MIT Technology Review

In the final week of the Musk v. Altman trial, lawyers traded blows over Elon Musk’s and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s credibility. Altman was grilled on his alleged history of lying and self-dealing involving companies that do business with OpenAI. But he fired back, painting Musk as a power-seeker who wanted to control the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI)—powerful AI that can compete with humans on most cognitive tasks.  As evidence of their commitment to AI safety, OpenA

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. How Chinese short dramas became AI content machines China’s short drama industry is fueled by bite-sized, melodramatic, and smutty shows built for smartphone scrolling. Now, many are being made entirely with AI: no actors, camera operators, cinematographers, or CGI specialists required. An average of 470 AI-generated short dramas were rele

Every year the World Health Organization publishes a global health statistics report. It features the numbers behind world health trends and, importantly, assesses whether we’re on track to reach ambitious goals set in 2015. It’s a bit like a health grade. The 2026 report was published on Wednesday. And the results aren’t looking brilliant. While we are seeing some improvements, they are uneven, and they’re far too slow. The targets themselves are part of the United Nations’ Sustainable

In a dimly lit bedroom, a frightened young woman is thrown onto a bed by a tall, muscular man. He grabs her hand, and flame-like vines crawl across her body, fusing with her flesh. She levitates, then drops. A dragon-shaped tattoo appears across her chest. “Two months,” the man says. “Give me an heir, or I will eat you.” The scene is from Carrying the Dragon King’s Baby, one of the many hundreds of short dramas that appear on apps like DramaWave and ReelShort. There’s just something about

Financial services companies have unique needs when it comes to business AI. They operate in one of the most highly regulated sectors while responding to external events that are updated by the second. As a result, the success of agentic AI in financial services depends less on the sophistication of the system and more on the quality, security, and accessibility of the data it relies on.  “It all starts with the data,” says Steve Mayzak, global managing director of Search AI at Elast

When generative AI first moved from research labs into real-world business applications, enterprises made a tacit bargain: “Capability now, control later.” Feed your proprietary data into third-party AI models, and you will get powerful results. But your data passes through systems you do not own, under governance you do not set. The protections you rely on are only as durable as the provider’s next policy update. Now, with generative AI established in everyday business operations and sophist

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. The shock of seeing your body used in deepfake porn When Jennifer got a research job in 2023, she ran her new professional headshot through a facial recognition program. She wanted to see whether it would pull up the porn videos she’d made more than a decade earlier. It did, but it also surfaced something she’d never seen before: one of her o

The Tesla Semi has officially arrived. The company recently released a photo of the first vehicle rolling off its new full-scale production line. This moment has been nearly a decade in the making: The company first announced the truck in late 2017. And now we’ve got final battery specs, official prices, and big news about big orders. The Semi is a relatively affordable electric semitruck with pretty impressive performance. It also comes at a moment when Tesla has lost its grip on the glob

When Jennifer got a job doing research for a nonprofit in 2023, she ran her new professional headshot through a facial recognition program. She wanted to see if the tech would pull up the porn videos she’d made more than 10 years before, when she was in her early 20s. It did in fact return some of that content, and also something alarming that she’d never seen before: one of her old videos, but with someone else’s face on her body. “At first, I thought it was just a different person,” says J

A Redditor recently wrote that he was “desperate for help”: for about a month, he said, his phone had been inundated by calls from “strangers” who were “looking for a lawyer, a product designer, a locksmith.” Callers were apparently misdirected by Google’s generative AI.  In March, a software developer in Israel was contacted on WhatsApp after Google’s chatbot Gemini provided incorrect customer service instructions that included his number.  And in April, a PhD candidate at the U

In the second week of the landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, Musk’s motivations for bringing the suit were under scrutiny. 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 c

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. 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

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. 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

Technology is changing the way we make babies. The pioneering work of the scientists who invented IVF led to the birth of the first “test tube baby” in 1978. We’ve come a long, long way since then. 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

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. 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

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. 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

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 c

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. 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,

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. 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 da

Every few centuries, changes in how information moves reshape how societies govern themselves. The printing press spread vernacular literacy, helping give rise to the Reformation and, eventually, representative government. The telegraph made it possible to administer vast nations like the US, accelerating the growth of the modern bureaucratic state. Broadcast media created shared national audiences, which in turn fueled mass democracy. We are now in the early stages of another such shift. Fas