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The ongoing public feud between the Department of Defense and the AI company Anthropic has raised a deep and still unanswered question: Does the law actually allow the US government to conduct mass surveillance on Americans? Surprisingly, the answer is not straightforward. More than a decade after Edward Snowden exposed the NSA’s collection of bulk…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Coming soon: our 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now For years, MIT Technology Review’s newsroom has been ahead of the curve, tracking the developments in AI that matter and…

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This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Online harassment is entering its AI era Scott Shambaugh didn’t think twice when he denied an AI agent’s request to contribute to matplotlib, a software library he helps manage. Then things…

The race to prevent the worst wildfires has been an increasingly high-tech one. Companies are proposing AI fire detection systems and drones that can stamp out early blazes. And now, one Canadian startup says it’s going after lightning. Lightning-sparked fires can be a big deal: The Canadian wildfires of 2023 generated nearly 500 million metric…

Scott Shambaugh didn’t think twice when he denied an AI agent’s request to contribute to matplotlib, a software library that he helps manage. Like many open-source projects, matplotlib has been overwhelmed by a glut of AI code contributions, and so Shambaugh and his fellow maintainers have instituted a policy that all AI-written code must be…

The transformational potential of AI is already well established. Enterprise use cases are building momentum and organizations are transitioning from pilot projects to AI in production. Companies are no longer just talking about AI; they are redirecting budgets and resources to make it happen. Many are already experimenting with agentic AI, which promises new levels…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Listen to Earth’s rumbling, secret soundtrack The boom of a calving glacier. The crackling rumble of a wildfire. The roar of a surging storm front. They’re the noises of the living…

Step inside the newsroom with MIT Technology Review editors for sharp analysis and unpublished insights from the team that researches and reports on emerging tech daily.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. This startup claims it can stop lightning and prevent catastrophic wildfires Startup Skyward Wildfire says it can prevent catastrophic fires by stopping the lightning strikes that ignite them. So far, it hasn’t publicly…

On June 1, 2023, as a sweltering heat wave baked Quebec, thousands of lightning strikes flashed across the province, setting off more than 120 wildfires. The blazes ripped through parched forests and withered grasslands, burned for weeks, and compounded what was rapidly turning into Canada’s worst fire year on record. In the end, nearly 7,000…

On February 28, OpenAI announced it had reached a deal that will allow the US military to use its technologies in classified settings. CEO Sam Altman said the negotiations, which the company began pursuing only after the Pentagon’s public reprimand of Anthropic, were “definitely rushed.” In its announcements, OpenAI took great pains to say that…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. I checked out one of the biggest anti-AI protests ever Pull the plug! Pull the plug! Stop the slop! Stop the slop! For a few hours this Saturday, February 28, I watched as…

Pull the plug! Pull the plug! Stop the slop! Stop the slop! For a few hours this Saturday, February 28, I watched as a couple of hundred anti-AI protesters marched through London’s King’s Cross tech hub, home to the UK headquarters of OpenAI, Meta, and Google DeepMind, chanting slogans and waving signs. The march was…

The American Society of Magazine Editors has named MIT Technology Review as a finalist for a 2026 National Magazine Award in the reporting category. The shortlisted story—“We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard”—is part of the publication’s Power Hungry package on AI’s energy burden. AI is often described…

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 rewiring how the world’s best Go players think Ten years ago AlphaGo, Google DeepMind’s AI program, stunned the world by defeating the South Korean Go player Lee Sedol. And in the…

Burrowed in the alleys of Hongik-dong, a hushed residential neighborhood in eastern Seoul, is a faded stone-tiled building stamped “Korea Baduk Association,” the governing body for professional Go. The game is an ancient one, with sacred stature in South Korea.  But inside the building, rooms once filled with the soft clatter of hands dipping into…

For years, Industry 4.0 transformation has centered on the convergence of intelligent technologies like AI, cloud, the internet of things, robotics, and digital twins. Industry 5.0 marks a pivotal shift from integrating emerging technologies to orchestrating them at scale. With Industry 5.0, the purpose of this interconnected web of technologies is more nuanced: to augment…

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. America was winning the race to find Martian life. Then China jumped in. In July 2024, NASA’s Perseverance rover came across a peculiar rocky outcrop on Mars covered in strange spots. On Earth,…

When a company claims to have created what’s essentially the holy grail of batteries, there are bound to be some questions. Interest has been swirling since Donut Lab, a Finnish company, announced last month that it had a new solid-state battery technology, one that was ready for large-scale production. The company said its batteries can…

To most people, rocks are just rocks. To geologists, they are much, much more: crystal-filled time capsules with the power to reveal the state of the planet at the very moment they were forged.  For decades, NASA had been on a time capsule hunt like none other—one across Mars. Its rovers have journeyed around a…

Listen to the session or watch below Sodium-based batteries could be a cheaper, safer alternative to lithium-ion, and the technology is finally making its way into cars—and energy storage arrays on the grid. Sodium-ion batteries are one of MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2026 list, and this subscriber-only discussion explains why. Watch a…

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 Crime issue Technology has long made crime and its prosecution a game of cat and mouse. But those same new technologies that have allowed crime to outpace law have also reenergized…

The boom of a calving glacier. The crackling rumble of a wildfire. The roar of a surging storm front. They’re the noises of the living Earth, music of this one particular sphere and clues to the true nature of these dramatic events. But as loud as all these things are, they emit even more acoustic…

The only reality show that matters The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is one of the best shows on television right now. Not one of the best reality TV shows, but one of the best TV shows, period. Chronicling a shifting group of wealthy women in and around Salt Lake, the show has featured…

Eons ago, in 2012, I had a weird experience. My iPhone suddenly shut down. When I restarted it, I found it was totally reset—clean, like a new device. This was the early days of iOS, so I wasn’t too concerned until I went to connect it to my computer to restore it from a backup.…