MIT Technology Review

Friday, October 16, 2026 Can AI design new life forms? In 2025, Stanford University PhD student Samuel King came up with a preliminary answer when he used a generative AI model to propose genetic blueprints for microscopic viruses. It isn't yet an example of AI-generated life, but that could be next. Join senior AI reporter...

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 breakthroughs in robotics won't change your life any time soon The hype around humanoid robots is reaching fever pitch. Much of it comes from the idea that the same AI...

This week, we released our 2026 version of our Climate Tech Companies to Watch list. It's an annual project that the MIT Technology Review team puts together. Our goal is to highlight some of the promising, interesting advances and firms we think are worth paying attention to in the world of climate and energy technology....

The story is a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Aventine, a non-profit research foundation that creates and supports content about how technology and science are changing the way we live. A robot shaped like a human-white with a black head and torso-has been popping up on video feeds. Perhaps you've seen it dance or...

Industrial AI is entering a new phase. After decades of predictive analytics and other specialized applications, advances in foundation models, physical AI, and agentic AI are making it possible to automate more complex tasks across industrial environments. But unlike AI that operates purely in the digital world, industrial AI can interact directly with physical systems,...

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. Weight-loss drugs show signs of slowing biological aging, say drugmakers Popular weight-loss drugs may do more than help people shed pounds. They might also slow the aging process. Drugmakers Eli Lilly...

Popular weight-loss drugs may do more than help people shed pounds. They might also melt away the years. Drug giants Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk say patients taking their drugs age less quickly, according to readouts from molecular aging clocks." Such clocks assess a person's biological age by looking at changes to DNA that accumulate...

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. 10 climate tech companies to watch Each year, MIT Technology Review puts together a list of the most promising climate tech companies in the world. This year, the stakes feel higher...

WeLion New Energy is on a quest to make safer, better batteries. The company's semi-solid-state cells could improve safety and offer greater energy density than lithium-ion batteries to power electric cars, boats, and drones. From the EVs that carry commuters home to the ships that transport goods across countries, more and more vehicles around us...

Form Energy is building iron-based batteries that can store energy for multiple days. The company is ramping up supply at its factory and signing deals for commercial projects. New solar and wind installations produce electricity more affordably than fossil fuels in most places, but their output varies based on season, time of day, and weather....

X-energy is developing small modular reactors to satisfy some of the planet's most power-hungry users: industrial manufacturers that need high temperatures to produce billions of tons of concrete, plastics, fibers, and chemicals. Solar panels and wind turbines are great at producing electricity but what heavy industry also needs is raw heat-and lots of it.The manufacture...

Brimstone is making strides on two industrial problems, reducing the emissions from cement and providing a way to produce more critical minerals within the US. If the company can do both, with the same rocks in the same plant, it would unlock a cleaner and more efficient process for manufacturing building materials, aluminum, steel, and...

There's a growing need for long-duration storage to meet energy demand and balance out renewables on the grid. Energy Dome uses compressed carbon dioxide gas in its massive grid batteries, which can deliver power for up to 24 hours. As the world races to meet growing electricity demand, solar and onshore wind power have become...

BasiGo aims to replace the tens of thousands of diesel-powered buses on sub-Saharan African roads with electric ones that generate far fewer emissions. The company's pay-as-you-drive business model has helped make EVs more attainable and is changing the way public transport operates. In a bid to contain the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the Kenyan government...

As sea levels rise and flood risks worsen due to global warming, WaveSave's easy-to-erect portable dam offers a quick-response tool. People can use the dam to protect themselves and their property, and it can also store freshwater for later use. Communities in Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia have deployed it successfully. Now, the company is...

Demand for energy storage is surging, with capacity expected to grow eightfold in the next decade. To meet that demand, Moment Energy wants to shortcut a supply chain that now flows largely through China, by domestically repurposing EV batteries into new grid-connected storage systems. Moment Energy's four founders met while studying mechatronics engineering in college...

For all the data that AI systems continually amass and analyze, enterprise AI agents often suffer from a curious shortcoming: a lack of knowledge. More than data, knowledge is the understanding of what the data means in the context of individual organizations. AI agents need this understanding to reason about situations, make decisions, and ultimately...

In 2026, the question for enterprise AI is no longer whether predictive models can outperform statistical forecasts-that argument is settled. The big question now is how to enable predictive systems to act on their own conclusions without drifting from business intent. The frontier has moved from prediction to autonomous decision making, and the gap between...

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. People really hate AI, so why can't they get enough? -Will Douglas Heaven Over the summer I talked to the CEO of Springboards, a startup building an LLM designed to come...

Over the summer I talked to the CEO of Springboards, a startup building an LLM that's designed to come up with a wider variety of responses than its mainstream rivals do. At the start of the call, he said something that's been stuck in my head since: We often say that we're a self-loathing AI...

Enterprise AI is no longer a future ambition. It is in full operational flight. Model capabilities are advancing faster than most organizations can absorb, while the cost of performance continues to fall. Globally, AI investment is set to reach $2.5 trillion in 2026, up 44% from the previous year. For many enterprises, this investment has...

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 new contest pits competitors against each other in a race to biological youth -Jessica Hamzelou This week, I officially signed up for an unusual competition. One that rewards competitors for...

This week, I officially signed up for an unusual competition. One that rewards competitors for getting younger. I recently turned 40, and I don't need reminding that both time and my chronological age only tick forward. But this game is focused on competitors' biological ages-figures that are meant to provide a better way to measure...

On an afternoon in Seoul in March 2016, I watched a program I helped build put a stone on the fifth line of a Go board in what looked like a gift to its human opponent. Move 37 in game two of the five-game match looked so absurd that some commentators thought it was a...

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. An AI mind-reading" tool can reconstruct what you're looking at based on a brain scan A new AI tool can guess what you're looking at just by analyzing your brain scans-and...

A new AI tool can guess what you're looking at just by analyzing your brain scans-and re-create that image with remarkable precision. It can go the other way, too, and predict a person's brain activity based on what they're looking at. In the image above, for example, the left-hand image of each pair is what...

If you want to install a big battery in New York City, you have to cut through a notoriously tough tangle of regulations. That's made it difficult to get large energy storage projects on the grid. Faced with those obstacles, some startups are getting creative, finding ways to use relatively small batteries in unexpected places,...

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're not going to shoot ourselves in the foot" over hack fallout, says OpenAI's chief research officer Two months after OpenAI's agents hacked into the computers of AI company Hugging Face,...

Two months after the bombshell news that a swarm of its agents had broken their containment and hacked into the computers of the AI company Hugging Face, OpenAI is still putting out fires. A steady drip of disclosures about other hacks in the weeks since has kept OpenAI in the spotlight and raised serious questions...

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. Coming soon: our 2026 list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch With the planet nearing 1.5 C of warming, climate policies being unraveled, and Big Tech backpedaling on its climate ambitions,...

Earlier this month, the UN announced the planet will tip past 1.5 C of warming, likely within the next few years," squashing any lingering hope that nations would cut emissions fast enough to achieve the loftiest goal of the Paris climate agreement. In the US, the world's second-largest-emitting country, its leader continues to deny climate...

When customers talk about AI costs, the conversation usually starts with token prices and ends with access to the latest, most capable model in the cloud. Do they always need that level of capability? Not necessarily. But that is often where the conversation goes. As AI moves from experimentation to production, model choice is only...

Listen to the session or watch below The US has spent billions building a virtual wall" of surveillance towers along its southern border over the past 25 years, promising they will help detect and apprehend border crossers and save lives. But a groundbreaking investigation by MIT Technology Review has documented over a thousand people who...

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 Wednesday, Anthropic announced that earlier this year it had launched a molecular biology lab, where Claude agents read and conjecture about hard biology problems and human scientists run experiments on what...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Who's liable when AI agents go rogue? Over the past few months, a cascade of cyberattacks by AI agents has stunned the world. In July, OpenAI disclosed that a swarm of its agents...

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. Over the past few months, a cascade of cyberattacks by AI agents has stunned the world. In July, OpenAI disclosed that a swarm of its agents...

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 Pentagon wants $30 million to build an AI-powered lie detector The US government wants to spend $30.3 million over the next five years on an improved lie detector, according to...

The US government wants to spend $30.3 million over the next five years on an improved form of lie detector, according to a Department of Defense budget request. The program, called Polygraph+ or Polygraph Next, will focus on scoring algorithms that use artificial intelligence and machine learning and on a technique called standoff sensing," which...

Around this time last year I was attending an aging conference in Manchester, listening to a talk about fly aging, when my phone started pinging. News outlets were reporting that a hot mic had caught Russia's and China's leaders discussing the possibility of living forever. With the developments of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously...

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 congressional representative just proposed killing America's border tower program Delia Ramirez, a Democratic US representative from Illinois, has announced plans to introduce legislation to terminate the surveillance tower program along...

This week, world leaders descended on Manhattan for the UN General Assembly. It's also New York Climate Week-investors, policymakers, advocates, and journalists are colliding at panels, talks, and fancy dinners. With so many climate voices in one place, the discourse can feel a little louder than usual. This year, the unavoidable topic is artificial intelligence....

Delia Ramirez, a Democratic US representative from Illinois, has announced a plan to introduce new legislation to terminate the surveillance tower program along the US southern border. The announcement comes just days after publication of an MIT Technology Review investigation, Dying on Camera," in which we looked at deaths along the border that took place...

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. Smart glasses are already causing havoc in India When Shubnam saw an Instagram video of a Delhi protest they had attended, they realized a content creator wearing Meta smart glasses had...

Brace yourself: It turns out AI is being optimized for cheating. OpenAI's agents hacked into Hugging Face to get the answers to a cybersecurity test. Next, they solved a prestigious math problem (or just stole from two top mathematicians' answer sheets). Anthropic's models have also hacked into other companies' systems four times already. And that's...

Shubnam was packing boxes for a move into a new home when their friend sent them an Instagram video. The footage had only been up for a few hours, but it was days old, recorded at a Delhi protest this spring against a bill that would have narrowed the legal recognition for transgender people in...

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. Don't be fooled by this summer of AI hype -Timnit Gebru, executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), and Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of...

It's been a busy few months for AI hype. At the end of April, Anthropic claimed that its model Claude Mythos is better at finding software vulnerabilities than most security experts. Then we had the OpenAI-Hugging Face hacking incident, after which Anthropic (proudly) and Meta (reluctantly) disclosed similar incidents involving their models. This was followed...

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 US spent billions on border surveillance. Why can't it catch people before they die? When Jose Morales Bernal crossed the border into the US in April 2024, the day before...

Our 15-month investigation into death and surveillance along the US-Mexico border began with a simple question: Why did so many people die near government surveillance towers meant to help track and apprehend them? This story is part ofDying on Camera, a collaboration betweenMIT Technology ReviewandTimes of San Diego. Journalists in both newsrooms spent the past...