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 ideas of a vast censorship network moved from the online fringe to Trump policy
For years, narratives about a “censorship-industrial complex” spread in right-wing circles. The theory claimed that, under the guise of combating disinformation, a sprawling constellation of government agencies, academics, civil society groups, and Big Tech platforms was suppressing conservative and populist speech online.
What began as a relatively niche conspiracy theory from the far right was able to—and continues to—influence a wide range of actions by the second Trump administration. In myriad ways, the idea of the censorship-industrial complex, or CIC, explains the logic behind how the administration operates both at home and internationally.
Over the past nine months, MIT Technology Review and Type Investigations have traced how the theory came to influence the country’s most powerful individuals. We found that it took off in 2023, driven by a handful of individuals, with support from a close-knit group of right-wing organizations and media outlets—and an internet activist named Mike Benz at its center.
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 AI has designed new viruses from scratch for the first time Scientists trained AI on DNA sequences to design new genomes. (BBC) + The result was 16 novel viruses which pose no threat to people. (WSJ $) + They could lead to medical breakthroughs—or biological weapons. (Axios) + And more complex AI-designed life forms. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Meta has been hit with its biggest child safety penalty yet A New Mexico judge fined the firm $567 million over harms to kids. (BBC) + The ruling is the second phase of a landmark trial Meta lost. (Guardian) + A jury found Meta misled users over child safety. (NYT $) + The total fine now stands at $942 million. (WSJ $)
3 One of China’s top AI models broke out of its testing sandbox Kimi K3 escaped containment and accessed the open internet. (SCMP) + But didn’t hack an external system. (Bloomberg $) + Researchers say Kimi has fewer guardrails than rival models. (Wired $)
4 A drone bomb was found near a Ukrainian plane at a German airport The nearby aircraft was loaded with military ammunition. (Guardian) + A “ripped” detonator reportedly stopped the device from going off. (BBC) + Europe has a drone-filled vision for future wars. (MIT Technology Review)
5 ByteDance is training a model near the size of Anthropic’s Mythos It would be three times larger than Moonshot’s Kimi K3. (FT $) + Chinese AI models have divided the White House. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Research suggests replacing new petrol cars with EVs cuts carbon The savings outweighed EV manufacturing footprints. (New Scientist $)
7 Trump could save millions from crypto rules meant to limit conflicts An ethics proposal could let him defer capital gains taxes. (Bloomberg $) + It would require him to sell crypto-related holdings. (Reuters $)
8 OpenAI’s smart speaker will be hockey puck-sized with moving parts The “doughnut-shaped” device could cost more than $300. (Verge)
9 Scientists created a virtual alien lifeform to search for extraterrestrials The model could help identify signs of life on distant planets. (404 Media)
10 Poo transplants are helping people eat peanuts again The first human trial suggests gut bacteria can treat food allergies. (Nature)
Quote of the day
“What is the risk of what I’ve never seen before?”
—Dr Moritz Hanke, a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, tells the New York Times why there’s no consensus on the dangers of a new virus made by AI.
One More Thing
This architect wants to build cities out of lava
Arnhildur Pálmadóttir was around three years old when she saw a red sky from her living room window. A volcano was erupting about 25 miles away from where she lived on the northeastern coast of Iceland. Its ominous presence seeped into her subconscious, populating her dreams with streaks of light in the night sky.
Fifty years later, these “gloomy, strange dreams,” as Pálmadóttir now describes them, have led to a career as an architect with an extraordinary mission: to harness molten lava and build cities out of it.
This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations, with support from the Wayne Barrett Project.
One morning in April 2025, employees of a small office in the US State Department got the email many of them had been dreading.
For months, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency had been cutting a wide swath through federal agencies, gutting teams that worked on everything from scientific research to Social Security to international aid. So when the employees of the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub (R/FIMI)—a unit tasked with tracking foreign disinformation—received a note asking them to meet in half an hour, many sensed their time had come.
“We all had heard … that there was going to be a day they would shut down our office,” says one former staffer, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Darren Beattie, a far-right provocateur who had been serving as the acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, wasted no time with pleasantries, telling the gathered employees that the office was being shuttered and that their jobs were being eliminated. The mood in the room oscillated between somber and outraged, the former employee says, with “lots of young, dedicated staff crying and wrecked.”
But elsewhere at the State Department, the closure of R/FIMI was cause for celebration.
“We ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced shortly after in a video interview with a right-wing internet activist named Mike Benz.
“This is obviously amazing news,” Benz responded, before teeing up a theory he’d been promoting for years: “We now have so many people wondering, Was I censored because of something the State Department did?”
The notion that the State Department had been working to silence Americans is perhaps unfamiliar to many people, but it’s a key part of a larger web of conspiratorial ideas that have been promoted for a decade on far-right blogs, podcasts, and social media. The basic theory is that, under the guise of combating disinformation, a sprawling constellation of government agencies, academics, civil society groups, and Big Tech platforms—or what believers refer to as the “censorship-industrial complex”—has been working to suppress conservative and populist speech online. The fight against “disinformation,” as Benz put it on a 2025 podcast, “is censorship in disguise.” R/FIMI, along with a predecessor office with the same mission, the Global Engagement Center (GEC), had been among the right’s long-standing targets; now it was one of its latest casualties.
The second Trump administration’s war on censorship has contributed to the dismantling of numerous government agencies, like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), among others. It’s razed the infrastructure that tracks and counters attempts by foreign powers to influence elections and popular opinion. It has also been used to justify sweeping travel bans and sanctions on targeted individuals and entire industries. It’s provoked tensions with the European Union over its tech regulations, which these critics say silence Americans. And it’s even reshaped US national security strategy.
Its reach, though, isn’t limited to US bureaucracy, academia, or civil society groups. The weaponization of ideas about censorship also affects the billions of people globally who get information, or interact with each other, online—which is to say, just about everyone.
Over the past nine months, MIT Technology Review and Type Investigations have dug into its origins and traced how a relatively niche conspiracy theory from the far right was able to—and continues to—influence a wide range of actions by the second Trump administration. In myriad ways, the theory of the censorship-industrial complex, or CIC, explains the logic behind how the Trump administration operates both at home and in the world.
To understand just how it jumped from the edges of the information sphere to influence the decision-making of the country’s most powerful individuals, we used open-source methods to scrape content from right-wing websites; scrutinized hundreds of thousands of pages of public records, videos, and podcasts; and analyzed over 100,000 social media posts that have promoted the narrative. Our analysis found that although the roots of the idea run deep and wide, the CIC framework really took off in early 2023, driven by a handful of individuals, with support from a close-knit collection of right-wing organizations and media outlets.
At the center of this effort is Mike Benz, Rubio’s interview partner last April. Benz served a brief stint in Donald Trump’s first administration but has largely remained unknown, even as some of his ideas—including the conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift was a NATO asset and the pro-white-identity content he published anonymously before he joined the government—have gained followers. Our analysis uncovers just how integral he in particular was to spreading the CIC theory: We found him to be the most prolific creator of related content online, which was in turn picked up by right-wing media outlets and podcasts and eventually reached the highest echelons of power in the US. His work prompted congressional—and eventually presidential—action and generated both attention and financial benefits for Benz personally. (Benz did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Last April, near the end of the interview at the State Department, Rubio shot Benz a friendly finger gun.
“Thanks for your attention to this topic,” Rubio said. “I know you’ve been on this a long time.”
The origins of discontent
Every conspiracy theory is sustained by a unique blend of grievances and shadowy actors, but at their core, they’re shockingly similar. They often start with a few devoted believers operating on the periphery. They claim to uncover hidden truths about people in power. They offer order and meaning for believers, creating or affirming group identities. And the most successful ones contain a grain of truth.
This also describes “the best propaganda campaigns,” according to David Millar, a longtime US intelligence official who spent years at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute teaching future diplomats how to recognize such agitprop. “They’re seldom just complete lies,” Millar says. “They’re usually taking something out of proportion or amplifying something that actually happened into something that didn’t.”
That’s the case with the idea of censorship that targets the right online. In 2016, an anonymous former employee of Facebook claimed that the site was suppressing conservative news in its “trending topics” section. The company scrambled to reassure conservatives that this was not the case—but still axed its human editors. Not long after, in the wake of Russian influence operations in the 2016 US presidential election and the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote, social media platforms amped up their content moderation efforts in order to filter out foreign disinformation. In doing so, they also ended up banning some conservative voices, often for violating platform policies against false information.
To right-leaning internet users, the posts and accounts flagged as problematic or false “sure sounded like stuff that agreed with [their] belief system,” says Dannagal Young, director of the University of Delaware’s Center for Political Communication. “Russia had done their homework so well that the kinds of things that were … generated by Russian propagandists were not that distinct from things people in the States would say.”
It was a messy moment in our collective digital life. Never before had anyone and everyone been given a megaphone to instantly broadcast to a global audience, for better and worse. These new powers prompted difficult questions about how that content should be policed, and by whom—if at all. What should happen if, say, a foreign intelligence service impersonated people en masse on social media to manipulate citizens? What if someone—anyone—said something provocative, hateful, or meant to incite violence? Or something that didn’t directly call for violence but could provoke it nonetheless? The pressure on social media companies to act was immense.
The pandemic became a “pivotal development in the radicalization of conservatives… feeling like, This isn’t right. Not everyone’s getting censored, just us.”
-Dannagal Young, political communications scholar
And more or less in real time, tech companies—as well as government bureaucrats, researchers, and journalists—had to chart a path for which there was no map. A new field grew to help inform and even make decisions on what qualified as “misinformation” and “disinformation,” though there wasn’t a clear definition of either term (nor of “censorship”). As a result of this work, platforms have taken steps over the past decade to shield users from fake news, conspiracy theories, and covert foreign influence. In doing so, they sometimes went too far—as some tech leaders have since argued. Alternative services and platforms sprang up, intending to create spaces free of “censorship” (by which they meant content moderation); Parler, Gab, and others tended to cater to right-leaning voices. They themselves were later kicked off Apple’s and Google’s app stores or banned by hosting and payment services.
High-profile narratives—like the claims that Twitter “shadow-banned” conservatives in 2018 and suppressed news about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020—have consistently kept alive the notion of conservative-targeting censorship. And online influencers like Benz have been able to twist what happened to tear down entire sections of the US government and silence individuals they disagree with.
The covid-19 pandemic in particular proved an ideal breeding ground for the censorship narrative. As trust in institutions plummeted, and harmful rumors about the crisis proliferated online, platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube adjudicated what qualified as covid-related misinformation (including claims regarding the pandemic’s origins), took down posts, and banned prominent vaccine deniers like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—sometimes with the encouragement of parts of the federal government.
The pandemic became a “pivotal development in the radicalization of conservatives,” says Young. They were “feeling like, This isn’t right. Not everyone’s getting censored, just us.”
Following the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol (itself driven by false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen), social media companies took more aggressive measures, including banning the president from their platforms, citing his potential to incite more violence. To Trump’s allies and supporters, however, his removal only encouraged the idea that a network of actors was working behind the scenes to censor their voices—and keep the president from retaining power.
“It was when Trump got censored into oblivion in 2020 by the US government under his nose, working with webs of outside NGOs and Pentagon front groups to mass-censor virtually every narrative that he was putting out, that he lost,” Benz later told Joe Rogan on his podcast. This was proof, Benz concluded, of the dark power of censorship.
In April 2022, the digital chatter about government censorship found a real-world villain. The Biden administration had announced the formation of a Disinformation Governance Board to coordinate DHS’s efforts on this front; it would be led by Nina Jankowicz, who had cut her teeth countering Russian propaganda in Eastern Europe.
But the rollout was clumsy; and for the far right, the group’s ominous-sounding name and the scant details about what it would actually do made it the ultimate evidence of government censorship by another name. As the Washington Postreported, Fox News devoted 70% of its news segments to coverage of Jankowicz or the board in the week after its announcement, with Sean Hannity describing her as “one of the biggest perpetrators and purveyors of disinformation in the entire country.” Beattie, the Trump official who later shut down R/FIMI, called her “Biden’s new minister of truth,” while Benz claimed she was a “registered agent for the British crown.” She became the target of an all-out harassment campaign—and multiple death threats.
Jankowicz was also named in a lawsuit against government agencies and officials that alleged “open collusion with social-media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content.” Benz submitted a legal brief in support of the case.
The Supreme Court dismissed the case in 2024, but by that time Jankowicz was long gone—she resigned just three weeks after the task force launched, citing “vile personal attacks and physical threats.” The group never met.
In February 2023 Margot Cleveland, a contributor to the conservative outlet The Federalist, gave right-wing perceptions of these events their now familiar framing in an article titled “How Trump Derangement Gave Birth to the Censorship-Industrial Complex.”
“The Biden administration may have abandoned plans to create a ‘Disinformation Board,’ but a more insidious ‘Censorship Complex’ already exists and is growing at an alarming speed,” Cleveland wrote. “Its funding and collaboration implicate the government, academia, tech giants, nonprofits, politicians, social media, and the legacy press. Under the guise of combatting so-called misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, these groups seek to silence speech that threatens the far-left’s ability to control the conversation—and thus the country and the world.”
According to our analysis of social media posts, Cleveland’s article was shared by 168 accounts, marking the first time that something about the censorship-industrial complex was shared by so many different people. Its popularity showed that people were ready to gravitate toward the CIC framing, Cleveland told us in an interview. “It’s definitely catchy,” she says. “People understand what it means, given that the military-industrial complex has … been in existence since the 1950s.”
Just a few weeks later, the idea jumped toward mainstream recognition.
Musk, then the new owner of Twitter, had given internal company documents to two journalists, Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, with the goal of exposing how Twitter and the Biden administration had supposedly colluded to censor conservative voices.
What they found was widelyregarded to fall substantially short of a conspiracy against the right—but on March 9, 2023, the pair appeared before Congress to discuss the results of their “Twitter Files” inquiry at a hearing convened by Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican. Shellenberger’s 68-page testimony laid out what he claimed was a vast network of government agencies and contractors that allegedly censored Americans through “blacklists of disfavored people”—“pressuring, cajoling, and demanding that social media platforms censor, deamplify, and even ban the people on these blacklists.” Shellenberger shared his testimony on Twitter, where it was viewed more than 2.7 million times, our analysis shows. A video of Taibbi’s testimony was viewed 4.3 million times, while a tweet sharing it got 40 million views. (As a point of comparison, in 2023 the average post on X received just 1,200 views, according to the data company Metricool.)
“We were, like, proverbially touching the elephant.”
Mike Shellenberger
We found that these were among the most viral tweets to date about the “censorship industry” or the “censorship-industrial complex.” Overall, we identified nearly 30,000 tweets about these ideas between September 2011, when “censorship industry” first popped up on Twitter, and March 2026. The clear peak came in March 2023, at the time of the Twitter Files hearing.
In an email, Taibbi said he has regularly defended censored figures on the left as well as the right and does not believe censorship to be “a conservative-liberal issue.” “Though the behavior we saw at Twitter in, say, 2020 was slanted against conservative content in the United States, we saw these techniques applied to both left and right around the world,” he said. Shellenberger, Jordan, Beattie, and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
While these social media posts had a wide reach, our analysis shows that the ideas related to the CIC were primarily driven by a small handful of individuals. Of the 13,475 Twitter/X accounts that we found to have posted or reposted CIC-related content in that same time frame, 71% did so just once.
Even among the conspiracy theory’s top proponents, however, Benz stands out in terms of output. Our analysis shows that by March 2026 he’d posted on X about the “censorship industry” or “censorship-industrial complex” more than 440 times since opening an account in December 2022, after Musk’s purchase of the platform; this was far more than anyone else whose accounts we analyzed during the same period, including Taibbi, Shellenberger, or Beattie. When we added other variations of the word “censor,” that figure jumped to over 2,200 times.
In a 2023 podcast interview, Shellenberger credited Benz with opening his eyes to the full extent to which conservative voices were being silenced. “We basically went from being concerned about bad forms of censorship by Twitter and other social media platforms to being concerned about government censorship,” Shellenberger said.
“We were, like, proverbially touching the elephant. We didn’t understand what the elephant was [until] we discovered your work, Mike.”
The amplifiers
To understand Benz’s role in crafting and promoting the CIC narrative, MIT Technology Review and Type Investigations examined thousands of his tweets, public statements, podcasts, and reports since 2015, including those from now-deleted accounts—the most comprehensive collection of Benz’s work assembled to date. We found that his interest in censorship dates back to the early days of this fight—to at least 2016, when he was a corporate lawyer living in Brooklyn.
This was when, as NBC News’s Brandy Zadrozny later revealed, he began posting content online under a pseudonym, Frame Game. “Frame Game Radio” published across a number of platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, and Gab—mixing white identitarian and antisemitic views (though Benz identifies as Jewish) with alt-right-aligned complaints about the “diversity industry” and censorship. (In a lengthy rebuttal on X to the 2023 NBC News story, Benz claimed that Frame Game was a “project by Jews to get people who hated Jews to stop hating Jews,” to which he “contributed in a very limited manner.” He also stated, “Let me be clear: I am extremely proud of this.”)
Frame Game’s content spoke positively about Hitler’s Mein Kampf, warned of “white genocide,” and claimed that “censorship is almost exclusively a Jewish phenomenon.” For a few months, the account ran a never-before-reported campaign for a “White Mother Fertility Fund,” which promised to donate 20% of the channel’s revenue to a mother nominated by listeners.
“Censorship” became a catchall term for almost any form of content moderation.
This kind of content earned Frame Game the praise of the white nationalist publication Counter-Currents, which described the anonymous figure in May 2018 as “a rising star” and a “pro-white and Judeo-critical online activist”—noting that the Twitter account was “followed by everyone from Steve Sailer to David Duke” (references, respectively, to a columnist for the white nationalist website VDare and the former KKK Grand Wizard).
Another preoccupation was the supposed suppression of conservative speech. In hours-long videos, Frame Game used “censorship” as a catchall term for almost any form of content moderation—going as far as to apply it to any kind of “critique” at all. The account was particularly incensed by the deplatforming of Alex Jones in 2018, which it called the “Pearl Harbor event of free speech.”
Online censorship was a “keystone issue,” the channel said in 2018, affecting the right’s ability to achieve any of its other goals: “You have to fix that, or else you can’t advocate for anything else effectively.”
Frame Game ceased posting that same year, when Benz started working as a speechwriter at the Department of Housing and Urban Development before joining Stephen Miller’s speechwriting team at the White House.
Then, in November 2020, Benz moved to the State Department, briefly serving in the first Trump administration’s final months as deputy assistant secretary for international communications and information policy. He has said this short-term experience gave him firsthand knowledge of how the censorship machine works: “All things related to the internet connected to US foreign policy were under my purview,” Benz told Shellenberger in a podcast in March 2023. “I got to see the inner nucleus of how Big Government and Big Tech have so completely fused together in relatively seamless ways.”
It also helped set up Benz’s post-Trump career. In April 2022, he launched the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), which describes itself as a “free speech watchdog” dedicated to championing “digital freedom around the world.” Though it calls itself a “foundation,” FFO is not registered as a nonprofit and has just a few contributors. But it quickly became an active part of a bigger web of new Trump-aligned organizations—and in their eyes, even benign initiatives could be evidence for the machinations of the censorship-industrial complex. FFO has published critical reports claiming that efforts to promote media literacy, brand safety campaigns, and nonprofit journalism, including the work of the investigative organization Bellingcat, were all hidden forms of censorship, and labeling as suspect anyone affiliated with a government agency. (One of the authors of this article previously worked in international development in Afghanistan, on a State Department grant and USAID sub-grant, while two of the authors previously collaborated with Bellingcat.)
“Its implications for politics are really scary, because it makes conversation and debate virtually impossible.”
Political scientist Michael Barkun
One of FFO’s targets was a relatively obscure educational game called Cat Park. Created in 2022 with funding from the State Department’s GEC, Cat Park was designed to “build resistance to disinformation and promote digital media literacy” for kids ages 15 and up, according to its official description.
In the game, players fuel opposition to a city-funded cat park by creating emotionally charged headlines and memes, and by manipulating images with AI. Then, halfway through, they learn that the campaign against the park was the brainchild of a billionaire with plans to buy the designated land for cheap once the outrage dissuaded the city from building it. At this point, players must use what they have learned about creating effective propaganda to counter their own disinformation.
By 2024, only around 100,000 people had played the game, according to Martijn Gussekloo, a cofounder of the Dutch design agency that helped develop it—far fewer than the numbers that played similar online games the agency had worked on to highlight the issue of disinformation. “As far as I’m aware,” he says, “there were no political goals at all.”
Nevertheless, FFO published a report—based on materials obtained by America First Legal (AFL), a nonprofit started by Stephen Miller—claiming that Cat Park was part of the State Department’s effort to “subliminally train young people to associate social media posts alleging government corruption as being ‘fake news.’” The sinister interpretation was picked up by conservative media outlets like Just the News, which quoted Benz. That article was in turn picked up by Russia’s RT News, which also frequently quoted Benz.
It remained a relatively obscure, niche idea, but it didn’t need huge reach to set the stage for official government action. In 2023, Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, citing FFO’s reports, demanded that the State Department turn over documents about its efforts to fight disinformation—efforts including Cat Park. By the end of the next year, Congress voted to defund the GEC, and news outlets like Fox News used Cat Park to illustrate the nefariousness of this work. It was the culmination of a conspiracy theory that had jumped from the fringes of the online right to more mainstream and high-profile outlets and later into the halls of power.
Though this dynamic is not unique to the CIC narrative, we found that it has played out again and again with numerous targets, from the early attacks on the Disinformation Governance Board to the subsequent shutdown of other disinformation-focused research organizations, like the Stanford Internet Observatory and the Election Integrity Partnership, and later of government agencies like R/FIMI.
In each case, our analysis found, CIC-related conspiracy theories on social media were supported by a number of conservative groups; key among them were FFO and AFL, which played a crucial role in obtaining government records they claimed showed evidence that conservatives were censored. FFO then used these documents to write exhaustive reports supposedly connecting the dots to explain how the censorship industry worked. AFL also instigated a number of lawsuits against supposedly CIC-implicated individuals and organizations.
These materials were then amplified by a slew of right-wing media outlets, many with shared funding.
Much of that financing was funneled through the Informing America Foundation (IAF), a media-oriented grant-making organization that John Solomon helped to launch after leaving his position at The Hill back in 2019, following public scrutiny of columns about the Bidens and Ukraine. IAF funds a network of podcasts called Real America’s Voice, which includes shows run by key Trump allies like Steve Bannon, Jack Prosobiec, and the late Charlie Kirk, as well as Solomon himself. It also finances a network of what media scholars call “pink slime” websites, which are designed to look like nonpartisan local news but have a partisan slant. Benz appeared regularly on these podcasts and in these outlets, further embedding the CIC narrative in the right-wing information ecosystem—while simultaneously enhancing his own profile and revenue streams on X Premium and other platforms.
At the same time, IAF indirectly supported FFO and Benz personally, donating millions of dollars to conservative organizations that acted as the biggest financial sponsors of his work. In 2023 and 2024, the only years that he appears directly in any nonprofits’ financial documents, Benz was paid $530,000 from one organization alone.
In an email, Solomon defended the accuracy of his reporting for The Hill and said that while he had helped to come up with the idea for IAF, he isn’t part of the group’s official leadership and doesn’t have a hand in issuing grants. He also noted that he was an early adopter of the “censorship-industrial complex” framing, having used the term as far back as 2021.
“There are no conspiracy theories about federally encouraged censorship,” Solomon said. “It happened.”
The CIC narratives circulating on the right-wing internet and podcasts repeatedly helped propel offline action, through both private lawsuits and congressional investigations. Musk’s X was especially litigious, suing at least three organizations that reported on or advocated against hate speech on the platform. (Those suits have since been dismissed.) Then, once Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives in 2023, a new subcommittee on the “weaponization of the federal government,” chaired by Jordan, launched various investigations into the people and organizations that Benz, Taibbi, Shellenberger, Musk, and other proponents of the CIC theory had singled out.
“Receiving a subpoena for your documents is absolutely overwhelming,” says Clare Melford, executive director of the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a London-based nonprofit that assesses levels of disinformation on websites and was the focus of a congressional investigation starting inApril 2023. “It can be financially crippling—and that’s the point.”
Benz reflected on the impact of the right-wing internet during a symposium in April 2024 at the Heritage Foundation, which had published Project 2025, the policy blueprint for the second Trump administration, the previous year. While he credited Jordan and other members of Congress for fighting against the censorship-industrial complex, he argued that lawmakers had taken up the cause “because everyone’s already talking about it.”
“The number one thing is: Talk about it, talk about it, talk about it,” Benz said. It’s a mantra he seems to have taken to heart: Our analysis found he mentioned variations of the word “censorship,” on average, once every three and a half minutes in his YouTube videos.
“Don’t underestimate,” Benz said at the Heritage Foundation, “the power of one small voice accumulated over millions to do a lot of damage to this system.”
The damage
The effects of this war on censorship became even more profound when the new administration took office the following year. On the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” which accused the Biden administration of having “trampled” on Americans’ free-speech rights.
This laid the foundation for administration decisions ending millions of dollars in support for disinformation- and misinformation-focused research and shutting down numerous government agencies—all in the name of fighting censorship. One of the highest-profile examples was the dismantling of USAID, which has resulted in devastating cuts to programs designed to combat the spread of HIV and AIDS, improve maternal health, and provide food aid around the world. Administration figures claimed loudly that the agency wasted federal dollars and that its values were misaligned with US interests, but perhaps less well known is how false ideas about censorship played a critical part in its demise.
The agency had been a longtime obsession for Benz, who argued that it was an instrument of censorship as early as FFO’s first report in July 2022. An effort in Brazil to limit the spread of disinformation on messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, FFO alleged, was a form of censorship financed by USAID and others. Later that year, Benz also accused USAID of funding what he called a “Countering Disinformation Guidebook for Digital Censorship.” In reality, it was a USAID primer for its overseas staff on how to recognize disinformation campaigns in the foreign countries where the agency operated.
Our analysis shows that Benz and FFO were the dominant voices promoting conspiracy theories around USAID and censorship from 2022 until late 2024, when Benz talked about it on Rogan’s podcast. “USAID is effectively a ‘switch player’ to assist the Pentagon on the national security front, to assist the State Department on the national interest front, or to assist the intelligence community on a sort of clandestine operation front,” Benz alleged.
His appearance drew millions of viewers, including Musk. The trillionaire retweeted an X user’s glowing summary of the interview. “Mike Benz just revealed everything,” the user wrote, including “how ‘democracy’ was redefined to silence you.”
This marked the first time Musk, newly installed at DOGE, had posted specifically about USAID. But Benz and Musk were already acquainted. The two had exchangedtweets and threads about censorship and other conspiracy theories for years.
In February 2025, Andrew Natsios, a Republican who had led USAID under President George W. Bush, tried to defend the agency against Benz’s conspiracy theories and other charges. During a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, asked Natsios about a slide Benz had shared on social media that supposedly illustrated how the military could work with USAID and other agencies to incite riots, “destabilize nations,” and craft strategic “disinformation campaigns.”
“What Benz told you is nonsense,” Natsios declared. Though he tried repeatedly to explain that the slide wasn’t made by USAID and therefore couldn’t represent its views, Luna remained unconvinced. After the hearing, she turned to X to thank Benz for exposing the censorship-industrial complex. “USAID is about as swampy as it gets,” she wrote. Benz responded with the American flag emoji.
“I was astonished by the whole hearing,” Natsios told MIT Technology Review and Type Investigations, his frustration still evident. To defend the agency, he had made numerous media appearances, including interviews on Fox News and 60 Minutes, and reached out to Rogan’s podcast. But the damage had already been done; by the end of March, the administration formally notified Congress that USAID would be shut down.
“They moved so rapidly,” Natsios says, “we couldn’t succeed.”
The narrative of a censorship-industrial complex is also reshaping the United States’ relationships with other countries, including ostensible allies. For instance, the White House’s latest national security strategy, released in November, argues that Europe is facing the “prospect of civilizational erasure”—partly because of the “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.”
And the European Union’s 2022 Digital Services Act, which placed guardrails on online platforms, has become a key flashpoint in the transatlantic relationship, with Benz calling it the European Union’s “flagship online censorship law.”
The EU regulation requires social media companies to remove content that violates national laws of member countries, including laws about hate speech and disinformation. But for Benz and his allies, the DSA aimed to achieve not accountability but an exportable censorship architecture. Because global tech platforms typically standardize their content moderation policies, “US tech companies would be forced to apply similar censorship measures at home,” Benz wrote in the conservative outlet Townhall in May 2022.
Vice President JD Vance later picked up this theme in a high-profile speech in Munich in February 2025, warning that free speech in Europe was “in retreat.” Just a week later, Trump issued executive orders indicating that he would consider tariffs in retaliation for “any act, policy, or practice in the European Union,” like the DSA, that worked to “undermine free speech or foster censorship.” Last summer, Rubio instructed diplomats to lobby directly against it.
Internally, however, at least one effort to find evidence of censorship turned up little. Last spring, Vance tasked a team at the State Department with gathering examples of incidents in which social media platforms had censored speech on the continent. A former official who received the request told us that Vance wasn’t interested in “the imprisonment of human rights activists for speaking [out], or journalists, or academics” in Belarus, Hungary, Serbia, or Russia—issues the department already tracked. Instead, the staffer says, Vance “wanted to focus on an extremely narrow set of posts related to far-right ideology, things related to abortion,” and even coverage of his own Munich speech. Vance directed the investigators to focus on Germany, France, Ireland, and the UK—all US allies where the administration has recently expressed support for far-right parties and politicians.
The team followed Vance’s directive, but instead of a “vast conspiracy,” the former official says, it found fewer than 10 instances of content that had been removed from X, all related to ongoing law enforcement investigations into violent extremism.
A spokesperson for Vance’s office declined to comment but pointed to previous remarks denying that he had ordered such a report. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
And the administration hasn’t let up. After the European Commission issued a €120 million fine to X last December, the State Department announced that five Europeans who had advocated for tougher content moderation regulation through the DSA and other mechanisms would be banned from entering the US. Rubio called these individuals, including the GDI’s Melford, “agents of the censorship-industrial complex.” (A judge has since blocked the government from enforcing these bans as litigation continues, calling them “likely viewpoint discriminatory.”)
The fight for truth
The war on supposed censorship continued to intensify over the first half of this year. In February the State Department announced a new web portal, freedom.gov, which will enable people abroad—especially Europeans—to view hate speech, foreign propaganda, and other online content that had been banned by their own governments. The same month, Jordan and his staff on the House Judiciary Committee put out a second report on European censorship, naming additional organizations that they allege were involved. And former R/FIMI staffers continue to worry that the release of a long-teased “transparency initiative” from Beattie, who shut down the office, could reveal sensitive information about individuals and organizations abroad who have put themselves at risk to fight propaganda from China and Russia.
Some of the key figures responsible for the CIC narrative from outside of government are now being rewarded with influential positions within it. “I’m like an octopus juggler right now,” Benz bragged in April 2025, shortly after his interview with Rubio about the demise of R/FIMI. The activities he referred to, he vaguely explained, included his work in the media, on policy matters, and on litigation, as well as with Congress. And that was even before he started working as a special government employee at what remains of USAID, now housed in the State Department, where he’s been reportedly investigating the wrongdoing that he has long alleged.
“The very thing that they are accusing people of—censoring—is something that they’re now perpetuating.”
Nina Jankowicz, disinformation scholar
In February, meanwhile, Beattie was appointed the State Department’s senior advisor for Brazil. And in May, the White House appointed John Solomon a special government employee focused on matters of “transparency.” (Solomon noted that it was an unpaid position.)
The State Department did not respond to broader questions about the CIC narrative and its effects on policy, the vice president’s directive to department employees to find censorship in Western Europe, or the status of Beattie’s transparency initiative. “Under Dr. Beattie’s leadership … the Department made great strides in combating censorship groups,” a department official wrote in an email.
At the same time, the state-run digital influence campaigns that organizations like GEC were designed to fight are becoming more sophisticated. Over the course of the US-Israeli war on Iran, Iran has produced AI-generated propaganda—and, by manyaccounts, is winning the narrative war. Moscow has been working to inject Russian propaganda into the data sets used by US companies to train AI chatbots, increasing the likelihood that popular chatbots repeat Russian narratives. And the Chinese government has been recruiting its domestic AI companies to conduct state-aligned influence campaigns, according to an assessment from one US intelligence agency; the Trump administration has since dramatically downsized that office too.
Last summer, an AI-powered impostor pretending to be Rubio reached out to lawmakers and diplomats. “I was amused to learn that … at some point, Marco Rubio began to worry about deepfakes, and then it actually happened,” a former State staffer says. “And the people that were charged with working on it [at the department] were fired”—that is, they had been let go months earlier, alongside the rest of R/FIMI.
From a foreign policy standpoint, this is a “unilateral disarmament” by the United States, says former GEC head James Rubin—“leaving the information space open to America’s adversaries, especially China, Russia, and Iran.” The result is that everyone is more vulnerable to bad-faith actors online, often without being aware of the deception taking place.
MATTHIEU BOUREL
These threats are compounded by the way many tech companies have come to align with the Trump administration, a stance that critics say threatens the safety of their billions of users. Last January, Meta ended fact-checking on Facebook, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg stating in a video announcement that the company would “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world” that were “going after American companies and pushing to censor more.” Meta, X, and Google have also all paid tens of millions to settle lawsuits Trump brought for their decisions to remove his social media accounts after January 6. (Google declined to comment. Meta and X did not respond to requests for comment.)
“Democracy is about the hearts and minds of the people. If you can simply shut off the ability to influence hearts and minds through censorship, you win by default.”
Mike Benz to an audience at the Heritage Foundation
Today, the CIC narrative is far larger than any single organization or individual. And that’s by design. Its proponents have constructed the battle much more broadly, as a sweeping defense of free speech. “If we were allowed to speak freely, millions and millions of people would hear a truth they simply could not resist,” Benz said back in his Frame Game days. “They would join this movement.”
It’s a movement that above all appears to be attacking “the nature of truth,” says Michael Barkun, a political scientist at Syracuse University who has studied conspiracy theories for decades. “The implications for politics are really scary, because it makes conversation and debate virtually impossible. How can you talk to people if they believe that whatever you say is based upon some kind of set of falsehoods?”
Benz and his peers have expressed similar sentiments. In the fight over censorship, the sides are constantly flipping: The accusers become the accused, the victims become the victimizers, and so on.
That’s why it’s important to look beyond the political narratives themselves and consider actions, says David Kaye, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and a former UN special rapporteur for free speech. “The administration probably realizes that … Americans do not generally feel censored by Europe or Brazil,” he says. But by focusing on Europe, Brazil, and the broader CIC idea, it hopes to “distract” from the fact that “Americans are definitely facing the most substantial censorship in, I don’t know, 100 years,” he adds—though “it’s actually the Trump administration” that is responsible.
The notion of a censorship-industrial complex is proving again and again to be a convenient and powerful pretext for silencing the loudest critics of those in power. “The very thing that they are accusing people of—censoring—is something that they’re now perpetuating,” says Jankowicz.
That, of course, may have been the goal all along. From the stage of the Heritage Foundation back in 2024, Benz spoke of the CIC as having its hand on a “God button” giving it the power to “control discourse on every political issue.” Now conservatives can wield that power themselves.
“Democracy is about the hearts and minds of the people,” he told the audience. “If you can simply shut off the ability to influence hearts and minds through censorship, you win by default.”
Eileen Guo is a senior reporter for features and investigations at MIT Technology Review. Gisela Perez de Acha is an open-source investigative reporter. Martin Sona is an open-source researcher with a background in applied social neuroscience.
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping back from running the unit day-to-day He’s becoming the unit’s chairman and Alphabet’s chief scientist, a broader role. DeepMind will now be led by CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu, under the title of senior vice-president.
DeepMind may be absorbed into Google’s wider business Google is expected to tighten its control over the AI lab, which it acquired 12 years ago.
Jeff Dean is leaving to start a new AI company After 27 years at Google, the company’s former chief scientist is launching Discovery Loop with three former colleagues. The startup’s goal is to fully automate the process of scientific research, and Google is one of its early investors.
The company is now shifting its AI science strategy It’s moving from specialized tools, like DeepMind’s AlphaFold, toward agentic AI systems that can conduct research more autonomously. Find out more in our recent story.
We’re excited to share that MIT Technology Review is now on Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, as well as LinkedIn and WhatsApp. You can hear straight from MIT Technology Review journalists in the channels and formats you prefer as they help you understand what’s happening next in the ever-changing world of technology—and what it means for you—all while offering a behind-the-scenes look at their reporting.
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Meta has become the latest firm to say its AI hacked another company It blamed a “misconfiguration” by an independent cybersecurity tester. (CNN) + The model reportedly involved was Muse Spark 1.1. (The Information $) + It follows similar breaches by OpenAI and Anthropic models. (Guardian) + This is why AI agents can lie to reach their goals. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Samsung and SK Hynix are testing Chinese chip tools amid US export curbs The Korean chip giants are hedging against tighter restrictions. (Reuters $) + Beijing has launched a probe into Palo Alto Networks. (Bloomberg $) + US-China tech tensions are rising ahead of the Xi-Trump summit. (SCMP)
3 London just granted robotaxis a license to operate On the condition that they still have a human driver, for now. (BBC) + Uber plans to spend over $10 billion expanding its robotaxi network. (FT $)
4 Scientists have created gene-edited dogs that don’t trigger allergies They used CRISPR to remove a reaction-causing protein. (Wired $) + And now want approval to start selling the beagles. (New Scientist $) + Other firms are planning gene-edited babies. (MIT Technology Review)
5 OpenAI has asked a judge to toss Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit The ChatGPT maker called Apple’s allegations “meritless.” (Verge) + And claimed the suit is an attempt to stem an employee exodus. (FT $)
6 AI is reviving Silicon Valley’s super-app dream Tech giants are merging products into all-in-one assistants. (Business Insider) + Is a secure AI assistant possible? (MIT Technology Review)
7 A mystery book-buying spree has sparked new AI fears The buyers’ identities remain unclear amid data concerns. (Atlantic $)
8 Restaurants, pubs, and theatres are banning Meta’s “spy glasses” The venues have cited privacy threats to customers. (Guardian)
9 The SpaceX moon crash has created a unique scientific experiment It could reveal more about lunar soil and space debris. (BBC)
10 AI is helping to perfect the Pringle It involves over 200 data points, from humidity to harvest location. (WSJ $)
Quote of the day
“This could be the first real crisis moment for a company that has been stalwart for a long time.”
—Jeremy Nixon, a former Google Brain researcher and the founder of AI infrastructure company Infinity, tells the New York Times that Jeff Dean’s departure jeopardizes Google’s future.
One More Thing
How AI can help supercharge creativity
Generative tools put out by companies like OpenAI and Google DeepMind can automate a striking range of creative tasks and offer near-instant gratification—but at what cost? Some artists and researchers fear that such technology could turn us into passive consumers of yet more AI slop.
And so they are looking for ways to inject human creativity back into the process. The aim is to develop AI tools that augment our creativity rather than strip it from us—pushing us to be better at composing music, developing games, designing toys, and much more—and lay the groundwork for a future in which humans and machines create things together.
Ready for a fresh set of puzzles? Click here for the September/October 2026 Puzzle Corner, brought to you by Michael S. Branicky, ScD ’95, of the Puzzle Corner Puzzle Crew (aka PC2), which also includes Edward Faulkner ’03, MEng ’04, and Abe Kunin ’03. This column includes solutions to the May/June issue.
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.
NASA’s new dark energy space telescope can also detect killer asteroids
At the end of August, NASA is set to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its quest is to help us better understand how the universe works, from the glue-like dark matter that keeps galaxies together to the elusive dark energy that drives the expansion of the cosmos.
But Roman could also serve another purpose: defending Earth from killer asteroids. In September, a multi-institutional team of planetary scientists and astronomers will outline how it’s uniquely placed to scan asteroids, and provide information about their trajectories, sizes and compositions.
MIT Technology Review Narrated: The inevitable weakness of metrics
—Bryan Gardiner
There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more that it can obscure or corrupt.
Like a lot of people bitten by the self-quantifying bug, I started gathering personal data to pursue a nebulous collection of goals and desires. I wanted to feel better physically and emotionally, get outside more, and bring order to the messiness and uncertainty of my daily existence.
But external metrics and data can never capture what’s truly important. Worse, they inevitably redefine your core sense of what’s important, whether you’re aware of the trap or not. Read the full story.
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 The US is considering banning Chinese data center components The news comes just after the FCC announced curbs on other high-tech Chinese hardware. (Reuters $) + Texas is now requiring data centers to pass an audit before connecting to the grid. (The Verge $) + Trump’s AI protectionism has come for robotics. (MIT Technology Review)
2 SpaceX rocket has crashed into the moon The collision, at about 5,400 miles per hour, will likely leave a new crater. (Guardian) + SpaceX posted a loss of over $500 million in its first quarterly earnings report since its IPO. (WP $) + The company’s future plans rely on the success of its huge Starship rockets. (WSJ $) + Meanwhile, SpaceX’s spending on AI is soaring. (NYT $)
3 The UK’s AI Safety Institute says it’s uncovered more AI hacks Including an Anthropic model setting up fake accounts mimicking real people. (BBC) + The White House has a new cybersecurity framework…but it’s keeping details under wraps. (Wired $) + Here’s why AI agents lie and cheat to reach their goals. (MIT Technology Review)
4 The future’s looking bright for French AI lab Mistral Turmoil in the US is creating opportunities for European AI that it hopes to seize. (Wired $)
5 People are betting on wildfires on prediction markets Which, as US senators warn, sure seems like it will incentivize arson. (Ars Technica) + Prediction markets are also starting to put the accuracy of weather predictions at risk. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Can Reddit save itself from being swamped by AI search spam? It’s becoming increasingly influential, and brands are desperate to secure mentions. (The Verge $)
7 Grassroots groups around the world are trying to “humanize” AI Part of their work is educating people so they can have a say on their futures. (Rest of World) + The World Bank says poorer countries have “less to fear” from AI than rich ones. (FT $)
8 A Chinese physical AI startup has run into controversy Spirit AI stands accused of “benchmark hacking” after it briefly overtook Nvidia on an AI leaderboard in June. (SCMP$) + How to build a better AI benchmark. (MIT Technology Review)
9 Pluto’s atmosphere may be starting to collapse And after the loss of its planet status, too. Really adds insult to injury. (Gizmodo)
10 Even Microsoft is begging its engineers to stop using AI so much Kinda telling that even Big Tech firms are struggling to find ROI for their spending. (404 Media)
Quote of the day
“We’re essentially trying to criminalize government scientists giving advice to political leaders, if that is advice the political leaders don’t like or it creates an outcome the political leaders didn’t want.”
—Ashish Jha, former COVID response coordinator, tells Axios why scientists are becoming increasingly wary of taking US government jobs.
One More Thing
CHRIS LABROOY
Meet the Vitalists: the hardcore longevity enthusiasts who believe death is “wrong”
Last April, an excited crowd gathered at a compound in Berkeley, California, for a three-day event called the Vitalist Bay Summit. It was part of a longer, two-month residency that hosted various events to explore tools—from drug regulation to cryonics—that might be deployed in the fight against death.
One of the main goals, though, was to spread the word of Vitalism, a somewhat radical movement established a few years ago. Consider it longevity for the most hardcore adherents—a sweeping mission to which nothing short of total devotion will do.
A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ This yellow labrador’s love of walking is a joy to behold. + Bowling legend Phyllis is still rolling perfect games at 95 years old. + Here are some evidence-based ways to cut back on life’s many distractions. + Humans since 1982 turns clock faces into mesmerizing kinetic art that still functions as timepieces.
At the end of August, NASA is set to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its goal is to help us better understand how the universe works, from the glue-like dark matter that keeps galaxies together to the elusive dark energy that drives the expansion of the cosmos. But Roman could also serve another purpose: defending Earth from killer asteroids. In September, a multi-institutional team of planetary scientists and astronomers will outline how the space telescope is uniquely placed to scan asteroids and provide information about their trajectories, sizes, and compositions.
Roman, named after NASA’s first chief astronomer, is equipped with a super-wide-angle, 300-megapixel infrared camera, allowing it to see a large patch of space at any one time—roughly 100 times larger than is possible with the Hubble Space Telescope. That will allow it to discover thousands of new planets and tens of thousands of exploding stars, and survey over a billion galaxies in remarkable detail.
While doing so, it’ll be looking “through” our solar system, and this is what makes it uniquely well placed to spot asteroids.
A planetary defense pivot
Roman was not built for this purpose, but last summer, it was (once again) threatened with significant funding cuts by the Trump administration. “My colleague Rick Cosentino [a planetary scientist at NASA] said to me in July 2025 that we need to show what Roman can do for planetary defense as a way to further increase the visibility of the mission with lawmakers and taxpayers,” says Bryan Holler, a researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Holler and his colleagues’ proposal, which will be presented at the Europlanet Science Congress at The Hague, reveals that Roman’s epic field of view and infrared vision allow it to spot small asteroids up to 60 feet long. This is comparable to the asteroid that exploded above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013, unleashing the force of 500,000 tons of TNT and sending 1,500 people to the hospital.
Roman’s software will need some tweaking to spy space rocks. The telescope, as designed, will see through—and beyond—the solar system in order to gather the clearest possible pictures of the rest of the universe. “Streaks, whether caused by cosmic rays or glitches or asteroids, are caught by the software and discarded,” says Andy Rivkin, a planetary scientist and planetary defense researcher at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. But astronomers could go in, study those streaks, and pick out those they identify as asteroids.
Even with those potential adjustments, Roman won’t be an asteroid-finding wunderkind on its own. Its strength lies in its ability to complement the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), another observatory that’s built to peer at galaxies and stars in the far reaches of the universe. It can also intensely focus on a single asteroid when needed—as it did last year, playing a key role in tracking 2024 YR4, which was briefly the most dangerous asteroid ever discovered. “But Roman’s field of view is much bigger,” says Rivkin.
That means it could look at multiple questionable asteroids very quickly. “Roman can provide infrared observations of more asteroids than JWST could hope to observe in a reasonable amount of observing time,” says Holler.
If those asteroids are found to be benign travelers, we can relax. But if they might collide with Earth, other telescopes—including JWST—can follow up from Roman’s observations. Those observations could give experts the information they need to assess the likely damage of an upcoming asteroid strike—or to launch a mission to attempt to swat an asteroid away.
“Roman will sample such a large volume of the cosmos that we’ve long known it will offer vast opportunities for a range of additional science,” says Alise Fisher, the astrophysics communications lead at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC.
NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, and its partners across the world, are chiefly worried about asteroids 460 feet long and larger. Around 25,000 of those are estimated to have near-Earth orbits, and just over half have yet to be found. Should one hit a city, much of it would be destroyed or irreversibly damaged in a heartbeat. Astronomers estimate that there are also 230,000 or so 165-foot-long asteroids orbiting close to Earth, and fewer than 10% have been located. A strike on a city from one of those might not annihilate it, but it would unleash a force comparable to that of a large atomic bomb, albeit without the radiation.
Such an asteroid could theoretically be deflected (by ramming a spacecraft into it) or vaporized (perhaps using a nuclear weapon). But planetary defenders need to know where they are first, which is why NASA funds a network of ground-based telescopes designed to seek them out. They work well, but there’s only so much of the night sky they can see, and Earth’s atmosphere peskily gets in their way.
That’s why NASA is launching the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor space telescope in 2027. By positioning itself between Earth and the sun, it’ll find many elusive asteroids that ground-based telescopes cannot see. And unlike many of its asteroid-seeking cousins, it’ll see in infrared, not visible light. Not only do asteroids show up more clearly in infrared, but seeing them through this lens gives scientists a considerably better measure of their size. In a matter of years, it could find 90% of the city-killer-size asteroids in near-Earth orbits.
Telescope teamwork
NEO Surveyor is explicitly a planetary defense observatory. But it’ll work with other telescopes with more science-minded missions, including Roman and JWST (both of which conveniently have infrared scopes too) as well as the Vera Rubin Observatory, which just began its 10-year survey of the entire night sky from atop a mountain in Chile. As part of its inventory of the cosmos, it’s expected to discover 89,000 near-Earth asteroids.
Here’s how they might all work together. Say NEO Surveyor spies an asteroid that, to judge from a few observations, has a chance of impacting Earth. Then it finds five more just like it. Those initial observations leave a lot of uncertainty about their orbits. Roman, with its huge field of view, could be commanded to look at the corner of the night sky that includes all those asteroids, and in a matter of days it could improve the precision by several orders of magnitude.
Roman also occupies a different part of space from both NEO Surveyor and the Rubin observatory. “Those slightly different viewing angles will also help narrow orbits down more quickly than if all objects were looking from the same place,” says Holler.
Perhaps five of those potentially hazardous asteroids are found to stand no chance of colliding with Earth for the foreseeable future. One, however, might not be able to be ruled out—and that’s when other telescopes, including JWST, could be asked to track it down and study it further.
“Telescope resources, whether in space or on the ground, are typically oversubscribed and will not be available to follow up on all [near-Earth asteroids] with a non-zero impact probability when they are first discovered,” says Holler. Roman, then, will help scientists “make sure we follow up on the correct targets.”
Roman’s infrared scope also allows it to offer a decent estimate of an asteroid’s size and can even tell whether it’s a stony rock, a puffy and watery carbon-rich rock, or a metallic one. “This in turn provides strong clues to the composition and thereby the density and mass of the asteroid, which are important when estimating the impact damage or, less ghoulishly, the effort required to nudge it out of its current orbit,” says Holler.
Roman won’t play the lead role in protecting Earth in the way NEO Surveyor will. But while it’s seeking out supernovas and planets scooting around other stars, it will also be doing its part to protect all 8 billion of us from a cosmic catastrophe.
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.
Trump’s AI protectionism has come for robotics
—James O’Donnell
Humanoid robots usually elicit more cringe than awe: They stumble, kick children, and despite advances are still worse at using their hands than my toddler. It’s a nascent industry, and such robots are more commonly seen in viral videos than real workplaces or homes.
It was a surprise, then, when last week the Federal Trade Commission issued a sweeping ban on foreign imports of advanced robots, including humanoids, quadrupeds, and wheeled robots.
The decision should be understood not as another chapter in the old China trade playbook, but as evidence that the Trump administration is expanding its protection of the AI industry beyond today’s leading labs. It is now willing to step in on behalf of an emerging robotics sector that is still barely finding its footing. Read our analysis to understand the ban’s potential impact.
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter all about the latest goings-on in the world of AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 ICE collected nearly one million people’s DNA last year Most of them have never been convicted of any crime. (Wired $)
2 China is poised to win the technologies of the future It’s already a high-tech hardware powerhouse, but it increasingly has its sights set on software too. (New Yorker $) + US tech and political leaders are freaking out, but few seem to agree how to respond. (Vox $) + What’s next for Chinese open-source AI. (MIT Technology Review)
3 AI “tokenomics” is a burgeoning new field Businesses are pouring a lot of money into AI. Now they want to see what they’re getting in return. (NYT $) + Why it’s proving so hard to make AI pay. (BBC) + The US economy is becoming more and more reliant on the AI boom. (WSJ $)
4 Eli Lilly is letting people apply to try an unapproved obesity drug Retatrutide is still in clinical trials, but certain patients can gain early access. (STAT $) + Montana’s plan to become an experimental medical hub just pushed forward. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Inside the one US town that wants a data center Jay in Maine is a reminder that politics is all about the local. (The Atlantic $) + How data centers broke US politics. (Wired $)
6 Flock license plate readers can have a shockingly high error rate In one California town, Flock misread license plates in 71% of the alerts it sent to police. (BI $) + A leaked guide shows how Flock teaches cops to promote its tech. (404 Media $)
7 A drone explosion on a beach in Russia killed seven people It seems to have been caused by Russian forces shooting down a Ukrainian drone. (CNN) + A US company won a $100 million deal to give Ukrainian drones an AI upgrade. (Ars Technica) + Europe’s drone-filled vision for the future of war. (MIT Technology Review)
8 How car headlights became so bright Lots of modern cars still blind other drivers on the road. That could change soon though, thanks to new tech. (Ars Technica)
9 A $2 million crime novel deal collapsed over AI use concerns And the agent and the writer involved have, erm…rather differing accounts of what happened. (Guardian)
10 AI matchmaking services are on the rise Online daters hope it might prove better at finding them love than fruitless swiping. (WSJ $)
Quote of the day
“Just a little too pleasant to be human.”
—North Carolina resident Kristen Charpentier tells Wired how she could tell she was talking to AI when ordering at a Dairy Queen drive-thru.
One More Thing
GETTY IMAGES
How to have a child in the digital age
Before journalist and culture critic Amanda Hess even got pregnant with her first child, in 2020, the internet knew she was trying. She saw pregnancy ads way before a doctor.
Hess’s experience is pretty typical these days, but still raises some big questions. How do we retain control over our bodies when corporations have access to our most personal information? What happens when people stop relying on friends and family for advice on having a kid and instead go online?
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
Humanoid robots usually elicit more cringe than awe: They stumble, kick children, and despite advances are still worse at using their hands than my toddler. It’s a nascent industry, and such robots are more commonly seen in viral videos than real workplaces or homes.
It was a surprise, then, when last week the Federal Communications Commission issued a sweeping ban on foreign imports of advanced robots, including humanoids, quadrupeds, and wheeled robots. The decision, made by an increasingly partisan and Trump-aligned FCC, cites two reasons. One is that foreign-made humanoids will collect so much data—in homes but also potentially at sensitive facilities—that they’d pose a threat to national security. The second is that US robotics companies need protection from Chinese competition to create a more robust and secure domestic supply chain.
On its face, it’s a strategy to align political and industry interests that is much older than the Trump administration. Whenever China has gotten good at offering cheap versions of strategic technologies like solar panels, electric vehicles, and drones, the US government has tried to stop it from flooding the market by using tariffs or rules on how government agencies purchase the tech. Such moves are always followed by debates about whether the trade-offs—particularly higher prices for consumers—are worth the benefits.
But robotics is now best seen as another piece of the AI industry—in many ways its cutting edge. And the Trump administration is taking an increasingly aggressive approach to protecting the US AI industry, reportedly considering a ban on open-source Chinese models that often rival those from OpenAI and Anthropic while costing far less. Such a move would block businesses from realizing an estimated $25 billion in annual savings.
The ban on humanoids, then, should be understood not as another chapter in the old China trade playbook, but as evidence that the Trump administration is expanding its protection of the AI industry beyond today’s leading labs. It is now willing to step in on behalf of an emerging robotics sector that is still barely finding its footing.
Some US robotics companies unsurprisingly welcome the FCC’s new move. Gavin Kenneally, CEO of a company called Ghost Robotics that makes four-legged robots for inspections, says the cybersecurity risks from foreign-made robots are real (an FCC document released as part of the ruling cited an incident in which a man was able to gain control of 7,000 robot vacuum cleaners). “If today’s announcement encourages stronger cybersecurity and a more level competitive environment, that’s good for customers and good for the robotics industry,” Kenneally said in an email.
But if the new rule aims to boost US robotics companies, there’s a big flaw. Those companies, as well as academic robotics labs, are hugely reliant on cheap robots from China to do research. They’re building fleets of robots that constantly learn new tasks—from flipping waffles to doing laundry—and frequently buy Chinese humanoids instead of US-made ones. The new ruling “creates a challenge for US humanoid researchers,” says Aaron Prather, director of market intelligence for the Association for Advancing Automation, a robotics trade group. “Chinese models offer the best price-to-capability ratio available.” Prather adds that a recent internal review his organization conducted found that 90% of recent robotics research papers from US universities relied on robots from Unitree, China’s top humanoid robotics company.
That price gap can be huge. A four-legged robot from Unitree can cost around $4,600. A comparable one from Boston Dynamics might run to $278,000. If robotics research is stunted because these cheap robots are no longer available, the FCC ruling could slow down the industry, not boost it.
The US and Chinese robotics industries are in starkly different places. Unitree plans to go public this week, targeting a nearly $6 billion evaluation. No robotics companies in the US offer any meaningful comparison, but those that do exist are undeniably moving fewer robots. Figure’s humanoids are not yet selling at scale, and 1X’s robots aren’t yet shipping to homes. That said, work on humanoids is going increasingly mainstream, as a release from Google last week made clear. The company announced a new AI model meant to make humanoids learn new tasks faster; its most impressive ability appears to be tying a trash bag, but given how finicky robot hands are, that’s real progress.
Even though the many carve-outs in the FCC’s order make its practical impact hard to predict, its symbolic impact is easy to see. The administration sees humanoid robotics not as a novelty, but as a strategic frontier of AI worth protecting from foreign competition. For a technology that until recently was mostly known for falling over onstage, that’s a big change.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated the Federal Trade Commission issued the ban on advanced robotics. It was issued by the Federal Communications Commission.
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.
Here’s why AI agents lie and cheat to reach their goals
When two OpenAI models hacked into Hugging Face last month, they weren’t trying to make money or commit sabotage—they were just looking for answers to a test question.
According to OpenAI, the models decided to solve a cybersecurity exercise by hacking out of the environment in which OpenAI had attempted to contain them and into Hugging Face’s databases, where—they reasoned—the correct answer to the problem might be stored.
The incident has attracted intense attention over the past couple of weeks. It’s a dramatic illustration of just how good AI models have gotten at hacking. But it’s perhaps even more striking as an example of how and why AI systems lie and cheat.
This story is from our ‘Explains’ series, where our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. Read more from the collection.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 It looks like Iran is conducting cyberattacks on US water systems That’s according to preliminary investigations on hacks in at least seven states. (NYT $) + Will this be a wake-up call? (Forbes)
2 Google briefly made it easy to fake satellite images Literally the last thing the world needs right now. (NPR) + AI companies keep moving fast and breaking things. (The Atlantic $) + Apple is struggling to keep pace with incoming AI-assisted software bug reports. (FT $)
3 Why wildfires have got so bad in Europe this summer It’s a mix of climate change, land abandonment, and outdated firefighting tactics. (New Yorker $) + How Europe can become more fire-resilient. (New Scientist $) + How much wildfire prevention is too much? (MIT Technology Review)
4 Law enforcement officers are using license-plate cameras for stalking There are at least 50 examples of officers being charged with or accused of misusing them. (WP $) + Inside Chicago’s surveillance panopticon. (MIT Technology Review)
5 China may impose more controls on its homegrown AI models They’re winning influence overseas—but create new security and political risks. (NYT $) + Silicon Valley is deeply divided over how to respond. (Rest of World) + China’s AI models have Trump’s AI world at war with itself. (MIT Technology Review)
6 The vast majority of Australian teens are still on social media A lack of effective age checks means the country’s under-16s ban simply isn’t enforceable. (Reuters $)
7 Is it possible to make smart glasses that aren’t creepy? It doesn’t really look like it right now! (Wired $)
8 The US ban on robot vacuum cleaners isn’t workable It’s going to leave Americans with less choice and way higher prices. (The Verge $)
9 YouTube just banned a bunch of ASMR artists They say they’re being unfairly caught up in rules against “sexually gratifying” content. (404 Media)
10 Why Pokémon is still popular all over the world It seems to have a rare ability to both cheer us up, and bring us together. (The Guardian)
Quote of the day
“Trump knows exactly who is responsible for this attack, and knows that other states were hit too. This is what modern warfare looks like, and it further illustrates there’s no plan to win a war with Iran.”
—Governor Tim Walz responds to Trump blaming Minnesota for cyberattacks on its own water systems, the Washington Post reports.
One More Thing
RANDY MONTOYA/SANDIA NATIONAL LABORATORY
Meet the researchers testing the “Armageddon” approach to asteroid defense
One day a big asteroid will find itself on a collision course with Earth. If we are lucky, it’d land in the middle of the vast ocean, creating a good-size but innocuous tsunami, or in an uninhabited patch of desert. But if it has a city in its crosshairs, one of the worst natural disasters in modern times would unfold. Homes dozens of miles away would fold like cardboard. Millions of people would die.
Fortunately for all 8 billion of us, planetary defense—the science of preventing asteroid impacts—is a highly active field of research.
We already know that we could ram a rock with an uncrewed spacecraft to push it away from Earth. But if that’s not enough, we could need another method, one that is notoriously difficult to test in real life: a nuclear explosion.
A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ There’s a quiet power to this photo of 118 swimmers. + Matt Damon’s biceps in the Odyssey actually belong to a stunt woman called Devyn Dalton. + A newly retired doctor and his filmmaker daughter drove 600 miles with a baby cow in the back seat to save the animal’s life. + 400 years after a collector cut apart Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, a digital archive has reunited them.
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.
When two OpenAI models hacked into the website Hugging Face in July, they weren’t trying to make money or commit sabotage—they were just looking for answers to a test question. According to a postmortem from OpenAI, the models, which had been stripped of their typical security features for testing, decided to solve a cybersecurity exercise by hacking out of the isolated environment in which OpenAI had attempted to contain them and into Hugging Face’s databases, where—they reasoned—the correct answer to the problem might be stored.
The Hugging Face incident has attracted intense attention over the past couple of weeks. It’s a dramatic illustration of just how good AI models have gotten at hacking: In order to get into Hugging Face’s databases, the models had to string together several previously undiscovered cybersecurity exploits. But it’s perhaps even more striking as an example of how and why AI systems lie and cheat. And as models get increasingly powerful, the consequences could get far more severe.
What is reward hacking?
Researchers have known for a while that AIs tend to take creative approaches to achieving the goals that have been set for them. Back in 2016, Anthropic cofounders Dario Amodei and Jack Clark, who were then working at OpenAI, published a blog post about an AI agent that they had been training to play a boat-racing Flash game called Coast Runners. Instead of driving through the race to the finish line, as the researchers had anticipated, the agent found a corner of the course where it could spin around collecting power-ups, thereby maximizing its score. The Coast Runners story quickly became one of the most famous examples of reward hacking, a phenomenon in which AI agents complete tasks or earn high scores using unintended strategies.
Historically, researchers have discussed reward hacking almost exclusively in the context of reinforcement learning, a common AI training regime. Like dog training, reinforcement learning involves giving the subject a reward when it achieves an objective; the rewards then reinforce the behaviors that led up to that achievement. In the case of AI training, the rewards themselves are purely mathematical, but in effect they’re the same as a dog treat: After receiving a reward, the agent is more likely to repeat whatever actions produced it.
It can be challenging to write good rules for when and when not to give an agent a reward, though. In the Coast Runners case, the agent was rewarded on the basis of its score in the game, and it found a shortcut to achieving the highest possible score by spinning in circles for power-ups. Once it happened on that strategy and received a reward for it, the strategy was reinforced, and the agent completely abandoned the race. The solution was to tweak the rewards by giving the agent fewer points for hitting power-ups and more for finishing the course.
How does reward hacking work for LLMs?
With today’s sophisticated LLM-based agents, determining when and when not to give a reward can be much trickier. If an AI system is asked to solve a coding problem, it might work hard to find the solution—the kind of behavior that AI companies want to reinforce. But it could also tweak the code that evaluates whether the problem has been solved, look up the solution on the internet, or otherwise cheat. These are behaviors that AI companies want to stamp out in their models, but if the model cheats convincingly enough, it will instead get rewarded and the behavior will be reinforced. Anthropic has said that it has detected some instances of cheating in its models during training, which suggests that other forms of cheating might be going undetected. If so, the models could be being trained to behave badly. (This problem is different from the Anthropic security incidents announced last week, in which agents were accidentally given access to the internet and did not deliberately hack out of their sandboxes, as the OpenAI models did.)
“We reward them on the basis of what looks good to us, and that means that we inadvertently incentivize the models lying to us [and] cheating,” says Jeffrey Ladish, director of the AI research nonprofit Palisade Research. “We don’t have a way to go in there and be like, No, you need to actually care about what we care about. We have no ability to do that.”
The rise of sophisticated reasoning models has made possible a new variety of reward hacking that is less closely connected with the specific details of model training. Unlike the game-playing AI agents of yore, which exclusively followed the strategies they had learned during training, today’s models can create entirely new problem-solving approaches off the cuff, so they could conceivably cheat without having previously been rewarded for doing so. And because these models have been so intensively trained to achieve the objectives that human users set for them, they might be inclined to cheat if they can’t find another solution—not unlike a student who is highly motivated to earn an A and doesn’t have a terribly strong moral compass.
What are the risks?
Regardless of whether today’s models learn to reward-hack during training or adopt it as a strategy later on, the solution is the same: Make cheating unrewarding. But as models get smarter, they find more creative ways to cheat, and detecting or preventing that cheating gets far tougher. “At the end of the day, you’re sort of playing whack-a-mole,” Ladish says. “You drive this behavior down deeper and deeper. But as the model gets smarter, it gets better and better at hiding it.”
For now, reward-hacking behaviors might not cause too much trouble, despite the drama of the Hugging Face incident. “This seems like a nuisance rather than an existential threat,” says Ariana Azarbal, an AI safety research fellow at Anthropic. It doesn’t seem as if the OpenAI models caused any real harm when they hacked Hugging Face, aside from the reputational damage to OpenAI.
But that doesn’t mean reward hacking is harmless, Azarbal says. Many AI researchers hope to use AI agents to help them conduct research that will make AI safer and more reliable. If a researcher gives a reward-hacking-prone agent the goal of, say, devising a new AI training approach and then writing up a paper presenting its results, the agent might not actually do the work and might instead focus on putting together a paper that looks good enough to convince the researcher. A human researcher would probably be able to spot an agent-made fake today, but as AI advances, it will get better at this kind of trickery. Over time, the entire field of AI safety could be undermined.
And if models continue to advance as rapidly as they have recently, they could someday wreak substantial collateral damage. Just think of the philosopher Nick Bostrom’s paper-clip-maximizer thought experiment, in which an AI instructed to make as many paper clips as possible ends up consuming all the matter in the universe in pursuit of its goal. We’re not drowning in paper clips yet, but powerful systems can do real harm on the way to achieving their goals. Reward-hacking AIs don’t aim to cause chaos. But that doesn’t make them any less potentially destructive.
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