MIT Technology Review

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...

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...