MIT Technology Review

2025 was a year of reckoning, including how the heads of the top AI companies made promises they couldn't keep. In this exclusive subscriber-only eBook, you'll learn more about why we may need to readjust our expectations. This story is part of the Hype Correction package.by Will Douglas Heaven December 15, 2025 Table of Contents:...

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. Microsoft has a new plan to prove what's real and what's AI online AI-enabled deception now permeates our online lives. There are the high-profile cases you may easily spot. Other times, it slips...

Twenty years ago, Joanna Wakefield-Scurr was having persistent pain in her breasts. Her doctor couldn't diagnose the cause but said a good, supportive bra could help. A professor of biomechanics, Wakefield-Scurr thought she could do a little research and find a science-backed option. Two decades later, she's still looking. Wakefield-Scurr now leads an 18-person team...

The bird is a beautiful silver-gray, and as she dies twitching in the lasernet I'm grateful for two things: First, that she didn't make a sound. Second, that this will be the very last time. They're called corpse doves-because the darkest part of their gray plumage surrounds the lighter part, giving the impression that skeleton...

There's a measles outbreak happening close to where I live. Since the start of this year, 34 cases have been confirmed in Enfield, a northern borough of London. Most of those affected are children under the age of 11. One in five have neededhospital treatment. It's another worrying development for an incredibly contagious and potentially...

AI-enabled deception now permeates our online lives. There are the high-profile cases you may easily spot, like when White House officials recently shared a manipulated image of a protester in Minnesota and then mocked those asking about it. Other times, it slips quietly into social media feeds and racks up views, like the videos that...

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 uncrewed narco subs could transform the Colombian drug trade For decades, handmade narco subs have been some of the cocaine trade's most elusive and productive workhorses, ferrying multi-ton loads of illicit drugs...

On a bright morning last April, a surveillance plane operated by the Colombian military spotted a 40-foot-long shark-like silhouette idling in the ocean just off Tayrona National Park. It was, unmistakably, a narco sub," a stealthy fiberglass vessel that sails with its hull almost entirely underwater, used by drug cartels to move cocaine north. The...

The United States and the European Union grew into economic superpowers by committing climate atrocities. They have burned a wildly disproportionate share of the world's oil and gas, planting carbon time bombs that will detonate first in the poorest, hottest parts of the globe. Meanwhile, places like the Solomon Islands and Chad-low-lying or just plain...

Google DeepMind is calling for the moral behavior of large language models-such as what they do when called on to act as companions, therapists, medical advisors, and so on-to be scrutinized with the same kind of rigor as their ability to code or do math. As LLMs improve, people are asking them to play more...

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. Welcome to the dark side of crypto's permissionless dream Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen, an Australian man in his mid-30s, with a rural Catholic upbringing, is a founder of THORChain, a blockchain through which users can...

To be human is, fundamentally, to be a forecaster. Occasionally a pretty good one. Trying to see the future, whether through the lens of past experience or the logic of cause and effect, has helped us hunt, avoid being hunted, plant crops, forge social bonds, and in general survive in a world that does not...

We're out of airspace now. We can do whatever we want," Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen tells me from the pilot's seat of his Aston Martin helicopter. As we fly over suburbs outside Melbourne, Australia, it's becoming clear that doing whatever he wants is Thorbjornsen's MO. Upper-middle-class homes give way to vineyards, and Thorbjornsen points out our landing...

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 curious case of the disappearing Lamborghinis Across the world, unsuspecting people are unwittingly becoming caught up in a new and growing type of organized criminal enterprise: vehicle transport fraud and theft. Crooks...

When Sam Zahr first saw the gray Rolls-Royce Dawn convertible with orange interior and orange roof, he knew he'd found a perfect addition to his fleet. It was very appealing to our clientele," he told me. As the director of operations at Dream Luxury Rental, he outfits customers in the Detroit area looking to ride...

When work went remote, the sound of business changed. What began as a scramble to make home offices functional has evolved into a revolution in how people hear and are heard. From education to enterprises, companies across industries have reimagined what clear, reliable communication can mean in a hybrid world. For major audio and communications...

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. Hackers made death threats against this security researcher. Big mistake. In April 2024, a mysterious someone using the online handles Waifu" and Judische" began posting death threats on Telegram and Discord channels aimed...

When he was just a teenager trying to decide what to do with his life, Cesar de la Fuente compiled a list of the world's biggest problems. He ranked them inversely by how much money governments were spending to solve them. Antimicrobial resistance topped the list. Twenty years on, the problem has not gone away....

The threats started in spring. In April 2024, a mysterious someone using the online handles Waifu" and Judische" began posting death threats on Telegram and Discord channels aimed at a cybersecurity researcher named Allison Nixon. Alison [sic] Nixon is gonna get necklaced with a tire filled with gasoline soon," wrote Waifu/Judische, both of which are...

There are tears in the audience as Patrick Darling's song begins to play. It's a heartfelt song written for his great-grandfather, whom he never got the chance to meet. But this performance is emotional for another reason: It's Darling's first time on stage with his bandmates since he lost the ability to sing two years...

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. US deputy health secretary: Vaccine guidelines are still subject to change Over the past year, Jim O'Neill has become one of the most powerful people in public health. As the US deputy health...

Making a movie is a lot like pulling off a heist. That's what Steven Soderbergh-director of the Ocean's franchise, among other heist-y classics-said a few years ago. You come up with a creative angle, put together a team of specialists, figure out how to beat the technological challenges, rehearse, move with Swiss-watch precision, and-if you...

Following publication of this story, Politico reported Jim O'Neill would be leaving his current roles within the Department of Health and Human Services. Over the past year, Jim O'Neill has become one of the most powerful people in public health. As the US deputy health secretary, he holds two roles at the top of the...

Americans have a new set of diet guidelines. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken an old-fashioned food pyramid, turned it upside down, and plonked a steak and a stick of butter in prime positions. Kennedy and his Make America Healthy Again mates have long been extolling the virtues of meat and whole-fat dairy, so it...

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 is already making online crimes easier. It could get much worse. Just as software engineers are using artificial intelligence to help write code and check for bugs, hackers are using these tools...

Anton Cherepanov is always on the lookout for something interesting. And in late August last year, he spotted just that. It was a file uploaded to VirusTotal, a site cybersecurity researchers like him use to analyze submissions for potential viruses and other types of malicious software, often known as malware. On the surface it seemed...

EVs are getting cheaper and more common all over the world. But the technology still faces major challenges in some markets, including many countries in Africa. Some regions across the continent still have limited grid and charging infrastructure, and those that do have widespread electricity access sometimes face reliability issues-a problem for EV owners, who...

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. The past year has marked a turning point for Chinese AI. Since DeepSeek released its R1 reasoning model in January 2025, Chinese companies have repeatedly delivered AI...

AI agents are a risky business. Even when stuck inside the chatbox window, LLMs will make mistakes and behave badly. Once they have tools that they can use to interact with the outside world, such as web browsers and email addresses, the consequences of those mistakes become far more serious. That might explain why 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. A QuitGPT" campaign is urging people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions In September, Alfred Stephen, a freelance software developer in Singapore, purchased a ChatGPT Plus subscription, which costs $20 a month and offers...

In September, Alfred Stephen, a freelance software developer in Singapore, purchased a ChatGPT Plus subscription, which costs $20 a month and offers more access to advanced models, to speed up his work. But he grew frustrated with the chatbot's coding abilities and its gushing, meandering replies. Then he came across a post on Reddit about...

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. A first look at Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review's new AI newsletter Are you interested in learning more about the ways in which AI is actually being used? We've launched a new...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. Lots of influential people in tech last week were describing Moltbook, an online hangout populated by AI agents interacting with one another, as a glimpse into the future. It appeared to show...

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. Moltbook was peak AI theater For a few days recently, the hottest new hangout on the internet was a vibe-coded Reddit clone called Moltbook, which billed itself as a social network for bots....

For decades, enterprises reacted to shifting business pressures with stopgap technology solutions. To rein in rising infrastructure costs, they adopted cloud services that could scale on demand. When customers shifted their lives onto smartphones, companies rolled out mobile apps to keep pace. And when businesses began needing real-time visibility into factories and stockrooms, they layered...

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. This is the most misunderstood graph in AI Every time OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic drops a new frontier large language model, the AI community holds its breath. It doesn't exhale until METR, an...

Nuclear power continues to be one of the hottest topics in energy today, and in our recent online Roundtables discussion about next-generation nuclear power, hyperscale AI data centers, and the grid, we got dozens of great audience questions. These ran the gamut, and while we answered quite a few (and I'm keeping some in mind...

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. Every time OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic drops a new frontier large language model, the AI community holds its breath. It doesn't exhale until METR, an AI...

The previous article in this series, Rules fail at the prompt, succeed at the boundary," focused on the first AI-orchestrated espionage campaign and the failure of prompt-level control. This article is the prescription. The question every CEO is now getting from their board is some version of: What do we do about agent risk? Across...

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. Why AI companies are betting on next-gen nuclear 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...

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. Microbes could extract the metal needed for cleantech In a pine forest on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the only active nickel mine in the US is nearing the end of its life. At a...

In a pine forest on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the only active nickel mine in the US is nearing the end of its life. At a time when carmakers want the metal for electric-vehicle batteries, nickel concentration at Eagle Mine is falling and could soon drop too low to warrant digging. But earlier this year, the...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. What would it take to convince you that the era of truth decay we were long warned about-where AI content dupes us, shapes our beliefs even when we catch the lie, and...

Many organizations rushed into generative AI, only to see pilots fail to deliver value. Now, companies want measurable outcomes-but how do you design for success? At Mistral AI, we partner with global industry leaders to co-design tailored AI solutions that solve their most difficult problems. Whether it's increasing CX productivity with Cisco, building a more...

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. Demand for electric vehicles and the batteries that power them has never been hotter. In 2025, EVs made up over a quarter of new vehicle sales globally,...

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...