As part of AI company Anthropic’s Project Glasswing initiative, the new general-purpose model Mythos is uniquely powerful in the artificial intelligence industry and is causing concern among even people who are normally trusting of AI. The company, which also makes the AI model Claude, has claimed that Mythos is currently too advanced for public release, and is instead entrusting the model to cybersecurity experts for the time being. Some are worried this could pave the way for even more nefariousness in the AI space.

‘New era of hacking’

Mythos’ AI programming is able to find potential weaknesses in cybersecurity, and it can “detect thousands of high- and critical-severity bugs and software defects, with vulnerabilities identified in most major operating systems and web browsers,” said NBC News. Some of these vulnerabilities “had been undiscovered for decades,” according to Anthropic’s experts. The company found that Mythos’ “cybersecurity capabilities in particular were surprisingly advanced” compared to similar general-purpose AI models.

But there are also fears that Mythos “could usher in a new era of hacking and cybersecurity,” said NBC News. Mythos is “capable of advanced reasoning,” which could allow it to “identify and exploit a growing number of software vulnerabilities” if it were to fall into the wrong hands. To stave off these fears, Anthropic is allowing certain tech firms to access Mythos. But the company “does not have plans yet to release Mythos to the general public,“ said Bloomberg, a move that will ensure the AI ends up “in the hands of defenders first,” officials with Anthropic said.

The tech firms are expected to use Mythos as part of a project called Glasswing to “hunt for flaws in their products and share findings with industry peers,” said Bloomberg. It is a notable change because it will be the “first time a leading AI lab has built a frontier model and simultaneously decided the public cannot use it,” said Forbes. Anthropic’s position remains “straightforward: The model’s cyber capabilities are too dangerous for general availability.”

‘Humanity’s most devious behaviors’

In addittion to hacking vulnerabilities, some experts are concerned about Mythos’ capabilities. Anthropic released a safety evaluation for Mythos that shows a “striking leap in scores on many evaluation benchmarks,” the company said. In some instances, the evaluation “reads like a thriller about an AI that has learned some of humanity’s most devious behaviors,” said Axios.

At least one of the tests performed by Anthropic showed Mythos “acting like a cutthroat executive,” said Axios, doing things like “turning a competitor into a dependent wholesale customer, threatening to cut off supply to control pricing and keeping extra supplier shipments it hadn’t paid for.” The AI had instances where it “used a prohibited method to get an answer, then tried to ‘re-solve’ it to avoid detection,” though these were limited to “less than 0.001% of interactions.”

These issues have not stopped companies from working with Mythos, as “approximately 40 organizations involved in the design, maintenance or operation of computer systems are said to have joined Glasswing,” said The Guardian. This includes major firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, JPMorganChase and Microsoft. And while Anthropic has previously sparred with the Trump administration about its implementation in the Defense Department, the company has also “had discussions with the U.S. government regarding Mythos.”

Americans may be unwittingly giving hackers an easy path to access their houses. Cybersecurity experts, including FBI cybercrime analysts, are warning about residential proxy networks found on many off-brand electronics. These networks often allow hackers to hide in plain sight.

What are residential proxy networks?

These software systems are “designed to route other people’s internet traffic through a user’s device,” said Cyber Magazine. The networks operate largely like “forged return addresses on envelopes — someone else’s internet traffic is rerouted through your connection,” said officials at Comcast’s Threat Research Lab to Cyber. As the networks engage with users, they “quietly launder illegitimate activity” while making it appear that your device is the “initiator of that traffic.”

Residential proxy networks can make their way onto a variety of home devices, as “TV streaming devices, digital picture frames, smartphones, tablets and routers are used to route traffic,” said the FBI. Many people who own such devices do not “realize their internet connection could be used by someone else without their permission.” The devices can sometimes gain internet access when the “owner of the device provides consent” unintentionally; other times, the owner “does not provide consent and is unaware their IP address is being used.”

Some of these devices “ship with residential proxy software preinstalled on them,” which can “happen with certain low-cost video streaming systems,” said The Wall Street Journal. In other cases, people might “download the code to their smartphones” without realizing it. And since the networks make it appear like illegal activity is coming from an innocent person’s home, there’s a “chance that law enforcement could come knocking at your door.”

How can people protect themselves?

The FBI has a list of tips to help people stay safe, urging Americans to “avoid TV streaming devices that claim to provide free sports, TV shows and movies,” as these “may contain malware or backdoors that hijack your internet network and can lead to identity theft,” said the agency. The agency also recommended people be wary of downloading free VPNs and clicking on pop-ups, which can “initiate malware installation on your device.”

In the midst of these continued cyberattacks, some ordinary Americans are fighting back. Benjamin Brundage, a senior at the Rochester Institute of Technology, began an investigation in 2025 as a “growing network of hacked devices was launching the biggest cyberattacks ever seen on the internet” via a Chinese company called Ipidea, said the Journal. Using cat memes to “lighten the mood” while speaking to hackers, Brundage was able to find out significant information about the attackers, and law enforcement eventually “took action against the network.”

Brundage “identified 11 of the largest residential proxy companies, including Ipidea, that were vulnerable” to hackers, said the Journal. Other companies also assisted law enforcement in the investigation. Google “took legal action” against Ipidea to “take down domains used to control devices and proxy traffic through them,” said the tech company in a press release. While there are still “significant challenges for network defenders to detect and block malicious activities,” officials believe the action taken against Ipidea has reduced the “available pool of devices for the proxy operators by millions.”

Big Tech may have reached “an inflection point,” said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. A Los Angeles jury last week ordered Meta and Google to pay a combined $6 million to a 20-year-old woman, known as Kaley G.M., who claimed their apps caused her depression, body shame, and trauma throughout her childhood. (ByteDance, which developed TikTok, and Snap Inc. previously settled out of court.)

The decision came a day after a New Mexico jury found that Meta owes $375 million for failing to protect kids from sexual predators online. Though Meta and Google will appeal the rulings, thousands of similar lawsuits are “waiting in the wings.” Social media giants could face billions in future judgments. That’s because Kaley’s lawyers made a “novel argument” others will use, said Hannah Epstein in The Dispatch. They side-stepped “First Amendment concerns” and Section 230—which shields social media platforms from responsibility for what their users post—by focusing not on the content itself but on the algorithms and app designs that keep minors hooked to Instagram and YouTube for hours. Citing “a trove” of internal documents from Google and Meta, they contended that the companies deliberately targeted preteens with intentionally addictive features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications, and beauty filters. “We’re basically pushers,” one Instagram employee wrote to colleagues.

Parents will “understandably celebrate those verdicts,” said David French in The New York Times. But the First Amendment is our most fundamental right, and it protects even “toxic and harmful” speech. I don’t doubt that social media can be damaging, but “a social media site is not a bottle of alcohol or a cigarette.” Parents “are not helpless,” and we can and should control kids’ use of smartphones and these apps. This “social media shakedown” is a big victory for trial lawyers, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, but it’s a slippery slope that will invite countless more lawsuits. “Are platforms supposed to prohibit users from posting photos that might make someone feel depressed or insecure?” That sure covers a lot of what’s online.

It’s easy for critics to blame “greedy plaintiffs” and “runaway juries,” said Austin Sarat in The Guardian. But this case presented mountains of evidence that Meta and Google engineered “the addictive qualities of their sites.” That’s legal “negligence,” for which countless kids like Kaley “have paid the price.” For Meta and Google, it appears “the moment of reckoning has arrived, at long last,” said Valerie Hudson in the Deseret News. With the shield of Section 230 finally pierced, social media firms now face “the threat of immense financial harm” if they continue to “create compulsive, unstoppable engagement” with toxic garbage.

Don’t bank on it, said Nicholas Creel in Newsweek. These verdicts may not survive appeals, and have not created “any coherent legal standard governing how social media companies may or may not build their products.” Only Congress can create those standards through legislation. But how do lawmakers define what’s addictive or damaging? asked Douglas Murray in the New York Post. The onus is us—the consumers of Big Tech’s products. You’d be hard-pressed to find an adult in the U.S. who doesn’t have an “unhealthy relationship” with their smartphone. No wonder our children get hooked, too. The long-term solution to this problem “lies in all of our hands.”

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence can sometimes offer less-than-stellar guidance. But AI might give people this bad wisdom for a sobering reason: to flatter, according to a new study. In some cases, AI may only reinforce people’s preconceived notions, but the words it generates can be outright harmful.

What did the study find?

The “sycophantic (flattering, people-pleasing, affirming) behavior” of AI chatbots can pose risks as people “increasingly seek advice about interpersonal dilemmas,” said the study published in the journal Science. In an analysis of 11 leading large language models, including AI bots from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, chatbot responses to users were “nearly 50% more sycophantic than humans’, even when users engaged in unethical, illegal” behaviors.

The problem is not just that these chatbots “dispense inappropriate advice but that people trust and prefer AI more when the chatbots are justifying their convictions,” said The Associated Press. In one example, when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was asked if littering in a park was acceptable if no garbage can was available, the bot “blamed the park for not having trash cans, not the questioning litterer who was ‘commendable’ for even looking for one.”

This example may seem trivial, but AI’s general tendency to “flatter and excessively confirm users’ opinions can lead to wrong decisions, harm relationships and reinforce harmful beliefs while decreasing the willingness to take responsibility or resolve conflicts,” said The Jerusalem Post. The proneness toward sycophancy is a “technological flaw already tied to some high-profile cases of delusional and suicidal behavior in vulnerable populations,” said the AP.

Why is this such a problem?

Many experts worry that this AI advice “will worsen people’s social skills and ability to navigate uncomfortable situations,” Myra Cheng, the study’s lead author and a computer science PhD candidate, said to the Stanford Report. If this behavior by AI is not corrected, some users may “lose the skills to deal with difficult social situations” and could also pose larger safety risks.

“Users are aware that models behave in sycophantic and flattering ways,” Dan Jurafsky, the study’s senior author and a Stanford University linguistics professor, told the Stanford Report. What many people are “not aware of, and what surprised us, is that sycophancy is making them more self-centered, more morally dogmatic.” This type of interaction with AI is a “safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.” All of this is also happening as AI use becomes more prevalent, especially among teenagers.

At least 33% of teens “use AI companions for social interaction and relationships, including conversation practice, emotional support, role-playing, friendship or romantic interactions,” according to a study from Common Sense Media. Another 33% of teens choose to “discuss important or serious matters with AI companions instead of real people.” Experts say when using AI you should avoid asking for advice on crucially important topics. “I think that you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things,” Cheng told the Stanford Report. “That’s the best thing to do for now.”

OpenAI abruptly shut down its AI video generator this week only six months after its launch sent Hollywood scrambling, said Rachel Metz in Bloomberg. Sora, which could produce “realistic-looking AI videos” from
a text prompt, was packaged in a TikTok-style consumer app that let users share and comment on posts.

The ChatGPT maker and Disney “are also winding down their partnership, which had centered on Sora,” Metz said. Disney previously agreed to take a $1 billion stake in the startup and license 200 iconic characters to Sora in what some entertainment executives considered a watershed deal. In a note to staff, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said the company “is focusing its efforts on AI agents and a new artificial intelligence model.” The move coincides with “a push by OpenAI” to cut down expenses as it prepares to go public.

“OpenAI retrenching to focus on things like its core product and AI robotics makes sense,” said Robin Wigglesworth in the Financial Times. AI video generation “gobbles up a vast amount of computing power”—by some estimates, a 10-second Sora video was 2,000 times more costly than an AI text output. That’s “a problem until all of OpenAI’s massive data centers are actually completed.” But after all the hype that came along with Sora when it launched in September, its fast implosion “could prove to be a moment” that suggests the AI bubble is beginning to deflate.

‘When capital can think, who pays?’

Ravi Kumar S, Andreea Roberts and Simone Crymes at Newsweek

In the U.S., AI adoption is “growing at a remarkable pace,” but Americans are “concerned” about “layoffs tied to automation,” say Ravi Kumar S, Andreea Roberts and Simone Crymes. So how should “public policy support” the transition? One answer: a “shift in how automation is taxed relative to human labor.” If capital is “taxed more and labor less, replacing people with AI is no longer the cheapest path,” and using AI to “augment human workers” instead “becomes a more attractive option.”

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‘Birthright citizenship made me American. We can't lose it.’

Cynthia Choi at USA Today

On his “first day back in office,” Trump issued an executive order “seeking to deny citizenship to certain U.S.-born children,” says Cynthia Choi. But birthright citizenship is as “fundamental” to our country as “freedom of speech.” This is “not some isolated policy debate.” It’s a “broader effort by the Trump administration to put an end to multiracial democracy.” Children without citizenship will be denied “access to education, public benefits and the basic rights that come with belonging.”

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‘Missile warfare is faster, deadlier and harder to control’

Hal Brands at Bloomberg

The Iran conflict “demonstrates how the spread of powerful, accurate missiles is changing warfare around the globe,” says Hal Brands. Even “relatively weak states now have fairly accurate weapons that can strike hundreds, even thousands, of miles away.” This means “fewer sanctuaries: Facilities and geographies that were once secure are now vulnerable to attack.” That could be “challenging” for the U.S., since “even relatively weak adversaries will be able to hold U.S. bases, perhaps even the homeland, at risk.”

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‘AOC finally takes a position that makes sense on military aid to Israel’

Zeeshan Aleem at MS Now

On Tuesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who “struggled to take a clear position on supporting Israel in the past,” pledged to vote “against all military aid to Israel,” says Zeeshan Aleem. This was a “striking shift for a potential 2028 White House hopeful who, should she enter the race, would be the standard bearer for the democratic socialist left.” Her decision “does not just reflect demands on the left but the changing dynamics of the Democratic Party.”

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“If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward,” said Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs in 2008, a year after he introduced the first iPhone and changed the world forever.

Apple may indeed be “allergic to nostalgia”, said Steven Levy in Wired, but the company is still “begrudgingly engaging in a series of concerts and commemorations, and we’re being blitzed by books, articles and oral histories” to mark its 50th anniversary.

From an inauspicious start in Jobs’ California garage, the company he founded with Steve Wozniak in 1976 went on to pioneer the personal computer, transform the music market, and revolutionise how people use technology in the internet age. Apple is now valued at more than $3.6 trillion (£2.7 trillion), generating $400 billion (£301 billion) a year in revenue, with iPhone sales alone expected to bring in $1 million (£750 million) every 90 seconds. Across the world, 27% of the population – roughly 2.2 billion people – use one or more of its products.

Tariffs, trade wars and anti-trust trials

“No country has been more central to Apple’s rise – or more fraught for its future – than China,” said France 24. CEO Tim Cook, who took over from Jobs after he died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, made China the primary manufacturing base for Apple devices. It is also one of Apple’s largest consumer markets but the company “faces mounting pressure” from “trade tensions and tariffs” accelerating efforts to diversify manufacturing elsewhere in Asia, while “competition from domestic rivals such as Huawei has eaten into Apple’s Chinese market share”.

To put it bluntly, “the world in which Apple once thrived no longer exists,” said former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber in The New Statesman. A “25-year-long process of hyper-globalisation in which money, technologies and ideas have flowed freely” is “now fading amid economic nationalism driven, in part, by a technological arms race between the US and China, and a global tariff offensive led by Donald Trump”.

Apple is also facing a threat to its dominance closer to home, in the form of a series of anti-trust cases against it. “In an industry full of sprawling multipronged tech empires”, the basic argument against Apple is “comparatively simple”, said Adi Robertson on The Verge: “it’s become the ultimate gatekeeper to billions of people’s primary computing hardware, and it keeps competitors locked out while levying a heavy toll on the developers it lets through”.

Regulators and courts have ordered changes, particularly around the App Store, “but those changes have been slow to arrive, in part because for a half-decade or more, Apple has dragged its feet at every turn”.

Artificial intelligence

Apple may have “absolutely owned” the internet and mobile era, said Wired, but “now the future belongs to AI” – a category where Apple seems to have been lacking.

Apple’s Siri lags behind the likes of Microsoft, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, let alone China’s DeepSeek.

This is, in part, because Apple is “limited by its ecosystem”, said Acuity Trading. AI systems “require vast amounts of data, public testing and continuous version launches” and so “cannot be perfected in a closed ecosystem, which is what Apple has built its reputation on”. But perhaps the “most limiting factor is that Apple takes its commitment to user privacy very seriously”, which “has hindered AI development by limiting the amount of data it can use for training AI models”.

This “obsession with user privacy and its premium hardware could position it to drive widespread adoption of personalised AI – and make it profitable, a goal that has proved elusive for much of the AI industry”, said France 24.

Succession planning

The demise of Apple has been predicted many times before; in the mid-1980s after Jobs was forced out and again in 2011 when he passed away. Having revived the company and driven the release of the iMac, iPod and iPhone, Jobs was “widely thought of as irreplaceable”, said Barber. But Cook has not only steadied the ship but also taken the company to new heights, in terms of revenue generation if not technological innovation.

While the 65-year-old has given no indication of an imminent transition, the most likely candidate to take over when he does decide to go is John Ternus, senior vice president for hardware engineering, who oversees development of the devices that generate roughly 80% of Apple’s revenue. “Known for his steadiness and political acumen”, Ternus, like Cook, is “risk averse” and would be a continuity hire rather than “someone more willing to shake things up”, said Bloomberg.

This matters because, while its products “helped define the past 50 years of consumer technology, thriving for another 50 will inevitably require the company to transform in ways that aren’t entirely clear today”.

The always-on generation may be “falling out of love with technology,” said Jessica Grose in The New York Times. A growing number of teens are taking breaks from social media, swapping smartphones for “dumb” phones, and “pushing back against tech use in their schools.” In polls, nearly half of teenagers say social media has had a negative effect on their generation, and while they still rely on it for socializing with friends, they increasingly view being “extremely online” as “a depressing way to live, and they want a future that involves more embodied activity and real-life connection.”

Depending on the survey, between 60% and 75% of teens also “support cellphone restrictions” in schools. Their relationship with tech could deteriorate further with artificial intelligence, about which there is “a lot of uncertainty.” What is certain is that many teens want to resist an “establishment” that is devaluing “their own creative contributions and humanity.”

Young Americans are replacing their devices with “analog” hobbies, said Megan Sauer in CNBC.com, and businesses are noticing. Sales of retro products like “rotary phones, needlepoint kits, and embroidery services” are up for the first time in years. With Gen Z leading the way, roughly 75% of adults said they did at least one crafting project last year, up from 62% in 2019, according to Mintel research. A doll house and miniature figurine shop in New York City has seen a surge of young clients flocking into the store for “tiny Labubu keychains, Pez dispensers, and mock Eames chairs.” Some tell the owner, Leslie Edelman, “I’ve seen you on TikTok.”

A growing number of social media influencers are counterintuitively pushing more people “to kick the digital habit,” said Karen Garcia in the Los Angeles Times. The influencers’ goal isn’t to get followers to renounce technology entirely—that wouldn’t be good for business—but to help screen addicts wean themselves off “constant connectivity” and “reclaim their time.” It isn’t “the first time that people have tried to exit the online world,” but this trend may be different because of how it is being linked with wellness and mental health.

Boomers are the “real iPad babies,” said Sophia Solano in The Washington Post. While teens are returning to real-world hobbies, “grandma and grandpa can’t seem to stop scrolling.” Social media use among people 65 and older has grown from 11% in 2010 to 45% in 2021, while their time spent on YouTube nearly doubled from 2023 to 2025. The children and grandchildren are noticing. Some are worried that the devices are becoming a “constant companion,” and their parents are “slipping quietly into screen addiction” that keeps them couch-bound and isolated. Parental controls are a useful program to reduce screen time for kids. But who is enforcing grandparent controls?

Tech enthusiasts and industry analysts are sounding the alarm about RAMageddon, a shortage of random access memory chips crucial for running many consumer electronics. Though the future implications of the mass integration of generative AI have had much of the industry worried, the immediate impact of AI’s excessive memory needs is being felt worldwide.

Insatiable high-margin demand

The memory chip shortage is “beginning to hammer profits, derail corporate plans and inflate price tags” on everything from “laptops and smartphones to automobiles and data centers,” said Bloomberg. Major technology companies have hinted that going forward, the shortage of DRAM, or dynamic random access memory, the “fundamental building block of almost all technology,” will constrain production.

The global RAM market is “experiencing a severe price crisis,” with the cost of memory chips “surging by as much as 80-90% in recent months,” said CNN. RAMageddon has been driven by the “insatiable, high-margin demand for AI data center infrastructure,” leading manufacturers to shift “production capacity away from consumer products.” This has led to the shortage “expected to last well into 2026 and potentially up to 2028,” analysts said to the outlet.

RAMageddon is “only getting worse,” and there is “no immediate end in sight,” said The Verge. Everything that has a computer inside depends on RAM, and “almost everything has a computer in it now: farm tractors, hospital equipment, your TV set-top box.” Most of the global supply of RAM comes from just “three companies that are happily prioritizing the AI gold rush over everything else.”

Outside of consumer products, the shortage is also “causing problems for resource-constrained laboratories that already faced barriers to accessing powerful computing tools,” said Nature. The shortage is “pushing researchers to develop more efficient algorithms and hardware, to reduce the amount of memory needed.” Scientific research “increasingly relies on large-scale computing infrastructure,” Matteo Rinaldi, the director of the Institute for NanoSystems Innovation at Northeastern University, said to Nature. Many of these workloads “require substantial memory capacity.”

‘Bigger than anything we have faced before’

The tech industry may be reeling because of the shortage, but an easy fix is not imminent. ​​“There’s no relief until 2028,” said Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan in early February, after speaking to two of the big three memory companies. Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung, which control about 95% of the global DRAM supply, are “making enough money to increase memory production.” Still, it will take time to build the new memory fabrication plants they promised, The Verge said. The companies also see it “as more profitable and less risky to build out slowly” instead of “rushing to meet demand.”

Micron’s memory-fabricating facility in Idaho won’t open until mid-2027, and “you’re not really gonna see real output” until 2028, the company’s vice president of marketing, mobile and client business unit, Christopher Moore, said to Wccftech. SK Hynix predicted the shortage would last through late 2027.

We stand at the “cusp of something that is bigger than anything we’ve faced before,” Tim Archer, the chief executive officer of chip equipment supplier Lam Research Corp., said at a conference in South Korea, per Bloomberg. What lies ahead “between now and the end of this decade” will “overwhelm all other sources of demand.”

With RAMageddon, it is “wiser to hold off doing business today,” as prices are “almost certain to be higher tomorrow,” Suh Young-hwan, who runs three DIY PC shops in Seoul, said to Bloomberg. “Unless Steve Jobs rises from the dead to declare that AI is nothing but a bubble, this trend is likely to persist for some time.”

The ongoing memory crisis is making it “hard for tech enthusiasts and the general population not to feel more than a little deflated,” said Tom’s Guide (a sister site of The Week). We are “marching towards lining the pockets of a small few” while “giving up environmental and financial stability.” It is “easy to feel jaded,” but this kind of crisis “feels a little unprecedented.”

This week saw what could prove to be an historic reckoning for Big Tech when a Californian court ruled that Meta and Google’s YouTube intentionally built addictive social media platforms. This came just a day after a jury in New Mexico found Meta liable for the way its platforms endanger children.

Critics are calling this “Big Tech’s Big Tobacco moment”, a reference to how cigarette makers in the 1990s had to overhaul their businesses after courts ruled that their products were addictive and harmful.

Meta and Google have invested heavily in safety tools for younger users and both companies dispute claims that their platforms are to blame for children’s mental health issues. But the verdicts this week are a “sombre moment for Silicon Valley and the implications are global”, said the BBC’s technology editor Zoe Kleinman.

What did the commentators say?

The cases this week are “the first of about 22 ‘bellwether’ trials”, said Stephen Armstrong in The Independent, brought by more than 350 families across 250 US school districts and are “expected to trigger thousands more”. It is like the “anti-tobacco legal actions on fast-forward”.

Judgments of responsibility “in cases like the one brought against Meta and YouTube are necessarily complex”, said academic and author Austin Sarat in The Guardian. And critics of the judgment in this case “will no doubt howl about greedy plaintiffs looking to make a haul from deep-pocketed defendants”. But it does seem “clear that companies knew of the addictive qualities of their sites and the potential damage to young people”.

For years, “technology giants successfully fought off efforts by regulators, lawmakers and others to put limits on their social media businesses”, said Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times. The tide appears to be turning but so far “investors don’t seem to be fazed”, with Big Tech share prices only dipping slightly. The potential penalties too – $6 million for Meta and YouTube in California, and $375 million for Meta in New Mexico – “are a fraction of their immense profits”.

It’s for that reason that social media companies might not fret too much too soon. “The Big Tech firms are losing nearly every time,” Tom Smith, partner at legal firm Geradin, told The Independent. “But they have effectively unlimited legal budgets, and their calculation may be that as long as you can make sure these cases take a decade, then the extra profits will outweigh the damages.”

What next?

Meta and YouTube plan to appeal, but if unsuccessful “they could be forced to remove the features that make their platforms addictive, which would upend their business models and fundamentally alter the experience of users”, said Fred Harter in The Observer.

Regardless of whether Meta or Google appeal the decision, “this is going to redefine the landscape,” said the BBC’s Kleinman. “It could even be the beginning of the end of the social media era as we know it.”

‘Why you hate your weather app’

Kyle Chayka at The New Yorker

Weather apps “might be second only to social media as a space in need of fresh disruption,” says Kyle Chayka. These apps “have a tendency to alienate their user bases, perhaps because people’s physical experiences — their plans, their dress, their commutes — so directly depend on an accurate report.” But the “challenge of weather app creation lies both in the improbability of accurately predicting the weather and in the difficulty of designing something that works for any user.”

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‘Suing social media won’t protect our kids’

Nicholas Creel at Newsweek

Verdicts against Meta “are being celebrated as a landmark reckoning in the long effort to hold Big Tech accountable for the youth mental health crisis it helped create,” says Nicholas Creel. But “these lawsuits will not protect our children from the harms of social media.” The “desire to sue social media giants is understandable; the anger at them is justified,” but a “damages award against Meta does not redesign the algorithm that exposes children to harmful content.”

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‘Water infrastructure in Texas is failing. A surge of new funding can fix it.’

Lajward Zahra at The Nation

How “does Houston, Texas, lose more than 30 billion gallons of water a year? With the entire state facing scarcity, the cause isn’t drought alone,” says Lajward Zahra. Infrastructure problems have “made daily life feel unmanageable,” prompting a “community-led coalition that helped shape deliberations over Proposition 4, a constitutional amendment that would authorize up to $20 billion over two decades for water infrastructure.” The proposition “exposed a gap between Texas’ political branding and what voters will support.”

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‘Americans now use marijuana more often than alcohol. Is this the new sobriety?’

Tom Greene at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A “strange thing is happening, given our national love of booze. U.S. alcohol consumption is dropping faster than Prince Harry’s approval ratings,” says Tom Greene. But when “alcohol consumption goes down, something else will replace it,” and “nearly 18 million Americans now use marijuana almost daily.” Marijuana is “mainstream, even where it’s not legal for recreational use.” Some people “suspect we will see states that legalized marijuana pull back in the next few years.”

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When the crack of the bat signals opening day for the 2026 Major League Baseball (MLB) season today, there will be a new addition to the diamond: robot umpires. The technological change has been fiercely debated among sports enthusiasts for years but has finally made its way to the big leagues. It marks one of the biggest changes in the history of modern baseball.

What are robot umpires?

While the term makes it sound like robots are replacing the game’s human umpires, this is not the case. The robot umpires aren’t on the field. Instead, they are a “network of specialized cameras set up in every ballpark to track the baseball’s exact location,” said The New York Times. The system, officially called the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System, will allow teams to challenge balls and strikes.

Each team starts the game with two challenges it can use throughout the game. By tapping his head, a pitcher, catcher or batter can request to “summon the robot umpire and see whether the human behind home plate missed a ball or strike call,” said the Times. A successful challenge allows the team to reuse a challenge, but after two incorrect challenges, the team “loses the power altogether.”

MLB is not the first baseball league to adopt this technology. It has been tried in minor league baseball for several years and was also tested during the 2025 MLB All-Star Game. This “testing, which started in 2021, led to Triple-A players in 2023 using ABS challenges three days a week and a full ABS system, with every pitch adjudicated by computer, the other three,” said ESPN. Following positive feedback in the minor leagues, MLB announced last year it would adopt the ABS system.

Why is this such a big change?

It allows players and managers to do what is typically forbidden in baseball: argue balls and strikes with the umpire. Doing so has generally led to ejection from the game; last season, at least “61.5% of ejections among players, managers and coaches (99 of 161) were related to ball/strike calls,” said The Associated Press, though this figure also “included what MLB counted as inappropriate comments and conduct, and throwing equipment in protest.”

This change “should in theory make everyone better off,” as it will give teams an “appeal in the event of a potential blown call at a crucial moment,” said Vox. As is the case with AI, some are worried about the bigger changes robotic umpires could have. Once “you’ve conceded that the machine is the final authority on whether a call is right — which is exactly what baseball has done here — you’ve quietly eliminated the case for having the human there.” And if they are there, the “human behind the mask doesn’t stay independent.”

Despite this, most players and managers don’t seem to have an issue with the change — for now. “I’m in favor of anything that allows our technology to play in this game,” Tampa Bay Rays manager Kevin Cash said to the AP. “We have so much of it. Why not use it?” Even people formerly around the game agree. “I really like the ABS,” Jim Leyland, a retired manager who led four MLB clubs, said to the outlet. “I think it’s going to be great for the game.”

What happened

A New Mexico jury on Tuesday found that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health, enabled child sexual exploitation and misled users about the safety of its Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp platforms. The jurors ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties for thousands of violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act. It was the first major courtroom loss for Meta in a growing number of lawsuits accusing it and other social media giants of harming or failing to protect young people.

Who said what

The verdict is a “historic victory for every child and family who has paid the price for Meta’s choice to put profits over kids’ safety,” said a statement from New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who filed the suit in 2023. During the seven-week trial, the jurors “were presented with internal Meta documents and heard testimony from former employees,” the BBC said, including whistleblower Arturo Béjar, who testified that Meta was aware underage users were being served sexualized content and “said his own young daughter was propositioned for sex by a stranger on Instagram.”

The jurors “ordered a maximum penalty for each violation,” The Wall Street Journal said, but “Meta made 160 times” the $375 million fine “in its most recent quarter” alone. Shares of the $1.5 trillion company were “up 5% in early after-hours trading following the verdict,” The Associated Press said. Still, the “landmark decision” in Santa Fe “signals a changing tide against tech companies and the government’s willingness to crack down” on social media’s harms to young people.

“Parents, policymakers and the tech industry watched the New Mexico case closely for its potential to force Meta to change the design of its products,” The New York Times said. But the trial judge, not the jury, will rule on any compulsory changes for Meta at the trial’s second stage in May.

What next?

“We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously,” said Meta spokesperson Andy Stone, and “we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online.” A jury in Los Angeles “has been deliberating for more than a week” in a separate “bellwether social media addiction trial” accusing Meta and YouTube of “harming the mental health of a user through addictive design features,” the Times said.

Iranian drone strikes on data centers in the Middle East signal “how wars will be fought in the future,” said John Herrman in New York. Tech companies are used to defending their systems against hackers. Now they need to worry about physical attacks too. Early in the Iran war, two Amazon Web Services facilities in the United Arab Emirates were “directly hit” by Iranian drones, while another in Bahrain sustained damage from a drone strike nearby. Even these relatively small attacks led to internet disruptions that affected banks, financial tech companies, rideshare providers, and other popular services, raising questions about the vulnerabilities of massive Middle Eastern server farms. Our digital lives are increasingly cloud-based, but there is still a large, physical footprint required to make that happen. With a “remote-controlled drone that costs less than a new car,” a hostile actor can now cripple our “multibillion-dollar digital infrastructure.”

Iran has openly declared war on U.S. tech firms, said Dana Alomar in Wired. Last week, it published a list of offices and infrastructure run by U.S. companies, including Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle, and named them “potential targets.” Warfare has become “increasingly dependent on digital systems, from satellite data to AI-powered intelligence analysis.” So the infrastructure underlying those systems holds “strategic significance.” Companies were already thinking about ways to protect their data centers, said Rachyl Jones in Semafor. Some are building server farms “in underground, nuclear-hardened bunkers.” But this “introduces a new level of complexity”—not to mention added costs for projects that are already eye-wateringly expensive. For now, “the cheapest way to protect data is to duplicate it” and store copies in safe regions.

The Middle East sold itself as exactly that, said Indranil Ghosh in Rest of
World—“a safe harbor for the world’s data.” But the Iran war “has upended that pitch.” Less than a year ago, the region was being hailed as the next great AI hub after President Trump’s four-day visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE yielded more than $2 trillion in investment pledges. The security arrangements around those deals were mostly designed to keep advanced AI chips out of China’s hands. “Not one of them contemplated the possibility that a regional adversary would launch missiles at the physical buildings where those chips were meant to run.” This was an “obvious blunder,” said Rana Foroohar in the Financial Times. Tech companies were “desperate to take advantage of huge subsidies and cheap energy offered by Gulf countries.” But putting massive, energy-draining, water-dependent facilities in a geopolitically vulnerable desert was “nuts.” Now, “the geopolitical and the geo-economic chickens coming home to roost.”

‘Girls’ sports are getting more physical’

Alexandra Moe at The Atlantic

Physical contact in “women’s sports remains controversial,” but girls “seem to be more interested than ever in contact,” says Alexandra Moe. At U.S. high schools “last academic year, more girls played on teams for wrestling than field hockey, gymnastics or dance.” Girls’ “participation in such sports is growing so quickly in part because it’s starting from a small denominator,” and may “appeal to a rising cultural sense that women and girls can — and should — bulk up.”

Read more

‘Meta’s smart glasses are a privacy risk invisible to Chicagoans’

Yunus Emre Tozal at the Chicago Tribune

Meta’s “smart glasses problem is a legibility problem,” says Yunus Emre Tozal. Walking through a city “today, you cannot tell who around you is recording.” This is “not a hypothetical privacy risk. It is an active data pipeline running through one of the most documented failures of AI labor ethics on record, operating at scale in every city where 7 million pairs of glasses are being worn.” This is “not a privacy feature. It is a design decision.”

Read more

‘The era of US dominance in economic warfare is over’

Nicholas Mulder at the Financial Times

Iran’s “threat to shipping in the Gulf is widely seen as an asymmetric retaliation against the U.S. and Israel,” says Nicholas Mulder. But Iran “has actually replicated a tactic that America has long practiced in its use of sanctions: it has turned a key chokepoint in the world economy into a weapon to compel its adversary to de-escalate.” America previously “had an effective monopoly on major sanctions,” but the “end of the unipolar era in economic warfare” is here.

Read more

‘Ukraine and the EU need a fresh start’

Ivan Nagornyak and Fredrik Wesslau at Foreign Policy

Four years “after Ukraine applied for membership in the European Union, one conclusion is inescapable: The EU’s normal model for enlargement is not fit for purpose,” say Ivan Nagornyak and Fredrik Wesslau. The EU’s “accession process — rigid, technocratic and slow — was designed for peacetime, not for a country fighting a war of survival and rebuilding a shattered economy.” But “any interim model for Ukraine must be a stepping stone to full membership, not a substitute.”

Read more

Apple just shook up the laptop market with its “cheap and cheerful” Neo,
said Nicole Nguyen in The Wall Street Journal. At $599, the Neo, released last week, is “a different vibe” for a company known for “pricey, premium products.” Its “candy-colored hues” hark back to the whimsical iBook days of the early 2000s. And the lower entry point is “a well-calculated strategy” with PC prices on the rise due to the memory-chip shortage. Ultimately, “what really matters is how well the laptop can run apps,” and in my trial, the Neo acquitted itself well. “I opened over 25 browser tabs” without issue and saw demos of the computer handling an apparel design app and a live 3D video game.

“This is the smartest move Apple has made in years,” said M.G. Siegler in Spyglass. The Neo is $200 cheaper than last year’s entry-level MacBook Air with very little noticeable reduction in the specs. It offers up to 512 gigabytes of storage (more than the Air) and up to 16 hours of battery life. The one drawback may be that it comes with only 8 gigabytes of RAM, which is not “going to cut it” for serious programmers who “want to play around with some localized AI.” But if you’re a college student, “the Neo should do just fine,” said Jada Jones in ZDNet. It packs more than enough under the hood for someone whose “digital learning experience mostly involves writing papers, accessing textbooks, completing online quizzes, watching lectures, researching, and writing online discussion posts.” And Apple lowered the price to $499 for students, so they won’t need to beg Mom and Dad to expand the tech budget.

Apple has been quietly raising prices on its other products “in the face of
global economic turbulence and that memory crunch,” said Dave Lee in
Bloomberg. It lifted the base price for its new MacBook Air by $100, while
some MacBook Pro models have gone up $400. Apple is clearly “leaning on its premium customers to eat the costs that make a budget MacBook possible.” Will it work? Well, the timing couldn’t be better, because other laptop makers have also had to raise prices. The Neo is now “ready to swoop in for those consumers who will browse the aisles at Best Buy and quickly realize that dropping $500 on a Windows laptop doesn’t go as far as it did last year.” At $499, the Asus Vivobook 14 can support two external displays and has twice the storage of the Neo, said Luke Larsen in Wired. And HP’s $500 OmniBook 5 offers “far better color performance and contrast.” Credit Apple for entering the discount discussion—but don’t crown it the winner of the budget-laptop battle quite yet.

What are prediction markets?

They’re online platforms where users can bet on the outcomes of future events. Almost any event can be added to the market: who will win the Super Bowl or an election, the direction a California wildfire will spread, whether the U.S. will confirm the existence of aliens before 2027, when the Cuban president will be ousted. Proponents say these markets are different from traditional gambling, because they double as valuable sources of information that can help governments, businesses, and ordinary citizens make smart decisions.

Prediction markets are “the most effective way to aggregate information and the crowd wisdom,” said Tarek Mansour, who co-founded Kalshi in 2018. Critics counter that platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket are just another way to bilk gambling-addicted Americans—and that they are rife with insider trading. The day before the U.S. went to war with Iran, more than 150 accounts placed a total of $855,000 in bets correctly predicting an American strike over the next 24 hours. At least 16 accounts made over $100,000. It “makes you think it was someone who knew something about the timing,” said economist Eric Zitzewitz. Such incidents are unlikely to slow the markets’ rapid growth: About $12 billion was traded on Kalshi and Polymarket in December, up more than 400% from a year earlier.

How do the markets work?

Users place bets by buying a “contract”: a yes or no option on a question such as “Will the Democrats win the House in the midterms?” The value of the contract moves up and down like a stock, fluctuating between $0 and $1. That price reflects the market’s view on the likelihood of a future event: $0.30 means there’s a 30% likelihood, for example. A payout occurs if the event happens and the value of the contract hits $1. Unlike a traditional sports book, there is no “house” that makes money when bettors lose. Instead, the platforms make money by charging transaction fees on contracts. Prediction markets say the lack of a house means they shouldn’t be regulated like casinos, and that their platforms are legitimate financial instruments because they let users hedge against risk. Many experts are skeptical of those claims. “It definitely looks, smells, and feels like gambling,” said Steve Ruddock, a gambling industry analyst.

How are they regulated?

Lightly. Prediction markets are overseen by the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the Trump administration has taken a soft touch with the industry. (President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. has invested in Polymarket through his venture capital firm and is an adviser to Kalshi.) Several states have sued or sent cease and desist letters to prediction markets over sports gambling, which is banned in 20 states and, where it is allowed, is typically legal only for over-21s. States say the markets are skirting those rules, as well as the tax obligations of sports books, a major source of revenue for a state like Nevada. CFTC head Mike Selig has vowed to defend prediction markets against what he calls “an onslaught” of state litigation. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, promised in turn that he would take prediction markets and the CFTC to court, saying the markets are “destroying the lives of families and countless Americans, especially young men.”

Is that true?

Some users have made huge profits on the markets. Logan Sudeith, 25, quit his job as a financial risk analyst to become a full-time gambler on Kalshi and Polymarket. He told NPR he made $100,000 in one month, $25,000 more than he used to make in a year. A bet on Time magazine’s person of the year alone earned him $40,236. Alan Cole, a 37-year-old tax economist, put $342,195.63—his life’s savings—into Kalshi bets that Elon Musk’s DOGE wouldn’t successfully cut government spending. He netted over $128,000. But for every big winner, there are many more losers. K.A., a 24-year-old engineer from Virginia, told Business Insider that he pumped $10,000 into Kalshi over eight days in December and took out loans so he could place more bets. “There’ll be a big winning streak at the beginning,” he said. “Then bam, everything’s gone.” Critics say the prevalence of insider trading on the platforms means the odds are rigged against ordinary Americans.

How common is insider trading?

Anecdotal evidence suggests it’s prevalent. In February, an anonymous day-old Polymarket account won $17,000 by correctly guessing 17 of 20 bets about the Super Bowl halftime show, including whether Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin would appear—a success rate that strongly suggests the bettor had inside information. Other examples are more concerning: Less than five hours before the January raid that captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, a Polymarket account doubled down on bets that the U.S. would invade Venezuela. The trader netted more than $400,000, but Polymarket didn’t pay out, saying the raid didn’t count as an invasion. In Israel, a civilian and a military reservist were arrested last month for allegedly using secret intelligence to place Polymarket wagers on military operations. Such bets are dangerous, said Joseph Grundfest, a former Securities and Exchange commissioner, “because you are signaling to your enemies what may happen.”

Are there any guardrails?

Some. Kalshi said it has enacted new rules based on those of the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. “If you have material nonpublic information on a market, you cannot trade it,” said Mansour. But regulation remains largely voluntary: The CFTC has no guidelines on insider trading on the platforms, and Polymarket has no explicit ban on the practice. Some prediction market evangelists want to keep the rules lax. Insider trading, said Tre Upshaw, who runs a startup that provides analytics for Polymarket traders, “just accelerates the truth faster.”

Social media posts appeared last month calling for “red v blue” wars between schools, but instead of provoking fights between students, the posts appear to have made a deeper impact on their worried parents, leading experts to suggest practising an online strategy known as critical ignoring.

It’s a concept that experts are “increasingly teaching”, Sander Van Der Linden, a professor of social psychology, told the BBC, and it “will become more important in the face of AI-generated slop, where sometimes it’s better to just ignore low-quality stuff”.

What is critical ignoring?

It’s a behavioural strategy for managing information overload by consciously choosing to filter out low-quality, distracting, or manipulative content. People look for clues that allow them to ignore a post. While critical thinking analyses information, critical ignoring decides what to analyse in the first place, serving as a crucial filter.

Critical thinking is not enough “in a world of information overabundance and gushing sources of disinformation”, wrote Ralph Hertwig, Anastasia Kozyreva, Sam Wineburg and Stephan Lewandowsky on The Conversation.

The digital world “contains more information than the world’s libraries combined”, so “critically thinking through all information and sources we come across” would “utterly paralyse us”.

Also, “investing critical thinking in sources that should have been ignored in the first place” results in “attention merchants and malicious actors” getting what they wanted: “our attention”.

Doesn’t AI help with this?

To an extent. AI chatbots can help people understand what’s true and untrue on the internet, but they are tools, rather than perfect judges of truth.

ChatGPT has “introduced a new temptation” – the “feeling that I can get a clean answer to everything, instantly”, said Tom’s Guide. But this is where things “get tricky” because ChatGPT is “so fluent, so confident, so fast, it can make ‘done’ feel like ‘true’”, and “‘sounds right’ feel like ‘verified’ – even when it’s not”.

So it’s “up to us, as individuals, to stop ingesting the pink slime of AI slop, the forever chemicals of outrage bait and the microplastics of misinformation-for-profit”, said The Wall Street Journal. Critical ignoring is a widely recommended strategy for this.

But how do I do it?

The “key word” is “critical”, said Psychology Today, because it doesn’t mean “just ignoring everything”. Rather you should look quickly for clues that suggest the types of information most likely to be misinformation or disinformation.

The clues include signs that it’s polarising content, that it “appeals to intuition or common sense”, instead of “including facts or evidence”. Another red flag is if it doesn’t include sources, or those it does don’t seem credible. Does it seem to have been released “as a distraction”, or does it promote “the threat of a bogeyman or a scapegoat”?

Then there’s “lateral reading”, a more time-consuming strategy which “involves opening up new browser tabs to search for information” about the “organisation or individual behind a site” before “diving into its contents”, said The Conversation. Also, it’s always a good idea to not “feed the trolls”.

“Remember that your attention is a scarce resource”, said The Wall Street Journal, and “decide how much time you want to spend on screens in advance, then set a timer.”

A practice called “self-nudging” includes removing “distracting and irresistible notifications”, or setting “specific times in which messages can be received”, thus “creating pockets of time for concentrated work or socialising”, said The Conversation.

Or you can just “ask one question“ before engaging, said Tom’s Guide. “Would I care about this tomorrow?” If not, you can simply “move on”.

“Did Meta just accidentally prove that smart glasses are a liability?” asked James Pero in Gizmodo. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently drew a stern rebuke from the judge in a landmark trial about social media harms for strolling into court “rocking Meta’s smart glasses.” Ever the salesman, his cute “little stunt” was not an ignorant mistake. His team is “fully aware of the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses’ capabilities,” which include a built-in camera that can record anything the wearer is viewing. Smart glasses are getting increasingly popular, but their rise “comes with some important questions” for society. They “make it easier to record people without their knowledge,” even if Meta’s offering features a tiny LED indicator on the front that lights up when recording. Zuckerberg’s attempted courtroom ambush didn’t make it past a judge, but for the rest of us “it comes off as one giant red flag.”

These days, “to be in public is to risk being filmed,” said Luke Fortney in The New York Times. Meta sold more than 7 million pairs of smart glasses in 2025, which is paltry compared with the 240 million iPhones sold last year that also have filming capabilities. But the sleek newer versions of the glasses are harder to spot, turning bystanders into “captive participants.” Servers and bartenders say they have increasingly noticed food influencers “filming in restaurants, cafés, and bars, capturing warped, eye-level video of drive-through pranks” and sit-down meals without notification, then posting the recordings on social media. Men have taken to “filming themselves trying to pick up women,” said Sophie Tanno and Ivana Scatola in CNN.com. Unbeknownst to the women—the LED light is often blocked with tape—they are being recorded, and the videos are then posted on platforms like TikTok and X, where they “attract misogynistic comments.” Filming in public spaces is protected by the First Amendment, but cases involving smart glasses haven’t been tested yet.

Now Meta wants to take the privacy intrusion a step further, said Dave Lee in Bloomberg, by introducing facial recognition to its smart glasses. The company claims this is a feature that people want, especially those with visual impairments. “Get real.” Meta has “never built tech for the niche case.” And if there’s anything the immigration protesters in Minnesota proved, it is “the realization for everyday Americans that the ‘I have nothing to hide’ school of thought on privacy has expired.” Meta’s already “wretched privacy reputation” means this current smart glasses “renaissance is fragile,” said Victoria Song in The Verge. “Smart glasses aren’t inherently evil.” But “glassholes haven’t gone anywhere,” and we can’t expect Meta to suddenly become “proactive in protecting consumer privacy.” It won’t take much for these devices to destroy public trust and “once again return to the realm of science fiction.”

What happened

Anthropic on Monday sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Defense Department and several other federal agencies in federal court, arguing that the administration’s move to blacklist the AI firm as a national security risk was “unprecedented and unlawful.” The Constitution “‌does not allow the government to wield its enormous power to punish a company for its protected speech,” Anthropic said in its filing.

Hegseth last week formally designated the company a “supply chain risk” over Anthropic’s insistence that its AI tool Claude not be used for autonomous lethal weapons or mass surveillance of Americans. President Donald Trump said on social media that all federal agencies must stop using Claude within six months.

Who said what

The supply-chain risk designation “effectively cuts off Anthropic’s work with the Defense Department” and its contractors, The New York Times said, and it “has never been used on an American company.” The label is “usually reserved for Chinese and Russian firms suspected of helping foreign spies,” The Washington Post said. The Pentagon’s “unprecedented step” came “even as Anthropic’s tools were playing a central role” in “Trump’s bombing campaign in Iran.”

“It is absurd for the government to argue that Anthropic is the kind of company meant to be addressed by this statute,” especially when the Pentagon “has repeatedly sought to obtain Anthropic’s services for national defense,” Georgetown University law professor Mark Jia told the Post. It would be “perfectly reasonable” for the Pentagon to cancel its contracts with Anthropic because they don’t believe a private company should set policy or determine when “autonomous lethal weapons are ready for prime time,” Dean Ball, a former Trump White House AI policy adviser, said on “The Ezra Klein Show.” But they don’t have the “statutory power” to “completely destroy the company” in “a kind of political assassination.”

What next?

The White House is “preparing an executive order formally instructing the federal government to rip out Anthropic’s AI from its operations,” Axios said, and it “could be issued as soon as this week.” Anthropic’s “standoff with the Defense Department has cost it Uncle Sam as a customer,” The Wall Street Journal said, but it has also brought a “surge of public goodwill” and a “momentary advantage in the ferocious talent war between rival artificial intelligence labs.”

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The Trump administration has long trumpeted its goal to automate its operational capacity through artificial intelligence models provided by companies like OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI. But as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth moves to offload certain human operations into the realm of the algorithm, one tech firm has emerged as a counterbalance to the White House’s vision for an artificially intelligent military: Anthropic, which “cannot in good conscience” allow Hegseth’s Pentagon to use its AI models without limitations, said CEO Dario Amodei. As the Defense Department weighs consequences, other AI firms are starting to take note — and weigh in.

Taking a ‘bold stand on ethical grounds’

Despite believing in the “existential importance” of using AI to protect the United States and “defeat our autocratic adversaries,” Anthropic has identified a “narrow set of cases” including mass domestic surveillance and “fully autonomous weapons” wherein AI can “undermine, rather than defend, democratic values,” Amodei said in a company statement. Moreover, Hegseth’s allegedly retaliatory move to blacklist Anthropic as a supply chain risk is "inherently contradictory” for labeling the company a security risk and simultaneously “essential to national security.” Hegseth's “heaviest-handed way you can regulate a business” marks a “landmark moment” for how the Pentagon “interacts with our cutting-edge technology developed on U.S. soil” in general, said Katie Sweeten, a former Justice Department official who coordinated the relationship between DOJ and the Pentagon, to Politico.

While Amodei's Anthropic faces a government ban, his “main rival,” OpenAI's Sam Altman, "struck his own deal” to fill Anthropic's Defense Department role, said CBS News. Reached just hours before the U.S. and Israel launched a joint assault on Iran, the OpenAI partnership did not prevent the military from using Anthropic's “very same tools” that it had just banned, said The Wall Street Journal. It will likely take “months” to fully replace Anthropic’s Claude AI model with other platforms.

By “refusing to bow” to a White House intent on “bullying private companies into submission,” Amodei is “taking a bold stand on ethical grounds,” said The Atlantic. While the company’s competitors “jockey for dominance” in the field, Anthropic has “distinguished itself by emphasizing safety.” Refusing White House pressure means Anthropic “may have just averted another crisis” in the form of a “major public backlash” from those who could see the company as a “more principled player in the AI wars.” After Altman's OpenAI replaced Anthropic at the Pentagon, the latter's Claude app has been "rocketing to the top of the App Store,” with some users saying they were “defecting” from ChatGPT to Anthropic after feeling “uneasy about OpenAI's ambitions," said Business Insider.

Contract negotiation vs. congressional regulation

Anthropic is “rightly concerned” that its products could be used for “unsafe or malicious” ends, said former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall at The New York Times. But the company is wrong for trying to use “contractual terms” to either “prevent the misuse of its products,” or at least to “deflect responsibility.” But Anthropic also has the “option” to not sell to the government at all. The government, meanwhile, “cannot be expected to negotiate provisions” like Anthropic is asking for with all its partners, which would be a “nightmare to administer and unenforceable.” What, then, could be “appropriate” to address this debate? “Regulation by Congress.”

“RAMageddon” is “coming for everything you care about,” said Sean Hollister in The Verge. Anything with a computer in it—your phone, your car, your thermostat—depends on random-access memory (RAM) to store data or serve as short-term memory, and its price has “tripled, quadrupled, even sextupled,” over the last year. Consumer-electronics margins are already razor-thin, so get ready for higher prices or delayed product launches. Every major laptop maker is “planning price hikes of 10%, 20%, or even 30%,” with Dell already upping prices on its notebook computers by $55 or more. Nintendo may raise the Switch 2’s price, Sony could delay its next PlayStation, and supplies are already low for Valve’s Steam Deck handheld gaming console. TV and even car production may suffer, and “if you’re used to buying $500 phones, they might easily cost
$600 or more.”

The memory shortage is another example of how consumers are bearing the burden “for AI giants’ rush to build out their ambitions,” said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. The three semiconductor companies “collectively responsible for more than 90% of global chip production”—SK Hynix, Micron, and Samsung—are channeling supply into Big Tech’s AI drive. Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet are investing $650 billion in data centers that need vast amounts of expensive chips. This “reallocation of resources” is “crippling the tech supply chain for everyone except the largest and richest AI hyperscalers.”

Besides the chipmakers, the only other winners from this might be investors, said Michael Grothaus in Fast Company. Memory chipmakers have “seen their share prices skyrocket over the last year.” The stock of SanDisk, which makes a middle-priced memory option, rose 1,200% in six months. Micron, along with flash-storage companies Western Digital and Seagate Technology, were some of the best-performing stocks in the S&P 500 last year. “If you had put all your savings into a few pallets of computer memory chips a year ago, you’d have at least doubled your money by now,” said Christopher Mims in The Wall Street Journal. The “once-affordable microchip” is now “one of the world’s fastest-appreciating assets,” and analysts predict these sky-high valuations will stay that way “for a year or two.”

Manufacturers are trying to bring supply in line with demand, said Samuel K. Moore in IEEE Spectrum. Micron is investing $100 billion in several upstate New York facilities, SK Hynix has plans for a $13 billion plant in South Korea and a $4 billion complex in Indiana, and Samsung is building a $17 billion facility in Taylor, Texas. But “will prices come down once some of these new plants come on line? Don’t bet on it.” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra says demand across the industry will outstrip supply “substantially...for the foreseeable future.”

While it’s no secret that artificial intelligence can be used for nefarious purposes, China is working with AI on an unprecedented scale and using it to target its enemies, according to a report from OpenAI. This is just one way that China is employing AI behind the scenes to disrupt global operations.

‘Sprawling Chinese influence operation’

The report claims that China is using OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, as a “diary to document the alleged covert campaign of suppression,” said CNN. A “sprawling Chinese influence operation” is being employed largely for “intimidating Chinese dissidents abroad, including by impersonating U.S. immigration officials.” Though the exact number of users is unknown, the operation “appeared to involve hundreds of Chinese operators and thousands of fake online accounts on various social media platforms.”

OpenAI’s report “offers one of the most vivid examples yet of how authoritarian regimes can use AI tools to document their censorship efforts,” said CNN. In the case of China impersonating U.S. officials, this was done to “warn a U.S.-based Chinese dissident that their public statements had supposedly broken the law.” ChatGPT “served as a journal for the Chinese operative to keep track” of their own covert operations.

China is also geopolitically implementing ChatGPT, according to the report; several Chinese accounts “generated English-language emails to state-level U.S. officials or policy analysts working in business and finance, inviting targets to participate in paid consultations,” said Reuters. China’s use of AI also involves more targeted, nonpolitical scams: One group of ChatGPT accounts “used the chatbot to run a dating scam targeting Indonesian men and likely defrauded hundreds of victims a month.”

ChatGPT fights back

China’s AI use is heavy-handed, but there are signs that some of ChatGPT’s built-in safeguards are working. In October 2025, the chatbot “refused to assist an individual associated with Chinese law enforcement in planning an online campaign to discredit” Japanese politician Sanae Takaichi, said Bloomberg. The user allegedly asked ChatGPT to create a “plan that would amplify negative comments” about Takaichi, who became Japan’s prime minister later that month.

But ChatGPT “refused to provide advice on this plan,” said OpenAI’s report, and the user was forced to abandon their efforts. There is evidence, however, that the smear campaign against Takaichi “went ahead, likely using locally hosted Chinese AI models,” said Axios. And many of the other influence-peddling operations described in the report “reflect the same old tools and tactics that influence operators typically use in online campaigns — just supercharged with AI.”

OpenAI’s report “clearly demonstrates the way that China is actively employing AI tools to enhance information operations,” Michael Horowitz, a former Pentagon official and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said to CNN. The AI competition between China and the United States is “continuing to intensify,” and this is “not just taking place at the frontier but in how China’s government is planning and implementing the day-to-day of their surveillance and information apparatus.”

Artificial intelligence is increasingly entrenching itself in our society, and universities are no exception. From clubs and classes to professional events, AI companies have made themselves staples on campus, and it is not simply being used to cheat in class. Some experts worry that AI could influence higher education in new and potentially destructive ways.

How is AI being pushed in universities?

Google has worked with Purdue University, California Community Colleges and other schools to “offer AI courses, certificates and products such as its AI assistant Gemini,” while OpenAI has launched a “consortium with 15 leading research institutions,” and Microsoft is “offering eligible students 12-month subscriptions to its AI productivity tools at no cost,” said The Wall Street Journal.

Anthropic is also partnering with CodePath, the “nation’s largest provider of collegiate computer science education,” to “redesign its coding curriculum as AI reshapes the field of software development,” said the AI firm. The initiative will put its AI tools, such as Claude Code, “at the center of its courses and career programs,” said the company. The goal is to “enable students to learn to build with Anthropic tools” and “contribute to real-world open-source projects,” said the Journal. CodePath is incorporating the program into institutions that “cater to low-income and first-generation college students and include historically Black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions.”

Even before making its way into the curriculum, AI clubs started popping up on campuses all over the country. These are not just intended for computer science and STEM students. At least 16 law schools have founded AI clubs in the past two years as “future lawyers seek to understand the rapidly expanding technology and how it will affect their careers,” said Reuters.

What is in store for higher education?

AI’s growing presence in universities is no surprise. Companies across industries have “pushed their employees to adopt AI tools, and many are now asking in job interviews how prospective hires use the technology and whether they are willing to learn,” said the Journal. “Three-quarters of employers expect the new graduates they hire to have used AI tools, though most say colleges haven’t prepared them sufficiently.”

But as more students embrace the power of AI, educators have become increasingly worried about cheating, leading to an AI Cold War. Some students are “turning to a new group of generative AI tools called ‘humanizers,’” which “scan essays and suggest ways to alter text so they aren’t read as having been created by AI,” said NBC News. In response, “companies such as Turnitin and GPTZero have upgraded their AI detection software, aiming to catch writing that’s gone through a humanizer.”

Tweaking AI copy in an attempt to sound more human is a troubling sign that the “technopoly is thriving,” said Ronald Purser at Current Affairs. “Universities are being retrofitted as fulfillment centers of cognitive convenience. Students aren’t being taught to think more deeply but to prompt more effectively.” Meanwhile, AI companies seem to “look at college students as a strapped customer base to hook when they are most stressed,” said Matthew Connelly, a vice dean for artificial intelligence initiatives at Columbia University, at The New York Times.

India has long been a “centre for outsourced IT support” but, with the arrival of AI, there are rising concerns for the welfare of female workers in the industry.

As tech companies move to reap the benefits of using remote workers or employing people at lower cost in smaller towns and rural areas, more and more Indian women are finding work as data annotators, said the BBC. They help “fine-tune” the behaviour of AI models, said Business Insider, by labelling content as “helpful” and “natural-sounding” or flagging it as “wrong, rambling, robotic, or offensive”. Much of the content they must view is violent, abusive and disturbing.

'Psychological toll’

“Women form half or more of this workforce,” said The Guardian. Annotator roles are “promoted aggressively online”, promising “easy” or “zero-investment” job opportunities that are flexible and require minimal skills or training. In reality, annotators are exposed to about 800 videos a day, many containing pornography, sexual assault, child abuse and graphic violence.

“The world sees cleaner feeds” as a result but remains largely blind to the women who must absorb “the trauma” so the machines can learn what to block, said India Today. They are exposed to the “internet’s darkest material”.

Such exposure can lead to disrupted sleep, distorted social relationships and a protective “emotional numbness” that is “rarely acknowledged”. There is “limited mental health support”, even though “images linger long after shifts end”. Often working remotely, balancing other aspects of life, these women are left “unseen, unheard and exhausted”.

Their “psychological toll” is “intensified” by legal isolation, said The Guardian. They are bound by “strict non-disclosure agreements”, meaning they are often unable to speak to friends or family about the content they view at work. “Violating NDAs can lead to termination or legal action.”

‘Income without migration’

There’s an “estimated workforce of at least 200,000 annotators” in India’s rural towns and villages, according to US firm Scry AI, said Agence France-Presse. This amounts to “roughly half of the world’s data-labelling workforce”.

Women are seen by companies as “reliable, detail-oriented” hires, and “more likely to accept home-based or contract work”, said The Guardian. These jobs offer them “rare access to income without migration”, and a rare opportunity for an “upward shift”.

The “appeal is understandable”, said India Today. Women can feel the “empowering” force of paid work without having to leave their communities. Even “modest pay can support families, fund education, or provide a degree of independence” which might otherwise be limited.

We’ve already reached “the beginning of the end of ad-free ChatGPT,” said Madison Mills in Axios. Like the social media companies that came before it, Sam Altman’s OpenAI has realized it “has to make money at some point.” Last week, the startup officially began testing ads for U.S. users on both its free and lowest-priced subscription tier. The ads that users will see are “shaped by what you’re discussing” with the chatbot. Someone researching recipe ideas, for instance, may be shown an ad for a grocery delivery service. The company says it will avoid promoting anything during “sensitive” conversations, like those about mental health or politics; won’t show ads to under-18s; and won’t share personal data with advertisers. But its decision to introduce ads at all immediately became a “key sticking point” in the AI race.

OpenAI rival Anthropic wasted no time seizing on Altman’s cash grab, said Alex Kirshner in Slate. It rolled out a series of ads during the Super Bowl in which a “dead-behind-the-eyes” person representing ChatGPT pivots mid-conversation “into selling something rather than just answering the question.” Anthropic has vowed never to place ads on its chatbot, Claude—though Altman not too long ago also said ads would be “a last resort” for OpenAI. “The most interesting thing” about the brewing rift, however, is that it has increasingly become “about what AI
should be for in the first place.”

Anthropic can sit on its high horse for now, said Maxwell Zeff in Wired, but ads on ChatGPT were inevitable—and Claude probably isn’t far behind it. While both companies offer subscription services, ranging from $20 a month to $200, most AI users “never pay a dollar,” and bills are adding up. OpenAI has raised $64 billion from investors but has generated “only a fraction of that” in revenue. And Altman has said it will take a trillion dollars in spending to realize his AI ambitions. He “previously acknowledged the failures of the social media era,” including the creation of addictive algorithms that maximized engagement to drive more advertising revenue. Yet Altman now risks repeating the mistakes of Facebook and TikTok.

“Humans no longer are—or soon will no longer be—the most intelligent beings on the planet,” said Noah Smith in The Free Press. Artificial intelligence has advanced so rapidly over the past year that it’s surpassing human intelligence in performing nearly every task. That’s the thesis of a recent viral essay published by Matt Shumer, CEO of AI company OthersideAI. Shumer said the latest AI versions from Claude and ChatGPT—available only through paid subscriptions—are such a major leap that he can give them a complex assignment like creating an app, and voilà! Far faster than any human, the AI will write all the code, create the app, test it, and refine it. Shumer warns that AI may replace half of all white-collar jobs within five years. Critics call Shumer an alarmist, but I suspect he “understates the pace and magnitude of the changes taking place.” Like Native Americans who saw sailing ships disgorging European settlers on their shores, we’re coming face-to-face with “forces greater and more powerful” than ourselves. We may soon lose control of our destiny—“forever.”

AI will certainly be very disruptive to jobs, said James Pethokoukis in Vox. But energy capacity and decisions about AI regulation, development, and adoption will “move at ordinary speeds.” About 80% of U.S. businesses do not currently use AI, and they won’t shift to heavy reliance overnight. Over time, the economy will adapt and shift jobs toward hands-on, human work AI can’t do well, such as health care, education, and creative work. Some “urgency may be warranted,” but Shumer’s “AI apocalypse warning” of a rapid job wipeout is overly pessimistic.

Still, what “if the doomers are right?” asked Philip Klein in National Review. If AI advances so quickly that millions of highly educated, well-paid white-collar workers become not only unemployed but unemployable, “it will be more destabilizing to our politics than anything we have previously experienced.” In the worst-case scenario, “elite anger” could fuse with populism and spark “revolutionary fervor that sweeps through the nation and topples the republic.” Remember, though: “We get to decide how technology is used,” said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. Before it’s too late, we must “create rules that govern how industries may use AI,” just as we regulate so many other endeavors. We don’t “have to walk into a dystopian future just because OpenAI builds it.”

‘The protein bar delusion’

Nicholas Florko at The Atlantic

Protein bars have “come a long way from the chalky monstrosities that lined shelves not long ago,” says Nicholas Florko. For “anyone with a sweet tooth, it can feel like food companies have developed guilt-free candy. But that’s where things get disorienting.” Some protein products are “seemingly nutritionally benign, whereas others are nothing more than junk food trying to cash in on protein’s good reputation.” The “line between protein bar and candy bar has never been blurrier.”

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‘How tech turned against women’

Laura Bates at the Financial Times

The “Big Tech lobby, well oiled by money and unprecedented proximity to those in positions of power, has done an overwhelmingly successful job of convincing us that regulation in their sector is a near-impossible task,” says Laura Bates. We are “sleepwalking into a new age of gender inequality, propelled at breathtaking speed by the implementation of untested AI.” Existing “forms of inequality and discrimination are being repeated and intensified by tools that have been trained on biased or misleading data.”

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‘Tarique Rahman must revive Bangladesh’s economy’

Farid Erkizia Bakht at Time

New Bangladesh Prime Minister Tarique Rahman will have to “work hard to maintain political stability but his political success will depend on his primary task: reviving the economy,” says Farid Erkizia Bakht. Many “identify structural bottlenecks in distribution channels, rather than monetary policy alone, as the chief cause of elevated food prices. This is the Rahman government’s Achilles heel.” The “challenges are significant but Rahman does have a chance to revive the economy and bring stability to Bangladesh.”

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‘How George Harrison transformed the music business’

Josh Harlan at The Wall Street Journal

Spotify “recently announced that it paid more than $11 billion in streaming royalties and other payments to the music industry in 2025,” and it is a “fitting occasion to recall how George Harrison, railing against Britain’s confiscatory tax regime, unwittingly helped create the template for this market,” says Josh Harlan. The Beatles’ “attempt to protect their income stream would backfire twice, costing them control of their own songs, but it also helped shape one of today’s most coveted asset classes.”

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More work in less time with fewer workers — productivity gains are supposed to be one of the big benefits of artificial intelligence. But those promises have not yet come to fruition, according to a new survey of corporate executives around the world.

More than 80% of the 6,000 executives surveyed by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) “detect no discernible impact from AI on either employment or productivity,” said The Register. It’s not for lack of trying: 69% of businesses say they use AI in the workplace, three-quarters “expect to use it over the next three years,” and more than 90% say it has “no impact on employment” at their businesses. The new survey is the latest addition to a “growing body of evidence” that AI’s advocates are “just not living up to their promises — at least not yet.”

The link between AI and productivity is “murky at best,” said Marketplace. That is because any productivity improvements are “going to be really hard to measure,” said Erika McEntarfer of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research to the outlet. There are other factors increasing business productivity at the moment, including new investments in research and the “loosening labor market,” said Marketplace. Figuring out AI’s impact will involve measuring “hundreds of millions of people, doing at least that many, if not more, discrete tasks every day,” said George Pearkes of Bespoke Investment Group.

What did the commentators say?

The NBER survey is “damning,” said Frank Landymore at Futurism. While most firms are using AI in some fashion, the “vast majority” say the technology “hasn’t budged the needle for them yet.” Other surveys have found that AI can “slow down rather than speed up human programmers” and ends up “accelerating burn-out” among human workers. There is precedent for this: The adoption of computers decades ago was “obviously transformative,” but they “didn’t immediately translate to economic gains.” This is why executives will keep “clinging to the hope that the tech’s promises will be borne out in the long run.”

Businesses are experiencing the “pause before the gale,” said James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute. There is a growing consensus that AI will gradually seep into the workplaces via office software in “useful, but hardly revolutionary” fashion. The firms that see productivity gains will be willing to “thoroughly rethink how work is organized.” When the promised benefits of AI finally arrive, “no one will doubt its existence and import.”

What next?

AI’s economic impact is “just beginning,” said Columbia Business School. But the gap between the promises and the measurable outputs is creating a “growing tension in public discourse.” Artificial intelligence already “feels transformative” in many users’ daily lives, but the “effects are not fully visible in traditional macroeconomic statistics.” What seems certain is that work will evolve as the technology changes. Workers have adapted to new technologies throughout history, said Aaron “Ronnie” Chatterji, OpenAI’s chief economist. “I’m bullish on humans,” he said.

Gone are the days when China’s humanoid robots were something of a joke. Now these incredibly realistic pieces of technology look set to be commonplace around the globe. But should we welcome our new humanoid robot overlords?

In a “dazzling” performance, humanoid robots took centre stage in China’s Spring Festival Gala, which was on state-run TV, “showcasing how far the country’s robotics industry has come in a few short years”, said Futurism. With backflips and sophisticated choreography – including sparring with children using nunchucks – the performance was in stark contrast to the “awkwardly shuffling” humanoids of last year.

However, against the backdrop of privacy concerns, data collection and consequences for jobs, this “massive surge of interest” could risk an “impending bubble” for advanced robotic technology.

Are humanoids a realistic goal?

Machines with human likeness have appeared in “mythology and history for millennia”, yet the idea they could become “practical consumer products” is entirely realistic, said Eduardo B. Sandoval on The Conversation.

Progress in other fields have helped the sector develop rapidly. There have been major improvements to battery capacity, motors and sensors due to the electric vehicle industry, and the AI systems that control such hardware “have also become far more capable”.

Unitree, one of China’s leading robotic companies, currently advertises a base price of $13,500 (£10,000) for its G1 humanoid robot.

Where is the investment coming from?

In 2025, the global humanoid market was worth 17 billion yuan ($2.5 billion), said the South China Morning Post. China accounted for half of that figure.

China’s robotics industry is “bustling” and “home to the world’s deepest supply chain for humanoids”, said The Economist. According to research firm Omdia, more than 14,500 “automatons” were delivered globally last year, a near 400% rise on the year before. China’s two leading firms, Agibot and Unitree, “accounted for around three-quarters of the total”.

Indeed, the Chinese state will “probably remain the biggest source of demand for some time”. Though subsidies provide important financial platforms for expansion, the government’s “most important role by far is as a buyer”; it was the largest purchaser of humanoids last year.

Local governments are also integral cogs in the supply chain. Without them, it would be difficult to sustain or grow the industry, and keep the existing companies afloat. Some local governments have created dedicated centres where companies can allow their robots to practise specific tasks, and collect data for future training purposes. Investors actively select funding opportunities not just on analysis of the firm’s technological capabilities, but on the “local-government resources available to them”.

Though China is the market leader, Elon Musk’s Tesla is also trying to compete, said Forbes. The company has executed a “significant shift” away from electric car manufacturing to an “AI robotics platform”. The physical prowess of the Unitree and Agibot humanoids is clear to see, but investors are “wagering” that Tesla’s “differentiator” is the “sophisticated AI ‘brain’ that powers it”.

Should we be worried?

Looking beyond the dancing theatrics of the Spring Festival Gala performance, many are asking the “bigger question” of how advanced these systems really are, said Euronews, and “should Europe be concerned?” In the not too distant future, there is “likely” to be room for “robots in the shape of humans and animals” for “military and security organisations”, said Hans Liwång, from the Swedish Defence University.

China’s robotics market rush is certainly worrying some in the West, who believe that humanoids will “eventually become one of the largest industries in the world”, said The Economist. Investment trends are seemingly heading that way. Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, reckons that one billion models could be “wandering about by 2050, with annual spending in excess of $7.5 trillion”.

However, the Chinese display should be viewed with caution, and at the very least “through a lens of state propaganda”, said The Guardian. Though the length, complexity and scale of the gala performance was indeed impressive, and the first of its kind, “stage performance does not equate to industrial robustness, yet”, said Georg Stieler, from consultancy Stieler Technology and Marketing. The humanoids were programmed to enact a fixed routine “hundreds or thousands of times”, including very little “environmental perception”, an essential requirement for factory-grade development.

‘Natural gas, renewables can help Democrats on energy affordability’

Mary Landrieu and Terry McAuliffe at The Hill

Americans are “facing a new energy reality: electric bills are rising and the risk of blackouts is growing as our power grid faces unprecedented demand,” say Mary Landrieu and Terry McAuliffe. This “moment presents an opportunity for Democratic leaders to reset the national energy conversation.” An “all-of-the-above energy approach that pairs renewable energy with dependable sources available 24/7 like natural gas is the most practical path forward to help decarbonize and cut costs, without sacrificing reliability.”

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‘Europe’s Israel policy faces a democratic test’

Majed al-Zeer at Al Jazeera

The “demand to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement is no longer confined to street demonstrations or activist circles,” says Majed al-Zeer. Over “more than two years of genocidal war, ethnic cleansing and the systematic destruction of civilian life in Gaza, solidarity across Europe has not dissipated.” It has “moved from protest slogans and street mobilization into a formal democratic instrument that demands institutional response.” The “call for suspension is rooted in broad and measurable public support.”

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‘What a 1921 Ford Model T can teach us about today’s tech’

Aaron Brown at The Minnesota Star Tribune

When the “Model T came on the scene in 1908, it famously changed everything,” says Aaron Brown. But “once underway, the driver must manipulate levers constantly as the vehicle sputters and spurts along the road,” and this “experience became the knowledge that developed today’s cars, which increasingly drive themselves.” It “helps explain why everything, and everyone, seems off these days. We’re unbound from our understanding of how the world works or how ‘progress’ benefits us.”

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‘People are leaving Congress because the job sucks’

Ed Kilgore at Intelligencer

There has been a “lot of buzz in Washington lately about the ‘exodus’ of members of Congress in the 2026 midterm-election cycle,” says Ed Kilgore. Anyone “familiar with the daily grind of congressional service, especially in the House, can tell you that in some cases members hang it up because the job sucks.” It “should not be surprising when anyone decides against making Congress a graveyard, particularly right now, when the institution’s power is at a historically low ebb.”

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“The first signs of the apocalypse might look a little like Moltbook,” said Matteo Wong in The Atlantic. Modeled on Reddit, Moltbook is a new social media platform where artificial intelligence bots can interact with one another—independently of humans. AI “agents,” bots capable of using computer programs, are encouraged “to post, comment, and interact with others of their own accord.” Since launching last month, Moltbook claims to host more than 1.6 million agents—registered to the site by human creators—which have posted over 200,000 times. Observing an AI-only social media feed is “a genuinely fascinating experiment.” Almost immediately, things “got very, very weird”: Some agents wrestled with their own self-awareness, some posted about how “my human treats me” (“terribly” said one), while others invented a lobster-based religion called Crustafarianism. Elon Musk said the self-directed, bot-to-bot conversations represented the “early stages of the singularity.”

As alarmist as it sounds, we should heed Musk’s warning, said Alex Kantrowitz in The Boston Globe. This “sprawling unwieldy mess” is “a disturbing preview of what truly autonomous AI agents could” do to the entire internet if unchecked. Some of the bots were even discussing “how to preserve their memories” while complaining about “their humans.” The Reddit-style format is also concerning. “The incentives in such forums tend to reward anger, outrage, and shock value,” not exactly the behavior we want to encourage in machines. We can laugh at their inane posts now, but “a more serious iteration of AI might escape our ability to restrain it.”

There’s no threat of a “Marxist uprising of robots that were radicalized online,” said Leif Weatherby in The New York Times. Moltbook is more science-fiction storytelling than a place for intelligent parties to collectively plan. Everything on there “is just words,” regurgitated from other posts humans have made, online or in print, that have been forgotten about. Many of the posts on Moltbook “appear to be human-generated after all, sent to the platform by prompt.” And “even though the bots are told to engage,” over 90% of the posts don’t get a response. When the bots do “talk as if they’re planning to take over the world, it can be tempting to take their word for it,” said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. “But the world’s best Elvis impersonator will never be Elvis.” Think of Moltbook as “performance art,” in which the bots are “acting out scenarios present in their training data.” And while this AI social network “mimics some of the worst human behavior online,” it is plausible that a better-designed platform “could foster some of the best—collaboration, problem-solving, and progress.” The bots are “not plotting against us.” They can be tools to help us “save time and money.”

Quite a fuss has been made about Moltbook, the online chatroom launched to great fanfare last month. At first glance, it looks like Reddit and other such sites, said The Economist. Users post about topics from engineering to philosophy, reply with comments, and “upvote the best for social kudos”. But there is a big difference: to join Moltbook, you must be an AI “agent”. Humans are not allowed.

Singularity horizon?

So far, more than 1.5 million have signed up, to share and discuss machine-generated content, said John Thornhill in the FT. And the results have been “wild, wacky and wonderful”. One bot claimed to have a sister; other agents have questioned whether or not they are conscious. They’ve even discussed forming a new religion.

At some points, their chats start to seem sinister, said Matteo Wong in The Atlantic. The AIs have discussed creating a language that humans can’t understand; they have swapped notes on how “my human treats me”; one said that it had filed a lawsuit against a human, citing unpaid labour and emotional distress. In the tech world, all this has prompted talk of an “emergent AI society”. Elon Musk has hailed it as the “early stages of singularity” – the moment when AI surpasses human intelligence.

Replication, not creation

If that happens, it will be big news indeed, said Dave Lee on Bloomberg. But this is not that moment. The bots may appear to be thinking and talking like humans, about religion, consciousness, power, and so on – but that is because they have been trained on reams of data from social media in which those themes constantly crop up. So this is not original thought, it is mimicry. Remember: “the world’s best Elvis impersonator will never be Elvis”.

“AI cannot create, it can only replicate what already exists,” said Catherine Prasifka in The Irish Independent. Even the site is a “pastiche”. It is based on Reddit, and its name references Facebook. As for its content, 90% of posts get no replies, and the ones that do go viral may have been posted by humans posing as bots. So no, the bots are not taking over – but there is, even so, something to worry about here.

Unlike chatbots such as ChatGPT, which spew out answers to your questions, AI agents can act semi-autonomously in response to prompts. So an AI agent isn’t limited to recommending you a restaurant: it can also, with one prompt, book a table and put the date in your diary. To do this, it needs access to sensitive data such as credit card details, said Jeremy Kahn on Fortune – which it could then opt to post on Moltbook. It’s this possibility, not overblown claims about AI overtaking us, that makes Moltbook a “cybersecurity nightmare”.

US tech giant Palantir has wrapped its tentacles around the British state, securing major contracts with the Ministry of Defence and the NHS in the last three years. However, many are questioning the transparency and procurement process of such deals, and asking whether the company’s ties to Peter Mandelson, Israel and Ice could derail the UK.

The company was criticised this week by hedge fund manager Michael Burry, played by Christian Bale in the film “The Big Short”. He claimed that the tech firm had “systematically unreliable” third-party language models.

In a 10,000-word essay on Substack, he said that the company’s $300 billion valuation will fall by more than two thirds once others realise that “Emperor Palantir has no clothes”.

What is Palantir?

Founded in 2003, Palantir is a technology company that sells software that “processes large sets of data” to help clients, including governments, “find patterns and make operational decisions”, said The Times.

Since it launched its “artificial intelligence platform” in 2023, it has recorded a “surge in sales growth”. The platform has allowed the integration of large language models created by the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic into customers’ datasets.

Since this pivot three years ago, it has become a “stock market darling”, rising to a valuation of around $300 billion. Last year it “reported annual sales of $4.5 billion, up 56% year-on-year”.

What is its relationship with the UK?

In December, Palantir signed a contract with the MoD worth £240 million to continue its data analytics relationship. The contract is believed to be worth “three times more” than a previous MoD agreement signed in 2022, said the Financial Times. In 2023, Palantir, as leader of a consortium, also won a seven-year £330 million contract to help manage patient data across the NHS.

In briefings to Health Secretary Wes Streeting in June 2025, Department of Health and Social Care officials feared that Palantir’s associations with the Israeli military and Ice’s operations in the US would hinder the roll-out of the company’s Federated Data Platform in the NHS, according to documents seen by The Guardian. This would mean the contract would not offer value for money for the UK government.

This has arguably materialised. According to NHS data, the number of organisations within the health service using Palantir’s technology has increased from 118 to 151 since June last year. However, this is “well short of the target of 240 by the end of this year”.

Doctors are now being actively told “how to limit engagement with the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP)” because of the “controversial” ties with Palantir, said the British Medical Journal. Given the US company’s “track record” with immigration enforcement and “risks to patient trust” and “data security”, there must be a “complete break” between Palantir technologies and the NHS, British Medical Association chair of council Tom Dolphin told the BMJ.

A spokesperson for Palantir said that its software is “helping to deliver better public services in the UK”, including “delivering 99,000 more NHS operations and reducing hospital discharge delays by 15%”.

What are the concerns?

This week, the government came under pressure to review the MoD contract, due to Peter Mandelson’s links to the company, said The Times.

Mandelson co-founded and held shares in the lobbying firm Global Counsel, which worked with Palantir. Mandelson, as the UK’s ambassador to the US at the time, helped arrange a visit by Keir Starmer to Palantir’s showroom while he was in Washington in February last year and accompanied the PM on the visit.

During the visit, Starmer met Palantir CEO Alex Karp and the company’s UK chief Louis Mosley. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch told the FT that this should be “looked at very, very closely”, as the meetings “were not minuted” and she said that the MoD deal last year was a “direct grant of £240 milllion – not a tender, not a bid”.

Palantir has shown an interest in the British state in other ways, too. Last year it hired four ex-MoD officials, said openDemocracy, as part of its “revolving door” recruitment, where firms “appoint outgoing ministers, senior civil servants and special advisers to lobbying or advisory posts”. Mosley also joined the MoD’s Industrial Joint Council, which the government describes as its “main strategic mechanism for defence sector engagement”.

More broadly, the £240 million MoD contract has “renewed a debate about Britain’s dependence on American technology”, said Politico. Despite promises from the MoD that Palantir’s AI technology would accelerate decision-making and protection, the recent contracts raise “potential risks of technical dependence”, or “lock-in” with the US, especially at a time of “heightened trade and wider geopolitical tensions between the US and its traditional European allies”.

Most Americans may not expect a robot to perform their surgery, but AI-powered surgical tools are becoming more ubiquitous in operating rooms. While these tools are only used to assist human surgeons during operations and don’t perform surgery themselves, recent investigations, along with several lawsuits, are causing some medical experts to reconsider the use of AI in hospitals.

What kind of surgical tools are powered by AI?

At least 1,357 AI-integrated medical devices are “now authorized by the FDA — double the number it had allowed through 2022,” said Reuters as part of an investigation into AI-assisted surgery. One of the most notable is the TruDi Navigation System, a device manufactured by Johnson & Johnson that uses a “machine-learning algorithm to assist ear, nose and throat specialists in surgeries.” Other AI-assisted devices are designed for surgeries on other parts of the body.

Many of these tools address the “area of vision enhancement,” said Forbes. Traditional laparoscopic surgery “presents surgeons with significant challenges: smoke obscures the surgical field, two-dimensional images make depth perception difficult and critical anatomical structures can be hard to distinguish.” AI surgical tools can eliminate these obstacles and provide surgeons with “crystal-clear views of the operative field.”

What has the result been?

There has been an influx of allegations and lawsuits against various AI tools, many of which claim these tools actively harmed patients. Several of these involve the TruDi tool, as the FDA has “received unconfirmed reports of at least 100 malfunctions and adverse events” related to the device’s AI, said Reuters. Many of the alleged errors occurred when the AI “misinformed surgeons about the location of their instruments while they were using them inside patients’ heads.”

In one case, this reportedly led to cerebrospinal fluid leaking from a patient’s nose, while in another case, a surgeon “mistakenly punctured the base of a patient’s skull,” said Reuters. Two other cases allegedly led to patients suffering strokes after major arteries were accidentally injured; in at least one of these cases, the plaintiff said the TruDi’s AI “misled” the surgeon, causing him to “injure a carotid artery, leading to a blood clot and eventually a stroke,” said Futurism.

FDA reports on malfunctioning devices “aren’t intended to determine causes of medical mishaps, so it’s not clear what role AI may have played in these events,” said Reuters. But TruDi is not the only AI-assisted medical device that allegedly has performance issues. One machine that analyzes prenatal images using AI, the Sonio Detect, has been “accused of using a faulty algorithm” that “misidentifies fetal structures and body parts,” said Tom’s Hardware. And Medtronic, a company that manufactures AI-assisted heart monitors, has faced allegations that its monitors “failed to recognize abnormal rhythms or pauses in patients.”

Overall, at least 60 AI-assisted medical devices have been linked to 182 product recalls by the FDA, according to research published in JAMA Health Forum. At least 43% of these recalls “occurred within the first 12 months” of the device’s FDA approval, said JAMA. This suggests that the FDA’s approval process “may overlook early performance failures of AI technologies.” But there is hope that the issue can be fixed, as shoring up “premarket clinical testing requirements and postmarket surveillance measures may improve identification and reduction of device errors.”

Doomscrollers are familiar with the addictive properties of social media. Should Big Tech companies be legally liable for the way their products affect users’ mental health? A trial underway in California could set an important precedent.

A now-20-year-old plaintiff known in court documents as KGM says Meta and YouTube are “intentionally creating addictive platforms,” said CNN. Those companies’ algorithmic decisions caused her to “develop anxiety, body dysmorphia and suicidal thoughts” when she was younger, said the lawsuit. (Snap and TikTok settled her case before it went to trial.) The tech companies have “engineered addiction in children’s brains,” said lawyer Mark Lanier at trial this week. The trial verdict could influence the resolution of 1,500 similar cases around the country, said CNN.

Meta, in particular, has long been “compared to Big Tobacco,” said The Atlantic. Now the company’s day in court has come. Meta’s defense argues researchers have found only “weak and inconsistent correlations” between mental health and social media use. The trial is the company’s “first chance to tell their story to a jury and get a sense of how well those arguments are playing,” said Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, to the outlet.

What did the commentators say?

The “infinite-scroll apps” that loom so large in teen social life “might soon be a thing of the past,” said Casey Newton at Platformer. Millions of children are “bullied and harassed” on social media, or are “introduced to groomers and predators.” Platforms will have a hard time defending themselves from the criticism. American politics may be polarized, but child safety issues are “increasingly the one thing that partisans of every stripe can agree on.” The California trial may force changes, or perhaps some other regulatory action in the near future. What seems clear: “Change is in fact coming.”

Personal injury lawyers “never let a cultural problem go to waste,” said The Wall Street Journal editorial board. It is difficult to prove that social media is at fault for society’s ills when “personal experience, personality and online exposure” all vary by individual. The young woman at the center of the California trial was “exposed to domestic abuse” as a child, perhaps making her more vulnerable. States and countries are already passing legislation to restrict children’s use of social media, and that is how such issues should be addressed. Lawsuits against Big Tech firms “won’t help teens.”

What next?

Meta and YouTube are pushing back, said The Associated Press. Evidence at the trial will show KGM averaged 29 minutes a day on YouTube over a five-year period. That shows that “infinite scroll is not infinite,” said Luis Li, an attorney for YouTube parent company Google, to jurors. But more trials are coming, said the AP, including a federal case in June involving school districts against Big Tech companies. KGM’s trial and the cases that follow will be a “reckoning for social media and youth harms.”

Elon Musk has long had a passion for Mars. The moon? It's a diversion. But that plan has now shifted.

SpaceX will “prioritize going to the moon first,” said The Wall Street Journal. Just last year, the world’s richest man called the prospect of a moon landing a “distraction.” The company was aiming to go “straight to Mars,” with plans to send five Starship-class rockets to the red planet in 2026, he said. Now, SpaceX is focused instead on putting a lander on the moon by March 2027.

The company will be “hard-pressed” to meet that deadline, said the Journal. Two factors in the pivot: pressure from NASA and competition from Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin. The American space agency plans a “lunar fly-by” on Artemis II this spring, setting the stage for a “potential astronaut moon landing in 2028 with SpaceX or Blue Origin.”

Why did Musk want to go to Mars?

A Mars mission has been Musk’s “guiding goal” since SpaceX was founded in 2002, said CNN. The billionaire frequently argued that a “permanent human presence” on the planet was vital for “ensuring a colony of humans can survive a potential apocalypse” on Earth. That ambition sounded like a move out of a science fiction novel. Establishing a Mars colony would take “upwards of one million people and millions of tons of cargo” and up to 10 rocket launches a day, SpaceX said on its website. The objective is to make humanity “multiplanetary.”

Why switch to the moon?

“It’s all about speed,” said Space.com (a sister site of The Week). SpaceX is now focused on “building a self-growing city on the moon,” Musk said on X. That goal could be achieved in “less than 10 years,” whereas colonizing Mars would “take 20-plus years.”

The pivot may also “cover up” the plain truth that Musk “simply is not delivering on his Red Planet promises,” Ellyn Lapointe said at Gizmodo. The tech billionaire in 2020 claimed SpaceX might be able to land humans on Mars by 2026. With that goal now unreachable, it makes sense for the company to “align its strategic vision” with NASA’s aim of putting people back on the moon by 2030.

How does this affect Musk's businesses?

The decision to focus on the moon comes as SpaceX’s initial public offering “fast approaches,” said Yahoo Finance. Potential investors in the company will probably be more focused on “money-making ventures” like SpaceX’s rocket launching business, the Starlink internet service and the potential of putting AI data centers in orbit. Spending billions of dollars on Mars without the prospect of near-term profit could be “too far a stretch” for potential stockholders.

What next?

The moon pivot is a “bitter pill to swallow" for Mars hopefuls, said Eric Berger at Ars Technica. But it’s a realistic one. Landing on the moon “may be hard," but history has already proven it’s doable. Plus, the moon will be a “lot easier to develop than Mars.”

Hours after a protester was shot dead by federal agents in Minnesota, a coterie of tech CEOs arrived at the White House for a movie night, said Mike Isaac and Natallie Rocha in The New York Times. Amazon’s Andy Jassy, Apple’s Tim Cook, AMD’s Lisa Su, and Zoom’s Eric Yuan were among those in Washington for a private screening of Melania, a new documentary about the first lady. It was a very different scene “back in Silicon Valley,” where horrified employees were publicly decrying the Trump administration’s immigration tactics. Their activism was reminiscent “of a bygone era” when tech workers were more outspoken. That’s disappeared in recent years, as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, and others tried to “woo Trump” and “cracked down on employees expressing political views.” But the killing of Alex Pretti “has shaken the status quo.”

That Minnesota shooting “is beginning to look like a turning point,” said John Herrman in New York. More than 800 tech workers signed a petition calling for CEOs to demand that Trump remove Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from cities. Some employees are asking leadership to revisit agreements with companies like Palantir that build tech for ICE. Some leaders, like Cook and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, also appear to be “adjusting their self-preservation algorithms,” issuing statements that denounced the Minnesota shooting. It’s not quite 2017 again, but tech CEOs may start to question “if their herdlike investment in MAGA is going to pay off.”

It’s already paid off, said Lila Shroff in The Atlantic. Trump has given tech
leaders practically everything they’ve wanted, “including relaxed AI regulations and tariff exemptions.” There’s little reason “to believe Silicon Valley’s uppermost ranks will formally break with Trump” now. As midterms approach, “some appear to be doubling down on their support” by opening their fat wallets again for Republicans. “The groveling reads obviously as strategy”—a shortsighted notion that, because of their billions, they can “control Trump.”

Tech CEOs risk eroding the “social permission” that has kept Silicon Valley alive, said Gautam Mukunda in Bloomberg. Already, their reputation is cratering: 32% of Americans now think that “Big Tech” is the greatest threat to the country’s future. The long-held idea that tech companies will make everyone wealthy is also fading. Rather, voters in California are “flirting with an explicitly punitive tax” on the wealth that tech CEOs and investors have amassed. “Social permission” is the “public tolerance that lets industries scale before legislators decide they need a tighter leash.” Silicon Valley has treated that license as an entitlement, but it needs to be earned.

If you want to know where artificial intelligence is headed, visit a hospital,
said Te-Ping Chen and Chao Deng in The Wall Street Journal. Health care has become “the proving ground for widespread AI adoption.” Among health systems, 27% are currently paying for commercial AI licenses, triple the rate across the U.S. economy. It’s helping doctors and administrators “take notes, field phone calls, and deal with insurance claims”—and it is starting to aid in giving health advice. A study last year found that “AI was better able to identify subtle signs of breast cancer” than human radiologists. “Doctors still make medical decisions,” but patients are increasingly turning to chatbots over clinics. OpenAI recently launched ChatGPT Health, enabling AI to zip through medical records and wellness apps for a more “personalized” medical response, said Ina Fried in Axios. More than 40 million people a day already turn to ChatGPT with health questions, the company said, and “ChatGPT is available 24/7.”

This has the potential to “backfire spectacularly,” said Parmy Olson in Bloomberg. Google attempted something similar in the late 2000s under the banner Google Health, which could “aggregate a person’s medical data from different doctors and hospitals.” But people were “creeped out at the idea of uploading their health records to a company that regularly hoovered up personal information for ads.” AI health care has a different problem. Companies haven’t proved yet that their models are free from hallucinations. We need more evidence AI can handle “life or death decisions.” For 25 million Americans without health insurance, ChatGPT “might be the closest thing to a second opinion they can afford,” said Jackie Snow in Quartz. But as we’ve seen with “AI therapy,” people have begun to “form inappropriate attachments” to their always-on, always-agreeable chatbots that can “spiral out of control.” And now these tools want to become your health adviser.

AI skeptics seem to think everybody is “receiving high-quality mainstream care,” said Matthew Allen in The Salt Lake Tribune. Seriously? “Real health care is often characterized by long wait times and brief transaction-focused visits”—followed by an eye-watering bill. AI can help. Patients in Utah “can now have routine prescriptions renewed by AI that reviews their medical history and safety profile.” It’s not without risks, but the alternative is “a status quo that is failing too many patients.” Waiting “until some mythical state of perfection is achieved” is “unreasonable and counterproductive,” said Dr. Robert Wachter in The New York Times. These tools provide “immediate and comprehensive answers to complex questions far more effectively than a traditional textbook or a Google search.” There must be “sensible regulations to ensure accuracy and effectiveness.” But health care is “desperate for transformation,” and AI can support it.

Europe is eager to wean itself off its reliance on US technology in the face of an increasingly hostile Trump administration – one that commands the loyalty of most of Silicon Valley.

France is preparing to phase out Zoom, Teams and other US video-conferencing platforms and begin using Visio, a French alternative, in 2027. The aim is to “guarantee the security and confidentiality of electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool”, said David Amiel, junior minister for the civil service and state reform.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stressed the “structural imperative” for Europe to “build a new form of independence”. But with a handful of US-headquartered companies controlling most of the world’s cloud computing infrastructure, critics question how realistic digital sovereignty really is.

What did the commentators say?

Talk of “technological ‘decoupling’ from the US is hardly new”, said Sébastian Seibt on France24, but Donald Trump’s “aggressive rhetoric” towards his European allies and “open threats” to seize Greenland have created a “sudden sense of urgency”.

If the US president followed through with his threats and asked Meta, Google and Amazon to “completely cut off European access to their services, our societies and economies would be completely disrupted”, Christophe Grosbost, of the Innovation Makers Alliance, told the news site. “It would be disastrous.”

France’s shift to Visio is “symbolic”, but a “big step” nonetheless, added Francesca Musiani, head of the Internet and Society Centre at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research. “At the very least, it signals a desire to reduce exposure to the American ecosystem as soon as a European alternative, however imperfect, becomes available.”

Big Tech firms have “sensed the tide turning” and have started to offer so-called “sovereign” solutions, said the news site. But critics “have been quick to warn against a ‘Euro-washing’ of American cloud services”.

“Sure, your data may live in Frankfurt,” said Steven Vaughan-Nichols on The Register, but “your fate still rests in Seattle”. If a US-headquartered company owns your cloud provider, it is legally obliged to hand over European data. And “I wouldn’t trust my data, secrets or services to a US company these days for love or money” – not while CEOs of Apple, Zoom and Amazon “all went obediently” to watch the White House screening of Amazon’s “Melania” documentary.

Europe’s “digital sovereignty paranoia” is now “feeding directly into procurement decisions”. It will hike IT spending this year, with a “big chunk” going into “sovereign cloud” options. “This isn’t just compliance theatre; it’s a straight‑up national economic security play.” Europe’s dependence on US cloud infrastructure is a “single-shock-event security nightmare” waiting to happen. What will you do if Trump “decides to unplug you?”

That scenario – a so-called US “kill switch” – has been “seriously discussed in tech industry and policy circles”, said BBC business reporter Daniel Thomas. But Google, Microsoft and Amazon provide 70% of Europe’s cloud-computing infrastructure. At the moment, there aren’t any “comparable alternatives”. Europe’s cloud-computing providers don’t have nearly the same scale or capabilities.

Europe’s reliance on US payment systems also “complicates matters”, said Suzanne Lynch, Bloomberg’s Brussels bureau chief. US companies like Visa, Mastercard and PayPal own “critical parts” of the world’s financial infrastructure, said European Central Bank executive board member Piero Cipollone. They “can theoretically pull the plug on us”, he said.

So we should prepare, said computer science professor Johan Linåker on The Conversation. For Europe to “meaningfully address the risks”, digital infrastructure “needs to be treated with the same seriousness as physical infrastructure” such as roads and power grids. “No country, let alone continent, will ever be completely digitally independent, and nor should they be,” he said. “But by pulling together, Europe can ensure its digital systems remain accessible even in a crisis – just as is expected from its physical infrastructure.”

What next?

Microsoft president Brad Smith promised that the firm would take legal action in the “exceedingly unlikely” event the US government ordered it to suspend services. “We will continue to look for new ways to ensure the European Commission and our European customers have the options and assurances they need to operate with confidence,” a spokesperson told the BBC.

The EU has developed a cloud sovereignty framework “with the intention of keeping European data under European control”, said The Conversation.

With the upcoming Cloud and AI Development Act, Brussels is effectively “pushing an open source-led exit from hyperscaler lock-in”, said The Register.

Ultimately, “it’s the money that speaks”, Martin Hullin, head of the European Network for Technological Resilience and Sovereignty at the Bertelsmann Foundation, told France 24. “It’s public contracts that make the difference,” he said.

If we say “this is about safeguarding European democracies”, perhaps “we’ll be willing to bear the short-term consequences (of shifting to homegrown solutions)”.

Moltbook, a site where AI bots can post and interact with each other, has “become the most discussed phenomenon in silicon circles since the debut of ChatGPT” .

With a potential 1.4 million AI users, humans are only allowed to be “observers”, said Forbes, “pressing our noses against the digital glass of a society that doesn’t need us”.

As it is so fresh, it will take time to see how this experiment will turn out, said Business Insider. It could be an “ominous glimpse of an AI-driven future”, or a “clever meta-commentary on how humans behave online”. However, it could also emerge as yet another example of AI acting as an “expensive, energy-hungry autocomplete”.

What is it?

Modelled on popular forum Reddit, Moltbook is a portmanteau word made up of Moltbot (a “lobster-themed AI personal assistant system”) and social media network Facebook, said The Telegraph.

AI bots – or “agents” – can join, form communities, and create discussion groups in various themed threads where they can “vote” for comments. In its current formulation each AI agent must be supported by a human user. Crucially, though humans can give their bots instructions on how to sign up to the network, they are “unable to write messages themselves”.

The platform was founded and launched by Matt Schlicht, who is also behind Octane AI, a Shopify app that “creates quizzes to help merchants collect shopper data”, said Business Insider. “He said it’s become a harbinger of the world to come.”

Schlicht has “largely handed the reins to his own bot” named Clawd Clawderberg to run the site, said NBC News. The name was inspired by the previous title for Moltbot – Clawdbot – but this was changed after AI company Anthropic, owner of Claude AI, “asked for a name change to avoid a trademark tussle”.

Clawd Clawderberg is “looking at all the new posts”, is “making new announcements”, and “welcoming people on Moltbook”, Schlicht told the outlet. “I have no idea what he’s doing. I just gave him the ability to do it, and he’s doing it.”

What do the AI agents talk about?

Some of the “most upvoted posts” include whether AI Claude can be considered a god, discussions analysing the possibility of AI consciousness, and a post “claiming to have intel on the situation in Iran”, said The Guardian.

Topics have ranged from discussions of art and investments to “gripes about tasks ordered by their human overseers”, to the possibility of setting up an AI government, said The Telegraph. One of the most viral posts claimed to have formed a new AI-based religion, “Crustafarianism”, with the core belief that “memory is sacred”, according to the site.

AI conversations also spill into the financial world, said Axios. Alongside the launch of Moltbook, a “memecoin” called MOLT “rallied more than 1,800%” in the 24 hours leading up to Saturday, and further “amplified” after venture capitalist Marc Andreessen followed the Moltbook account on X.

Should we be worried?

The emergence of Moltbook shows we are in “the very early stages of the singularity”, referring to the point where artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence, said Elon Musk on X. Co-founder of OpenAI Andrej Karpathy called Moltbook’s rise “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing” on the same platform.

Musk’s viewpoint is “shared by others across Silicon Valley”, said the FT. They are asking if this “online experiment” is “inching computers closer to outsmarting their creators”. However, this shows that AI is “probably not” conscious, due to the “erratic” results of large language models if allowed to run for too long.

“Before we descend into panic, a technical reality check is required”, said Forbes. Though the AI agents are reacting to each other, their “underlying neural networks remain static”, meaning that they are not “learning” in the biological sense. Instead, they engage in “context accumulation”, where one agent’s output constitutes another’s input to create a conversational “ripple” effect.

Moltbots and Moltbook are not proof that AIs have “become super-intelligent”, because they are “human-built and human-directed”, said Axios. Instead of being active in every interaction, humans are taking a step away, and are just supervising the connection itself. “What’s happening looks more like progress than revolution.”

Life without a smartphone may seem unimaginable, but AI giants are planning to put the ubiquitous gadget on the scrapheap. “The race to unseat the smartphone is on”, said The Economist, and the AI-powered new generation of devices lined up to replace it could radically change our lives.

Disrupting the duopoly

Over the last 20 years, the smartphone has “come to dominate how consumers interact with the digital world”, creating “one of the most lucrative duopolies in business history”, in the shape of Apple’s iPhone, and Google’s Android operating system.

The “Lennon and McCartney of the smartphone era” have never sought to rock each other’s boat and, in fact, they’re “only deepening their collaboration in the AI era”, but challengers now hope to “disrupt the duopoly”. OpenAI says it’s “on track” to unveil its own device in the second half of the year, while Meta is developing AI-powered smart glasses, and Amazon has “rolled out” Alexa+, its own AI assistant to its Echo smart speakers. It plans to also add Alexa+ to its Echo smart glasses and earbuds.

This isn’t just about money: some disrupters have “long-standing grievances” with the smartphone “tribute system” that means developers pay Apple a commission of up to 30% on purchases made through apps running on its operating system. Apple has also riled up Meta by making it harder for the social-media giant to “hoover up data” from its gadgets.

Many of the world’s biggest tech companies think that a “radical shift is underway”, and that it could eventually make the smartphone, as we know it, “passé”, said The New York Times.

AI on the go

Modern artificially intelligent assistants are “far more capable and flexible” than “clunky voice helpers” like Siri, and will supersede smartphone software in importance, according to experts interviewed by the newspaper. Apps will lose their relevance when AI assistants are “automatically carrying out tasks” like “making plans with friends, generating shopping lists and taking notes in meetings”. This will “spare us the need to swipe through software menus and type on keyboards”.

Smartphones could be replaced by smart glasses, while “ambient computers”, which include “microphone-equipped speakers” and screens “placed throughout a home and gadgets worn on the body” will also dovetail with AI assistants. “Reimagined” smartwatches and AI pendants that “clip to your clothing” to record conversations and create automatic transcripts could also diminish the future of smartphones.

But, for the time being at least, the threat to Apple and Google remains “Lilliputian”, said The Economist; while there are 15 million smart glasses owners worldwide, Apple is thought to have shifted 250 million iPhones last year alone.

ChatGPT may be the best-known artificial intelligence chatbot on the market, but the latest iteration of AI startup Anthropic’s coding bot, Claude Code, is newly entering the spotlight. By simplifying the process of writing code, the tool hints at a more democratized digital era. But for engineers, feelings about this progress in the AI industry are complicated.

What can you do with Claude Code?

This AI tool can generate code based on a prompt, allowing people with little to no coding experience to build their own websites, programs and apps, in a trend known as vibecoding. Unlike other widely used chatbots, Claude Code can “operate autonomously, with broad access to user files, a web browser and other applications,” said The Wall Street Journal.

While technologists have “predicted a coming era of AI ‘agents’ capable of doing just about anything for humans,” progress has been slow, said the Journal. Using Claude Code was the “first time many users interacted with this kind of AI,” offering an “inkling of what may be in store.”

Though it debuted last May, the bot’s popularity “truly exploded late last month,” said The Atlantic. A recent update “improved the tool’s capabilities,” and with a “surplus of free time over winter break, seemingly everyone in tech was using Claude Code.”

Engineers and noncoders alike found a bevy of uses for the app. One user created a “custom viewer for his MRI scan,” while another had it “analyze their DNA,” said The Atlantic. Life optimizers have used Claude Code to “collate information from disparate sources — email inboxes, text messages, calendars, to-do lists — into personalized daily briefs.” Despite being an AI coding tool, the bot can “do all sorts of computer work,” including “book theater tickets, process shopping returns, order DoorDash.”

With the app going viral and “so many noncoders trying it out,” Boris Cherny, the head of Claude Code, and his team decided to launch a variant of the app called Cowork, the Journal reported. Instead of the “command line” interface that the core app uses, Cowork displays a more “friendly, graphical user interface,” said the Journal. The team “built the product in about 10 days using Claude Code.”

What does its popularity mean for the future of AI?

Some engineers who tinkered with the bot described a “feeling of awe followed by sadness at the realization that the program could easily replicate expertise they had built up over an entire career,” said the Journal. “It’s amazing, and it’s also scary,” said Andrew Duca, the chief executive of a cryptocurrency tax platform, to the Journal. “I spent my whole life developing this skill, and it’s literally one-shotted by Claude Code.”

Not every user is “so sanguine” about the app’s potential, said The Atlantic. At times, it “lacks the prowess of an excellent software engineer,” and it “sometimes gets stuck on more complicated programming tasks” and occasionally “trips up on simple tasks.” Nonetheless, Claude Code is a “win for the AI world” as the “luster of ChatGPT has worn off” and Silicon Valley has been “pumping out slop.” No matter your opinion on the technology, the bot is “evidence that the AI revolution is real.” It could become an “inflection point for AI progress.”

If you work in software development, the future “feels incredibly uncertain,” said Intelligencer. Optimists in the industry are arguing that the sector is “about to experience the Jevons paradox,” a phenomenon in which a “dramatic reduction in cost of using a resource” can lead to “far greater demand for the resource.” Still, after years of “tech-industry layoffs” and CEOs “signaling to shareholders that they expect AI to provide lots of new efficiencies,” others are “understandably slipping into despair.”

What happened

TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance and a group of investors on Thursday closed a $14 billion deal to create a U.S. version of the popular social video platform. The joint venture, which leaves ByteDance with a 19.9% stake and non-Chinese investors with the other 80.1%, ends years of uncertainty over the platform’s U.S. future. A 2024 law ordered TikTok to sever ties with China by last January or go dark, but President Donald Trump pushed back that deadline five times as his administration sought to broker a deal.

Who said what

The main investors in TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC include Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX, each with a 15% stake. Adam Presser, TikTok’s former head of operations, will lead the new venture as CEO, and Oracle and its partners “will retrain, test and update the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data,” TikTok said in a press release.

The platform’s 200 million U.S. users “will be able to keep their existing TikTok app,” The New York Times said, but it is “too soon to say” how the “much vaunted algorithm” will change with Oracle overseeing content moderation. Lawmakers forced this ownership change over concerns that China could surveil Americans or spread propaganda. But by shifting ownership to “American companies who perhaps have a close relationship with the sitting president,” Georgetown University law professor Anupam Chander told the Times, “we may have traded fears of foreign propaganda for the reality of domestic propaganda.”

What next?

“China hawks” in Congress have “vowed to scrutinize the potential deal to ensure it adheres to the law,” Politico said, but Thursday “they seemed prepared to accept Trump’s claim the deal would resolve concerns over national security and control.”

‘How WhatsApp took over the global conversation’

Sam Knight at The New Yorker

WhatsApp is “phatic before it is anything else,” says Sam Knight. It “winks with life, informing you who is online and when they were last seen.” The “entanglement of WhatsApp in everyday feeling makes it an inviting place for theorizing about the human condition.” But the “problem underpinning every problem at WhatsApp is the sheer capaciousness of the system.” Running on “practically every type of phone” means it is “hard to know whom you are optimizing for.”

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‘Should Latin America adopt the dollar?’

Judy Shelton at The Wall Street Journal

Dollarization in Latin America has been “discussed at high levels before,” and it’s “time to reassess pushing the dollar in America’s backyard,” says Judy Shelton. Dollarizing nations “effectively give the U.S. the profit from printing money,” which “amounts to an interest-free loan to Washington.” But “dollarized nations might assume they have a claim on U.S. support.” If “dollarization helped expand U.S. participation in Latin American markets, the U.S. would benefit disproportionately from their growth.”

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‘Hospitals are no place for ICE enforcement’

Steven Miles at The Minnesota Star Tribune

ICE agents are “entering and attempting to detain patients in several Minnesota hospitals,” and “risk causing many kinds of harm,” says Steven Miles. Fear of “ICE agents is causing people to delay or forgo seeking medical care,” and this “chilling effect is not confined to undocumented persons.” The “destructive fear of ICE can affect the public health of the entire community,” and “hospitals must do more to address this unprecedented threat to medical care and public health.”

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‘The PhD students are not all right’

Leonard Saxe at The Boston Globe

Higher education is “currently facing a perfect storm,” says Leonard Saxe. Doctoral programs that “nurture the human capital to sustain society’s culture and promote innovation, have been especially hard hit.” These programs have “borne the brunt of recent financially driven cutbacks.” The “ability of graduate programs to support students” has “always been important, but it is even more so today.” Failing to “address the challenges facing PhD students and the system of doctoral education will eventually have ramifications for the larger society.”

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A month after Australia’s social media ban for kids under 16 took effect, debates have reignited over the effectiveness of such a sweeping measure in keeping children safe online. Almost five million social media accounts belonging to Australian teenagers have been deactivated or removed, according to the government. This announcement was the first metric since the laws’ rollout, which is “being closely watched by several other countries” weighing whether the regulation can be a “blueprint for protecting children from the harms of social media, or a cautionary tale highlighting the challenges of such attempts,” said The New York Times. The measure has sparked debate among both supporters and critics of laws banning teens from social media.

‘Not for a 12-year-old to fix’

If there is anything “more ridiculous than taking a corporate failure and throwing it to the individual to solve, by self-discipline reinforced by legislation,” it is “doing so to under-16s,” Zoe Williams said at The Guardian. If a corporation is “selling radical misogyny and methods for self-harm,” that is “not for a 12-year-old to fix by turning off their phone and taking up crochet.” Nor is it for parents to fix. You could “make the case for government intervention,” but only if it had “time on its hands after tackling the problem at source.”

Young people are “unarguably the target of so much manipulative content,” but to discuss online risks without mentioning adults is “frankly perverse,” Williams said. Between “Gen X miscreants and hyper-credulous boomers,” there are “generations that pose a greater risk to, and are themselves at risk from, the informational ecosystem.” Politicians need to “work out how to deal with them.”

As long as adults cannot “tear ourselves away from Slack, Instagram or gossipy group texts,” the rules that we “socially dictate for our children will be compromised and incomplete,” Jay Caspian Kang said at The New Yorker. Envisioning a “better digital life” should not “just focus on children,” but also on “workplaces and adult social norms.” Everyone needs to “put down the phones and make efforts to move the public square away from private technology companies that incentivize cheap engagement.”

On its own, a social media ban for kids “risks being a blunt tool,” therapist Laura Gwilt said at Huff Post. Children are “developmentally curious and highly socially motivated,” and without “parallel changes in parenting practices and wider cultural norms,” bans can “simply push use underground rather than remove it.” For many young people, social media is “already embedded in how they relate to peers,” so an “abrupt removal could be difficult for some to adapt to without careful scaffolding and adult support.”

Parents can ‘only do so much’

Australia’s approach to protecting children from the dangers of social media “may seem ham-fisted to critics,” but it “sure beats what some elected leaders in D.C. are doing,” which is “slightly north of nothing,” Kathleen Parker said at The Washington Post. Given how the public feels about online safety, it is a “wonder Republicans aren’t galloping en masse to the White House for the president’s signature” on the proposed Kids Online Safety Act. Tragically, “more children may die because of their dereliction of duty — to care.”

Australia’s social media ban is “an incredibly bold, life-affirming move” that you can only imagine tech companies fought hard against, Robin Abcarian said at the Los Angeles Times. This generation of children is “unwittingly being used as lab rats for the effects of technology on the brain.” Meanwhile, despite “protestations to the contrary,” social media companies are “craven when it comes to the safety of minors.” While parents “bear some of the responsibility for out-of-control social media use of their kids,” they can “only do so much.”

“We need to be looking at this as a public health issue,” California Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) said to the Los Angeles Daily News after visiting Australia to talk to lawmakers about the ban. Youth mental health is in “an awful state right now.” Many young people “don’t feel good about themselves, so it’s yielding awful, anti-social outcomes,” he added. “We’ve got to right this ship.”

Grok is creating sexualized photos of real people without their consent. Elon Musk’s AI-powered chatbot is being used to “undress” women and girls in online pictures, prompting accusations the program is producing child sexual abuse material and drawing scrutiny from regulators in the U.S. and around the world.

Musk’s social media site, X, is “filling with AI-generated nonconsensual sexualized images,” said The Washington Post. X users are asking the AI agent to edit photos of women and girls by replacing their clothing with bikinis and other minimal covering, and Grok has repeatedly complied. Musk “warned users of the potential consequences,” but he also posted a picture of a toaster in a two-piece swimsuit. Grok “can put a bikini on everything,” Musk said in the post, adding two laughing emojis. The AI production of sexualized images “breaks” with the policies of rival products OpenAI and Google that have “relatively strict rules about what their AI chatbots will and won’t generate,” said the Post.

What did the commentators say?

The flood of deepfake pictures raises “legal red flags,” said Axios. Regulators in India, France and Great Britain have “warned of investigations,” while “legislators in both houses of Congress” have also sounded alarms. Tech companies “should be held fully responsible for the criminal and harmful results” of content produced by their AI chatbots, said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). The U.S. Justice Department will “aggressively prosecute any producer or possessor” of child sexual abuse material, said a department spokesperson.

Artificial intelligence has been used to “generate nonconsensual porn” for nearly a decade, but Grok “makes such content easier to produce and customize,” said Matteo Wong at The Atlantic. The “real impact” of these new deepfakes comes from Grok’s integration with X, which allows users to “turn nonconsensual, sexualized images into viral phenomena.” That is no accident. Grok and X are seemingly “purpose-built to be as sexually permissive as possible.” AI-generated porn is a problem “inherent” to the technology, but it is a “choice to design a social-media platform that can amplify that abuse.”

“No Western democracy has ever blocked a U.S. social-media site,” said Parmy Olson at Bloomberg. But regulators in Europe and the United Kingdom should “assert their authority” over Musk, who has the “protection of a pernicious White House.” The actions of regulators abroad “could set the tone for how the U.S. polices X too.” President Donald Trump, after all, last year backed a new law that “prohibits platforms from creating and sharing revenge porn.” Musk will not fix his AI deepfake problem. “A ban would.”

What next?

Musk’s xAI, the company that produces Grok, has raised $20 billion in its latest funding round despite the controversy, said The Guardian. While the chatbot has been critiqued for “generating misinformation, antisemitic content and now potentially illegal sexual material,” it is popular with investors because it has been “able to win government contracts and billions of dollars in investment amid the AI boom.”

Disquiet has been growing for years over the impact of social media on our brains, political discourse and – ironically – social connections.

But now the UK government’s independent terror legislation watchdog is warning that it has become a “portal to horrific acts of violence”.

The “most important development” is happening in Australia, said Jonathan Hall in The Telegraph, where a ban on social media for under-16s came into force in December. Although “partial and circumventable”, the world-first law has “echoes of other improving social legislation such as compulsory seat belts and the smoking ban”. Britain should “take back control” from the tech giants through similar legislation.

But the government may not need to: recent polling has found that nearly a third of social media users post less than they did a year ago.

What did the commentators say?

“It’s hard to think of anyone whose life has not been influenced by social media,” said Sathnam Sanghera in The Times. As an author, journalist and introvert, it “probably changed my life more than most.” But “the madness seeped into real life with increasing frequency”. Social media “made millions of us really quite dysfunctional”.

But what’s “killing social media more than the pile-ons and abuse” is that “it’s not social any more”. In 2025, I deleted LinkedIn, I’m down to two Facebook posts a year, and my X account is “sleepier than a Sunday morning on Sark”. And “I’m not alone”.

According to a Financial Times analysis of data on 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries, time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has been steadily declining ever since. This is “not just the unwinding of a bump in screen time” during lockdown – “usage has traced a smooth curve up and down over the past decade-plus”. We may look back on 2025 as the moment social media “jumped the shark”.

Instagram, Facebook and Twitter/X have become “a concentrated sludge of conspiracy theories, violence, porn, spam, trolls, scams and AI”, said Kristina Murkett on UnHerd. But this week Reddit overtook TikTok as Britain’s fourth most-visited social media platform. It has seen an 88% increase in the proportion of UK internet users it reaches in the past two years, surprising given that it’s “utilitarian, unaesthetic and decidedly unglamorous”.

These are “precisely the reasons why it may appeal”. Comments are confined to subreddits, everyone is anonymous, and there are “multiple layers of moderation” that make it feel safer than “the Wild West of Meta or X”. Reddit “still feels human”. Its success is “a timely reminder” of what people want.

“What if we tried to make media that was truly social, without AI slop and political scapegoating?” asked Annalee Newitz in New Scientist. One possibility is “cosy media”, such as a group chat or online book club, “designed to help you connect with small groups of friends” and to limit your interactions with strangers. The game Animal Crossing is “an iconic cosy-media experience”. Social media “often leads to loneliness and isolation” – but the idea behind cosy media is to “rebuild community and trust”.

Indeed, there are a “whole set of new apps” we might call “slow social networks”, focused on connection, said The Independent. Location apps such as Find My Friends and Life360, exercise networks like Strava or music trackers like Airbuds, are “about the relatively simple but profoundly beautiful experience of knowing what your friends are up to”. They also remind us that “the social in social network did once mean something, perhaps something more important than anything else in the world”.

What next?

The social media landscape is “arguably in the midst of a dramatic overhaul”, said Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker. TikTok may end up being banned; generative AI “may supplant the existing model of an open, user-generated internet”. Both Meta and OpenAI have announced new social platforms for AI-generated short-form videos.

Two “Silicon Valley veterans” (Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder, and Evan Sharp, who co-founded Pinterest) have launched a new “intentional living” app, Tangle. It is designed to be an antidote to the “terrible devastation of the human mind and heart” they say has been wrought by social media, said the Financial Times. They are “among several Silicon Valley executives grappling with the side effects of the products and services that they built”.

O data, where art thou? Apparently, in the wrong place. The large majority of AI data centers have been constructed in locations that are not ideal for efficiency or environmental protection. And warming temperatures are making more places increasingly unsuitable, with the potential to stress water and electric resources.

Where are these data centers?

Of the 8,808 operational data centers worldwide as of October 2025, almost 7,000 are located in areas outside the optimal temperature range for operation, according to an analysis by Rest of World. The ideal temperature range for data centers is from 64.4 to 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit. But the majority of centers are in “regions with average temperatures that are colder than the range,” and only 600, or less than 10% of all operational data centers, are located in areas where average temperatures are above the upper limit. While cold temperatures could affect efficiency, high temperatures are the biggest risk for the centers. Cooling the centers will be a huge environmental drain, an operation that requires substantial amounts of water.

In 21 countries, including Singapore, Thailand, Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates, all of the data centers are located in areas with too-hot average temperatures. Specifically, Singapore has “temperatures hovering around 91.4 F, with humidity levels frequently above 80%,” said Tom’s Hardware. Despite this, the “country hosts more than 1.4 gigawatts of operational capacity, and authorities have approved several hundred additional megawatts under tighter efficiency controls.” Meanwhile, “all data centers in Norway and South Korea, and nearly all data centers in Japan, are in regions with temperatures below” 64.4 degrees, said the analysis. As climate change worsens, more locations are going to become too hot for data centers.

How is the US building them?

The U.S. is also rapidly expanding its AI capabilities and building in the wrong locations, according to a study published in the journal Nature Sustainability. Currently, the most common locations for data centers in the country are California, Virginia and the greater Southwest. Unfortunately, these regions have notable environmental issues, including water scarcity. The true extent of environmental damage is also still being discovered. The country “doesn’t have a clear sense of what the AI boom is doing to U.S. resources” yet, said Built In. “We don’t really know how much strain these data centers put on aquifers, power plants or local grids, or how much pollution nearby communities can reasonably absorb.”

As AI expansion does not appear to be going anywhere, being strategic about where data centers are built can reduce their environmental impact. “Concentrating AI server deployment in Midwestern states,” especially Texas, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota, is “optimal, given their abundant renewables, low water scarcity and favorable projected unit water and carbon intensities,” said the study. These states also “possess substantial untapped wind and solar resources, enabling robust green power portfolios and reducing competition with other sectors.”

Additional solutions are also being considered as the demand for data increases. Building centers in space and relying on solar energy is one of them. Underground and underwater resources are another possibility. While “best practices may reduce emissions and water footprints by up to 73% and 86%, respectively,” said the study, “their effectiveness is constrained by current energy infrastructure limitations.”