s a very dangerous thing.”
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
How courts are coping with a flood of AI-generated lawsuits
Most days in her chambers, Judge Maritza Braswell, a federal magistrate judge in Colorado, sifts through stacks of documents written by people without a lawyer. The number of these filings has more than doubled compared to before 2023. She puts that jump down to AI.
But while AI appears to be expanding access to justice, it doesn’t seem to be improving people’s chances of winning. Judges are starting to question what rights and duties chatbots should have as they stand in for lawyers. Lawmakers, meanwhile, are grappling with who should pay the price when chatbots produce bad legal advice.
How virtual power plants could provide energy for data centers
Would you take a payment to ramp down your electricity use? Would it change anything if you were doing so to help power a local data center? A new project backed by Google will put those questions to the test.
The company has signed a deal to fund a virtual power plant in the largest power grid in the US. The system will group together devices like electric vehicles and smart thermostats, paying customers to adjust their usage when the grid is stretched.
This story is from The Spark, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things climate. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 The EU has proposed new legislation to end its Big Tech dependence The laws aim to boost domestic cloud, AI and semiconductors. (CNBC) + US firms would be blocked from critical public tenders. (Reuters $) + It also wants to make sure non-EU actors cannot disrupt tech services with a “kill switch.” (The Guardian) + But the proposal needs to be negotiated with EU member states. (Politico $)
2 Intelligence agencies warn Chinese spies are recruiting on LinkedIn The Five Eyes alliance said Beijing is using job platforms for espionage. (BBC) + The spies are allegedly recruiting government and military staff. (Politico $) + The Chinese embassy in the UK condemned the accusations. (Bloomberg $) + Meet the man hunting the spies in your smartphone. (MIT Technology Review)
3 AI CEOs have called for a law protecting against biological weapons They warn that synthetic DNA could be used for bioweapons. (Wired $) + Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis joined the call. (WSJ $) + No one’s sure if synthetic mirror life will kill us all. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Firms are using Reddit to manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI search They’re spamming subreddits to get posts scraped by chatbots. (404 Media) + What we’ve been getting wrong about AI’s truth crisis. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Meta keeps delaying the launch of its new AI model The new Muse Spark AI model API still has no release date. (WSJ $) + Which is hampering Meta’s plans to monetize its AI investments. (Reuters $)
6 For the first time, a US city has voted to permanently ban data centers Monterey Park, California, voted in favor of the move. (LA Times) + Should we be moving data centers to space? (MIT Technology Review)
7 China is betting on household chore training to advance robotics Data harvested in homes and factories provides a scaling edge. (Rest of World) + Gig workers are training humanoids at home. (MIT Technology Review)
8 Sam Altman will urge US lawmakers not to require AI model approvals He’s advocating against proposals for new AI rules. (Reuters $) + His move comes after President Trump signed a new AI order. (Wired $)
9 Quantinuum raised $1.68 billion in an IPO as quantum computing rises Investors flocked to one of the fast-growing sector’s leaders. (Reuters $)
10 Someone finally wants to hire philosophers: Silicon Valley Big tech hopes they will help build better machines. (The Atlantic $)
Quote of the day
“Historically, these companies have been very willing to play Russian roulette—and they’re playing another round.”
—Connor Leahy, an AI researcher, former hacker and US director of ControlAI, tells the Financial Times why he’s concerned about Anthropic’s relentless race to the top.
One More Thing
HENRY HORENSTEIN/GETTY
What an octopus’s mind can teach us about AI’s ultimate mystery
Emily Bender, a linguist at the University of Washington, has developed a thought experiment she calls the octopus test. It involves an octopus learning to copy patterns in human writing and produce squiggles in response. But does the animal actually understand the language or are we merely projecting meaning onto it?
Bender’s octopus is a stand-in for AI systems like ChatGPT. The intelligence we see in these machines is also projected on them by us. The same applies to consciousness: we may claim to see it, but it remains unclear whether it is really there.
Most days in her chambers, Judge Maritza Braswell, a federal magistrate judge in Colorado, sifts through stacks of documents written by people without a lawyer. Many of them can’t afford to hire a lawyer, and others have cases too weak or too small to interest one. She reads each one carefully, mindful of how daunting it is to walk into the courtroom alone.
Lately, like many judges across the US, she has seen a noticeable uptick in such filings. According to a new study that examined 4.5 million federal civil cases from 2005 to 2026, the share of lawsuits brought by self-represented people increased from 11% in 2022 to 16.8% in 2025. Within those cases, the number of filings made more than doubled from pre-2023 levels.
Judge Braswell puts that jump down to AI.
“I do correlate that to AI in part because I see AI use,” she says. As a tech-savvy judge who uses AI to vet court documents, she’s learned to recognize how large language models write. She can tell from the prose and at times, hallucinated cases and fabricated quotes.
“I’m also actually seeing better-drafted pleadings,” she says.
But while AI appears to be expanding access to justice, it doesn’t seem to be improving people’s chances of winning. Judges are also starting to question what kinds of rights and responsibilities large language models should bear as they step into lawyers’ shoes. For example, they ask whether a chatbot has a duty to provide good advice, as a human lawyer does. And a growing number of lawmakers across the US are starting to grapple with who should pay the price when chatbots dish out bad legal advice.
AI supercharges lawsuits
To test whether AI was driving the increase in lawsuits filed by people without a lawyer, the authors of the study, Anand Shah at MIT and Joshua Levy at the University of Southern California, ran 1,600 randomly sampled court documents through Pangram, a commercial AI-text detector. The share flagged as containing AI-generated writing rose from 1% in 2023 to 18% in 2026.
To Judge Braswell, that’s not necessarily a cause for concern. While the surge of AI-assisted filings might be adding to their workloads, she and many other judges find the cases easier to rule on because AI is helping people without legal training better articulate their arguments.
Court documents written by people without lawyers are notoriously hard to decipher. Some arrive as handwritten scrawls bordering on gibberish that judges take a while to decode. However cryptic, judges are required to read them charitably.
These days, Judge Braswell has been churning through motions drafted by AI faster than the ones written by the litigants. “I have to be really careful because some of them contain hallucinations and errors, but I can generally understand what they’re arguing better with AI assistance from them than without it,” she says.
The clearer filings let Judge Braswell hear them better. “If I understand an argument a little bit better, I’m probably going to be able to help a little bit more,” she says.
Online communities are springing up to trade self-help guides on using AI to sue. In December 2024, a viral Reddit post walked immigration applicants through suing the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services over delayed review of their applications: draft a writ of mandamus with Microsoft Copilot, pay a lawyer $150 to polish it, and file in the expedient District of Vermont. Cases filed by people without lawyers in Vermont rose from about 45 a year before 2022 to more than 1,100 in 2024.
Even so, people without lawyers are far more likely to lose their case than people with lawyers, and that’s not changing even with the addition of AI, the study found.
“It turns out that mounting a lawsuit is a complex, multifaceted task. Not all of it is just drafting text,” says Levy.
Chatbot-client privilege
Judge William Garfinkel, a federal magistrate judge in Connecticut, has served on the bench for three decades, pondering all sorts of questions about lawyers’ relationship with their clients. Lately, he has been wondering whether people’s conversations with chatbots dispensing legal advice should be privileged, the way their conversations with lawyers are.
“You can make a good argument that … conversations with large language models like Claude or ChatGPT or Grok should deserve some protection,” he says.
Courts are starting to grapple with this question. In February, a federal court in Michigan ruled that a self-represented person’s conversations with ChatGPT to prepare her case were work product—legal work that is shielded from the opposing side.
The decision came on the same day a federal court in New York held that documents a criminal defendant had generated using Claude were not privileged attorney-client conversations or work product. The court argued that Claude is not an attorney and that a user has no “reasonable expectation of confidentiality in his communication” with it because AI companies can disclose user data to third parties.
In March, Judge Braswell ruled that a self-represented person’s use of a chatbot should stay off limits. “It is true that AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others … collect user data for training and other purposes. But … that does not eliminate all expectations of privacy,” she wrote. Courts have since remained split on the issue.
Malpractice without a pulse
Some judges are also wondering whether a chatbot, like a lawyer, has a duty to provide good legal advice. Judge Allison Goddard, a federal magistrate judge in California, has noticed that people without lawyers often get the wrong advice from ChatGPT when trying to assess the value of their case during settlement negotiations. In one case, a plaintiff who slipped and fell in a store asked for $700,000 from the store, which was wildly more than the case was worth.
“Where are you getting the idea that you’re getting $700,000? Did you go to ChatGPT?” Judge Goddard asked. “Well …” the plaintiff mumbled. She then walked the person through the law to explain why ChatGPT was wrong and suggested a lower amount. “It’s like Dr. Google went to law school,” she says.
Then there’s the question of who’s liable when a chatbot makes such mistakes. In March, Nippon Life Insurance Company sued OpenAI alleging that ChatGPT practiced law without a license and helped a woman reopen a lawsuit that was already settled, flooding the court with frivolous filings. “ChatGPT is not an attorney,” the lawsuit said.
In May, OpenAI asked the court to dismiss the case, arguing that ChatGPT does not practice law. “ChatGPT is not a person and neither has nor uses any degree of legal knowledge or skill,” OpenAI said in its filing. The case is still pending before the court.
States have started to weigh legislation that would hold AI companies liable when their chatbots offer bad legal advice. New York introduced a bill in March that would bar chatbots from impersonating lawyers, even if they notify users that they are interacting with chatbots. In Congress, a series of bills have been proposed to ban chatbots from posing as lawyers, doctors, and other licensed professionals. The bills have yet to gain traction.
For now, people will continue turning to AI to be their lawyer. For many of them, the rewards outweigh the risks. Not long ago, when Judge Braswell asked self-represented litigants why they wanted a particular piece of evidence, they mumbled timidly. Now, they answer her questions confidently, having rehearsed with a chatbot.
“This is a really tough system to navigate. With AI, though, it gets a little less complex,” she says.
Would you take a payment to ramp down your electricity use? Would it change anything if you were doing so to help power a local data center?
Google just signed a new deal to help pay for a virtual power plant (VPP) in the largest power grid in the US. The agreement is with Voltus, a leading VPP and distributed energy resources platform.
Voltus will set up the virtual power plant, grouping together devices like electric vehicles and smart thermostats. It’ll pay customers to participate, and the company will dial back power or use the stored energy during times when the grid is stressed. Google will foot the bill for setting it up, and the extra capacity generated by the project will help run its data centers in the region.
This is one of the most concrete examples so far of a tech giant using a VPP to help meet energy demand for data centers. But there are still some lingering questions about just how far this sort of program can go, and what the limits are.
Last year, it felt as if everyone was talking about data center flexibility. A high-profile study from Duke University found that if data centers agreed to decrease their energy demand for roughly 40 hours per year, a whole bunch of them (about 100 gigawatts’ worth) could come online without making new power plants or transmission equipment necessary.
The underlying reason is that our power grid is designed not for our average energy use, but for the absolute maximum: the brutally hot July evening when everyone is blasting their air conditioners, watching Love Island, and microwaving popcorn. If a data center is willing to refrain from pulling so much power during those high-stress times, the grid can happily support it the rest of the year.
One lingering question here is about incentives: How would you get data centers to agree to this? After all, they might not have a very flexible load, especially now that AI use is more widespread—training a model can easily be delayed or shifted, but customer demand is more immediate. Giving up computing capacity could mean losing revenue.
Regulation is one approach that could work here. One proposal in the US would allow new data centers to come online years sooner if they agree to lower demand when the grid is nearing its max. And a new Texas law requires large users to switch to backup power or curtail their demand in emergency situations.
Another approach is for data center operators to pay for other people to be flexible.
Voltus announced a new program in September that allows data centers to finance flexibility on their local grid. The company calls it “Bring your own capacity.” Google is now the first named customer taking advantage of this program.
In the new agreement, Voltus will pay people who agree to participate in the virtual power plant. The plant will be part of PJM, the grid that covers much of the US East Coast. The company says it will be able to aggregate up to 100 megawatts of distributed energy resources each year. The plant should be operational in 2027, according to Voltus.
This isn’t Google’s first foray into flexibility; the company has agreements with utilities across the US to limit or shift its own energy demand, which can help free up grid capacity. As the company pointed out in a blog post earlier this year, though, there are limits on how flexible a data center can be, and not every facility will be able to ramp down its power demand.
“There is no one solution for expanding grid capacity and we’re continuing to explore all options, including the many avenues for load flexibility,” said Michael Terrell, Google’s global head of advanced energy, in an emailed statement in response to written questions.
Once again, I’m wondering about incentives here. These companies are asking homes and businesses to be flexible. Will they agree?
A recent study in California looked at local people’s willingness to participate in managed electric-vehicle charging. Essentially, the program pays people to give up control of when they charge their EVs. This is another way to help smooth out electricity demand and ease the burden on the grid.
The problem? Not many people signed up. With no economic incentive, only 1% of EV owners enrolled in managed charging. At $40 per month (about 15% of their power bill), only 4.6% did.
This is a different situation and a different region from the one in which Google is working with Voltus. (It’s worth noting that the companies aren’t sharing how much they plan to pay the participants, which will obviously be a big determinant in participation for this kind of project.)
But this study shows that even with money on the table, people may not always jump at the chance to cede control of their electricity demand. And it certainly feels relevant that about 70% of Americans oppose AI data centers in their area, according to recent Gallup polling.
Being flexible sounds like a great idea in theory, and these financed VPPs could provide an immediate route to meeting energy demand. But as we move from idea to implementation, it’ll be interesting to see whether trial runs work as intended.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
5 key points in Trump’s new AI order
Less than two weeks after scrapping an executive order on AI, President Donald Trump signed a new one on Tuesday. Promising to promote innovation and security, the policy represents a turning point in the White House’s AI governance—but is likely to attract criticism from both opponents and supporters of stricter regulation. Here are five key points from the order:
1. It’s created a voluntary review system: tech companies will be asked to share frontier models with the government for review 30 days before they plan to release them. 2. There’s no mandatory licensing: the government will not require permits before software can be deployed. 3. It establishes a dedicated AI cybersecurity clearinghouse: the new hub will coordinate security checks with the private sector. 4. It’s a watered-down version of the order Trump shelved last month: the earlier version requested models 90 days before their release. 5. But it’s still a move towards stronger AI oversight: the policy marks a clear departure from the White House’s previous hands-off approach.
Quay Barnett, who leads the effort at Anduril following a career in the Army’s Special Operations Command, aims to optimize “the human as a weapons system.” His vision is cyborg-inspired: drones and soldiers will see together, share information seamlessly, and make decisions as one.
—James O’Donnell
This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 President Trump has signed an AI order that expands model oversight The long-awaited executive order aims to mitigate security threats. (NYT $) +It asks companies to submit models voluntarily for tests before release. (NPR) + It’s a slimmed-down version of the order Trump shelved in May. (WSJ $) + And marks a strategic shift in his AI strategy. (Reuters $) + A war over AI regulation is coming to the US. (MIT Technology Review)
2 SpaceX plans to raise $75 billion in IPO at $135 per share The company intends to sell 555.6 million shares. (Reuters $)+ The fixed price breaks from the traditional IPO process. (Bloomberg $) + Morningstar says the valuation should be nearly 50% lower. (BI)
3 Meta has scaled back plans to track workers’ clicks and keystrokes to train AI All staff can pause it for 30 minutes, with some fully exempt.(The Information $) + The changes follow a fierce backlash to the tracking plans. (Reuters $) + AI is supercharging surveillance. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Microsoft wants to ‘make users addicted’ to its new AI assistant According tointernal documents for the “Scout” tool. (404 Media) + Microsoft launched the assistant on Tuesday. (TechCrunch)
5 Mathematicians fear that AI threatens their field A new declaration raises concerns about AI’s trustworthiness. (Ars Technica) + It arrives a week after OpenAI said it solved a famous math problem. (WSJ $) + A startup wants to change how mathematicians do math. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Scientists have found a way to supercharge computer worms with AI The worm could target any known flaw in the world’s computers. (NYT $) + AI supercharging scams. (MIT Technology Review)
7 Google must let UK publishers opt out of AI search features Online publishers can choose not to appear in the AI Overviews. (BBC) + Google is now testing features for sites to exit AI search. (Reuters $)
8 America’s data center build-out is falling way behind schedule 60% of those planned for completion in 2027 aren’t yet under construction. (WSJ $) + Nobody wants a data center in their backyard. (MIT Technology Review)
9 EVs are getting cheaper worldwide—except in the US The US is short on supportive policies and affordable Chinese EVs. (Rest of World)
10 The European Parliament is ditching Google for… Qwant The French search engine is the new default on in-house computers. (Politico) + The switch comes amid a broader push to wean the EU off US tech. (FT $)
Quote of the day
“SpaceX’s valuation could be richer than a plate of dauphinoise potatoes.”
—Dan Coatsworth, head of markets at AJ Bell, tells CNBC that SpaceX’s IPO price looks overloaded with expectations.
One More Thing
Marseille’s battle against the surveillance state
Heading toward Marseille’s central train station, Eda Nano points out what looks like a streetlamp on the Rue des Abeilles. But this sleek piece of urban furniture is not a lamp. It’s a video camera, with a 360-degree view of the narrow street.
Nano, a 39-year-old developer, wants to make Marseille residents more aware that they’re being watched. She’s part of a growing group of activists resisting the rise of policing cameras in their hometown.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
How small businesses can leverage AI
From accounting to design to market research and product development, there’s a staggering breadth of skills needed to run a business. Large companies can hire experts to handle these tasks, but small businesses don’t always have that luxury.
That’s where AI comes in. Today’s models can already take on a range of basic administrative work, from organizing notes and summarizing meetings to invoicing, goal-setting, and social media planning. Find out how small-business owners can put AI to work.
—Peter Hall
This article is from Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review’s limited-run newsletter examining how to apply LLMs across industries. To receive it in your inbox, sign up here.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Anthropic has confidentially filed for IPO ahead of OpenAI It aims to go public as early as this fall. (CNN) + The company did not disclose its target valuation. (Guardian) + It’s expected to list shortly after a trillion-dollar IPO by SpaceX. (BBC) + Beating OpenAI in the IPO race could have a big impact. (WSJ $)
2 The EU may exclude US cloud giants from critical contracts The likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google could be shut out. (Reuters $) + The EU aims to reduce its dependence on US tech. (FT $) + Trump supercharged this sovereignty push. (Politico $)
3 Florida has become the first state to sue OpenAI The lawsuit targets ChatGPT’s alleged child safety risks. (NPR) + Florida says OpenAI put profit ahead of safety. (Reuters $) + Chatbots are now starting to check user ages. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Hackers stole Instagram accounts just by asking Meta AI for them They easily broke into a host of celebrity profiles. (404 Media) + The exploit shows the risk of offloading support to AI. (TechCrunch) + AI is making online crimes easier. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Chinese universities with military ties are seeking Nvidia chips Two are blacklisted by the US Commerce Department. (Bloomberg $) + The Chinese military has sought restricted Nvidia chips for years. (NYT $) + US senators have slammed a loophole in chip export rules. (Reuters $)
6 Blue Origin and NASA disagree on a crucial rocket’s next flight + Blue Origin says the rocket will fly again this year. (Engadget)+ But NASA is less optimistic. (CNBC)+ The rocket’s failure cast doubt on NASA’s moon plans. (BBC)
7 Moderna has won funding to develop an Ebola mRNA vaccine The CEPI has pledged over $60 million to the effort. (Ars Technica) + To fight an outbreak raging out of control. (MIT Technology Review)
8 China is using AI to predict future political dissent A company called Geedge Networks is developing the tech. (NYT $)
9 Geoengineering can thicken Arctic ice, but melt results are mixed Trials show the tech has had a limited impact. (New Scientist $)
10 Top AI labs are expanding research into machine ‘consciousness’ Meta, Anthropic, and DeepMind are increasing their investments. (FT $) + A new tool could show how consciousness works. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“Sam Altman and ChatGPT have chosen the AI race over the safety and security of our kids. They have chosen profit over public safety, and we’re not going to stand for it in here in Florida.”
—Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier tells reporters why his state is suing OpenAI, the LA Times reports.
One More Thing
The entrance to the Moscow storage facility of KrioRus, which was until recently the only cryonics company in Eurasia.
ALESSANDRO GANDOLFI
Why the sci-fi dream of cryonics never died
Cryonics is best known for its appearance in sci-fi films like 2001: A Space Odyssey. But its adherents have held on to a dream that advances in medicine will one day allow for resuscitation and additional years on Earth.
Around 500 people are preserved in liquid nitrogen globally, while another 4,000 are on waiting lists. Despite scant evidence that cryonics can work, believers remain optimistic that future science could eventually revive them.
The global health care sector is under increasing strain.
Decades of chronic underinvestment and constraints in recruitment have coincided with a surge in demand for services for aging populations. Gaps in provision are already taking a toll, with fragmented access to care and high rates of stress and burnout among staff. And it’s getting worse. The World Health Organization has warned that current shortfalls will increase to 11 million workers by 2030.
In their urgent hunt for a solution, many health-care providers are now pinning their hopes on agentic AI, with more than two-thirds (68%) having already adopted AI agents into their workforce, according to KPMG.
The technology is being deployed to automate complex back-office processes, collaborate with medical teams, and even triage patients, all in a bid to reduce the cognitive load on clinicians and improve quality of care for patients as the supply of human health-care workers dwindles.
A different type of digitalization
Until now, the benefits of digitalization within health care have been limited.
Many staff have blamed slow or outdated technology for adding to the administrative burden rather than alleviating it. For example, U.S. patient data was migrated to electronic health records (EHRs) in the early 2000s, but this data remains fragmented and reliant on manual inputs.
New telehealth services and digital care tools, like remote monitors, have had similar shortcomings, says Ashis Barad, MD, chief digital and technology officer at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), an academic medical center in New York that focuses on musculoskeletal health. Both technologies have helped improve access to health care by removing geographical barriers, he says, but they’ve failed to replicate the quality of in-person care or win trust from patients.
Agentic AI is different from these existing technologies, he insists.
Rather than relying on manual inputs or defaulting to human workers for any case that sits slightly outside a rigid framework, AI agents can handle nuanced, complex scenarios. They can make autonomous decisions, retrieve information from expert clinical sources, and iterate over time, freeing clinicians to focus on higher-level patient care. As Dr. Barad puts it: “Agentic AI takes your workflow and collapses it, augments it, supercharges it, and makes it more performant.”
At HSS, AI agents have already been deployed in multiple areas. They handle complex backend processes, such as insurance claims that previously took several weeks to complete and involved both HSS staff and a third-party contractor to handle the volume. Now, says Dr. Barad, AI agents complete 1,100 claims per month. They’ve reduced the appeals stage from 45 minutes to five and improved the success rate of those appeals from 65% to 100% in the nine months since implementation. HSS now handles all claims in-house.
Building on that success, HSS is now deploying AI agents in non-clinical patient-facing settings with an AI scheduling and triage service, as part of a collaboration with enterprise agentic AI developer Ema Unlimited. The service is accessible 24/7 via web, text, or phone. It uses conversational AI to ask patients clarifying questions about their condition and then books appointments with the most appropriate clinician, factoring in location, insurance coverage, and physician availability. “It completes the whole loop,” says Dr. Barad. The AI agent is trained on “all of our context, all of our rules, and all of our knowledge base,” he adds, providing patients with streamlined access to highly specialist knowledge from world-leading surgeons.
Given the high-stakes decisions delegated to AI agents, the triage service has built-in safeguards—sensitive, complex, or uncertain scenarios are escalated to human specialists. Every decision made by the AI agent is auditable and human staff can step in at any point. Patient data is kept secure and the system is trained on all HSS protocols, policies, and care pathways. By keeping humans in the loop, Ema says its technology strikes the balance between efficient automation, patient-first safety, and human-informed decision making.
As the technology becomes more prolific, it will be incumbent on providers to ensure they have these sorts of guardrails embedded into systems, says Dr. Barad. At HSS all decisions around the technology are filtered through an AI subcommittee that Dr. Barad co-chairs alongside a senior nursing executive. AI agents that may touch on patient care will be scrutinized with far more rigor than, say, backend processes, he explains.
AI agents prompt systems-level change
For example, Dr. Barad has plans to create a dedicated AI lab at the HSS main campus in New York City—a move that aims to democratize access to the technology across the organization. It will be open to all staff looking to understand or build AI agents, he explains, with informative classes and one-on-one training. “We’re getting agentic AI into everybody’s hands,” he says. This echoes research by Deloitte, which found that leading agentic AI adopters in health care were far more likely to have opted for multiagent solutions, redesigning end-to-end workflows rather than sticking to narrow solutions or individual use cases.
The key, it appears, is to integrate AI agents across the entire enterprise, treating them as a general-purpose technology. As Dr. Barad puts it: “It’s wrong to think of agentic AI in use cases… It’s a general-purpose technology, analogous to electricity.”
In practice, this means health-care providers need to set the right foundation to achieve value with agentic AI. This includes creating a unified data strategy, one that integrates fragmented data sources across an organization to create a single, comprehensive source of truth. In health care, data is often split across multiple departments and providers, each with their own legacy IT system.
In systems that rely on fragmented data sources, metrics often lack standardized definitions too. For example, Dr. Barad says that each hospital he’s worked in has had a slightly different definition for “time to start surgery,” a metric commonly used to gauge operating room efficiency. This level of fragmentation impedes AI agents from retrieving information from different sources or applications and assimilating the tacit knowledge that differentiates them from other technologies.
By creating greater interoperability of data at HSS, patient-facing AI agents can draw from a patient’s clinical care history and existing recommendations from their clinician, combine this information with current symptoms, and decide whether a situation requires escalation before notifying the correct specialist and informing the patient.
Building better outcomes
For Dr. Barad, the potential for AI agents to overhaul health care and alleviate the current pressures on resources, access, and patient care is huge.
He envisions a future in which 90% of non-clinical health-care tasks could be administered by AI agents, freeing clinicians up for what he calls white-glove work, meaning the most complex, specialized, and sensitive cases.
Most health-care providers seem equally optimistic. According to research by KPMG, 84% of providers are already comfortable handing decision making about specific processes over to AI agents.
“We’re spending so much time on keyboards and computers right now that we’re actually not doing what we should be doing,” says Dr. Barad. “This is going to rehumanize health care.”
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.
This article is from Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review’s limited-run newsletter examining how to apply LLMs across industries. To receive it in your inbox,sign up here.
From accounting to design to market research and product development, there’s a staggering breadth of skills needed to run a business. A large company can hire experts to handle these tasks, but small businesses don’t always have this luxury.
That’s where AI comes in. Today’s AI models do a decent job at these tasks. The trick for small businesses is to understand where AI is good enough and where it’s not.
One place where a “good enough” AI can already be quite valuable to small business owners is in providing secretarial skills and handling basic administrative matters. Let’s take a look at how one private tutor is using it to improve his recordkeeping and free up his time.
Case study
Sam Finnegan-Dehn works in fundraising for a charity, but he moonlights as a math and philosophy tutor for university students from his home in London. Through this part-time business, he can leverage his degrees in philosophy and share his love of the subject with clients.
But meeting with students is only a fraction of the work it takes to be a good tutor. He also plans lessons and finds fresh reading materials, creates assignments, sends invoices, and keeps up with new research—all on top of his regular job. Given these demands, Finnegan-Dehn doesn’t have as much time as he’d like to grow his tutoring roster.
So he’s turned to AI for some help in managing the day-to-day aspects of his business. He says AI has taken on a secretarial role across all of his digital notebooks, where he jots down reminders about his clients’ progress and new readings to keep himself up-to-date. He describes using AI as kind of like having a second memory that helps him connect ideas he’s written down in various places.
While he has experimented with different tools like Claude and ChatGPT, he’s now landed on Notion AI because it integrates better with his tutoring notes, which live across his notebook tabs in the Notion app. Finnegan-Dehn doesn’t use AI to create teaching materials, but he does let Notion AI record meetings with his clients (after getting their consent), and then uses its automated summaries to refine his teaching strategy. For example, if he notices from the AI’s summary that it seems like a certain technique was not helping a student, he may change how he approaches the subject next time.
Beyond this, Notion AI also helps him with goal-setting, drafting lesson notes, invoicing, and generating and syncing social media posts. For goal-setting, for example, Finnegan-Dehn says he understands his long-term goals for his business but not always the concrete steps to build to them. He uses AI to help fill in these gaps. He starts by writing down a “North Star” goal—say, to have a certain number of clients by the end of the year. Next, he asks his AI to generate the steps that he needs to take to get there, given the profile he has built up in the app. Then, he can reflect on the results and choose which tasks to tackle first.
The tool
Notion has been a big player in note-taking software for many years. Its AI add-on, released in late 2023, now has tools that enable it to interact with many other online productivity platforms. There’s an email client, calendar integrations, and a newly released agent. And while this level of access has raised privacy concerns, it can also make for a pretty powerful virtual assistant.
Many of the tasks targeted by Notion AI are less creative and more rote: syncing information across documents or searching through old scribbles, for example. This makes the tool especially appealing to small business owners, who have limited bandwidth, particularly for menial work.
Other companies are developing tools targeted at specific industries. For example, Grandma’s Quilt Shop in Yuma, Arizona, uses Rain, which has a software suite tailored to craft companies, to generate inventory descriptions and pricing for its stock of fabric designs. The owners claim this AI tool cuts the time it takes to list items by 60 to 80%.
There are drawbacks, though, as Finnegan-Dehn described some of Notion AI’s idiosyncrasies as “clunky” at times. And the AI add-on for Notion costs $20 per month. As with all new tools, small business owners should carefully assess how the potential gains and headaches measure up against the cost of just doing the job themselves.
User tips
Consider these points when thinking about whether AI might be able to help you run a business, or make any part of your work life just a little bit easier.
Look before you leap. Since LLMs feed on the data you input to answer your queries or complete tasks, you want to give them information in a way that’s convenient for you and for the model. For many of these notebook AI services, this means, for example, using their platform for notetaking so you don’t have to input or upload notes later. Because of this, it’s a good idea to weigh your options carefully before committing to an AI-powered ecosystem.
Work to your strengths. Think about what skills you lack in-house, and see if AI can either help with training or take these tasks on for you. Just be aware: AI hallucinates and makes mistakes, so think about where accuracy is needed and keep humans in charge there.
AI isn’t always the best tool. It’s okay to use something off the shelf when that’s the better choice. It’s going to be safer, for example, to use existing payment processing platforms like Shopify or Square than to vibe-code one using AI.
Consider using local models for any sensitive information. Our reporting has covered the risks that online AI models have in leaking sensitive data, and there have been many reports about how AI companies collect your data when you ask their chatbots questions. Even if your business doesn’t handle personal information, there can still be some things you’d prefer not to share publicly. In these cases, using an open-source model that makes inferences on your prompts locally can be a great option, instead of ChatGPT or Claude or other proprietary models. Thankfully, some LLMs can now be run off of laptops and small desktops. Here’s how to set one up and start using it.
Sign up for Making AI Work,MIT Technology Review’s limited-run newsletter examining how to apply LLMs across healthcare, climate tech, education, and more.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
China has approved the world’s first invasive brain-computer chip—here’s what’s next
Sitting in the courtyard of his house in China’s Henan province last October, Dong Hui decided to try holding a pen. Six years after a car accident left him paralyzed from the neck down, he slowly wrote his name, “Thank you,” and the date.
The breakthrough was made possible by a brain implant called NEO. In March, it became the world’s first invasive brain-computer interface approved for use beyond clinical trials. The approval is expected to accelerate China’s push to become a global leader in brain implants.
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Nvidia is launching its first AI chip for personal computers The RTX Spark will power laptops from Dell, HP, Microsoft, and others. (BBC) + They’re being designed specifically to run AI agents. (WSJ $) + The first devices are set to launch on Windows PCs in the fall. (CNBC) + The move marks a challenge to Apple and Intel. (FT $)
2 The US is stopping exports of AI chips to Chinese firms abroad It’s closed a loophole allowing exports to Chinese subsidiaries. (Reuters $) + Which may have enabled unlicensed access to Nvidia chips. (Al Jazeera) + Export curbs have led China to redesign its chip industry. (MIT Technology Review)
3 Surgeons have transplanted pig liver and kidneys into a living person The clinically dead recipient’s organs worked for almost five days. (Nature) + Pig organs could ease transplant shortages. (Guardian) + Putin says organ transplants could grant immortality. (MIT Technology Review)
4 The US, Australia, and UK will defend seabed cables with underwater drones They’re developing the vehicles via the trilateral AUKUS defense pact. (CNN) + Undersea internet cables face growing threats. (BBC)
5 A new study has revealed chatbots’ manipulative ‘dark patterns’ It found they prey on emotions to encourage harmful behavior. (404 Media) + They can also sway voters better than political ads. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Apple plans to disrupt the traditional glasses market Its smart glasses target the broader spectacles industry. (Bloomberg $) + Smart glasses are also gaining traction in warfare. (MIT Technology Review)
7 AI super PACs are dueling over the midterms Split between Anthropic and OpenAI, they’re fighting to shape AI regulation. (NYT $)
8 SoftBank has overtaken Toyota as Japan’s most valuable company The AI boom pushed SoftBank’s market value above $305 billion. (Bloomberg $)
9 A botnet of more than 17 million devices has been dismantled in Europe Dutch authorities linked the network to a Russian proxy service. (Ars Technica)
10 Tech leaders are uniting around a transhuman vision for AI They’re working toward a post-human agenda. (Guardian)
Quote of the day
“It’s just been shoved down their throats in secrecy. And that makes them upset.”
—Legendary environmental activist Erin Brockovich tells “The Jim Acosta Show” why citizens are angry about data centers expanding into their communities.
One More Thing
MIKE BELLEME
What happens when you donate your body to science
Rebecca George doesn’t mind the vultures. At Western Carolina University’s body farm, forensic anthropologists monitor donors—sometimes for years—as they become nothing but bones.
Around 20,000 people donate their cadavers to scientific research and education each year. At anatomy labs and body farms, they help train doctors, advance research, and teach scientists more about the human body long after death.
One day last October, sitting in the courtyard of his house in China’s Henan province, Dong Hui decided to see if he could hold a pen to write.
Dong, 39, had sustained spinal cord injuries in a car accident six years earlier that left him paralyzed from the neck down. Slowly but determinedly, he wrote his name, “Thank you,” and then the date. This was the result of an 11-month-long rehabilitation enabled by an implant in his brain. Before that process, Dong could move his arms slightly but wasn’t able to use his fingers.
“I couldn’t believe I was able to write again. I was so excited I even missed a stroke in my name,” he told MIT Technology Review on a video call.
In November 2024, Dong became one of the first people in China to be given an invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) through brain surgery. He had signed up for a clinical trial with the device’s developer one month after seeing on TV how a BCI had apparently enabled another paralyzed Chinese man to hold his granddaughter.
This March, the implant Dong uses became the first invasive BCI product in the world to be approved for use beyond clinical trials. It’s now available to some patients with paralysis in their limbs due to spinal cord injuries. We spoke to a range of experts to understand why the device was able to reach this global milestone, what makes this moment so significant, and what to expect next.
A world first
Dong’s brain implant is a coin-size device called NEO. It was developed by Neuracle Technology, a Shanghai-based startup, together with researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
During a procedure that took just over an hour and a half, the device’s sensors, which collect Dong’s brain signals, were placed on his dura mater, the tough outer layer of tissue that covers and protects the brain. The signals are transmitted to a computer by an implant placed on Dong’s skull. The computer then translates the signals into commands for a soft robotic glove Dong wears during the 2.5-hour training sessions he completes each day to help him learn to grab.
Dong started his rehabilitation around a week after surgery. “On the ninth day of my training, my right hand successfully grabbed a ball without the glove,” he says. “That was a miraculous moment.”
Now he continues with his training at home. He wants to be able to control his hands better in order to put on clothes, eat, and do other daily tasks without troubling his aging parents.
A growing number of people with traumatic injuries in China are now poised to tread a similar path thanks to NEO’s recent approval. According to China’s National Medical Products Administration, the bureau responsible for drug supervision, the product is suitable for patients between 18 and 60 who have paralysis in all limbs due to spinal cord injuries but still have some residual function in their arms.
NEO beat several other BCIs to approval, including one from Neuralink, a California-based company founded by Elon Musk. Since October 2023, Neuracle has conducted 36 clinical trials using NEO, including the one on Dong. Thirty-two of them took place in the space of a few months in 2025, with the details about one of the four first in-person trials published in a preprint paper last July. Neuracle did not reply to a request for comment from MIT Technology Review.
One reason for NEO’s fast approval could be that it has a “relatively less invasive” design than counterparts such as Neuralink’s N1 brain chip, says Avinash Singh, a BCI researcher at the University of Technology Sydney. NEO’s eight sensors sit on top of the brain’s protective membrane while Neuralink’s N1 chip directly penetrates the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain itself. Neuracle’s device faces fewer regulatory constraints because it presents a lower risk of hemorrhage, glial scarring, and long-term signal degradation, Singh says.
China’s strong support for its BCI industry also means that NEO was put on an expedited regulatory pathway; in comparison, the approval process of the US Food and Drug Administration can take several years, Singh adds.
A big boost for BCIs
NEO’s approval is hugely important for the global BCI industry, says Wang Shouyan, a neuroscientist at Fudan University in Shanghai who was not involved in research or trialing for NEO. Even though research and development on BCIs has taken place for several decades, most of it happened in the lab. The news means that BCIs are now ready for large-scale manufacturing and clinical use in China, Wang says.
For Dong, however, it means something much more personal. “Now, it will be able to help not only me, but also thousands and thousands of other patients suffering from spinal cord injuries in China who are tortured by despair each day,” he says of NEO. “It will bring them hope and change their lives.”
Days after NEO was approved, China started incorporating it into the country’s health insurance system by assigning it a unique code. This is one of the first steps toward a future where eligible Chinese patients pay a certain percentage of the BCI’s price if they need it during their treatment.
The growth of China’s BCI industry is expected to accelerate thanks to the government’s policy support and financial backing. The country’s latest five-year plan, published on the same day Neuracle received its approval, lists BCI as one of six key industries important to China’s future tech competitiveness, alongside quantum technology, humanoid robots, and others. Several Chinese startups, including NeuroXess and StairMed, have already worked in the field for many years.
“China’s decision to double down on becoming a global leader in the field owes in part to what these companies have already accomplished,” says Meicen Sun, an information scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who studies information and technology policy.
But, Sun says, the biggest advantage China may have is that Chinese people, particularly patients like Dong, tend to welcome this technology and are genuinely enthusiastic about it. In comparison, in the US and Western Europe, testing technologies on human bodies elicits an “ick factor,” triggering concerns and even resistance, she says.
Cooperation in a cold climate
NEO has become the world’s first invasive BCI to go commercial, but scientists interviewed by MIT Technology Review caution against comparing Chinese and US efforts through the lens of a race.
A race implies an endpoint, but it is hard to say where that is for the development of BCIs, says Nick Ramsey, a neuroscientist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Also, the US and China have fundamentally different visions, Sun says. The US is primarily concerned with being the first to do something and achieving state-of-the-art performance, while winning to China means capturing more consumers and using technology to deliver solutions on a societal scale.
“Being exceptional and being accessible are two diametrically opposed definitions of winning,” Sun says.
In fact, neurotechnology has emerged as a rare tech sector where US-China collaboration is still happening despite geopolitical tensions. The US company Axoft, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says it has teamed up with a Chinese company and a hospital in Shanghai to test its BCI on four patients in China and has plans to expand its trials in the country.
Looking forward, China’s BCI industry is expected to speed up its growth over the next five years thanks to strong government support. “There is no comparable national-level ambition or coordinated map elsewhere in the world at the moment,” says Singh.
More BCIs are also in the pipeline for domestic approval in the country, including Beinao-1, developed by the Chinese Institute for Brain Research in Beijing and its affiliated startup, NeuCyber NeuroTech. The device, which sits on the dura mater, is designed to help those who have movement and speech difficulties due to spinal cord injuries or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. These candidates could get the green light as early as 2028, Singh says.
Login
