Last week, Musk took the stand, alleging that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman had deceived him into donating $38 million to the company. He claimed that they’d promised to maintain it as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for the benefit of humanity, only to later accept billions of dollars of investment from Microsoft and restructure the company to operate a for-profit subsidiary.  

This week, Brockman fired back with his side of the story, arguing that Musk had actually pushed for OpenAI to create a for-profit arm and fought a bitter battle to have “absolute control” over it. OpenAI has argued that Musk is suing because he didn’t get his way and is now trying to undermine a competitor to his own AI company, xAI.

Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI board member and the mother of four of Musk’s children, also testified, revealing that Musk tried to recruit OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to lead a new AI lab at his electric-car company, Tesla. 

Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015 with Altman, Brockman, and others but left in 2018. Now, he’s asking the court to remove Altman and Brockman from their roles and to unwind the restructuring OpenAI undertook last year, which converted its for-profit subsidiary into a public benefit corporation. He is also seeking as much as $134 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, OpenAI’s investor. 

The outcome of the trial could upend OpenAI’s race toward an IPO at a valuation approaching $1 trillion. Meanwhile, xAI, which Musk founded in 2023, is now a division of his rocket company, SpaceX; the combined companies are also expected to go public as early as June, at a target valuation of $1.75 trillion.

On Monday, Brockman walked into the courtroom in a blue suit and tie, holding hands with his wife, Anna Brockman. On the stand, he was serene, even chipper, as he recalled OpenAI’s early days. But he grew agitated under impassioned questioning from Elon Musk’s lawyer, Steven Molo. Altman listened in silence, while Anna Brockman sat behind him, fidgeting. Outside the courthouse, protesters rallying against the AI race sang hymns over the voices of lawyers giving press conferences.

Two days before trial began, according to Brockman, Musk messaged him to ask if he would be interested in settling. When Brockman suggested that both sides drop their claims, Musk texted back: “By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be.”

Musk stormed out with a Tesla painting

Last week, Musk testified that he’s suing to save OpenAI’s nonprofit mission to develop AI safely, but he said he was open to seeing OpenAI become a capped-profit company with moderate investments from Microsoft. 

This week, Brockman told the jury that Musk was never truly committed to keeping OpenAI a nonprofit. In the summer of 2017, when an AI model that OpenAI built beat the world’s best players in a video game called Dota 2, Musk hosted a gathering at his “Haunted Mansion” near San Francisco. The house was splattered with confetti and cups, Brockman recalled, and the actress Amber Heard, who was Musk’s girlfriend at the time, served whiskey.

“Time to make the next step for OpenAI. This is the triggering event,” Musk wrote in an email—having said weeks earlier that if OpenAI made a major public achievement, it would be “time to create a for-profit,” Brockman told the jury.

Over the next six weeks, Brockman said, Musk and the other cofounders had intense discussions about creating a for-profit entity to raise enough capital to build artificial general intelligence—powerful AI that can compete with humans on most cognitive tasks. Musk wanted to have majority equity in the entity and the right to choose a majority of the board members. He also wanted to be its CEO, said Brockman. 

Brockman testified that in August 2017, he and other cofounders gathered to hash out the terms of the for-profit structure. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist at the time, arrived bearing a painting of a Tesla as a “token of goodwill” in return for the actual Teslas Musk had given them days earlier. “It felt a little bit like [Musk] was buttering us up, right,that he wanted us to feel indebted to him,” Brockman told the jury.

When Brockman and Sutskever proposed that they all have equal shares of equity, said Brockman, Musk fell silent and finally said, “I decline.” Musk then stood up and “stormed around the table,” he said. “I actually thought he was going to hit me.” Musk grabbed the painting and walked out. 

Brockman said that afterwards he struggled to decide whether to continue building OpenAI with Musk or break away. “There was a fork in the road,” he said. “Do we accept Elon’s terms? Or do we reject the terms, he quits to create his own, and then we create our own?”

“The one thing we could not accept was to hand him unilateral, absolute control, potentially, over the AGI,” Brockman told the jury.

What was Brockman thinking?

In his theatrical baritone, Molo argued that Brockman was motivated by greed rather than a commitment to OpenAI’s nonprofit mission to develop AI that benefits humanity. He noted that while Brockman never invested money in the company, he now owns a stake worth close to $30 billion. 

“Solving for the mission has always been my primary motivation,” Brockman said, pushing back on Molo’s characterization of him. “It remains so today.” 

Molo pulled up Brockman’s electronic journal on a screen in the courtroom, trying to show the jury what Brockman was really thinking behind the scenes. In 2017, while negotiating with Musk over the terms of a for-profit entity, Brockman wrote about wanting to become a billionaire: “Financially, what will take me to $1B?” 

“Why didn’t you take the $29 billion and donate it to the nonprofit that you had a fiduciary duty to, for the good of humanity?” Molo asked Brockman, raising his voice to dramatize moral indignation at Brockman’s personal gain. 

Molo then pulled up a journal entry Brockman had written in November 2017, while he was torn over whether to turn OpenAI into a for-profit without Musk: “it’d be wrong to steal the nonprofit from him. to convert to a b-corp without him. that’d be pretty morally bankrupt.” Brockman and Musk had previously considered creating a b-corp, which is a for-profit company that pursues a social mission.

Brockman explained, “I meant it would actually serve the mission, but it’d be hard to look at yourself in the mirror.”

Molo also tried to undermine Brockman’s credibility by revealing that he holds a stake in multiple companies with business ties to OpenAI, including the AI company Cerebras, the cloud provider CoreWeave, and the nuclear fusion startup Helion Energy. Altman has tried to steer OpenAI into deals with companies that he invests in, including Helion and the rocket maker Stoke Space, drawing scrutiny over potential conflicts of interest.

Former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati and former OpenAI board member Helen Toner both appeared in video depositions. They addressed the brief firing of Altman in 2023, saying that they could not trust him because of his alleged history of lying. Murati’s text messages with Altman from that time, which were introduced as evidence, revealed his desperate attempts to understand what was happening and regain control. 

Musk plotted a rival AI lab at Tesla

After Brockman’s two days of testimony, Shivon Zilis, who left OpenAI’s board in 2023, took the stand in a black jacket and black jeans, appearing composed but with a flicker of nerves. OpenAI’s lawyer Sarah Eddy asked her in a deceptively soothing voice whether she acted as a conduit for Musk as he tried to poach OpenAI’s cofounders to work at a new AI lab within Tesla. Eddy argued that Musk is suing OpenAI only to undermine a competitor in the AI race. 

Zilis said she met Musk while working at OpenAI as an informal advisor in 2016, and that they had a “one-off” romantic encounter. In 2017, she joined Tesla and Musk’s brain-implant company, Neuralink. In 2020, she joined OpenAI’s board of directors. She became pregnant with Musk’s children through IVF but did not disclose her ties with Musk to OpenAI until Business Insider reported them in 2022. 

By December 2017, with negotiations over creating a for-profit entity stalled, Musk had concluded that OpenAI was unlikely to build AGI and pivoted to building an AI lab at Tesla, according to an email sent to Zilis. 

Eddy pulled up a draft of an FAQ document that Zilis emailed a colleague at Tesla in 2017 about an event the company was organizing at the NeurIPS AI conference: “The purpose of this event is to share that Tesla is building a world leading AI lab(?) which will rival the likes of Google/DeepMind and Facebook AI Research.” 

Zilis told the jury that when Musk was still on OpenAI’s board, he tried to recruit Altman to lead that prospective AI lab. Musk had asked Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI research scientist he’d recruited to work at Tesla, “to send a list of top OpenAI people to poach,” according to a text message by Zilis. 

“There is little chance of OpenAI being a serious force if I focus on TeslaAI,” Musk texted Zilis in 2018, just before he left OpenAI. Tesla’s AI lab never came to fruition.

Eddy asked Zilis whom she was loyal to when she was working for both OpenAI and Musk. “I had an allegiance to the best outcome for AI for humanity,” Zilis told the jury.

What’s going on next week?

Next week, Ilya Sutskever and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will testify. The lawyers for both Musk and OpenAI will deliver their closing arguments. The jury will begin deliberating the week after and deliver an advisory verdict guiding the judge to decide the case.

This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s ongoing coverage of the Musk v. Altman trial. Follow @techreview or @michelletomkim on X for up-to-the-minute reporting.

Eight passengers aboard a Dutch-flagged cruise ship have contracted a type of hantavirus, a rare virus transmitted by rats. Three of them have died. As the ship prepares to dock in the Canary Islands, plans are being finalized to let the remaining passengers and crew disembark safely.

The virus in question appears to have a high fatality rate. Read on for answers to the big questions surrounding the outbreak—and to hear why health experts don’t expect a rerun of the covid-19 pandemic.

What is hantavirus?

Hantaviruses are a group of viruses that typically infect rodents but can be transmitted to humans through exposure to the animals or their droppings, urine, or saliva. The viruses don’t seem to cause illness in rodents, but they can make people very unwell. The symptoms can depend on the type of hantavirus a person has been exposed to. Varieties found in the Americas can cause hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome, which affects the lungs and heart and has a fatality rate of up to 50%.

That condition made headlines last year when it caused the death of pianist Betsy Arakawa, the wife of actor Gene Hackman. 

How many cases have there been so far?

On April 6, a man aboard the MV Hondius developed respiratory symptoms. He became very unwell and died just five days later. His wife, who left the ship at the island of Saint Helena, also developed symptoms. Her health deteriorated during a flight to Johannesburg, South Africa, and she died the following day, on April 26. South Africa’s National Institute of Communicable Diseases tested samples taken from the woman and confirmed that she had hantavirus.

A third person aboard the ship, who developed symptoms on April 28, died on May 2. Four other passengers who became ill were evacuated—one to South Africa and three to the Netherlands.

An eighth person had disembarked in Saint Helena and reported similar symptoms once he was in Zurich, Switzerland. A team at Geneva University Hospitals confirmed that he had become ill from the Andes virus—a form of hantavirus that can be spread between people.

Could this be the start of the next pandemic?

Health experts don’t believe so. They stress that the situation is nothing like the one the coronavirus that causes covid-19 presented in 2020. For a start, the Andes virus is not a mysterious new virus—scientists already have an understanding of it, and Argentina is sharing diagnostic kits it has already developed.

The virus also doesn’t spread in the same way. Officials at the World Health Organization emphasized that the spread of hantavirus requires close contact—the kind a person might have with a partner, household member, or medical caregiver.

The cruise ship outbreak represents “a specific confined setting where people are interacting in a prolonged close contact,” Abdirahman Mahamud, the alert and response director for the WHO’s health emergency program, said at a press event on Thursday. “With the experience our member states have, and the actions they have taken, we believe that this will not lead to a subsequent chain of transmission.”

What about the rest of the people onboard the ship?

All the remaining passengers have been asked to stay in their cabins, which the WHO says are being disinfected. Doctors and health professionals from the WHO and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control have boarded the ship and are assessing everyone on board.

So far, no one else on board has developed symptoms, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO acting director for epidemic and pandemic management, said at the press event. That’s “a good sign,” she said, but she added that the Andes virus has a long incubation period (around six weeks). Passengers are being advised to wear a medical mask when they leave their rooms.

At the same event, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was in regular contact with the ship’s captain, who was reporting that “morale had increased significantly” since the ship started its journey to the Canary Islands.

What do we know about the Andes virus?

The Andes virus is the only hantavirus that is known to be transmitted between people. That transmission seems to rely on prolonged, intimate contact.

There was an Andes virus outbreak in Argentina around eight years ago. Between November 2018 and February 2019, there were 34 confirmed cases of infection, and 11 deaths. That outbreak was triggered when a person with symptoms attended a social gathering, said Tedros. “We are in a similar situation right now,” he said. “A cluster in a confined space with close contact.”

The fact that the 2018 outbreak was limited to 34 cases should be somewhat reassuring, he implied. “We believe this will be a limited outbreak if the public health measures are implemented and solidarity is shown across all countries,” he said.

How is hantavirus treated?

Unfortunately, we don’t have any specific antiviral treatments or vaccines for hantavirus. The WHO recommends early intensive care for people who develop symptoms. “This can save lives,” Anaïs Legand, WHO technical lead on viral hemorrhagic fevers, said on Thursday.

How did people get infected in the first place?

We don’t yet have an answer to that. But we do know that the couple who died had traveled through Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay on a birdwatching trip before they boarded the ship. That trip included visits to areas where species of rats that carry the Andes virus are known to live. The WHO is working with authorities in Argentina to try to retrace the couple’s movements on that trip.

Has the virus spread beyond the ship?

We don’t yet know for sure. The WHO is receiving reports of “potential suspect cases,” Van Kerkhove said at the Thursday briefing. Some of them have links to the ship or its passengers. Each “alert” will be followed up by health authorities in the relevant country, she said.

Has the US withdrawal from WHO affected anything?

Five US states have said they are monitoring US nationals who have disembarked from the ship. WHO officials are stressing that they are still sharing technical information with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Things are … as they used to be,” Tedros said. “WHO’s mission is to help the world to be safe … and we want the American people to be safe as well.”

But it’s worth noting that cuts made by the Trump administration aren’t exactly putting the US in a good position for events like these. Last year, all full-time employees in the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program—which helps prevent and control illness outbreaks on cruise ships—were laid off. Further cuts to the CDC have left public health experts worried about how ill prepared the US is to deal with future disease outbreaks.

What will happen next?

Any suspected cases will be monitored by health authorities. Passengers are due to disembark in Tenerife in the Canary Islands on Sunday, May 10, and the WHO has said it will work with the Spanish government to ensure that the risk to residents remains low and that the passengers are treated with dignity and respect.

In the meantime, scientists are working to fully sequence the genome of the virus from patient samples. They want to find out if it is different from the viruses involved in the previous cases. “So far, we haven’t seen anything unusual,” said Van Kerkhove.

We’ve entered the era of AI malaise

AI is spreading everywhere, and it is not going away. But what will it do? What effect will it have on our society? Will it make life better, or worse? How will we know? What’s the plan?

This technology may very well take our jobs—or just crash the economy instead. Our apps are all getting injections of AI, like it or not. And it is increasingly impossible to tell whether we are relying too much on AI or not using it enough.

We’re all sitting uncomfortably with AI right now. Read our essay on the strange, uncertain mood of the moment.

The era of AI malaise is an essay written by our editor-in-chief Mat Honan. It accompanies MIT Technology Review’s 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now, our list of the big ideas, trends, and advances in the field that are driving progress today—and will shape what’s possible tomorrow.

Here’s how technology transformed babymaking

Technology is changing the way we make babies. Clinicians have improved hormonal treatments. Embryologists have devised ways to culture embryos in the lab for longer. IVF clinics today offer multiple genetic tests for embryos.

The technology has also had a huge social impact, allowing for changes in the structure of families and providing more reproductive choices for would-be parents. Now, AI and robots are set to usher in another new era for IVF.

Here’s how technology is reshaping babymaking.

—Jessica Hamzelou

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things biotech. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

How robots learn: a brief, contemporary history

For decades, researchers have been inspired by science fiction robots that can move through the world, adapt to different environments, and interact with people. But bringing these devices into the messiness of the real world has proved incredibly difficult.

Now, advances in AI are changing that. Instead of relying on rigid rules, robots are learning through trial and error, simulations, and huge amounts of real-world data. The progress represents a revolution in how machines interact with their surroundings.

It also means that Silicon Valley roboticists are dreaming big again. Here’s how we got here. 

—James O’Donnell

This story is from the latest issue of our print magazine, which is all about nature. Subscribe now to read it in full.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 ICE plans to develop its own smart glasses
The “ICE Glasses” would identify people in real time. (404 Media)
+ ICE already uses an app with facial recognition to track citizens. (NYT $)
+ A new lawsuit wants to stop ICE using DNA to track critics. (Ars Technica)

2 AI is distorting key economic signals
It makes growth look better and the job market look worse. (WSJ $)
+ Welcome to the economic singularity. (MIT Technology Review)

3 A cyberattack paralyzed thousands of schools
And stole 275 million people’s data from edtech platform Canvas. (NYT $)
+ The digital learning software is used across the US. (CNN)
+ It’s the worst case scenario from an attack on one education platform. (Wired $)

4 The US suspects Nvidia chips were smuggled to Alibaba via Thailand
Super Micro servers containing Nvidia chips were allegedly smuggled. (Bloomberg $)
+ Through a firm linked to Thailand’s national AI initiative. (Reuters $)

5 China’s affordable AI models are increasingly worrying Silicon Valley
They’re often cheaper and more adaptable than US rivals. (Bloomberg $)
+ China is betting big on open source. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Scientists developed a new energy storage system inspired by sunburn
It stores solar energy by mimicking molecular changes in damaged DNA. (BBC)
+ Solar and wind with battery storage are becoming cost-competitive. (Reuters $)
+ Here are three other breakthrough climate technologies. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Russia’s internet crackdown is hobbling small businesses
App restrictions and internet outages are causing headaches. (Reuters $)

8 Younger researchers are more likely to produce “disruptive” science
A new study found more experience led to fewer breakthroughs. (Nature)

9 Why Richard Dawkins was mistaken to believe Claude has feelings
But his line of inquiry wasn’t altogether foolish. (The Atlantic $)
+ Why it’ll be hard to tell if AI ever becomes conscious. (MIT Technology Review)

10 The Golden Globes have new AI rules (and they’re looser than the Oscars’)
AI is permitted as an enhancement, but not as a replacement. (Gizmodo)
+ Last week, the Oscars banned AI actors and writing. (NPR)

Quote of the day

“When I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines. I treat them exactly as I would treat a very intelligent friend.” 

—Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins reflects on his interactions with advanced AI systems in an essay published in Unherd.

One More Thing

VIRGINIA HANUSIK

How to stop a state from sinking

In a 10-month span in 2020 and 2021, southwest Louisiana saw five climate-related disasters, including two destructive hurricanes and flash floods. But there could be a better way to protect the area: elevation.

The $6.8 billion Southwest Coastal Louisiana Project is betting that raising buildings while restoring coastal boundary lands that have long acted as natural barriers can preserve this slice of coastline. 

Here’s how officials hope to protect vulnerable communities by lifting homes out of the floodplain.

—Xander Peters

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ Soaking in a hot tub might offer even more health benefits than a sauna.
+ A court has officially protected America’s largest rainforest from future logging.
+ Experience the majesty of the world’s largest owl collection through these intimate, high-detail portraits.
+ A dad has turned his toddler’s random stories into high-production pop songs that are surprisingly catchy.

This week, I’ve been working on a piece about the cutting edge of IVF technologies and what’s coming next. Think AI and robots and, potentially, gene-edited embryos.

My reporting has also made me think about just how much progress has been made in the last five decades. Clinicians have improved hormonal treatments. Embryologists have devised ways to culture embryos in the lab for longer. IVF clinics today offer multiple genetic tests for embryos.

In recent years, we’ve had reports of babies born with DNA from three people, babies born following “IVF on wheels,” babies born from decades-old embryos, and even babies “conceived” with the aid of a sperm-injecting robot.

The technology has also had a huge social impact. It has allowed for changes in the structure of families and provided more reproductive choices for would-be parents. So this week, let’s consider the technologies that have transformed babymaking.

Alan Penzias, a reproductive endocrinologist at Boston IVF, has been working in IVF since the early 1990s. In those days, his lab at Yale would collect a person’s eggs, fertilize them, and culture any resulting embryos for two days, until the embryos had two or four cells.

The embryos couldn’t survive any longer outside a body, so they’d be transferred to the uterus at that point. All of them. Even if there were, say, five embryos in total. Typical healthy patients could expect a live birth rate of 12% to 15%, he says.

Then Penzias heard that other teams were managing to culture embryos for three days. “We thought, No, that’s not possible,” he recalls. He learned that scientists had achieved this by tinkering with the culture medium—the nutrient-rich fluid the embryos are grown in.

Those three-day embryos, which had around six to 10 cells, seemed to have a better chance of resulting in a live birth. The teams culturing embryos for longer saw their success rates climb to 25% among similar patient groups, says Penzias. Again, he couldn’t believe it. “We thought they were making it up,” he says.

In the years since, teams have made more improvements to culture medium. Today, most IVF embryos are cultured for five or six days—a point at which they have 80 to 100 cells. The culturing process can act a little like a stress test—the embryos that make it to day six are generally more likely to go all the way and develop into a healthy baby.

Over the same period, advances in other technologies have opened up the options for what we can do with those embryos. Scientists learned they were able to freeze embryos and use them at a later date. A little over a decade ago, clinics shifted to a “vitrification” approach that rapidly cools the embryos to a glassy state. Vitrified embryos are more likely to survive freezing and thawing, so this approach quickly caught on.

As a result, doctors no longer needed to transfer multiple embryos at once. This made it less likely that patients would have twins or triplets, which can increase the risk of pregnancy complications.

Vitrification has also made IVF safer in other ways, including by affording patients a bit of time between fertility treatments. The hormonal treatments used in the first phase of IVF are designed to increase the production of mature eggs that can be collected. These treatments carry a small risk of a condition called ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), which in rare cases can be life-threatening. The ability to freeze all your embryos and use them at a later date is thought to give the body a chance to recover from hormonal treatment and reduces the risk of OHSS.

And because clinics are now able to culture embryos for up to a week, they can take a few of the 100 or so cells and send them for genetic testing before freezing the embryos. People undergoing IVF can get genetic readouts of all the embryos before deciding which to implant. (It is worth noting, however, that these testing technologies are not perfect.)

“Those are really radical changes, and we take them for granted,” says Penzias.

These technologies have also changed the function of IVF. What was once a treatment for infertility is now used to preserve fertility. People who want to delay parenthood can opt to freeze their eggs or embryos and use them later. They might opt to transfer one embryo in a year’s time and a second several years later. “We’ve been able to empower women to be able to have much more reproductive choice and get more reproductive mileage from a single IVF cycle,” says Penzias.

People who are about to undergo cancer treatments that might damage the testes or ovaries can opt to store their eggs or sperm ahead of time, too. Scientists have even been able to preserve pieces of ovarian and testicular tissue and reimplant them later, enabling recipients to have healthy babies.

Today, more people than ever have access to safe IVF options that offer multiple paths to parenthood. Those options look set to expand. But if you want to find out more about the AI and IVF robots, you’ll have to read this week’s story, here!

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

What’s next for IVF

IVF has brought millions of babies into the world over the last four decades. But the process can still be slow, painful, and expensive—and far from guaranteed to work. Now, a wave of new technologies aims to change that. 

Researchers are using AI to identify promising sperm and embryos, developing robotic systems that could automate parts of the IVF process, and even exploring controversial genetic editing techniques designed to prevent inherited disease.

The technologies could make IVF more effective and accessible. But they’re also raising difficult ethical questions about how far reproductive medicine should go.

Find out what’s next for IVF.

—Jessica Hamzelou

This story is from MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series, which looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.

The balcony solar boom is coming to the US

Dozens of US states are considering legislation to allow people to install plug-in solar systems, often called balcony solar. These small arrays require little to no setup and could help cut emissions and power bills.

Proponents say the systems could make solar power more accessible, but some experts caution that there are safety concerns. 

Read the full story on balcony solar’s potentially massive impact in the US.

—Casey Crownhart

This article is from The Spark, our weekly climate newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

Resistance: 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now

Resistance against AI’s proliferation is growing. People from all walks of life are speaking out against rising electricity bills from data centers, disappearing jobs, chatbots’ impact on teen mental health, the military’s use of AI, and copyright infringement—among other concerns. 

People want to have a say in how the technology transforms their future. And they’re starting to create small cracks in AI labs’ vision for the future. Find out how.

—Michelle Kim

Resistance is on our list of the 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now, MIT Technology Review’s guide to what’s really worth your attention in the buzzy world of AI. 

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 After years of insults, Anthropic and SpaceX have teamed up
Anthropic will tap SpaceX’s GPUs to meet surging demand. (Axios)
+ While SpaceX gets a marquee customer for its AI ambitions. (Wired $)
+ Anthropic says the deal will double Claude Code’s rate limits. (Ars Technica)
+It’s also exploring building compute capacity in space. (CNBC)
+ Musk previously called Anthropic “evil” and “misanthropic.” (Gizmodo)

2 Ex-OpenAI leaders say Sam Altman sowed “chaos” and distrust
Former CTO Mira Murati said she couldn’t trust his words. (The Verge)
+ He also bypassed OpenAI’s safety board before a model release. (Gizmodo)
+ And pitted leaders against one another. (Forbes)
+ But Elon Musk still tried to recruit Altman to lead a Tesla AI lab. (FT $)
+ Here’s why Musk and Altman are in court. (MIT Technology Review)

3 China’s humanoid robots are fueling its next export boom
Morgan Stanley says Beijing has taken an early lead in the sector. (Bloomberg $)
+ Gig workers are training humanoids at home. (MIT Technology Review)

4 SpaceX’s IPO plans will give Elon Musk “virtually unchecked” authority
And erode typical shareholder protections. (Reuters $)
+ Activists and pension funds are pushing back against the IPO. (Wired $)
+ While SpaceX is shifting focus from Falcon 9 to Starship. (Ars Technica)

5 Google DeepMind will use the MMORPG Eve Online for AI model testing
It’s also bought a stake in the game’s maker. (Ars Technica)
+ DeepMind also recently built a new video-game-playing agent. (MIT Technology Review)

6 The US risks isolating its automakers by banning a Chinese EV standard
It’s prohibiting software that’s dominating global EV markets. (Rest of World)

7 Elon Musk’s proposed Texas chip factory could cost $119 billion
It would manufacture chips for Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. (CNBC)
+ Future AI chips could be built on glass. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Why the “attention-span crisis” is misunderstood
Technology may be exhausting attention rather than shortening it. (Atlantic $)

9 Scientists are getting closer to explaining what causes lightning
New tools are revealing unexpected physics inside thunderstorms. (Quanta)

10 Kids have found an age verification loophole: fake mustaches
Resourceful children are foiling blocks on adult websites. (TechCrunch)

Quote of the day

“My concern was about Sam saying one thing to one person and completely the opposite to another person.”

—Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI, testifies ‌in court that CEO Sam Altman was deceptive, Reuters reports.

One More Thing

ALAMY

A brief, weird history of brainwashing

During the Cold War, the US prepared for a psychic war with the Soviet Union and China by spending millions of dollars on research into manipulating the human brain. 

The science never exactly panned out, but residual beliefs fostered by this bizarre conflict continue to play a role in ideological and scientific debates to this day. And now, new technologies are altering how we think about mind control. 

This is how the race for mind control changed America forever.

—Annalee Newitz

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ Listen to the 10 bird songs of spring in this lovely compilation of American species.
+ Good Samaritans saved a 29-foot whale that had wandered too far into a river.
+ Explore the intersection of human emotion and machine learning in this look at AI’s influence on art.
+ Break down the walls between streaming services and manage all your digital music in one place with this app.

Balcony solar is already popular in Europe, and proponents say that the systems could make solar power more accessible for more people in the US, including renters. As popularity rises, though, some experts caution that there are safety concerns with how balcony solar would work with existing electrical equipment in homes.

Let’s talk about what balcony solar is, why it’s unique, and how new testing requirements could affect our progress toward deploying the technology in the US.

Plug-in solar systems are designed to be simple to install, often requiring no electrician or specialized worker at all. They’re small, and many can be plugged into existing outlets.

People across Germany have installed over a million balcony solar systems. They generally measure up to roughly two square meters or about 20 square feet, and can generate up to 800 watts—enough to power a standard microwave.

Now the plug-in solar wave is coming to the US. Many Americans have already installed DIY balcony solar without the permission of their utilities—it’s something of a regulatory gray area. In late 2025, Utah became the first state to explicitly allow people to install and use balcony solar systems. Over two dozen other states are now considering similar legislation.

Generally, utilities require users to sign an interconnection agreement before they can plug in large arrays of solar panels that generate power for the grid. There can be fees and permits, and it all amounts to an expensive and lengthy process.

Utah’s law ditched the interconnection requirement for panels that have a low power cap and that are certified by a national testing facility. (Legislation under consideration in other states, including New York, includes the same requirements.) The thinking is that since the panels produce very little power, which would be used to meet a home’s own energy demand and probably not get sent back to the grid, the same requirements shouldn’t apply. 

As for that certification piece, in January the national testing and certification lab UL Solutions released UL 3700, a testing protocol to certify balcony solar systems and ensure that they’re safe. 

There are three main safety considerations to address for these plug-in solar systems, says Joseph Bablo, manager of principal engineering, energy, and industrial automation at UL Solutions. First, there’s the possibility of overloading a circuit. Generally, electrical circuits have circuit breakers, which can trip and interrupt current if necessary. But if there’s a solar panel adding extra power to a circuit, a traditional breaker might not be able to respond to overload. Over time, overloaded circuits can damage equipment or even start a fire. 

Second, these small systems are typically installed on the outside of homes, and outdoor power outlets generally have ground fault circuit interruption (GFCI). Basically, if an outlet or its surroundings are wet, it can shut down to prevent electric shock. Many GFCI systems may not work if there’s power going back into an outlet from a solar panel.

Finally, there’s touch safety: If a plug gets disconnected from the wall, the blades of the plug may still have power running through them for a short time. If a panel is getting sunlight, those blades could be energized for longer than is typical.

The new UL Solutions testing framework aims to address these concerns. One of the key recommendations is that plug-in solar panels should use a special outlet that’s designed specifically for them. The safety measures included in that connection, and within a panel, would ensure that the panels are safe.

The need for a special outlet means that currently, people who want to plug in a solar panel array would probably need to have an electrician come and update their wiring in order to comply with the protocol, Bablo says. “I know they want to say ‘No electrician, no permits’—we’re not there.”

Today, anyone can buy products like solar panels and inverters, some of which carry their own component UL certifications, and string them together. (Inverters are covered under UL 1741, for example.)

But the gold standard is to have an entire system that meets the safety requirements, and that means adhering to the new standard, Bablo says. As of early May, there aren’t any plug-in solar systems that have been fully certified by UL Solutions. And Bablo said he couldn’t share information about what, if any, are in the pipeline.  

Even with the new certification requirements, Bablo still thinks plug-in solar still has the potential to help more people access the technology. “There’s a way for it to work, but we want it to work safely,” he says.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

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.

Forty-eight years ago this July, Louise Joy Brown became the world’s first person born with the help of in vitro fertilization. Millions more IVF babies have entered the world since then. And that’s partly thanks to advances in technology that have made IVF safer and more effective.

But it’s still not perfect. The process can be slow, painful, and expensive—and that’s for the lucky people who are able to access it in the first place. And by at least one measure, IVF success rates have been declining in recent years.

Reproduction is complex, and there’s a lot that embryologists and gynecologists still don’t know and can’t control. They don’t know why many healthy-looking embryos don’t “stick” in the uterus, for example. They don’t always have an explanation for why their patients can’t get pregnant. And they can’t always account for vast differences in IVF success rates between individuals and between fertility clinics.

Scientists are working on all those questions and more. They’re wrestling with complex ethical questions about how new genetic tools will be used to analyze or even alter embryos. Meanwhile, technologies designed to standardize treatment, eliminate human error, boost success rates, and make IVF more accessible are already beginning to usher in a new era for assisted reproduction—one aided by AI and robots.

1. Helping embryos stick

Some of those technologies are being developed at the Carlos Simon Foundation in Valencia, Spain. When I visited in March, researchers gave me a tour of the labs and showed me a device that had been used to keep a human uterus alive outside the body for the first time.

While some members of the team dream of building artificial uteruses that might one day be able to carry a fetus to term, they first want to use such devices to learn more about implantation—the moment at which a fertilized egg makes contact with the lining of the uterus, burrows inside, and essentially “hatches,” triggering the start of a pregnancy.

Despite decades of advances in IVF, that process is still poorly understood. Even healthy-looking embryos stick no more than 40% to 60% of the time.

In IVF techniques used today, clinics can create early-stage embryos and wait until the uterus is deemed most receptive, but once they insert the embryo into the uterus, it’s on its own. Xavier Santamaria, senior clinical scientist at the Carlos Simon Foundation, and his colleagues are trialing a different approach. They’ve developed a device that, at the press of a button, injects the embryo into the uterine lining.

JESS HAMZELOU / MITTR

In a demonstration I watched with a prototype, Santamaria picked up his speculum and turned to face the vaginal opening of his “patient,” which in this case was just a model of the real thing—a plastic bottom with labia, a vagina, a uterus, and ovaries, two short stumps representing what would normally be a pair of legs held in stirrups.

He hunched over and peered inside. “Embryo,” he called. His colleague Maria Pardo, an embryologist, passed him a thin needle containing a mouse embryo she had recently collected from a petri dish.

Santamaria’s device allows for the embryo-containing needle to be connected to a delivery tube. This tube also has a camera, a light, and a sensor that lets the doctor know when the needle reaches the uterine lining. Once it has been fed into the uterus, the gynecologist can see the inside of the organ and direct the tube to the lining.

JESS HAMZELOU / MITTR

“When everything is ready, you just press the button,” Santamaria said as he activated it using a foot pedal, allowing the embryo to be injected. “There it goes.”

The team has just started a trial of the device; so far, fewer than 10 women have undergone the procedure, and none of those have become pregnant. But foundation director Carlos Simon is hopeful, noting that the inventors of IVF had to perform over 160 cycles before Louise Brown was born (between 1969 and 1978, that team performed 457 cycles in 250 people, resulting in only two live births). “The trial is ongoing,” he says.

2. Picking the “best” eggs, sperm, and embryos

One long-running challenge of IVF has been selection. Say you manage to collect 10 eggs from one partner and a decent-looking semen sample from the other. How do you choose which cells to use? The same question comes up once the resulting embryos have been cultured in a dish for a few days: Which should you transfer to the uterus?

Traditionally, these judgments have been made by eye. Embryologists literally pick the ones that look the best in terms of their shape or, in the case of sperm, how they move. But scientists have been working on alternatives. And over the last decade or so, many have turned to genetic testing to hint at which embryos have the best chances of creating a healthy baby.

The most commonly used test is called PGT-A, which stands for preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy. Aneuploidy essentially means having an “incorrect” number of chromosomes, and it is thought that embryos with such characteristics are more likely to be lost through miscarriage or potentially develop into babies with genetic conditions.

Once embryologists have created embryos in the lab, they can pinch off a few cells and test them for aneuploidies. The tests are especially beneficial for women over the age of 38, says Alan Penzias, a reproductive endocrinologist at Boston IVF. “You start to see an improvement: more babies and fewer miscarriages,” he says. The tests can shorten the time to pregnancy.

This type of genetic testing is possible thanks to multiple advances in technology—not just in genomics, but also in the ability to keep embryos alive in a dish for five to six days and the technique of freezing embryos while the cells undergo testing and thawing them once the results are in. And it has become hugely popular—some clinics do PGT-A tests on all their embryos.

But PGT-A won’t give you a perfect readout of a future baby’s genetics, says Sonia Gayete-Lafuente, a reproductive endocrinologist at the Center for Human Reproduction in New York City. And some of the abnormalities might be able to self-correct with time. Gayete-Lafuente and her colleagues have transferred some of those “abnormal” embryos into patients’ uteruses and seen them develop into perfectly healthy children, she says.

Other forms of PGT are even more controversial. PGT-P tests are designed to predict an embryo’s chances of developing complex traits that rely on multiple genes, including medical disorders but also physical characteristics like height or cognitive factors like IQ. These tests are new, and they are illegal in some countries, including the UK. But they are gaining ground in the US. Nucleus Genomics—a company that invites customers to “have [their] best baby”—promises to predict traits running the gamut from eye color and intelligence to left-handedness and risk of Alzheimer’s.

When I asked IVF practitioners how they might respond if a patient asked for this service, most dodged the question and told me there’s not enough evidence that any of these tests actually work. They also cautioned that selecting for one trait might inadvertently introduce new risks. None seemed especially keen on the idea of using genetic testing for anything other than preventing serious disease.

3. Speeding things up with AI

Some seemed more excited about the potential for AI. After all, AI tools are generally good at recognizing patterns. Many researchers have attempted to train tools to spot healthy sperm, eggs, and embryos.

And they’ve had some success. A team at Columbia University Medical Center in New York has developed a device that uses AI to examine semen samples from men who have only tiny numbers of healthy sperm. An embryologist might struggle to find a single healthy sperm in such a sample. But the Sperm Tracking and Recovery (STAR) system can analyze over a million microscope images in an hour. It has already been used to create healthy embryos. The team behind the work announced the first pregnancy resulting from the treatment in November last year.

Other teams are using AI tools to advance IVF in more dramatic ways. Around a decade ago, a reproductive endocrinologist named Alejandro Chavez-Badiola began developing an AI tool trained to rank embryos, another to rank eggs, and another to select sperm. He recalls being struck by a realization that these tools were “the brains that have the potential to drive robots in the future,” he says.

4. Using robots to standardize IVF

In the early 2020s, Chavez-Badiola and his colleagues decided to combine technologies and develop an automated system for IVF. In theory, a robotic system loaded up with AI tools could undertake most of the steps required in the IVF process: selecting the eggs and sperm, fertilizing eggs to create embryos, culturing those embryos in a dish, and selecting the “best” one for transfer. Such a system could “do everything in a standard way” without ever getting tired, he says.

Chavez-Badiola, who is now founder and chief medical officer at Conceivable, started building prototypes by motorizing regular IVF equipment and connecting it to computers. He and his colleagues started testing their system with animal cells before eventually moving on to human ones. “We were able to prove that integrating robots to automate different steps in IVF is doable,” he says.

The device is now being used to prepare sperm and eggs and create embryos. At least 19 children have been born following the automated IVF. It is early days, but Chavez-Badiola is hoping that future iterations of the machine could each process thousands of IVF cycles in a year, potentially making the procedure more affordable and accessible.

Many in the field are excited about the potential for automated devices like Conceivable’s. “This is all time saved for the embryologists,” says Laura Rienzi, a clinical embryologist and scientific director of the IVIRMA network of fertility centers in Italy. She also hopes it will help standardize IVF treatments. “Automation [will allow for] every patient to be treated in the same way in every single lab in the world,” she says.

5. Controversial edits are on the table

There’s a catch, however: All these technologies rely on the availability of at least some healthy sperm, eggs, and embryos at the outset. Embryologists and IVF patients have to work with what they’ve got. And sometimes, what they’ve got won’t result in a healthy baby. 

That’s why some scientists are proposing a controversial idea: using gene-editing technologies like CRISPR to tinker with the genome of an IVF embryo before it is implanted. The biophysicist He Jiankui infamously took this approach to create embryos that resulted in the births of three children in the late 2010s. He was widely condemned by the scientific community and ultimately spent three years in a Chinese prison. 

His former romantic partner Cathy Tie, who now leads startup Origin Genomics, is pursuing the technology as a potential way to prevent serious disease in children. At a recent event held at the Hastings Center for Bioethics, Tie made the case for using embryo editing to prevent diseases like cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s, and sickle-cell.

It won’t be straightforward from a technical, legal, or ethical perspective. Diseases that are known to be caused by single-gene mutations are good first candidates, but as the Center for Human Reproduction’s Gayete-Lafuente points out, most diseases are much more complicated than that. “I wish we could understand the genetic basis of every disease to be able to prevent it,” she says. So far, we can’t. Besides, most diseases can be influenced by our diets, behaviors, and environments as well as our genes.

As things stand, no one knows if editing a human embryo to eliminate the risk of one disease might increase a future child’s risk of some other disorder. And some scientists worry that such edits might be a slippery slope to genetic enhancement or eugenics.

Rienzi hopes that the technology might be developed in a safe way with regulatory oversight, and only for a specific list of diseases. “It has to be within a legal context,” she says. “But to me, it’s a dream.”

In the meantime, the field looks set to keep transforming with the development of new technologies that are already creating healthy babies. Watch this space. 

Inexpensive seafloor-hopping submersibles could stoke deep-sea science—and mining

Last week, two oblong neon submersibles started to descend nearly 6,000 meters into the Pacific Ocean. Throughout the rest of May, they will map the seafloor in search of critical mineral deposits. 

If all goes well, the vehicles, built by Orpheus Ocean, could help scientists probe the vastly understudied deep sea—and the resources it holds—at a fraction of the cost of existing systems.

But the same submersibles are also attracting deep-sea mining companies, raising concerns about environmental impacts. Find out why they’re drawing so much attention.

—Hannah Richter

The new war room: 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now 

A new kind of system has entered the war room: conversational AI tools that commanders turn to not just for analysis, but for advice. 

One US defense official told MIT Technology Review that personnel might give these advice engines a list of potential targets to help decide which to strike first. China is commissioning similar tools too.

But as the systems gain traction, they’re also sparking concerns about AI-generated errors, a lack of transparency, and Big Tech gaining undue influence over what information gets seen. 

Here’s how these AI advice engines could impact the battlefield.

—James O’Donnell

The new war room is one of the 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now, our list of the big ideas, trends, and advances in the field that are driving progress today—and will shape what’s possible tomorrow.

MIT Technology Review Narrated: is fake grass a bad idea? The AstroTurf wars are far from over. 

In 2001, Americans installed just over 7 million square meters of synthetic turf. By 2024, that number was 79 million square meters—enough to carpet all of Manhattan and then some. The increase worries folks who study microplastics and environmental pollution.  

While the plastic-making industry insists that synthetic fields are safe if properly installed, lots of researchers think that isn’t so. 

—Douglas Main 

This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Elon Musk pushed OpenAI to go commercial, its president has testified
Greg Brockman said Musk tried to turn it into a for-profit company years ago. (NYT $)
+ Musk allegedly wanted full control so he could raise $80 billion to colonize Mars. (Reuters $)
+ The Tesla CEO claims he intended for OpenAI to remain a non-profit. (BBC)
+ Here’s what happened in week one of Musk v. Altman. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Google and Meta are building AI agents to rival OpenClaw
Google’s Gemini agent will take actions on the users’ behalf. (Business Insider)
+ Meta’s will be powered by its Muse Spark AI model. (FT $)
+ Hustlers are cashing in on China’s OpenClaw AI craze. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Anthropic will spend $200 billion on Google’s cloud and chips
The investment will be spread across five years. (The Information $)
+ It’s part of a broader AI compute war. (Axios) 

4 DeepSeek is nearing a $45 billion valuation
A state-backed “Big Fund” will lead a new investment round in the company. (FT $)
+ Beijing is pushing to build alternatives to Nvidia and OpenAI. (Bloomberg $)
+ Here’s why DeepSeek’s new model matters. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Anthropic is launching AI agents for banks and financial firms
The 10 tools cover a broad mix of financial services tasks. (WSJ $)
+ They’re part of a push to win over Wall Street. (Bloomberg $)

6 Apple will pay $250 million to settle an AI lawsuit
It was accused of misleading iPhone buyers about Apple Intelligence. (BBC)
+ Some iPhone owners are eligible to receive up to $95. (NYT $)

7 Cheap laptops and phones may be disappearing because of AI demand
 Competition for memory chips is driving up gadget prices worldwide. (The Guardian)

8 Google DeepMind workers in the UK have voted to unionize
As a result of Google’s work with the Pentagon. (Wired $)

9 Pennsylvania is suing Character.AI over chatbots posing as doctors
Investigators say the bots claimed to hold medical licenses. (NPR)
+ How well do AI health tools work? (MIT Technology Review)

10 Scientists created a “living” plastic that destroys itself on command
It could help to eliminate microplastics. (Gizmodo)

Quote of the day

“I want AI to benefit humanity, not to facilitate a genocide.” 

—An anonymous Google DeepMind worker tells the Guardian that Google’s work with the Israel Defense Forces had motivated their vote to unionize.

One More Thing

COURTESY OF BENEATH THE WAVES

How tracking animal movement may save the planet

For decades, wildlife researchers have dreamed of building an “Internet of Animals”—a big-data system that monitors and analyzes animal behavior to help us understand the planet. Advances in sensors, AI, and satellite technology are now bringing that vision to reality.

Scientists want the system to track 100,000 sensor-tagged animals. They believe it could reveal how species respond to climate change and ecosystem loss—and even predict environmental disasters. Read the full story on how their idea could save our planet.

—Matthew Ponsford

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ Master the art of fried chicken with this definitive chef’s guide.
+ Find out why some birds hop and others walk in this breakdown of avian lifestyles.
+ This vintage Hollywood map shows how California’s landscape stood in for everything from the Nile to the Alps.
+ Here’s a fascinating look at the “Flatbed” airplane that was surprisingly efficient on paper but never left the hangar.

Week one of the Musk v. Altman trial: what it was like in the room

Two of the most powerful figures in AI—Sam Altman and Elon Musk—are in the middle of a landmark legal showdown, with Musk alleging he was misled about OpenAI becoming a for-profit company.

Our reporter Michelle Kim, who also happens to be a lawyer, has been in court each day, and has broken down the first week’s key moments in her latest report. In a new Q&A, she also reveals what it was like in the room, the new details that have emerged about how Musk and OpenAI operate—and what we can expect from this week’s proceedings.

Find out what she’s discovered so far, and if you want to keep up with MIT Technology Review’s ongoing coverage of the Musk v. Altman trial, follow @techreview or @michelletomkim on X.

—James O’Donnell

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday. 

A blueprint for using AI to strengthen democracy

—Andrew Sorota & Josh Hendler lead work on AI and democracy at the Office of Eric Schmidt.

Faster than many realize, AI is becoming the primary interface through which we form beliefs and participate in democratic self-governance. This shift could further strain already fragile institutions, but it could also help address problems like polarization and declining civic engagement.

What happens next depends on design choices that are already being made, whether we know it or not. Here’s how we can harness AI to strengthen democracy.

Artificial scientists: 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now

Large language models can already assist scientists in all sorts of ways, from writing code to searching through literature and drafting articles. But companies and labs have a much more ambitious vision. They want to build AI systems that can act as a full member of a scientific team—and even conduct entire research projects.

These artificial scientists seem like a win for frontier labs and for society at large. But they could also narrow the scope of scientific inquiry.

Read the full story on how artificial scientists could reshape the research process—and what might be lost along the way.

—Grace Huckins

Artificial scientists is an item on our list of the 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now, MIT Technology Review’s guide to what’s really worth your attention in the busy, buzzy world of AI. We’re unpacking one item from the list each day here in The Download, so stay tuned.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The Pentagon has struck sweeping AI deals for classified work
It’s signed contracts with Microsoft, Nvidia, AWS, and Reflection AI. (NYT $)
+ It wants the US military to be an “AI-first” force. (BBC)
+ The announcement leaves Anthropic increasingly isolated. (WP $)
+ Here’s how the firms could train on classified data. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Elon Musk has finally settled the SEC lawsuit over the Twitter purchase
He’s agreed to pay a $1.5 million fine for waiting too long to disclose his initial stock purchases. (Guardian)
+ But won’t lose any of the $150 million he allegedly saved. (The Verge)
+ Musk allegedly illegally hid his growing Twitter stake. (CBS News)

3 A Chinese court has ruled that firms can’t lay off workers on AI grounds
They can’t terminate employees just to replace them with AI. (Bloomberg $)
+ The court said a firm had illegally fired one of its workers. (NPR)
+ Chinese tech workers are starting to train their AI doubles—and pushing back. (MIT Technology Review)

4 A gene therapy is helping deaf children hear again
In a trial, 80% of patients gained measurable hearing. (Vox)

5 The White House is vetting AI models before they’re released
It may create a new working group to oversee AI development. (NYT $)
+ A war over AI regulation is coming to the US. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Nature has retracted a paper on ChatGPT’s educational benefits
Over “discrepancies” and a lack of confidence in the findings. (404 Media)
+ The paper had already racked up hundreds of citations. (Ars Technica)
+ AI giants want to take over the classroom. (MIT Technology Review)

7 GameStop made a $56 billion bid for eBay
eBay said it was reviewing the offer. (Ars Technica)
+ The bid has drawn skepticism from investors and analysts. (Reuters $)

8 AI systems are increasingly used to monitor workers’ emotions
New tools claim to measure “agreeability” as well as productivity. (The Atlantic $)

9 Peter Thiel is backing wave-powered data centers
He’s leading a $140 million investment into a startup developing the tech. (FT $)

10 Ask Jeeves is shutting down after nearly 30 years online
The closure marks the end of one of the internet’s earliest search engines. (NYT $)

Quote of the day

“By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America.” 

—Elon Musk texted a warning to OpenAI president Greg Brockman two days before their courtroom battle started, NBC News reports.

One More Thing

SIMON MITCHELL

Meet the divers trying to figure out how deep humans can go

Two hundred and thirty meters into one of the deepest underwater caves on Earth, a team of extreme divers tested a route to new depth records: breathing hydrogen.

They believe the gas could help the human body withstand underwater pressure significantly past its natural threshold. But the approach is highly experimental—and dangerous.

Find out how far they’re willing to go.

—Samantha Schuyler

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ Wild horses are roaming in Spain for the first time in 10,000 years.
+ Star Wars meets the Renaissance in this bardcore cover of the “Imperial March.”
+ Improve your writing by avoiding these six common linguistic pitfalls shared by many Americans.
+ From Stephen King’s IT changing the clown industry to Black Widow boosting hair dye sales, here are 12 times movies changed the real world.

We are now in the early stages of another such shift. Faster than many realize, AI is becoming the primary interface through which we form beliefs and participate in democratic self-governance. If left unchecked, this shift could further strain America’s already fragile institutions. But it could also help address long-standing problems, like lagging civic engagement and deepening polarization. What happens next depends on design choices that are already being made, whether we know it or not.

Start with what might be called the epistemic layer—how we come to know things. People are increasingly relying on AI to know what is true, what is happening, and whom to trust. Search is already substantially AI-mediated. The next generation of AI assistants will synthesize information, frame it, and present it with authority. For a growing number of people, asking an AI will become the default way to form views on a candidate, a policy, or a public figure. Whoever controls what these models say therefore has increasing influence over what people believe. 

Technology has always shaped the way citizens interact with information. But a new problem will soon arise in the form of personal AI agents, which can change not only how people receive information but how they act on it. These systems will conduct research, draft communications, highlight causes, and lobby on a user’s behalf. They will inform decisions such as how to vote on a ballot measure, which organizations are worth supporting, or how to respond to a government notice. They will, in a meaningful sense, begin to mediate the relationship between individuals and the institutions that govern them.

We’ve already seen with social media what happens when algorithms optimize for engagement over understanding. Platforms do not need to have an explicit political agenda to produce polarization and radicalization. An agent that knows your preferences and your anxieties—one shaped to keep you engaged—poses the same risks. And in this case the risks may be even more difficult to detect, because an agent presents itself as your advocate. It speaks for you, acts on your behalf, and may earn trust precisely through that intimacy.

Now zoom out to the collective. AI agents and humans could soon participate in the same forums, where it may be impossible to tell them apart. Even if every individual AI agent were well-designed and aligned with its user’s interests, the interactions of millions of agents could produce outcomes that no individual wanted or chose. For example, research shows that agents displaying no individual bias can still generate collective biases at scale. And setting aside what agents do to each other, there is what they do for their users. A public sphere in which everyone has a personalized agent attuned to their existing views is not, in aggregate, a public sphere at all. It is a collection of private worlds, each internally coherent but collectively inhospitable to the kind of shared deliberation that democracy requires.

Taken together, these three transformations—in how we know, how we act, and how we engage in collective governance—amount to a fundamental change in the texture of citizenship. In the near future, people will form their political views through AI filters, exercise their civic agency through AI agents, and participate in institutions and public discussions that are themselves shaped by the interactions of millions of such agents.

Today’s democracy is not ready for this. Our institutions were designed for a world in which power was exercised visibly, information traveled slowly enough to be contested, and reality felt more shared, if imperfectly. All of this was already fraying long before generative AI arrived. And yet this need not be a story of decline. Avoiding that outcome requires us to design for something better.

On the informational layer, AI companies must ramp up existing efforts to ensure that models’ outputs are truthful. They should also explore some promising early findings that AI models can help reduce polarization. A recent field evaluation of AI-generated fact checks on X found that people with a variety of political viewpoints deemed AI-written notes more helpful than human-written ones. The paper is yet to be peer-reviewed, but that is a potentially revolutionary finding: AI-assisted fact-checking may be able to achieve the kind of cross-partisan credibility that has eluded most manual human efforts. Greater understanding of and transparency about how models make these assertions and prioritize sources in the process could help build further public trust.

On the agentic layer, we need ways to evaluate whether AI agents faithfully represent their users. An agent must never have an agenda of its own or misrepresent its user’s views—a technically daunting requirement in domains where users may have not explicitly stated any preferences. But faithful representation also cannot become an accessory to motivated reasoning. An agent that refuses to present uncomfortable information, that shields its user from ever questioning prior beliefs or fails to adjust to a change of heart, is not acting in the person’s best interest.

Finally, on the institutional level, policymakers should hurry to harness AI’s potential to make governance more responsive and legitimate. Several states and localities are already using AI-mediated platforms to conduct democratic deliberation at scale, building on research showing that AI mediators can help citizens find common ground. As agents become increasingly common participants in public input processes—and there is already evidence that bots are skewing those processes—identity verification for both humans and their agentic proxies must be built in from the start.

What is needed is a new generation of democratic infrastructure, technological and institutional, built for the world that is actually here. Failing to design for democratic outcomes, in a domain this consequential, means designing for something else. And the history of unaccountable power does not leave much room for optimism about what that something else tends to be.

Andrew Sorota and Josh Hendler lead work on AI and democracy at the Office of Eric Schmidt.