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. This tool strips away anti-AI protections from digital art The news: A new technique called LightShed will make it harder for artists to use existing protective tools to stop their work from being...

China is the dominant force in next-generation energy technologies today. It's pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into putting renewable sources like wind and solar on its grid, manufacturing millions of electric vehicles, and building out capacity for energy storage, nuclear power, and more. This investment has been transformational for the country's economy and has...

A new technique called LightShed will make it harder for artists to use existing protective tools to stop their work from being ingested for AI training. It's the next step in a cat-and-mouse game-across technology, law, and culture-that has been going on between artists and AI proponents for years. Generative AI models that create images...

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 empire: A conversation with Karen Hao In a wide-ranging Roundtables conversation for MIT Technology Review subscribers, journalist and author Karen Hao recently spoke about her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams...

In a wide-ranging Roundtables conversation for MIT Technology Review subscribers, AI journalist and author Karen Hao spoke about her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI. She talked with executive editor Niall Firth about how she first covered the company in 2020 while on staff at MIT Technology Review, and...

The Big, Beautiful Bill" that President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4 was chock full of controversial policies-Medicaid work requirements, increased funding for ICE, and an end to tax credits for clean energy and vehicles, to name just a few. But one highly contested provision was missing. Just days earlier, during a late-night...

Michigan may be best known as the birthplace of the American auto industry, but its innovation legacy runs far deeper, and its future is poised to be even broader. From creating the world's largest airport factory during World War II at Willow Run to establishing the first successful polio vaccine trials in Ann Arbor to...

From a cluster of call centers in Canada, a criminal network defrauded elderly victims in the US out of $21 million in total between 2021 and 2024. The fraudsters used voice over internet protocol technology todupe victims into believing the calls came from their grandchildren in the US, customizing conversations using banks of personal data,...

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 the most dangerous asteroid hunt ever If you were told that the odds of something were 3.1%, it might not seem like much. But for the people charged with protecting our planet,...

Fusion energy holds the potential to shift a geopolitical landscape that is currently configured around fossil fuels. Harnessing fusion will deliver the energy resilience, security, and abundance needed for all modern industrial and service sectors. But these benefits will be controlled by the nation that leads in both developing the complex supply chains required and...

Today's AI landscape is defined by the ways in which neural networks are unlike human brains. A toddler learns how to communicate effectively with only a thousand calories a day and regular conversation; meanwhile, tech companies are reopening nuclear power plants, polluting marginalized communities, and pirating terabytes of books in order to train and run...

If you were told that the odds of something were 3.1%, it really wouldn't seem like much. But for the people charged with protecting our planet, it was huge. On February 18, astronomers determined that a 130- to 300-foot-long asteroid had a 3.1% chance of crashing into Earth in 2032. Never had an asteroid of...

When a historic UK-based retailer set out to modernize its IT environment, it was wrestling with systems that had grown organically for more than 175 years. Prior digital transformation efforts had resulted in a patchwork of hundreds of integration flows spanning cloud, on-premises systems, and third-party vendors, all communicating across multiple protocols. The company needed...

Digital transformation has long been a boardroom buzzword-shorthand for ambitious, often abstract visions of modernization. But today, digital technologies are no longer simply concepts in glossy consultancy decks and on corporate campuses; they're also being embedded directly into factory floors, logistics hubs, and other mission-critical, frontline environments. This evolution is playing out across sectors: Field...

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 latest threat from the rise of Chinese manufacturing In 2013, a trio of academics showed convincing evidence that increased trade with China beginning in the early 2000s and the resulting flood of...

The findings a decade ago were, well, shocking. Mainstream economists had long argued that free trade was overall a good thing; though there might be some winners and losers, it would generally bring lower prices and widespread prosperity. Then, in 2013, a trio of academic researchers showed convincing evidence that increased trade with China beginning...

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 India's scramble for AI independence Despite its status as a global tech hub, India lags far behind the likes of the US and China when it comes to homegrown AI. That gap...

In Bengaluru, India, Adithya Kolavi felt a mix of excitement and validation as he watched DeepSeek unleash its disruptive language model on the world earlier this year. The Chinese technology rivaled the best of the West in terms of benchmarks, but it had been built with far less capital in far less time. I thought:...

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. Don't let hype about AI agents get ahead of reality -Yoav Shoham is a professor emeritus at Stanford University and cofounder of AI21 Labs. At Google's I/O 2025 event in May, the company...

We got two big pieces of energy news from Google this week. The company announced that it's signed an agreement to purchase electricity from a fusion company's forthcoming first power plant. Google also released its latest environmental report, which shows that its energy use from data centers has doubled since 2020. Taken together, these two...

Google's recent unveiling of what it calls a new class of agentic experiences" feels like a turning point. At its I/O 2025 event in May, for example, the company showed off a digital assistant that didn't just answer questions; it helped work on a bicycle repair by finding a matching user manual, locating a YouTube...

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 generative AI could help make construction sites safer More than 1,000 construction workers die on the job each year in the US, making it the most dangerous industry for fatal slips, trips,...

Last winter, during the construction of an affordable housing project on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, a 32-year-old worker named Jose Luis Collaguazo Crespo slipped off a ladder on the second floor and plunged to his death in the basement. He was one of more than1,000constructionworkers who die on the job each year in the US, making...

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. People are using AI to sit' with them while they trip on psychedelics A growing number of people are using AI chatbots as trip sitters"-a phrase that traditionally refers to a sober person...

The internet infrastructure company Cloudflare announced today that it will now default to blocking AI bots from visiting websites it hosts. Cloudflare will also give clients the ability to manually allow or ban these AI bots on a case-by-case basis, and it will introduce a so-called pay-per-crawl" service that clients can use to receive compensation...

Peter sat alone in his bedroom as the first waves of euphoria coursed through his body like an electrical current. He was in darkness, save for the soft blue light of the screen glowing from his lap. Then he started to feel pangs of panic. He picked up his phone and typed a message to...

Last week, the technology companies Anthropic and Meta each won landmark victories in two separate court cases that examined whether or not the firms had violated copyright when they trained their large language models on copyrighted books without permission. The rulings are the first we've seen to come out of copyright cases of this kind....

Recorded on June 30, 2025 AI journalist Karen Hao's book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, tells the story of OpenAI's rise to power and its far-reaching impact all over the world. Hear from Karen Hao, former MIT Technology Review senior editor, and executive editor Niall Firth for a conversation exploring...

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 Jim O'Neill, the longevity enthusiast who is now RFK Jr.'s right-hand man When Jim O'Neill was nominated to be the second in command at the US Department of Health and Human Services,...

When Jim O'Neill was nominated to be the second in command at the US Department of Health and Human Services, Dylan Livingston was excited. As founder and CEO of the lobbying group Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (A4LI), Livingston is a member of a community that seeks to extend human lifespan. O'Neill is kind of one...

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 battery recycling company is now cleaning up AI data centers In a sandy industrial lot outside Reno, Nevada, rows of battery packs that once propelled electric vehicles are now powering a small...

Weight-loss drugs are this decade's blockbuster medicines. Drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro help people with diabetes get their blood sugar under control and help overweight and obese people reach a healthier weight. And they're fast becoming a trendy must-have for celebrities and other figure-conscious individuals looking to trim down. They became so hugely popular...

In a sandy industrial lot outside Reno, Nevada, rows of battery packs that once propelled electric vehicles are now powering a small AI data center. Redwood Materials, one of the US's largest battery recycling companies, showed off this array of energy storage modules, sitting on cinder blocks and wrapped in waterproof plastic, during a press...

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. Google's new AI will help researchers understand how our genes work When scientists first sequenced the human genome in 2003, they revealed the full set of DNA instructions that make a person. But...

It's crunch time for the grid this week. As I'm writing this newsletter, it's 100 F (nearly 38 C) here in New Jersey, and I'm huddled in the smallest room in my apartment with the shades drawn and a single window air conditioner working overtime. Large swaths of the US have seen brutal heat this...

When scientists first sequenced the human genome in 2003, they revealed the full set of DNA instructions that make a person. But we still didn't know what all those 3 billion genetic letters actually do. Now Google's DeepMind division says it's made a leap in trying to understand the code with AlphaGenome, an AI model...

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: the Power issue Energy is power. Those who can produce it, especially lots of it, get to exert authority in all sorts of ways. The world is increasingly powered by both tangible...

The US is on the brink of enacting rules for digital assets, with growing bipartisan momentum to modernize our financial system. But amid all the talk about innovation and global competitiveness, one issue has been glaringly absent: financial privacy. As we build the digital infrastructure of the 21st century, we need to talk about not...

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn't always easy. That's why we've created the AI Hype Index-a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. AI agents might be the toast of the AI industry, but they're still not that reliable. That's why Yoshua Bengio, one of the...

The last good Instagram account It's a truth universally acknowledged that social media is a Bad Vibe. Thankfully, there is still one Instagram account worth following that's just as incisive, funny, and scathing today as when it was founded back in 2016: Every Outfit (@everyoutfitonsatc). Originally conceived as an homage to Sex and the City's...

Officially, Conor Browne is a biorisk consultant. Based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, he has advanced degrees in security studies and medical and business ethics, along with United Nations certifications in counterterrorism and conflict resolution. He's worked on teams with NATO's Science for Peace and Security Programme and with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, analyzing...

It may sound bluntly obvious, but energy is power. Those who can produce it, especially lots of it, get to exert authority in all sorts of ways. It brings revenue and enables manufacturing, data processing, transportation, and military might. Energy resources are arguably a nation's most important asset. Look at Russia, or Saudi Arabia, or...

The computer first appeared on the Broadway stage in 1955 in a romantic comedy-William Marchant's The Desk Set. The play centers on four women who conduct research on behalf of the fictional International Broadcasting Company. Early in the first act, a young engineer named Richard Sumner arrives in the offices of the research department without...

This past spring, we launched a brand-new manufacturing initiative-building on ideas that are as old as MIT. Since William Barton Rogers created a school to help accelerate America's industrialization, manufacturing has been an essential part of our mission-a particularly MIT brand of manufacturing, informed and improved by scientific principles and advanced by the kind of...

As an MIT visiting scholar, rap legend Lupe Fiasco decided to go fishing for ideas on campus. In an approach he calls ghotiing" (pronounced fishing"), he composed nine raps inspired by works in MIT's public art collection, writing and recording them on site. On May 2, he and the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble debuted six...

Hundred-year storm tides could strike every decade in Bangladesh Tropical cyclones can generate devastating storm tides-seawater heightened by the tides that causes catastrophic floods in coastal regions. An MIT study finds that as the planet warms, the recurrence of destructive storm tides will increase tenfold for one of the world's hardest-hit regions. New electronic skin"...

It was a banner year for the Engineers in 2024-'25, with four MIT women's teams all clinching NCAA Division III national titles for the first time. After winning their fourth straight NCAA East Regional Championship, the cross country team claimed their first national title in November with All-American performances from Christina Crow '25 (pictured), Rujuta...

Two new studies from MIT and Harvard Medical School add to a growing body of evidence that infection-fighting molecules called cytokines also influence the brain, leading to behavioral changes during illness. By mapping the locations in the brain of receptors for different forms of IL-17, the researchers found that the cytokine acts on the somatosensory...

Over the past decade, Institute Professor Paula Hammond '84, PhD '93, and her students have used a technique known as layer-by-layer assembly to create a variety of polymer-coated nanoparticles that can be loaded with cancer-fighting drugs. The particles, which could prevent many side effects of chemotherapy by targeting tumors directly, have proved effective in mouse...