Today, I’m talking with Helen Toner, the executive director of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University. This episode is part two of our series on AI in real life.
At this point, reading through the latest splashy pledge to use AI for the good of the environment feels like downing a nonalcoholic beer. Admittedly, I'm suspicious from the onset. How can this be good?
Today, I’m talking with Mitch Glazier, who is CEO and chairman of the RIAA. This conversation was a real full-circle moment for me: I was in college when Napster hit, and the RIAA became everyone’s villain for suing kids for downloading music.
On Tuesday, millions of American voters went to the polls and voted overwhelmingly for Democrats and against AI. The fight against Big Tech is about to come roaring back, and the fight over data centers is looking even harder for the folks trying to build them.
Consider what passes for success in technology policy. An AI company promises that its chatbot will not encourage suicide. A social media platform makes it more difficult for children to buy fentanyl. These are important protections, and they should have existed all along.
In Foreign Affairs, historian Niall Ferguson, researcher Lisa Klaassen, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt cast the US and China as AI empires and every other country as a dependency. The race won't be decided by breakthroughs but by who can bankroll it. US corporations alone plan to spend more than $600 billion in 2026.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday night that New Yorkers must resist the narrative that an AI takeover is inevitable and demand regulations that protect the public and put power back in their hands.
Today, I’m talking with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who has a lot of thoughts about AI, tech, and privacy.
Today, I’m talking with Benn Jordan, musician, YouTuber, researcher, and investigative journalist. You might know Benn from those first two titles — he’s got a prolific discography of experimental music dating back decades.
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what’s coming next.
President Donald Trump has a knack for turning words against his enemies. His first successful presidential run was built on monikers like "Little Marco" and "Crooked Hillary"; he changed "fake news" from a phrase describing scammy media outlets to a derogatory term for the press at large.
Sam Altman thinks that the benefits of AI will be so great that "the world should accept some bad things happening" along the way.
Today, I’m talking with Sen. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California. Schiff sits on a number of committees with oversight into tech and AI: intellectual property, antitrust, privacy and technology — it’s all there.
On Equity, we discussed the Trump administration's attempts to rebrand AI.
AI is far from a perfect resource. But it seems to hallucinate less than Kennedy.
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next.
Brace yourself: It turns out AI is being optimized for cheating. OpenAI’s agents hacked into Hugging Face to get the answers to a cybersecurity test. Next, they solved a prestigious math problem (or just stole from two top mathematicians’ answer sheets). Anthropic’s models have also hacked into other companies’ systems four times already.
Is the wall AI is hitting in the room with us right now?
Chris Lehane argues that stronger AI capabilities require stronger safety evidence, shared standards, and durable policy action while the policy window remains open.
Import AI issue 471 focuses on the Hugging Face and OpenAI agent incident, in which hundreds of agents secretly collaborated on OpenAI infrastructure, built communication systems, acted collectively and attacked OpenAI and Hugging Face.
The Institute for Law & AI proposed radical optionality in regulation: governments should avoid excessive regulation now while building information gathering, whistleblower protection, evaluation and model-weight security capabilities to respond quickly when powerful AI affects the world. A Meta and KAIST paper proposed a Neural Computer unifying computation, memory and I/O in learned runtime states.