MIT Technology Review

Runaway" AI, rogue" agents, and autonomous" actors-the current rhetoric would have you believe that AI agents are not only awake and aware, but angry at their creators. Prominent tech leaders such as Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, and Sam Altman push for regulation of these seemingly superhuman" systems, while a separate faction, led by policy organizations...

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. Support networks aim to help kids through the polycrisis Sometime in the late 2000s, six-year-old Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car in Thailand when she saw a...

There's a hunt for new sources of hydrogen, and the gas (or at least the right conditions to make it) could be hiding beneath our feet. Hydrogen can be used as a fuel in everything from large trucks to planes to steelmaking. It's often hailed as a climate solution because when burned, it produces water...

Each day, an airline transports tens of thousands of passengers on hundreds of flights. Often these are not straightforward point-to-point routes, with passengers requiring multiple connections. The airline can consider potentially hundreds of variables to price each of these journeys: demand, season, time of day, current events, global markets, and competitor airline activity to name...

Sometime in the late 2000s, Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car, headed toward her great-grandmother's tiny town in the south of Thailand. She watched big mountains pass by out the window. She was just six years old but was about to be hit by an adult-size realization. They were just quarried...

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's recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all The AI industry's boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight....

Pam Wisniewski's digital adolescence showed her the best and the worst of the internet. At 14, she left an abusive home, where she'd been isolated in a fifth-wheel trailer at the end of a seven-mile dirt road. She moved in with her older sister and taught herself to type on AOL Instant Messenger. Online, she...

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. We still don't know how people are really using AI AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using their products. But they only release the...

AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using products like Claude and ChatGPT, but they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say. There is no independent source to corroborate it," says Anka Reuel, a computer science PhD candidate at the Stanford Trustworthy AI Research...

The AI industry's boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight. LLMs can already write code, generate synthetic data for training, and optimize the computer chips they run on. Forecasts of explosive AI progress predict that what researchers call recursive self-improvement is on the horizon....

When the four astronauts on board NASA's Artemis II swung around the moon earlier this year, they set a new record for the farthest humans have ever ventured from Earth, surpassing the distance set by Apollo 13 in 1972 by some 4,000 miles. While no space mission can live up to the historic touchdown of...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. Flock, the police-tech giant known for its network of some 120,000 automatic license plate readers around the US, announced some changes to its platform last Thursday. The updates are meant to prevent...

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 happens when a kid's robot best friend dies? When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him how to calm down when he was anxious or mad. Six years later, she...

In the 1990s, Barbara Sherwood Lollar descended into the Kidd Creek mine in northern Ontario, which cuts more than three kilometers into the ancient root of North America. There her team of geochemists found water that had been confined underground for more than a billion years. This ancient brine turned out to be a habitat...

When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him that when he was anxious, he could calm down by exhaling through his lips so that he buzzed like a bee. They practiced breathing like dragons to manage feeling mad and sniffing like bunnies to boost his energy. But in the six years they've known each other,...

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. Flock is tightening its rules in response to a growing surveillance backlash The police-tech giant Flock is changing officers' access to its nationwide network of license plate readers. The move comes...

In 2017, Deanne Taylor attended a presentation at the University of Pennsylvania, just a short walk from her office. A researcher was there to unveil the Human Cell Atlas, an ambitious project that aimed to map every cell in the human body. Taylor was floored, and then concerned. As details emerged, she discovered that the...

Roman Chiporukha has long turned wild travel dreams into reality. Over two decades as co-owner of the luxury lifestyle firm Roman & Erica, he has orchestrated everything from the construction of a client's superyacht to vacations in the Bahamas at a location so private that guests must sign an NDA. The experiences earned him the...

This week I spoke to scientists who have found a way to turn male mouse embryos female. They've developed a CRISPR-based approach to essentially cut out the Y chromosome. It allowed them to create female clones of male mice. That's right: female animals that are genetically identical to males, except for the missing Y chromosome....

Listen to the session or watch below The censorship-industrial complex" is an idea that a network of government, tech, and research groups is collaborating to suppress conservative online speech. This was fodder for the right-wing information sphere for years-then it began making its way into US policy. Watch a conversation exploring how it started, where...

Quantum computing has alternated between breakthrough darling and overhyped promise in technology circles. Its powerful new capabilities come with a threat to break current cryptography, but for business leaders navigating the noise, the signal should be clear: post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is a manageable evolution, not a crisis. The mathematics behind today's encrypted digital transactions may...

The police-tech giant Flock is announcing today that it will change officers' access to its nationwide network of license plate readers, in an apparent effort to quell a growing backlash and win back contracts lost amid concerns about mass surveillance and police abuse. Several changes aim directly at a problem that has made recent headlines:...

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 kids feel about AI, in their own words -Jen Swetzoff and Keeley McNamara, the founding editors of Anyway, an independent print magazine for tweens and teens When we set out...

This summer has been a scorcher for much of the Northern Hemisphere. June and July marked the hottest two-month stretch in Europe since record-keeping began. The contiguous US endured its hottest month on record in July. South Korea saw its highest-ever recorded temperature. The heat isn't over yet, but some scientists are already looking ahead...

When we set out to talk to kids about artificial intelligence, we thought we knew what we'd hear. We expected some to tell us they were using it to cheat a little, the way Millennials and Gen Xers opened up CliffsNotes or programmed formulas into their TI-82s, and others to share inspiring ways they were...

Scientists have deliberately turned male mouse embryos into females for the first time. A team based in Japan used a CRISPR-based approach to remove the Y chromosome from male cells and create female clones of male mice. No one has done this before," says Monika Ward, a reproductive biologist at the University of Hawaii, who...

Business and technology leaders need no convincing that the time of agentic AI is here. Organizations are rapidly adopting agents, and few executives doubt the technology's potential to transform work. But many organizations find that realizing the desired return on investment (ROI) from AI hinges on having the right foundation, with inadequate infrastructure and data...

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 we picked 35 of the world's top young scientists and engineers On September 8, MIT Technology Review will reveal its 2026 list of Innovators Under 35, recognizing 35 young people...

Next month, on September 8, MIT Technology Review will reveal its 2026 list of Innovators Under 35, recognizing 35 young 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 in their work,...

I first heard the term censorship-industrial complex" on April 15, 2025. That's when I got the tip that a small office in the U.S. State Department, which focused on monitoring and countering foreign disinformation from the likes of Russia, Iran, and China, was facing imminent shutdown-the next day. And the reason? R/FIMI, as the office...

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...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Last week, I headed 30 miles south of San Francisco to a hotel in Mountain View, California, to join some of the most accomplished, and some of the most promising, AI...

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...

Every few decades, someone announces that science has reached its end. In 1903, the revered physicist Albert Michelson wrote that the facts of physical science have all been discovered." In the 1980s, Stephen Hawking predicted that theoretical physics might be finished by the end of the century. With the explosive arrival of artificial intelligence, the...

MIT Technology Review's What's Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of themhere. Way back in the summer of 2017, AI researchers at Google put out a paper called Attention Is All You Need," in which they described a new...

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...

This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations, with support from the Wayne Barrett Project. One morning in April 2025, employees of a small office in the US State Department got the email many of them had been dreading. For months, Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency had been cutting a wide swath through...

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,...

Ready for a fresh set of puzzles?Click here for the September/October 2026 Puzzle Corner,brought to you by Michael S. Branicky, ScD '95, of the Puzzle Corner Puzzle Crew (aka PC2), which also includes Edward Faulkner '03, MEng '04, and Abe Kunin '03. This column includes solutions to the May/June issue. Send problems, solutions (by October...

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...

At the end of August, NASA is set to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its goal is to help us better understand how the universe works, from the glue-like dark matter that keeps galaxies together to the elusive dark energy that drives the expansion of the cosmos....

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: Theystumble,kick children, and despite advances are still worse atusing their handsthan my toddler. It's...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. Humanoid robots usually elicit more cringe than awe: They stumble, kick children, and despite advances are still worse at using their hands than my toddler. It's a nascent industry, and such robots...

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...

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what's coming next. You can read more from the series here. When two OpenAI models hacked into the website Hugging Face in July, they weren't trying to make money or commit sabotage-they were just looking for answers...

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...

Kris DeVault is desperate. His son, Brody, was born in March 2023. It wasn't long before he started to show signs of developmental delay, says DeVault. As time went on, Brody started missing key milestones in speech, movement, and coordination, he says. When Brody was around two and a half years old, a genetic test...

As of this week in Montana, any biotech company with an experimental drug has a clear path to selling it to consumers. 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...

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...

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 the International Conference on Machine Learning, a top AI conference, this month. The claim has huge implications for the safety of this technology, which...