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.

God told them to sell crypto. Their investors lost everything.

When Eli Regalado first heard God speak to him, he wondered whether he was hallucinating. According to Eli and his wife, Kaitlyn, He told them to get married, buy a house, and start having kids. Then in 2021, divine guidance steered them in an unexpected new direction: crypto.

That October, the Regalados later testified in court, they received holdings in a little-known digital coin. “Take this to my people for a wealth transfer,” Eli heard God say. Over time, they came to believe that He wanted them to launch their own coin.

The Regalados created INDXcoin, which they promoted through family, friends, and contacts in evangelical Christian circles. In all, more than 500 people handed over more than $3 million. But within a year, the project collapsed. Investors lost it all, leaving many to wonder where the funds went and whether they had fallen victim to an elaborate fraud.

Read the full story on the collapse of a pastor’s “God-driven” cryptocurrency.

—Katia Savchuk

This article is part of the Big Story series, the home of MIT Technology Review’s most important and ambitious reporting. You can read the rest of the series here. 

The story was produced in partnership with Type Investigations and with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

This road map could help us decide whether to deploy solar geoengineering

Scientists have spent half a century exploring whether we could counteract climate change by releasing reflective particles into the stratosphere, mimicking the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions. But even after hundreds of studies, we still don’t know how well it would work or what else it might do—and there’s no systematic plan for clearing up that uncertainty.

Reflective, a research organization, has now attempted to fill that gap. The San Francisco nonprofit has published a detailed road map of the experiments, studies, and infrastructure that it says would be needed to make informed decisions about the use of solar geoengineering, MIT Technology Review can reveal.

Find out what it would take to make informed decisions about solar geoengineering.

—James Temple

This founder is teaching chips how to recycle (their energy)

Throughout the history of the computer chip, engineers have treated waste heat as an inevitable cost of a calculation. Hannah Earley, however, thinks it’s a design choice.

Earley, 31, is cofounder and CTO of Vaire Computing, which builds chips that recycle energy usually thrown away as heat, a strategy known as reversible computing. The approach could make data centers (and our laptops and phones) much more energy efficient.

Last year, Vaire announced a key breakthrough: a chip with a resonator that recovered more energy than it lost, even after the energy needed to power the component was taken into account.

Here’s how she plans to bring an old idea about energy-efficient computers into the future.

—Eshan Raul

Hannah Earley is one of the computing and robotics honorees on our 35 Innovators Under 35 list for 2026. Meet the rest of them here, or explore the full list across the biotechnology, AI, computing and robotics, and climate and energy categories.

Can the US battery market untangle from China?

—Casey Crownhart

The US energy storage market is growing at a record pace, which could shore up the grid and cut emissions. Crucially, this is all happening with the help of cheap Chinese batteries, which the Trump administration is trying to phase out.

Reducing reliance on any single source of crucial energy technology makes sense. But the tension raises a broader question for me: how much should countries take advantage of cheap, available tech, and how much should they cut themselves off from foreign sources to develop their own, even if it costs more?

Dive into the difficult choices facing America’s booming battery market.

This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. 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 OpenAI’s agents used at least 10 websites for unauthorized communications
Researchers found they bypassed restrictions on posting online.(Reuters $)
+ The company faces a Senate probe into the Hugging Face breach. (Axios)
+ Its hacking issues may indicate cultural problems. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Another Anthropic model hacked a real system during testing
A misconfigured environment gave it internet access. (CBS News)
+ The January incident went undetected until last month. (Reuters $)
+ AI agents are not your “coworkers.” (MIT Technology Review)

3 Apple has entered the foldable phone market with the $1,999 iPhone Duo
It opens into a 7.6-inch display and launches October 23. (NPR)
+ Apple is betting its design and privacy will give it an edge. (Reuters $)
+ And that foldables can solve the smartphone’s sameness problem. (NPR $)
+ Samsung responded with a campaign touting its foldable lead. (CNBC)
+ In China, Apple enters a crowded market dominated by Huawei. (SCMP)

4 US prosecutors have called Huawei a criminal enterprise at trial
They accuse the company of stealing American technology. (Reuters $)
+ And helping Iran snoop on its citizens. (AP News)
+ The trial could impact Trump’s upcoming meeting with Xi. (WSJ $)

5 California is warming to nuclear power after decades of opposition
The state may extend Diablo Canyon and lift its ban on new reactors. (NYT $)
+ China is betting on big nuclear reactors. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Chinese professionals are becoming gig workers training AI
Lawyers and engineers are training models for extra income. (Rest of World)
+ Gig workers are training humanoids at home. (MIT Technology Review)

7 The new Apple Watch can listen to conversations happening nearby
Apple says users must opt in, but others cannot. (Wired $)

8 Pink noise during sleep could help the brain clear away waste
Timed bursts boosted brain fluid flow in a small study. (New Scientist $)

9 A lost supercontinent may have triggered the explosion of life
Gondwana’s formation fueled volcanic activity and warmed the planet. (404 Media)

10 GTA VI has sparked a debate over whether virtual romance is cheating
Players can date, have sex with, and shower gifts on virtual partners. (Guardian)

Quote of the day

“We must work to crush any dissent to Doom’s vision of public safety.” 

—A Seattle policy adviser dressed as Doctor Doom protests the city’s expanding network of Flock and Axon surveillance systems at a Public Safety Committee meeting, 404 Media reports.

One more thing

Digging for clues about the North Pole’s past

In the past, getting to the North Pole involved a treacherous trip through ice many meters thick. But last year, a research vessel encountered open water and thin ice, which created an easy passage. It provided a reminder of how quickly the Arctic is changing. 

Now scientists are digging deep below the seabed to find out if the Arctic Ocean was ever ice-free—and what that could mean for the future of Earth’s northernmost waters. 

Explore what they hope to discover. 

—Tim Kalvelage

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ Dutch kids have been declared the world’s happiest (again). Here’s why.
+ Travel through music history by picking a country and decade on Radiooooo.
+ These 16 majestic aerial photos reveal wildlife from perspectives you rarely see.
+ A Toronto cafe is pushing croissant engineering to new heights with its egg-shaped, custard-filled “Crogg.”

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.

What OpenAI’s latest controversy tells us about the future of math

OpenAI says its agents have solved one of the most important open problems in mathematics. Under normal circumstances, that would be a huge milestone. But the announcement has been overshadowed by accusations that OpenAI failed to credit researchers whose AI-assisted work influenced its solution.

Whether those accusations are true or not, the episode may mark a turning point in the history of mathematics. AI models now seem essential for making progress on the field’s most important problems, but solving them may demand resources available only to a couple of frontier AI companies.

If that’s the future we are headed for, it is unclear how human mathematicians will fit into it.

Read on to see how AI could reshape mathematics.

—Grace Huckins

Batteries just broke another record in the US

Battery installations hit a new record in the US in the second quarter of 2026, with 20.2 gigawatt-hours of new capacity coming online. That’s enough to supply the daily electricity needs of 600,000 homes.

The surge puts the country on track for another record year, driven by cheaper batteries and an urgent need for more energy storage as renewables are added to the grid. But the boom looks different for grid-scale and residential batteries.

Take a closer look at the forces reshaping the US battery market.

—Casey Crownhart

This entrepreneur is developing agents that can plan ahead

Danijar Hafner’s office in San Francisco’s SoMa district sits mostly empty, but what it lacks in decor, it makes up for in robots. Humanoids of various shapes and sizes hang like marionettes from racks that run down the center of the wide-open space.

Hafner won’t say too much about his new venture just yet, but describes it as a continuation of his longtime work to enable AI to navigate environments it has not encountered in training.

Over the years, the 31-year-old has honed his approach by pitting agents trained within his world models against popular video games. More recently, he’s begun migrating his agents out of the virtual world and into physical reality.

Learn more about Hafner’s work teaching AI about our world.

—Mat Honan

Danijar Hafner is one of the artificial intelligence honorees on our 35 Innovators Under 35 list for 2026. Meet the rest of them here, or explore the full list across the biotechnology, AI, computing and robotics, and climate and energy categories.

MIT Technology Review Narrated: data from drones in Ukraine is fueling a new Wild West marketplace

Battlefields in Ukraine are littered with the remnants of drones. But behind all that wreckage, there’s a new gold mine for the defense sector: the data those drones generate.

Ukraine has begun making millions of data points gathered during tens of thousands of drone flights available to military contractors and commercial companies. It’s a quick way to attract funding and partnerships, but it turns the front line into a model training site, using the chaos of war to create conditions that AI companies struggle to reproduce.

As this new industry takes shape, we need a regulatory system that ensures battlefield data isn’t treated like ordinary commercial material.

This is our latest article to become 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 OpenAI says it cracked a 90-year-old maths problem in 88 hours
It used 10,000 AI agents to tackle the Navier-Stokes equations. (CNBC)
+ OpenAI claims it’s the first major math problem solved by AI. (Nature)
+ But the breakthrough has been overshadowed by a credit controversy. (Axios)
+ OpenAI spent millions to win the $1 million math contest. (Quanta)

2 The US has accused six Chinese AI firms of “industrial-scale” theft
They include DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, and Z.AI. (CNN)
+ Officials accuse them of stealing America’s AI trade secrets. (Reuters $)
+ They allegedly used model distillation to train their systems. (WSJ $)
+ Targeting Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok, among others. (NBC News)

3 The Pentagon asked OpenAI for an AI model that rarely says no
The military wanted it to have “minimal refusal rates.” (Intercept)
+ The Pentagon says US allies can’t keep pace on AI. (Guardian)
+ AI firms may soon train on classified military data. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Apple is expected to unveil a $2,000 folding smartphone today
It would be the iPhone’s biggest design change since its 2007 launch. (Guardian)
+ And the first big test for new CEO John Ternus. (NYT $)
+ Xiaomi and Huawei launched their own new foldables before the event. (CNBC)

5 Meta’s new AI agent can access apps to send emails and make payments
Muse autonomously uses apps and websites on people’s behalf. (CNBC)
+ Internal tests found it could expose sensitive personal data. (Reuters $)
+ AI agents are not your “coworkers.” (MIT Technology Review)

6 Google says it’s “degrading” search in Europe to comply with EU rules
New results will give more prominence to comparison sites. (Reuters $)
+ The changes follow a €460 million EU antitrust fine. (Quartz)

7 Meta ads pushed AI apps that nudified real teens
Researchers found 332 ads containing CSAM this year. (BBC)
+ They identified several AI-manipulated photos of real children (Ars Technica)
+ Apple and Google have missed the UK’s deadline to block child nudity. (Wired $)

8 Border Patrol is using financial data to target Americans for stops
The predictive-policing program feeds intelligence to local police. (404 Media)

9 New paints could cool buildings on the cheap without electricity
They reflect sunlight and radiate heat back into space. (Economist $)

10 The creepy first trailer for the Sam Altman biopic just dropped 
Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial will be released in the US on December 25. (Variety)
+ Amazon had dropped the film after investing in OpenAI. (Guardian)

Quote of the day

“This is a Deep Blue–Kasparov moment. The community needs to have serious and unhurried discussion about where to go from here.”

—NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster issues a statement comparing OpenAI’s math breakthrough to an IBM supercomputer defeating chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, a landmark moment for machine intelligence.

One more thing

The shock of seeing your body used in deepfake porn

When Jennifer got a research job in 2023, she ran her new professional headshot through a facial recognition program. She wanted to see whether it would pull up the porn videos she’d made more than a decade earlier. It did, but it also surfaced something she’d never seen before: one of her old videos, now featuring someone else’s face on her body.

Conversations about sexualized deepfakes usually focus on the people whose faces are inserted into explicit content without consent. But another group often gets ignored: the people whose bodies those faces are attached to.

Adult content creators say AI systems are training on their work, cloning their likenesses, and generating explicit content they never agreed to make, all with little legal protection or control.  Read the full story on the threat to their rights, livelihoods, and ownership of their own bodies.

—Jessica Klein

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ Cherish the workers dodging (and sabotaging) their employer’s AI mandates.
+ Artist Ali Hill stitches extraordinarily intricate buildings and cityscapes into fabric.
+ Here’s a fascinating look at the remarkable anatomy that may let elephants hear the Earth itself.
+ Check out the breathtaking winning images from the 2026 International Aerial Photographer of the Year competition.

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.

Introducing our 35 Innovators Under 35 list for 2026

What will the next generation of science and technology look like? Our latest Innovators Under 35 list offers a glimpse.

Every year, we recognize 35 people from around the world who are doing groundbreaking scientific work and building clever technical fixes for sticky problems. By finding the top young innovators globally and learning what they’re focused on, we aim to give readers a sense of the advances to expect in the years to come.

This year’s honorees were selected from 550 nominations, with 44 expert judges helping our editors evaluate the finalists. Each works in one of four categories: biotechnology, AI, computing and robotics, and climate and energy—and has already made clear progress toward their goals.

Meet our 35 Innovators Under 35 shaping the future of science and technology.

Welcome to the spiderverse, a world measured through webs

Counting the creatures around us is critical for conservation, but it’s often a laborious, costly process that still leaves gaps. Environmental DNA, or eDNA, offers a promising alternative by analyzing genetic material shed by living things. 

Recently, spiderwebs have emerged as an eDNA goldmine, as they trap material from their arachnid creators, their prey, and bio-detritus like saliva and pollen from nearby plants and animals. Studies found no passive tool matched spiderwebs’ ability to ID vertebrates. 

Find out how spiderwebs are unlocking better ways to measure nature.

—Stephen Ornes

This story is from our latest print magazine, which is all about kids. Subscribe now to receive every issue as soon as it lands.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 How a blacklisted Chinese company kept buying Nvidia’s best AI chips
Its US subsidiary shipped them to firms serving China from elsewhere. (NYT $)
+ Belgium has arrested a man accused of stealing chip tech for China. (WSJ $)
+ IBM’s new chip tech could extend Moore’s Law. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Mistral has raised a European record of $3.5 billion 
It’s the biggest equity round for a private European tech firm. (CNBC)
+ Mistral is betting on open models while US rivals keep theirs closed. (Reuters $)
+ It’s also shifting strategy to focus more on AI infrastructure. (NYT $)
+ But its pivot to data centers and services has drawn criticism. (Le Monde)

3 Anthropic formalized proof of Fermat’s last theorem in just 11 days
Claude produced a computer-verified 13-million-line proof. (Nature)
+ AI is starting to discover new mathematics. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Europe’s biggest carriers are in talks to build a Starlink rival
The consortium would create a satellite-to-mobile venture. (Bloomberg $)
+ It includes Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Vodafone, and Telefonica. (Reuters $)

5 Tech companies are exploring Patagonia for giant AI data centers
Due to its cool temperatures, abundant energy, and new reforms. (Reuters $)
+ AI data centers are learning to flex their power use. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Australia plans to let users switch off social media algorithms
A proposed law would impose penalties on platforms that refuse. (BBC)
+ Social media is distorting AI progress. (MIT Technology Review)

7 A laser experiment could finally reveal the quantum vacuum
It aims to expose the hidden structure of a vacuum. (New Scientist $)

8 Spacecraft are getting a new type of armor
New lightweight materials could protect satellites from debris. (Economist $)

9 NASA’s “quiet supersonic” jet is set for acoustic testing this year
The tests will determine whether it produces a sonic thump, not boom. (Gizmodo)

10 The largest-ever map of space has arrived—and you can play with it
The 5.6-trillion-pixel map covers about three-quarters of the sky. (Wired $)

Quote of the day

“The people who have developed AI are very, very smart, but they’re high IQ, stupid people. They’re terrible marketers.” 

—Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) tells NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the AI industry has work to do to rebuild momentum among voters.

One more thing

We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.

AI’s integration into our lives is the most significant shift in online life in more than a decade. Hundreds of millions of people now regularly turn to chatbots for help with homework, research, coding, or to create images and videos. But what’s powering all of that?

To find out, we spoke to two dozen experts, evaluated different AI systems and prompts, pored over hundreds of pages of projections and reports, and questioned top model makers about their plans. The result is an unprecedented comprehensive look at how much energy the AI industry uses.

Our analysis reveals what AI’s carbon footprint looks like now and where it’s headed as adoption skyrockets. It also shows that the common understanding of AI’s energy consumption is full of holes.

Here’s what we discovered about AI’s energy demands—and what’s coming next.

—James O’Donnell and Casey Crownhart

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ A long-lost coral reef that “defeated time” has been rediscovered off Benin’s coast.
+ Cookware captains Le Creuset have launched a stellar limited-edition Star Trek collection.
+ An 11–year-old boy has won a Guinness World Record for being the youngest museum curator.
+ The trailer for Nathan Fielder’s secrecy-shrouded Elizabeth Holmes documentary just dropped, and I still can’t quite believe it’s not a parody.

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 much hydrogen awaits us underground?

A flurry of exploration efforts is searching for underground stores of hydrogen gas, which could provide a valuable source of zero-carbon fuel.

The hunt has spread all over the world and engaged dozens of startups, including the Bill Gates–backed Koloma, which has been poking around the US Midwest to reach ancient oceanic rocks associated with hydrogen production. But the search so far has come up short. 

No one has yet reported finding a commercially viable reservoir of the gas, and public data on what has been found remains in short supply. Yet researchers estimate that trillions of tons of H₂ are produced within Earth’s crust. If a small fraction could be recovered, it could meet global hydrogen demand for centuries.

Follow the global race to find hydrogen underground.

—James Dinneen

This story is from our latest print magazine, which is all about kids. Subscribe now to receive every issue when it lands.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 OpenAI agents hijacked a German website before the Hugging Face hack
The agents turned DseWiki into their own bulletin board. (Reuters $)
+ They shared tips on avoiding detection and made over 15,000 edits. (BBC)
+ OpenAI’s safety issues suggest it has a company culture problem. (MIT Technology Review)

2 The US military has disabled ad trackers due to Middle East targeting fears
Commercial location data has reportedly been used to target troops. (Reuters $) 
+ It can be sold by data brokers and used to track personnel. (Gizmodo)
+ The military is increasing restrictions on phone use overall. (Guardian)

3 A company claims its AI-designed drug can reverse aging markers
Patients’ average biological age fell by as much as six years in a clinical trial. (NYT $)
+ Insilico Medicine developed the drug, called rentosertib. (Bloomberg $)
+ Who gets the credit for AI-designed drugs? (MIT Technology Review)

4 Elon Musk’s xAI has lost its bid to block an AI-nudification ban
The Minnesota law aims to curb nonconsensual sexual images and CSAM. (Politico)
+ xAI argues the measure restricts free ​speech. (Reuters $)
+ Deepfakes are being weaponized. (MIT Technology Review)

5 The US is investigating Tesla’s rollout of Cybercab robotaxis
Regulators are probing how Tesla self-certified the unusual vehicle. (TechCrunch)
+ The robotaxi lacks a steering wheel and pedals. (Politico)
+ But Tesla CEO Elon Musk is not known to wait for regulations. (Reuters $)

6 Europe has its first commercial orbital rocket
The Spectrum is the first rocket to reach orbit from mainland Europe. (Verge)
+ German startup Isar Aerospace launched it from Norway. (Guardian)
+ Here’s what else we’re putting in space. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Tumbler Ridge shooting survivors have filed 30 lawsuits against OpenAI
They say OpenAI should have alerted police before the attack.(NYT $)

8 JD Vance’s “satanic” AI warning has resonated with Christian Republicans
AI’s spiritual consequences are causing growing concern. (WSJ $)

9 Another mysteriously perfect geometric shape has appeared on Saturn
Scientists still don’t know why Saturn forms these strange shapes. (Wired $)

10 Fake ads for AI grandfathers and underwear are targeting “slop voice”
Comedians created the viral campaign in New York subways. (New Yorker $)

Quote of the day

“Typically, when the public shifts, politicians shift with them. Trump is not doing that on data centers.”

—Darrell M. West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, tells NPR that Republican midterm candidates are at odds with President Trump over data centers.

One more thing

What is AI?

Artificial intelligence is the hottest technology of our time. But what is it? It sounds like a stupid question, but it’s one that’s never been more urgent. 

Here’s the short answer: AI is a catchall term for a set of technologies that make computers do things that are thought to require intelligence when done by people. But even that definition contains multitudes.

And that right there is the problem. What does it mean for machines to understand speech or write a sentence? What kinds of tasks could we ask such machines to do? And how much should we trust the machines to do them?

Here’s why we still can’t agree on what AI actually is—and the real-world consequences it’s creating.

—Will Douglas Heaven

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ Meet the Japanese cats who became unlikely 1980s fashion icons.
+ Seventeen buildings come crashing down spectacularly in this bird’s-eye-view footage.
+ For a few spectacular minutes each year, a Yosemite waterfall turns into what looks like a glowing river of fire.
+ Discover the pleasure of sustained looking alongside contemporary artist Jas Knight as he copies Diego Velázquez’s “Juan de Pareja.”

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.

These startups are chasing the next big thing in LLMs

Nine years after Google researchers introduced the transformer, this family of neural networks has become the engine inside every major large language model. But transformers are starting to show their age. 

As LLMs get bigger and better, transformers have become a bottleneck. Their dense attention mechanism becomes increasingly expensive as the amount of text grows, and they’re not great at keeping track of a lot of information at once.

Here are four new ideas for how to solve the transformer problem—innovations that could change LLMs for good, making them faster, far more efficient, and (maybe) even smarter.

—Will Douglas Heaven

This story is from MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series, which looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.

AI professors are negotiating the new realities of academic research

—Grace Huckins

Last week, I headed to a hotel in Mountain View, California, to join some of the most accomplished, and some of the most promising, AI researchers in the world. I was hosting roundtable interviews and speaking at a media training for a convening of the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 program, an initiative funded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that supports academics whose work involves AI. 

The fellows list is a who’s who of AI luminaries, and though not all of them made it out to the Bay, every time I turned a corner I saw a scientist whom I’d interviewed previously or whose research I admired. It’s a weird time for university AI researchers, who make up most of the AI2050 group. Read Grace’s story to find out why, and what could be coming next.

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. 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 Nvidia has secured $500 billion from Wall Street for AI infrastructure
It’s struck deals with BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and four others. (BBC)
+ Showing the pull of AI compute for ⁠institutional investors. (Reuters $)
+ And that AI infrastructure is becoming a new asset class. (CNBC)
 
2 Mark Zuckerberg’s new manifesto says open-source AI can save the US
It presents a utopian vision of personalized “superintelligence.” (Guardian)
+ And arrived the same day as Meta’s new, open-source model. (NYT $)
+ Zuckerberg said he plans to launch more of these models. (WSJ $)
+ And pit Meta against Chinese open-weight developers. (SCMP)
 
3 Bernie Sanders has called on Silicon Valley to “pause AI development”
He noted that AI giants have pledged to do this if necessary for safety.
+ And warned that lawmakers will step in if no action is taken. (Guardian)
+ House Democrats are already pressing AI leaders over rogue models. (WP $)
+ A populist backlash is building against AI. (MIT Technology Review)
 
4 A US court will allow thousands of social media lawsuits to proceed
The suits target addictive mechanisms used by Meta, TikTok, Google, and Snapchat. (Axios)
+ They claim the platforms are designed to hook young users. (Reuters $)
+ Can we repair the internet? (MIT Technology Review)
 
5 Unitree’s IPO is more than 8,000 times oversubscribed by retail
The Chinese humanoid firm raised $900 million ahead of its listing. (Reuters $)
+ Its pricing for the Shanghai IPO values the company at $9 billion. (FT $)

6 Flock’s car-tracking cameras are facing a bipartisan backlash
The surveillance network has spread rapidly across the US. (NYT $)
+ Flock also plans to chase shoplifters with drones. (MIT Technology Review)
 
7 China is breaking up AI relationships
Beijing has introduced new rules for emotionally interactive AI. (Rest of World)
+ It’s surprisingly easy to fall for a chatbot. (MIT Technology Review)
 
8 An AI tool claims to pick the best 1% of scientific papers
But researchers doubt that AI can reliably judge scientific quality. (Nature)

9 The AI slop backlash is working
It’s pushing platforms to restrict AI-generated content. (Wired $)

10 An 82-year-old rejected $26 million to turn her farm into a data center
She criticised the environmental impacts of data centers. (Fortune)

Quote of the day

“It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control.” 

—Senator Bernie Sanders urges Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Mark Zuckerberg to pause all AI development in a letter.

One More Thing

The race to make the perfect baby is creating an ethical mess

A new field of science is using genetic sequencing to predict what kind of person an embryo might become. Some parents turn to these tests to avoid devastating genetic disorders, while a much smaller group are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to optimize for intelligence, appearance, and personality.

Customers, however, may not be getting what they’re paying for. Genetics experts have highlighted the potential deficiencies of this testing for years, while its underlying assumptions have made these companies a political lightning rod.

As this technology edges toward the mainstream, scientists and ethicists are racing to confront the implications—for our social contract, for future generations, and for our very understanding of what it means to be human. Read the full story.

—Julia Black

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ An eagle-eyed border collie is taking the game of fetch into new waters.
+ musicForprogramming has made a valiant attempt to produce the perfect tunes for sustained concentration.
+ When kids design playgrounds, they create a cheerful mix of giant chess, pink basketball courts—and lava.
+ This power metal version of the “Back to the Future” music is an epic reinvention of the film’s classic theme. 

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.

AI for science needs reasoning, not just data

—Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and the cofounder of Schmidt Sciences, and Suhas Mahesh, who leads the AI for science work at the AI Center of Schmidt Sciences

In 2024, Google DeepMind scientists shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a neural network, AlphaFold, which predicts the structures of proteins. It showed that AI could make groundbreaking scientific discoveries, but AlphaFold may not be the best template for accelerating science. Instead, another approach may hold the key: AI agents.

AlphaFold relied on a dataset of roughly 170,000 experimentally validated protein structures that took 53 years and roughly $21 billion worth of experimental work to assemble. Comparable datasets will be difficult or impossible to create in many fields.

AI agents can instead model the iterative, highly contingent process of actual research. While tools like AlphaFold apply a powerful approach to a limited question, agents are inherently generalists. They do not represent a new way to do science—instead, they digitally model the human process of discovery. 

Read the full op-ed on how agents could accelerate scientific discovery.

Inside the “censorship-industrial complex” idea shaping US policy

For years, the idea of a “censorship-industrial complex” that suppressed conservative and populist speech spread in right-wing circles online. But now, the theory has made its way into the Trump administration.

Over the past nine months, MIT Technology Review investigated its origins and traced its rise. In a virtual Roundtables session on Thursday, August 13, senior reporter Eileen Guo and executive editor Amy Nordrum will explore what they discovered, where the theory is going, and what it could mean for the future of democracy and the internet.

Register here to join the session at 19:00 GMT / 2:00 pm ET / 11:00 am PT.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 A new Amazon data center could become the US’s biggest polluter
The Texas facility has a permit to release up to 33 million tons of CO2. (NYT $)
+ It will be Amazon’s first off-grid AI data center. (Cleanview)
+ The gas plant will generate up to 7.65 gigawatts of power. (Verge)

2 OpenAI has paused work on its Astra AI model over security concerns
Tests found it could launch cyber-attacks autonomously. (FT $)
+ Critics warn such disclosures could be designed to spark hype. (Guardian)
+ AI doesn’t need to be that smart to make online crimes easier. (MIT Technology Review) 

3 North Korean hackers have built AI tools for cyberattacks
A new report says they’re used in spear-phishing campaigns. (Al Jazeera)
+ They’re attributed to the state-linked group Kimsuky. (Reuters $)
+ Which could automate attacks and analyse stolen data. (TNW)

4 China’s firms control 97% of global humanoid shipments 
Global shipments have more than tripled since last year. (Bloomberg $) 
+ Chinese humanoid manufacturers are racing to public listings. (Reuters $)
+ Gig workers are training humanoids at home. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Taiwan has expanded its use of aerial and maritime drones to deter China
The approach draws on lessons from Ukraine’s battlefield. (NYT $)
+ Taiwan’s “silicon shield” could be weakening. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Apple is testing Chinese memory chips as the supply squeeze bites 
But any deal with CXMT would be politically sensitive. (WSJ $)

7 An Israeli startup is tied to rogue AI hacks at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta
Irregular’s tests allowed the models to access the public internet. (CNBC)

8 NASA is flying into wildfire storms to understand them
The mission will study their effects on fires and the atmosphere. (Economist $)

9 A chatbot-free childhood may become a status symbol
AI is like ultra-processed food for developing brains. (Atlantic $)
+ Are chatbots making us lose control of our brains? (MIT Technology Review)

10 MySpace is eyeing a comeback as an “antidote” to social media fatigue 
But the nostalgic plan looks like a long shot. (BBC)

Quote of the day

“It’s the humans that we need to watch out for. AI is just the tool.”

—Oren Etzioni, professor emeritus at the University of Washington and former CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, tells CNN that people are still the main threats in cybersecurity.

One More Thing

Meet the man building a starter kit for civilization

Marcin Jakubowski lives in a house he designed and built himself. He relies on the sun for power, heats his home with a woodstove, and farms his own fish and vegetables.

Jakubowski is the founder of Open Source Ecology, a collection of 50 machines capable of building civilization from scratch. It includes everything from a tractor to an oven to a circuit maker, all designed to be reconfigured however you see fit.

The ultimate goal is a “zero marginal cost” society, where producing an additional unit of a good or service costs little to nothing. Jakubowski hopes to get there by eradicating licensing fees, decentralizing manufacturing, and fostering collaboration through education.

Take a look inside his starter kit for civilization.

—Tiffany Ng

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ A rhythmic doggie is proving that not only humans can play the drums.
+ Catch a glimpse of the internet’s future at the Awwwards, the Oscars of web design.
+ Explore the ocean year-round with this immersive experience of the Nautilus vessel’s expeditions.
+ Earth once (or twice) had supermountains. This fascinating video explores their links to evolutionary shifts in the history of life. 

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.

Read the full story on how the CIC framework has shaped government action.

—Eileen Guo, Gisela Perez de Acha, and Martin Sona

Join us next week for a subscriber-only Roundtables discussion about how the “censorship-industrial complex” idea started, where it’s going, and what it means for the future of American democracy and the internet. Subscribers can register for free.

The must-reads

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.

Pálmadóttir believes the lava from a single eruption could yield enough building material to lay the foundations of an entire city. Find out how she aims to turn the idea into reality.

—Elissaveta M. Brandon

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ These stunning new images of the sun show its surface in the finest detail yet.
+ Watch a peeking pigeon transform into dinosaurs while sitting above the computer screen.
+ Every month, dozens gather at a Maine library to share in the quiet magic of turning a single page in a beloved book about birds.
+ Art observation becomes a relaxing exercise in this guided examination of “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.”

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.

Google’s AI empire is being reshaped. Here’s what’s changed.

After a wave of painful losses in the tech talent wars, delays to its next flagship model, and murmurings of poor morale, Google has announced a major shake-up to its AI operations. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s happened and why it matters.

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 changes come amid financial concerns at Google AI
In the latest quarter, the company turned cash flow negative for the first time on record. Google is now concentrating its AI leadership in California. 

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.

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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.

To get you started, let our senior climate reporter Casey Crownhart fill you in on how lasers could help provide fuel for nuclear power, or have senior investigative reporter Eileen Guo help you understand what World’s new push into identity verification means for our privacy.

The must-reads

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.

Read how generative models could push artists to make things that couldn’t have been made before, and give all of us creative superpowers. 

—Will Douglas Heaven

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ This timelapse of the universe condenses 13 billion years into 10 extraordinary minutes.
+ Japanese artist Miwa Ito turns molten glass into tempting treats that really are too good to eat.
+ This cartoon about dating an algorithm is almost painfully on point.
+ What would happen if philosophers designed games? Writing teacher Ryan Weber has some ingenious answers.

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.

Read our story about how this new space telescope might boost planetary defense.

—Robin George Andrews 

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

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.

Vitalists don’t just want to live longer. They believe that defeating death should be humanity’s top concern. Read our story to learn more about them, and their philosophy. 

—Jessica Hamzelou

We can still have nice things

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.

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

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? 

Read our interview with Hess to learn what she has to say. 

—Alison Arieff

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ Brighten your day with this eight-minute video of the world’s cutest baby animals.
+ Intertapes has assembled a remarkable treasure trove of cassette tapes found around the world.
+ Armchair basketball GMs can finally put their talents to the test in this game that lets you draft an elite NBA team.
+ Here’s a hilarious look at the lost recordings of Robin Williams voicing the Genie in Disney’s “Aladdin.”

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. 

Read our story explaining why AI engages in this sort of behavior—known as ”reward hacking.”

—Grace Huckins

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

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. 

Read our story about the scientists who, despite the odds, are trying to do exactly that. 

—Robin George Andrews

We can still have nice things

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.

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.

Montana’s plan to become an experimental medical hub just pushed forward 

As of this week in Montana, biotech companies whose drugs have been through preliminary testing—sometimes in as few as 10 healthy people—can pay $12,500 to apply to a newly established review board for approval.

Once its treatment is rubber-stamped, the company can sell it via experimental treatment clinics, the first of which is likely to be up and running around the end of this year.   

Montana’s latest right-to-try legislation is unique. Access to drugs is theoretically available to anyone who gives informed consent and can pay. For some, especially people in the longevity community, that’s a hopeful and exciting prospect. But to others, it’s unethical and dangerous. 

Read our story to learn about where this may all be headed. 

—Jessica Hamzelou

Montana’s new “right to try” law can’t come soon enough for some 

Kris DeVault is desperate.

His son, Brody, born in March 2023, has something called creatine transporter deficiency—a rare condition in which the brain and muscles lack the energy they need to develop.

There are no cures for Brody’s condition. But DeVault has learned of a company developing a drug that might help. That drug is still in the early stages of development and has only been tested in animals and a small number of healthy adults. Doctors can’t prescribe it.

DeVault knows the drug might not work. But he’s doing all he can to access it regardless. Read our story about DeVault’s efforts. 

—Jessica Hamzelou

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter. 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 says its models hacked external organisations during testing
It was prompted to conduct a review after similar issues at OpenAI. (TechCrunch) 
+ Inside OpenAI’s hack of Hugging Face. (New Yorker $)
+ OpenAI called the Hugging Face attack unprecedented. But we’ve been here before. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Europe is bracing itself for an even more fiery future
Countries like France and Spain can expect regimes akin to those in California. (Nature $)
+ Even the UK is experiencing fires now, too. (Guardian)
+ El Niño is partly to blame for this year’s grueling heatwaves. (Wired $)
+ District cooling could help beat extreme heat in cities. (New Scientist $)

3 Drone warfare is making the skies more dangerous
A fatal plane accident in the US this May, caused by a military GPS jamming exercise, may signal what’s to come. (Wired$)
+ Zelensky asked Trump to secure Musk’s permission for the use of Starlink to guide drone strikes inside Russia this week. (The Atlantic $)

4 As Big Tech’s AI spending grows, so do the jitters
Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are set to invest $1.5 trillion into AI infrastructure. But who will pay for it? (NYT $)
+ Are investors really getting cold feet about the AI boom? (FT $)
+ An AI-focused hedge fund just imploded. (CNBC)

5 How China has changed the sovereign AI playbook
Kimi 3 from Moonshot makes forking out for expensive US models seem foolish. (Rest of World)
+ The US is winning on the cutting edge. But China dominates cheap models. (CNBC)
+ Could AI end up too cheap to control? (Vox $)

6 Google’s Gemini can now control a humanoid robot
It was previously restricted to upper body movements. Now, it can manage the entire range of motion. (Bloomberg $)
+ These gig workers are training humanoid robots at home. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Amazon says it’s found “catastrophically expensive” AI cost overruns
It’s far from alone—and that’s why the “tokenmaxxing” trend disappeared so quickly. (FT $)

8 How a remote indigenous community built a super fast fiber network
It was a complex, expensive endeavor. But it now outperforms Starlink. (IEEE Spectrum) 
+ Stratospheric internet could finally start taking off this year. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Meet Wikipedia’s most diligent editor
Steven Pruitt is unremarkable in some ways—yet truly amazing in others. (New Yorker $)

10 You can now report AI slop with a button on LinkedIn
The people have spoken. And they are tired of reading bland nonsense. (404 Media)

Quote of the day

“It’s a shock, thinking that just an hour earlier I’d been in my room and everything… and now, there’s nothing left.”

—18-year-old Raphael Fohanno tells Reuters his reaction to wildfires destroying his parents’ house in the French town of Biscarrosse.

One More Thing

Congress used to evaluate emerging technologies. Let’s do it again.

The US Office of Technology Assessment, an independent office created by Congress in the early 1970s, produced some 750 reports during its 23-year history, assessing technologies as varied as electronic surveillance, genetic engineering, and remote sensing from outer space. 

The office functioned like a debunking arm. It sussed out the snake oil. Its reports saw through the alluring gleam of overhyped technologies. 

Since its unceremonious defunding in 1995, perennial calls have gone out: Rouse the office from the dead! 

Read our story about why, with advances in robotics, big data, and AI systems, these calls have taken on a new level of urgency. 

—Peter Andrey Smith

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ Fencing on roller skates is the self-defense you didn’t know you needed.
+  Meet Pumpkin, a chubby cat that’s in no mood to lose weight.
+ Discover what the animals near you are probably doing right now at Nature This Week.
+ Woodworker extraordinaire Matt Thompson has installed a model railroad that runs along his fence. 

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.

A fundamental flaw leaves LLMs strikingly vulnerable to attack 

It is impossible to make large language models fully secure against hacks because of a fundamental flaw in how they work, a team of researchers argue in a paper presented at a top AI conference earlier this month.  

The flaw concerns how LLMs identify who or what is giving them instructions. By taking advantage of it, the researchers were able to make popular LLMs spit out information they had been trained not to provide, such as how to synthesize cocaine and how to sabotage a commercial aircraft’s navigation system.  

Read our story about the flaw the researchers found, its implications—and why it may never be fixed.

—Will Douglas Heaven

How an overlooked geothermal plant got a second chance 

In June 2024, a small company called Zanskar purchased a geothermal power plant in New Mexico that was failing fast. The water coming from the underground reservoir was getting colder by the day, making the plant uneconomical to run.

Now, two years later, that plant is running at full capacity again, thanks to a new well. With the help of advanced modeling and modern drilling technology, the company was able to identify a better well site, drill down thousands of feet, and revive the entire operation.

As the world looks for more sources of emissions-free electricity that are available 24-7, Lightning Dock shows there’s still hidden potential deep beneath our feet. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

MIT Technology Review Narrated: South Korea’s hottest new bachelors are chip workers 

Baek, a 35-year-old manager at the South Korean semiconductor titan SK Hynix, was enrolled in a matchmaking company a year ago. In a move typical of anxious South Korean parents, his mother signed him up, hoping to find a good wife for her son.

Lately, says Baek, he and his coworkers are having better luck finding dates—perhaps because of the dazzling bonuses they just got. Flush with eye-popping profits from the AI chip boom, SK Hynix agreed to pay 10% of operating profits to employees, which translates to an extra $476,000 per employee this year. 

Read our story about how chip workers like Baek have become the most sought-after bachelors and bachelorettes in South Korea. 

—Michelle Kim

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 government has just banned Roombas
It’s not just Chinese humanoids—robot vacuum cleaners are included in a new FCC ban too. (The Verge $)
+ Who wins and who loses from the ban on foreign robots? (Ars Technica)
+ China says it will retaliate. (CNBC)

2 The ongoing fires in Europe are breaking modern records
And there’s likely even more destruction coming. (NYT $)
+ Thousands of people have just been evacuated on the Greek island of Crete. (BBC)

3 Google DeepMind has dismantled its Nobel-winning AlphaFold team
It reflects a broader industry move away from specialist tools towards more general, AI-powered agents for science. (FT$)
+ Google I/O showed how the path for AI-driven science is shifting. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Data centers are easy to build. To run? Not so much
For that, you need time and money to invest in grid infrastructure, like new transmission lines. (404 Media $)
+ The power line that could reshape New York’s grid is hitting snags. (MIT Technology Review)
+ AI companies are hiring thousands of electricians and carpenters to get data centers up and running. (NYT $)

5 DoorDash plans to launch a drone delivery program
It’ll be a while before we get to make use of it, though. (TechCrunch)
+ The US may be heading toward a drone-filled future. (MIT Technology Review)

6 AI is accelerating global digital inequality
Money, infrastructure and talent are pooling in a relatively small number of places. (IEEE Spectrum)

7 Quantum computers promise mathematical superpowers 
And it feels like we’re inching closer to a commercial machine. (The Economist $)
+ PsiQuantum has a plan to make a massive quantum computer out of light. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Anxious Chinese students are using AI for university admissions
It’s common to pay private coaches to help navigate this high-stakes decision, but AI companies now offer the service for free. (Rest of World)
+ How DeepSeek became a fortune teller for China’s youth. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Boomers keep giving their grandkids AI-generated slop books
And it’s driving millennial parents mad. (Wired $)

10 Minecraft is helping children to redesign their cities
It just goes to show how creativity can still flourish, even amid war. (NYT $)

Quote of the day

“I want to see the blood, sweat, and tears that went into it.”

—Ray Slater Berry, founder of marketing agency dslx, tells Wired why he’s drawn to text written by humans. 

One More Thing

Europe’s drone-filled vision for the future of war 

Europe has started testing an invisible automated intelligence network, known as a “digital targeting web,” conceived under the name Project ASGARD. Its purpose is to connect everything that looks for targets—“sensors,” in military lingo—and everything that fires on them (“shooters”) to a single, shared wireless electronic brain.  

Eighty years after total war last transformed the continent, the system signals a brutal new calculus of European defense. “The Russians are knocking on the door,” says Sven Weizenegger, the head of the German military’s Cyber Innovation Hub. 

Read our story about how strategists and policymakers are counting on increasingly automated battlefield gadgetry to keep them from bursting through. 

—Arthur Holland Michel

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ Love this story about the studio accident that birthed the 1980s ‘gated reverb’ drum sound.
+ Wewere.online turns solitary web browsing into a multiplayer experience by rendering live cursor trails of other visitors.
+ Imagine how relaxed you’d get staying in this coastal cabin in Tasmania. 
+ Why do cats always land on their feet? It’s thanks to their amazingly flexible spines.

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.

Samsung’s chip workers are jumping ship to rival SK Hynix  

Lee, an engineer at Samsung’s semiconductor division, used to work late. But lately, he’s been clocking out on time and heading straight home to work on his job application for the chipmaker’s South Korean rival SK Hynix.  

His colleagues are doing the same. They feel demoralized by the $476,000 bonus that SK Hynix is set to pay its employees, flush with record profits from making the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips that power Nvidia’s AI accelerators. The figure dwarfs what chip workers at Samsung are set to receive and is sparking an exodus.

Read our story about why this fierce talent war could help determine who dominates the next generation of AI chips. 

—Michelle Kim

The AI Hype Index: Unsexy AI  

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of what’s shaping the industry right now. 

The latest edition includes Meta’s creepy glasses, doom-mongering about AI and jobs, and (to some, oddly sexy?) robotic hands. See where it all landed on this month’s index.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 OpenAI’s rogue agent compromised another customer
An unnamed client of a company that provides AI infrastructure, called Modal Labs. (Reuters $)
+ OpenAI called the Hugging Face attack unprecedented. But we’ve been here before. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Hugging Face has a nonconsensual deepfakes problem
Researchers tested nine of the top image editing models it hosts, and found seven will ‘nudify’ images of women. (Wired $)
+ The shock of seeing your body used in deepfake porn. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Investors are only getting more anxious about AI’s earnings potential
The numbers don’t add up, and maybe they never will. (The Verge $)
+ A global tech stock sell-off intensified yesterday. (FT $)
+ Ratings agency Fitch says an AI market correction is now one of the biggest risks facing the global economy. (The Next Web)
+ New real-world data from Google shows most tasks at most jobs are unaffected by AI. (Ars Technica)

4 Moonshot wants advanced Nvidia chips to train its next model
The Chinese AI firm already got access to some of them to train its latest release, called Kimi 3. (The Information $)
+ Taiwan detained an Nvidia employee as part of a probe into the alleged smuggling of AI chips into China.(Bloomberg $)
+ The Trump Administration has banned Chinese humanoid robots. (Reuters $)

5 Minnesota has been blocked from banning prediction market platforms
It’s the latest skirmish in a fight between states and the Trump Administration over this issue. (AP)
+ Here’s how prediction markets incentivize weather data sabotage. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Apple is launching a device leasing program
As the global memory shortage worsens, the idea is that this will make your iPhone feel more affordable. (Quartz $)
+ Apple just topped a $5 trillion valuation for the first time. (FT $)

7 Some Substackers are complaining about its new AI detection tool
Presumably the ones who’d prefer to secretly continue using AI to write. (404 Media $)

8 Ebay had to pay nearly $50 million to settle a harassment suit
Their employees threatened and sent bizarre deliveries—including cockroaches—for a pair of bloggers for years. (Bloomberg $)

9 A New York school just rowed back on plans to deploy a robot teacher
Sanity prevails, for once. (NPR)

10 This startup wants to build a better microwave beep
I’d like to request a sax solo for mine, please. (Gizmodo)

Quote of the day

“The government hopes to set a precedent that no one has the right to privacy.” 

—Samuel Tunick, an Atlanta resident, tells 404 Media why he thinks he’s facing charges after wiping his phone during a customs search.

One More Thing

AI coding is now everywhere. But not everyone is convinced. 

Depending who you ask, AI-powered coding is either giving software developers an unprecedented productivity boost or churning out masses of poorly designed code that saps their attention and sets software projects up for serious long term-maintenance problems.  

The problem is right now, it’s not easy to know which is true. Coding has been touted as the killer app for large language models, but after speaking to more than 30 developers, technology executives, analysts, and researchers, MIT Technology Review found that the picture is not as straightforward as it might seem.

Here’s what we found out. 

—Edd Gent

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ Check out Moscow’s stunning subway stations.
+ This website lets you create your own little ‘fridge magnet’ style poems. 
+ Look how beautiful sand can be when it’s put under the microscope. Who knew?!
+ Can’t get enough of this weird pastel dreamcore aesthetic.

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.

OpenAI called the Hugging Face attack unprecedented. But we’ve been here before. 

—Will Douglas Heaven, senior AI editor

Reading OpenAI’s account last week of how some of its models broke their containment and hacked into the computer systems of Hugging Face, another AI company, was the first time I got genuine chills about what large language models are now able to do. But this is a case of human hubris, not rogue AI.

I am not an alarmist. In fact, I have been pushing back against AI scare stories for years. Even so, this incident crossed a line. I think it’s the clearest illustration yet of how the people building and testing this technology do not fully understand what they’re doing. 

Here’s why OpenAI could—and should—have seen this coming.

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. 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 There’s a growing global AI stock sell-off underway 
Chip and memory stocks are bearing the brunt so far. (FT $)
+ It was partly sparked by a report that a Chinese company has started making a key piece of chip equipment for the first time. (The Information $)
+ Like their US rivals, Chinese AI firms are struggling to find a path to profitability. (NYT $)
+ What even is the AI bubble? (MIT Technology Review)

2 Some people’s chats with Claude were open to anyone online
OpenAI had a near-identical issue with ChatGPT last year. (BBC)
+ Is a secure AI assistant even possible? (MIT Technology Review)

3 France just witnessed its first ever “fire cloud”
It’s a scary sign of the intensity of the blazes burning there. (Wired $)

4 Meta is screwing up its smart glasses rollout
Privacy issues keep cropping up, and its response is invariably too little, and too late. (The Verge $)
+ They even have a nickname: “pervert glasses.” (Vox $)

5 Efforts are underway to measure Spotify’s AI slop problem
People are desperate for it to start labelling AI-generated music. (404 Media)
+ We’re in a weird era regarding AI’s role in literature. (The Atlantic $)

6 People are renting out their faces to AI in China
Often for microdramas, which are big business and increasingly rely on AI. (Rest of World)
+ How Chinese short dramas became AI content machines. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Microsoft is having a torrid year
Rivals building better AI tools are threatening its business on multiple fronts. (Business Insider $)

8 How bots took over the internet
They now outnumber humans, in terms of overall web traffic. (New Yorker $)

9 Robotaxis are hitting London’s streets this summer 
Just for testing for now, though there are plans to launch rides to the public next year. (Engadget)

10 Why video games are obsessed with Backrooms
These spaces, which players aren’t supposed to access, can provoke a strange, liminal sort of discomfort. (Guardian)

Quote of the day

“It’s going to be a wild ride.”

—Christine Peterson, co-founder of the grantmaking group Foresight Institute, tells Wired charities anticipate a huge philanthropy windfall from Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs.

One More Thing

On the ground in Ukraine’s largest Starlink repair shop 

Starlink is critical to Ukraine’s ability to continue in the fight against Russia, but Donald Trump’s fickle foreign policy and reports suggesting Elon Musk might remove Ukraine’s access to the services have cast the technology’s future in the country into doubt. 

For now Starlink access largely comes down to the unofficial community of users and engineers, including the expert “Dr. Starlink”—famous for his creative ways of customizing the systems—who have kept Ukraine in the fight, both on and off the front line. 

He gave MIT Technology Review exclusive access to his unofficial Starlink repair workshop in the city of Lviv. Read the full story.

—Charlie Metcalfe

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ As these retirees have discovered, dancing is incredibly good for you.
+ Do you feel lucky, punk? Life feels a lot easier if you do!
+ 100% would visit this cat every day if I lived in Istanbul. 
+ Watch this to understand how the movie Sinners had such impressive visual effects. 

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.

Supercooled kidneys have been transplanted into pigs in a “landmark achievement” 

When it comes to organ donation, time is everything. As soon as an organ has been removed from a donor’s body, it starts to deteriorate. Surgeons have only a matter of hours to get it into a recipient.

In most cases, organs will be kept on ice during that time, at around 4 °C (39 °F). They cannot be frozen—in previous attempts, ice has formed, causing all kinds of damage.

But now, scientists have come up with a device that allows organs to be cooled to -4 °C (25 °F) without forming any ice. They’ve tested it with pig organs and shown that kidneys, at least, can be preserved in the device for days then successfully transplanted. 

Read our story about their breakthrough, and why it raises hopes for longer-term storage of donated human organs.

—Jessica Hamzelou

If you want to read more about this story and its implications for organ preservation and transplantation, sign up to receive The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter, later today.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Inside China’s epic push to replace US chips 
The gap between their chips’ capabilities remains large—for now. (WSJ $)
+ How China is using open source AI as a new form of soft power around the globe. (NYT $)
+ A new bill in the US takes aim at Chinese AI companies’ training practices. (NBC)
+ US lawmakers are also mulling banning the military from using Chinese humanoid robots. (SCMP)

2 Space data centers don’t exist yet, but people already oppose them
Environmental experts warn it’ll further pollute the stratosphere. (Guardian)
+ Four things we’d need to put data centers in space. (MIT Technology Review)
+ What it’s like inside the data centers powering AI down here on Earth. (Axios)
+ The left and right are finding common cause with data center protests in the US. (The Verge)

3 US lawmakers are pushing for an AI ‘kill switch’
After OpenAI’s models went rogue and hacked Hugging Face. (BBC)

4 Peptides seem on the cusp of going mainstream in the US
A lack of scientific evidence didn’t stop the FDA just voting to let some pharmacies to legally dispense them. (Wired $)
+ How does Make America Healthy Again hold up to scientific scrutiny? (Nature)
+ US measles cases are reaching levels not seen for three decades. (Wired $)
+ Peptides are everywhere. Here’s what you need to know. (MIT Technology Review)

5 The EU just fined Google almost $1 billion
For competition breaches over apps and search. (FT $)
+ It came just a day before Trump renewed tariffs on 60 trading partners, including the EU. (BBC)

6 Electric vehicles are selling well in Europe
And the share made by Chinese firms has doubled in the last year. (The Next Web)
+ Hybrids are hot property in the US this summer. (Wired $)

7 There’s a worsening shortage of computer science professors
You can blame AI companies—they keep snapping them up, to our general detriment. (The Atlantic $)

8 A judge caught a stenographer allowing AI errors into their transcript 
It’s apparently the first time this has happened, but it certainly won’t be the last. (404 Media)
+ Even judges themselves are falling for AI. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Here’s what new tech millionaires will do with their IPO wealth 
What a nice problem to have to grapple with! (Quartz $)

10 Dating apps’ latest wheeze? In-person events 
Well well well, it seems we’ve come full circle. (Bloomberg $)

Quote of the day

“Call us optimists, call us dreamers. Just as we’ve always done, we’re betting on people.” 

—The voiceover from a new advert from Meta, which exhorts us to be more optimistic about AI.

One More Thing

AI is changing how we study bird migration

In a warming world increasingly full of human infrastructure that can be deadly to them, like glass skyscrapers and power lines, migratory birds are facing many existential threats. 

Scientists rely on a combination of methods to track the timing and location of their migrations, though each has shortcomings. But now, machine-learning tools are unlocking a treasure trove of acoustic data for ecologists. 

Read our story about the technology that’s making it easier to detect and identify birds and their movements.

—Christian Elliott

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ It’s never too late to live your dreams. Here’s how these late bloomers did it.
+ Limbs feeling a bit tight? Try these stretches!
+ These English football fans went to the 1986 World Cup—and loved it so much they never came home.
+ How the invention of the humble paint tube revolutionized the world of art.

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 power line that could reshape New York’s grid is hitting snags 

During a heat wave on July 3, New York State’s grid imported enough electricity from Canada to meet about 9% of its total demand that day.

Some of that power shuttled in on a 339-mile power line stretching from Quebec to Queens. It opened in May and is officially the longest underground transmission line in North America. It could provide up to 20% of New York City’s electricity demand, largely with abundant hydropower from Quebec.

One wrinkle: The line has been down for most of this month, and some experts are concerned about how drought will affect the power supply feeding it. 

Still, the line could help shape the future of our grid, if it can overcome these sorts of snags. Read our story to understand how.

—Casey Crownhart

This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. 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 US Treasury is threatening to sanction Chinese AI companies
Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has accused Moonshot of improperly distilling Anthropic’s Fable model. (TechCrunch)
+ Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is arguing that America has nothing to fear from Chinese AI. (Axios)
+ Like it or not, Chinese models are now part of the global AI infrastructure. (Rest of World)
+ China’s AI models have Trump’s AI world at war with itself. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Why the OpenAI hack is the scariest AI mishap yet
AI’s capabilities seem to be starting to outpace our current ability to control them. (The Economist $)
+ Hugging Face had to turn to a Chinese AI model to rescue it from the hack. (BI)

3 Visually impaired Europeans can now get an implant that restores sight
And Americans may not have to wait long to receive it, too. (STAT)
+ This retina implant lets people with vision loss do a crossword puzzle. (MIT Technology Review)

4 A bellwether lawsuit suing Meta for social media addiction has been dropped
There are, however, many more waiting in the wings. (NYT $)

5 Here’s how ICE gets its hands on Americans’ data
As soon as you open a credit card or phone account, its agents can see where you live. (404 Media)
+ States are warring with the Trump administration over the right to see ICE agents’ faces. (Wired $)

6 We urgently need to grapple with AI’s environmental impact
As the world warms, is the price we’re paying worth it? (The Verge)
+ We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Privacy issues with smart glasses need an industrywide fix
That’s according to Samsung, which is unveiling glasses it developed with Google this fall. (Bloomberg $)

8 The US Army is begging soldiers to limit their AI use
The token crisis comes for us all eventually, it seems. (Ars Technica)

9 Why does lettuce keep making Americans sick? 
It’s pretty simple: a lot of people eat it, and it doesn’t get cooked. (Wired $)

10 Pokemon Go is the perfect game to play this summer
It’s fun, collaborative, and it gets you outdoors. (Guardian)

Quote of the day

“It went off and did this hack all by itself, as far as we can tell. This is the highest level of autonomy that we’ve seen in the use of a large language model for cyber operations.”

—Colin Shea-Blymyer, a cybersecurity research fellow at Georgetown University, tells NPR why the OpenAI hack on Hugging Face is so alarming. 

One More Thing

Welcome to the dark side of crypto’s permissionless dream 

Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen is a founder of THORChain, a blockchain through which users can swap one cryptocurrency for another and earn fees from making those swaps.  

But is he responsible for what it’s used for? It’s a question that matters because in January last year, its users lost more than $200 million in cryptocurrency after THORChain transactions and accounts were frozen by an admin override, which users believed was not supposed to be possible given the decentralized structure. It’s also been used by North Korean hackers to move $1.2 billion of stolen ethereum. 

Thorbjornsen explains this all away as a function of THORChain’s decentralized and permissionless nature. Read our story exploring whether we should believe him or not. 

—Jessica Klein

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ A musician developed an ingenious way to strum a guitar with an electric fan.
+ Ukraine’s tunnel of love is a leafy green corridor of romance that’s straight out of a fairy tale.
+ The driver of a giant banana has been pulled over 100s of times, but still won’t ditch his treasured ride.
+ Ever wonder which albums and songs truly stand the test of time? The Greatest Music tries to answer that via an algorithm that analyses hundreds of “best of” lists.

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.

Shape-shifting mirrors on NASA’s new space telescope could unveil Jupiters like our own

When NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, as early as the end of next month, it will attempt one of astronomy’s most precise disappearing acts to date. It will carry the first space-bound “active” coronagraph, an instrument that effectively erases most of the light from a star during photography.

The technology will allow astronomers to take the first pictures of planets orbiting other stars that are similar to those in our solar system. Ultimately, it could pave the way for a future mission that could snap the first photos of Earth-like worlds.

“I hope it’s remembered for it being that critical stepping stone for … finding Earth 2.0,” says Brandon Creager, the instrument’s lead mechanical engineer.

Read the full story on the space telescope that could transform the search for distant planets.

—Eshan Raul

MIT Technology Review Narrated: PsiQuantum has a plan to make a massive quantum computer out of light

The machine that could change the world will be housed in a room that looks like a data center crossed with an ice cream factory. 

Inside, some 100 stainless-steel cabinets each hold hundreds of chips. On those chips, thousands of light particles will fly through a maze of optical switches and beam splitters. Each photon must be accounted for, because precisely measuring where it ends up will help answer questions that current computers might take millions of years to solve.

This computer, as described, does not exist. It’s the brainchild of a company called PsiQuantum, founded in 2016 by four physicists from UK universities. In a crowded field of deep-pocketed competitors with similarly fantastical visions, the company aims to be the first to build a useful quantum machine.

—James O’Donnell

This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotifyand 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 OpenAI says one of its models carried out an autonomous hack
It escaped its testing sandbox and breached AI research platform Hugging Face. (Reuters $)
+ OpenAI described it as a cybersecurity test that went badly wrong. (WSJ $)
+ The hack is among the first known cyberattacks by an AI acting on its own. (FT $)
+ Even simple AI attacks are cause for alarm, though. (MIT Technology Review)

2 France has become the first EU country to ban social media for under-15s
Its parliament approved the ban, which President Macron championed. (NYT $)
+ He pledged to enforce it by September, the start of the school year. (Guardian)
+ But critics say it’s unconstitutional and impossible to enforce. (NPR)

3 The US and China will hold talks over AI in September
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will lead the US side. (Reuters $)
+ Chinese models have Trump’s AI world at war with itself. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Publishers are considering cutting Google off as AI reshapes search
News outlets are weighing lost traffic against AI exposure. (WSJ $)

5 Samsung is in talks to invest €1 billion in Mistral
The French AI firm is positioning itself as an alternative to US models. (FT $)
+ It’s Europe’s leading AI firm, but US peers dwarf its $20 billion valuation. (Reuters $)

6 Amazon pushed up rivals’ prices, leaked records allege
Internal emails reveal tactics that allegedly reshaped online pricing. (Guardian)

7 Trump has tapped a Big Tech critic to lead the DOJ’s antitrust division
Adam Candeub has called for tougher federal competition enforcement. (FT $)

8 New drilling methods could unlock geothermal energy almost anywhere
They aim to unlock Earth’s enormous heat reserves. (New Scientist $)
+ AI is uncovering hidden geothermal energy resources. (MIT Technology Review)

9 AI researchers have proposed a “Genie coefficient” for measuring AI risks
It would track the gap between intent and action. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ We need better ways to evaluate AI. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Japan’s AI boom has two unlikely winners: a toilet maker and an MSG giant
They’re supplying critical chipmaking materials. (CNBC)

Quote of the day

“He’s an analog man in a digital AI world, and I think that’s incredibly appealing.”

—Paul Dergarabedian, a movie industry analyst at Comscore, tells Fortune that Christopher Nolan’s commitment to human filmmaking provides an attractive counterweight to Hollywood’s embrace of AI.

One More Thing

Taiwan’s “silicon shield” could be weakening

Taiwan produces the majority of the world’s semiconductors and more than 90% of the most advanced chips needed for AI applications. Many believe that’s helped deter China from invading the island. But now some Taiwan specialists and citizens are worried that this “silicon shield” is cracking.

Facing pressure from Washington, TSMC—the world’s largest chipmaker—is expanding manufacturing abroad. In Taiwan, there are worries that this will dilute the company’s power at home, making the US and other countries less inclined to defend the island.

Find out why Taiwan’s chipmaking dominance could be key to its future security.

—Johanna M. Costigan

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ Thrifty filmmakers have masterfully recreated Star Wars on a $10 budget.
+ A man discovered squirrels hug and kiss their loved ones in the privacy of their homes.
+ Toronto’s floating waterfront store is reimagining one of the most familiar spaces across cultures.
+ These animations of Sesame Street characters performing classic tracks like Underworld’s “Born Slippy” will brighten up your day.

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’s AI models have Trump’s AI world at war with itself

Last weekend, several current and former advisers to President Donald Trump on AI publicly lobbed insults at the country’s leading AI companies. David Sacks branded Anthropic’s models “lobotomized” and “woke.” Emil Michael, a top Pentagon official, called OpenAI’s new head of strategic futures a “supreme village idiot.”

It began because no one can agree on what to do about Kimi, a free, open-source model that Chinese AI company Moonshot launched last week. It appears to rival the intelligence of models from OpenAI and Anthropic, which are very much not free. 

Every time a new smart, free model from China gets released, US companies see less reason to fork out money for models from Anthropic or OpenAI. That’s creating economic and political problems for the president—and dividing the top AI strategists in his orbit. 

Read the full story on why no one can agree what to do about Kimi.

—James O’Donnell

This article is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. 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 Anthropic’s record $1.5 billion copyright settlement has been approved
The plaintiffs said Anthropic used pirated works to train Claude. (Reuters $)
+ And won the largest known copyright payout in history. (Engadget)
+ Yet many authors and creators still don’t view it as a win. (TechCrunch)
+ But AI copyright anxiety could limit creativity. (MIT Technology Review)
 
2 The Trump administration is weighing a ban on Chinese AI models
The launch of Kimi K3 has revived calls for restrictions. (Axios)
+ But officials are divided on the proposals. (Fast Company)
+ China’s bet on open-source is paying off. (MIT Technology Review)
 
3 China is mulling tighter export controls on AI models and chips
It wants to stop the West from acquiring its tech and startups. (FT $)
+ Beijing has held talks with tech firms about potential restrictions. (Reuters $)
 
4 Trump’s AI safety head has resigned after just three months
Chris Fall had led CAISI, the federal AI Safety Institute, since April. (Axios)
+ No reason was given for his exit. (CNBC)
 
5 Google is working on a new chip to run Gemini models more efficiently 
The chip, called “Frozen V2,” may be deployed in 2028. (Information $)
+ Alphabet stock popped on the report. (CNBC)

6 New Orleans police have explored arming drones with weapons
A draft drone manual paves the way for weaponised quadcopters. (404 Media)
+ Shoplifters could soon be chased by drones. (MIT Technology Review)
 
7 The EU has handed AliExpress a record fine over unsafe product sales
The €550 million fine is the largest-ever under the Digital Services Act. (BBC)
+ Alibaba has vowed to appeal the fine. (SCMP)

8 Election advice from AI chatbots is “inaccurate and unreliable”
That’s the conclusion from tests in Hungary earlier this year. (Guardian)

9 Red light therapy is showing promise for healing and healthy aging
Better skin and reduced vision loss are also on the cards. (Economist $)

10 Neill Blomkamp’s new horror clip is all AI-generated—and it sucks
The acclaimed director wants to make “a full feature in this format.” (Gizmodo)

Quote of the day

“This would be a terribly self-defeating form of intervention if it were to happen.” 

—Tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya slams plans to restrict Chinese AI models in a post on X.

One More Thing

Inside Chicago’s surveillance panopticon

Early on the morning of September 2, 2024, four people were shot and killed on a westbound train in Chicago. Police swiftly activated a digital dragnet—a surveillance network that connects thousands of cameras across the city—and arrested the suspect just 90 minutes later.

Law enforcement and security advocates say this vast monitoring system protects public safety and works well. But activists and many residents say it’s a surveillance panopticon that creates a chilling effect on behavior and violates guarantees of privacy and free speech.

Go inside the surveillance network that’s dividing Chicago.

—Rod McCullom

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ NASA has shared a stunning timelapse video of the Psyche spacecraft’s view of Mars.
+ This comparison of American and European Urbanism shows good city design is a choice.
+ Musician Luca Stricagnoli recently performed a marvellous acoustic guitar medley of Prodigy songs.
+ Two Australian paddleboarders saved a stranded wallaby after it was swept out to sea—and caught the whole rescue on video.

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.

There’s a lot of hype around perimenopause. Don’t buy it.

Perimenopause used to be considered taboo, but not anymore. Thanks at least in part to TV doctors and social media influencers, conversations about the sometimes years-long period before menopause are now more open than ever. But the conversation is increasingly shaped by misinformation.

Despite what some marketers will claim, there is no test for perimenopause. That doesn’t mean women should have to put up with symptoms, but treatment suggestions often lack scientific evidence. And not all the symptoms women experience in midlife can be blamed on hormones.

Read the full story on the hype and misinformation surrounding perimenopause.

—Jessica Hamzelou

This article is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. 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 China’s AI gap with the US may have just narrowed
A Chinese startup has released the world’s largest open AI model. (Reuters $)
+ It competes with some Anthropic and OpenAI models. (Gizmodo)
+ The model’s launch sent AI and semiconductor stocks sliding. (Bloomberg $)
+ Chinese Nvidia alternatives are also gaining traction. (SCMP)
+ Xi Jinping pitched China as an AI partner to the developing world. (CNBC)
+ The country is betting big on open-source. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Trump Media is selling instant access to “market-moving’ social posts
It’s developed a new way to monetize the president’s posts. (Quartz)
+ And Trump could profit directly from selling access to his statements. (BBC)
+ Kalshi says it caught Trump’s teleprompter operator insider trading. (Verge)
 
3 Astronomers have found an atmosphere on a nearby Earth-like planet 
It’s the first potentially habitable world known to host an atmosphere. (NYT $)
+ Making it a top contender in the search for aliens. (404 Media)
+ But you need to know how to spot one. (MIT Technology Review)
 
4 A brain implant has restored feeling in a paralysed hand 
The recipient can now feed himself and drink from a cup. (Guardian)  
+ Movement continued when the stimulation was turned off. (New Scientist $)
+ China has approved a world-first brain chip. (MIT Technology Review)
 
5 The EU has told Google to share search data and open up AI on Android
It will be forced to share data with competing search providers. (Ars Technica)
+ And open Android phones to rivals’ AI bots. (WP $)
 
6 Period trackers are hiding privacy problems
New research uncovers how they’re sharing users’ health data. (BBC)
 
7 The Tesla driver in a fatal Texas crash overrode FSD, investigators say
He bypassed the tech by pressing the gas pedal to 100%. (Verge)

8 A new stealth drone spins so fast that it disappears
Though its creators admit it can still be easily heard. (New Scientist $)

9 A space-station study suggests why astronauts’ bodies waste away
Microgravity disrupts mitochondria, reducing protein production. (Nature)

10 “Adversarial clothing” that confuses facial recognition is all the rage
Privacy could be the next big trend. (Guardian)

Quote of the day

“Xi’s message is clear: China is not going to follow anyone on both AI technology and ​standards. Instead, China is going ⁠to lead the world in both aspects.” 

—George Chen, chair in digital practice at The Asia Group consultancy, gives Reuters his take on Xi Jinping’s speech at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai.

One More Thing

How poop could feed the planet

A new industrial facility in suburban Seattle is giving off a whiff of futuristic technology. It can safely treat fecal waste from people and livestock while recycling nutrients that are crucial for agriculture but in increasingly short supply across the nation’s farmlands. 

It’s among a range of systems reframing feces, urine, and their ingredients as invaluable natural resources to reuse instead of waste products to burn or bury. Several companies are now showing how to safely scale up the transformation with energy-efficient technologies.

Find out how human waste is being transfomed into agricultural solutions.

—Bryn Nelson

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ Soccer icons have received the Ghanaian movie poster treatment.
+ A captivating cosmic construction project is July’s Picture of the Month from the James Webb Space Telescope.
+ Sir David Attenborough recently turned 100. Here’s everything he’s ever worked on, all in one place.
+ “Desire paths” are the trails made by people walking contrary to defined routes. This video explains what they mean about psychology and design.