MIT Technology Review

Civitai-an online marketplace for buying and selling AI-generated content, backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz-is letting users buy custom instruction files for generating celebrity deepfakes. Some of these files were specifically designed to make pornographic images banned by the site, a new analysis has found. The study, from researchers at Stanford and Indiana...

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. DHS is using Google and Adobe AI to make videos The news: The US Department of Homeland Security is using AI video generators from Google and Adobe to make and edit content shared...

For the last couple of years, I've been following the progress of a group of individuals who believe death is humanity's core problem." Put simply, they say death is wrong-for everyone. They've even said it's morally wrong. They established what they consider a new philosophy, andthey called it Vitalism. Vitalism is more than a philosophy,...

Everyone is panicking because AI is very bad; everyone is panicking because AI is very good. It's just that you never know which one you're going to get. Grok is a pornography machine. Claude Code can do anything from building websites to reading your MRI. So of course Gen Z is spooked by what this...

The US Department of Homeland Security is using AI video generators from Google and Adobe to make and edit content shared with the public, a new document reveals. It comes as immigration agencies have flooded social media with content to support President Trump's mass deportation agenda-some of which appears to be made with AI-and as...

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. 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....

The eastern half of the US saw a monster snowstorm over the weekend. The good news is the grid has largely been able to keep up with the freezing temperatures and increased demand. But there were some signs of strain, particularly for fossil-fuel plants. One analysis found that PJM, the nation's largest grid operator, saw...

Who here believes involuntary death is a good thing?" Nathan Cheng has been delivering similar versions of this speech over the last couple of years, so I knew what was coming. He was about to try to convince the 80 or so people in the audience that death is bad. And that defeating it should...

AI is driving unprecedented investment for massive data centers and an energy supply that can support its huge computational appetite. One potential source of electricity for these facilities is next-generation nuclear power plants, which could be cheaper to construct and safer to operate than their predecessors. Watch a discussion with our editors and reporters on...

The ability to remember you and your preferences is rapidly becoming a big selling point for AI chatbots and agents. Earlier this month, Google announced Personal Intelligence, a new way for people to interact with the company's Gemini chatbot that draws on their Gmail, photos, search, and YouTube histories to make Gemini more personal, proactive,...

From the Gemini Calendar prompt-injection attack of 2026 to the September 2025 state-sponsored hack using Anthropic's Claude code as an automated intrusion engine, the coercion of human-in-the-loop agentic actions and fully autonomous agentic workflows are the new attack vector for hackers. In the Anthropic case, roughly 30 organizations across tech, finance, manufacturing, and government were...

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. The first human test of a rejuvenation method will begin shortly" Life Biosciences, a small Boston startup founded by Harvard professor and life-extension evangelist David Sinclair, has won FDA approval to proceed with...

When Elon Musk was at Davos last week, an interviewer asked him if he thought aging could be reversed. Musk said he hasn't put much time into the problem but suspects it is very solvable" and that when scientists discover why we age, it's going to be something obvious." Not long after, the Harvard professor...

OpenAI just revealed what its new in-house team, OpenAI for Science, has been up to. The firm has released a free LLM-powered tool for scientists called Prism, which embeds ChatGPT in a text editor for writing scientific papers. The idea is to put ChatGPT front and center inside software that scientists use to write up...

Today, an estimated 2.2 billion people still have either limited or no access to the internet, largely because they live in remote places. But that number could drop this year, thanks to tests of stratospheric airships, uncrewed aircraft, and other high-altitude platforms for internet delivery. Even with nearly 10,000 active Starlink satellites in orbit and...

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. Inside OpenAI's big play for science -Will Douglas Heaven In the three years since ChatGPT's explosive debut, OpenAI's technology has upended a remarkable range of everyday activities at home, at work, and in...

In the three years since ChatGPT's explosive debut, OpenAI's technology has upended a remarkable range of everyday activities at home, at work, in schools-anywhere people have a browser open or a phone out, which is everywhere. Now OpenAI is making an explicit play for scientists. In October, the firm announced that it had launched a...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. How do tech companies check if their users are kids? This question has taken on new urgency recently thanks to growing concern about the dangers that can arise when children talk to...

In an era where business, education, and even casual conversations occur via screens, sound has become a differentiating factor. We obsess over lighting, camera angles, and virtual backgrounds, but how we sound can be just as critical to credibility, trust, and connection. That's the insight driving Erik Vaveris, vice president of product management and chief...

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. Meet the new biologists treating LLMs like aliens How large is a large language model? We now coexist with machines so vast and so complicated that nobody quite understands what they are, how...

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. Dr. Google" had its issues. Can ChatGPT Health do better? For the past two decades, there's been a clear first step for anyone who starts experiencing new medical symptoms: Look them up online....

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 them here. In the final weeks of 2025, the battle over regulating artificial intelligence in the US reached a boiling point. On December 11, after Congress failed twice...

This week marked a rather unpleasant anniversary: It's a year since Texas reported a case of measles-the start of a significant outbreak that ended up spreading across multiple states. Since the start of January 2025, there have been over 2,500 confirmed cases of measles in the US. Three people have died. As vaccination rates drop...

For the past two decades, there's been a clear first step for anyone who starts experiencing new medical symptoms: Look them up online. The practice was so common that it gained the pejorative moniker Dr. Google." But times are changing, and many medical-information seekers are now using LLMs. According to OpenAI, 230 million people ask...

This story first appeared in The Debrief, our subscriber-only newsletter about the biggest news in techby Mat Honan, Editor in Chief. Subscribe to read the next edition as soon as it lands. It's supposed to be frigid in Davos this time of year. Part of the charm is seeing the world's elite tromp through the...

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. Yann LeCun's new venture is a contrarian bet against large language models Yann LeCun is a Turing Award recipient and a top AI researcher, but he has long been a contrarian figure in...

In 2026, I'm going to be closely watching the price of lithium. If you're not in the habit of obsessively tracking commodity markets, I certainly don't blame you. (Though the news lately definitely makes the case that minerals can have major implications for global politics and the economy.) But lithium is worthy of a close...

Yann LeCun is a Turing Award recipient and a top AI researcher, but he has long been a contrarian figure in the tech world. He believes that the industry's current obsession with large language models is wrong-headed and will ultimately fail to solve many pressing problems. Instead, he thinks we should be betting on world...

Governments plan to pour $1.3 trillion into AI infrastructure by 2030 to invest in sovereign AI," with the premise being that countries should be in control of their own AI capabilities. The funds include financing for domestic data centers, locally trained models, independent supply chains, and national talent pipelines. This is a response to real...

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. All anyone wants to talk about at Davos is AI and Donald Trump -Mat Honan, MIT Technology Review's editor in chief At Davos this year Trump is dominating all the side conversations. There...

This story first appeared in The Debrief, our subscriber-only newsletter about the biggest news in techby Mat Honan, Editor in Chief. Subscribe to read the next edition as soon as it lands. Hello from the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. I've been here for two days now, attending meetings, speaking on panels,...

The story of enterprise resource planning (ERP) is really a story of businesses learning to organize themselves around the latest, greatest technology of the times. In the 1960s through the '80s, mainframes, material requirements planning (MRP), and manufacturing resource planning (MRP II) brought core business data from file cabinets to centralized systems. Client-server architectures defined...

AI agents are moving beyond coding assistants and customer service chatbots into the operational core of the enterprise. The ROI is promising, but autonomy without alignment is a recipe for chaos. Business leaders need to lay the essential foundations now. The agent explosion is coming Agents are independently handling end-to-end processes across lead generation, supply...

A number of startups and university teams that are building AI scientists" to design and run experiments in the lab, including robot biologists and chemists, have just won extra funding from the UK government agency that supports moonshot R&D. The competition, set up by ARIA (the Advanced Research and Invention Agency), gives a clear sense...

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. The man who made India digital isn't done yet Nandan Nilekani can't stop trying to push India into the future. He started nearly 30 years ago, masterminding an ongoing experiment in technological state...

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. What it's like to be banned from the US for fighting online hate Just before Christmas the Trump administration dramatically escalated its war on digital rights by banning five people from entering the...

Today marks an inflection point for enterprise AI adoption. Despite billions invested in generative AI, only 5% of integrated pilots deliver measurable business value and nearly one in two companies abandons AI initiatives before reaching production. The bottleneck is not the models themselves. What's holding enterprises back is the surrounding infrastructure: Limited data accessibility, rigid...

It was early evening in Berlin, just a day before Christmas Eve, when Josephine Ballon got an unexpected email from US Customs and Border Protection. The status of her ability to travel to the United States had changed-she'd no longer be able to enter the country. At first, she couldn't find any information online as...

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. 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...

Earlier this week, MIT Technology Review published its annual list of Ten Breakthrough Technologies. As always, it features technologies that made the news last year, and which-for better or worse-stand to make waves in the coming years. They're the technologies you should really be paying attention to. This year's list includes tech that's set to...

In this exclusive subscriber-only eBook, you'll learn about how the idea that machines will be as smart as-or smarter than-humans has hijacked an entire industry. by Will Douglas Heaven October 30, 2025 Table of Contents: Related Stories: Access all subscriber-only eBooks:

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. Meet the man hunting the spies in your smartphone In April 2025, Ronald Deibert left all electronic devices at home in Toronto and boarded a plane. When he landed in Illinois, he bought...

Happy New Year! I know it's a bit late to say, but it never quite feels like the year has started until the new edition of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies list comes out. For 25 years, MIT Technology Review has put together this package, which highlights the technologies that we think are going to matter...

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. How next-generation nuclear reactors break out of the 20th-century blueprint The popularity of commercial nuclear reactors has surged in recent years as worries about climate change and energy independence drowned out concerns about...

Behold, the hyperscale data center! Massive structures, with thousands of specialized computer chips running in parallel to perform the complex calculations required by advanced AI models. A single facility can cover millions of square feet, built with millions of pounds of steel, aluminum, and concrete; feature hundreds of miles of wiring, connecting some hundreds of...

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. Sodium-ion batteries are making their way into cars-and the grid For decades, lithium-ion batteries have powered our phones, laptops, and electric vehicles. But lithium's limited supply and volatile price have led the industry...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. I decided to go to CES kind of at the last minute. Over the holiday break, contacts from China kept messaging me about their travel plans. After the umpteenth See you in...

Emissions from air freight have increased by 25% since 2019, according to a 2024 analysis by environmental advocacy organization Stand.Earth. The researchers found that the expansion of cargo-only fleets to transport goods during the pandemic - as air travel halted, slower freight modes faced disruption, but demand for rapid delivery soared - has led to...

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. Introducing this year's 10 Breakthrough Technologies It's easy to be cynical about technology these days. Many of the disruptions" of the last 15 years were more about coddling a certain set of young,...