August 7, 2026

The Download: a censorship conspiracy theory and the first virus created by AI

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How ideas of a vast censorship network moved from the online fringe to Trump policy For years, narratives about a “censorship-industrial complex” spread in right-wing circles. The theory claimed that, under…

Technology

The $400 million machine powering the future of chipmaking

June 23, 2026
Jos Benschop is climbing a ladder to get to the top of his newest machine.  It’s a bit of a schlep. The contraption is the size of a double-decker bus—more than 150 tons of gleaming precision-milled aluminum covered in thousands of snaking tubes, colored cables, and pressurized tanks. From the ground, it looks like a…

Three things to watch amid Anthropic’s latest feud with the government

June 22, 2026
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. For those of you enjoying your summer unaware of Anthropic’s latest feud with the US government, here’s a recap: In April the company said it had built an AI model called Mythos…

The Download: record-breaking subsea tunnels and flexible data centers

June 22, 2026
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Inside the world’s deepest and longest subsea road tunnel —Niall Firth I’m currently around 1,000 feet beneath the North Sea, in a dark, dank cave. It smells weird. And I’m increasingly…

Inside the world’s deepest and longest subsea road tunnel

June 22, 2026
It’s cold, it’s very, very noisy, and—if I can be quite honest with you—I’m not feeling super relaxed. I’m currently around 300 meters, or 1,000 feet, beneath the North Sea, in a dark, dank cave. It smells weird. And I am increasingly aware of the pressure from millions of tons of seawater just above my…

The Download: AI bottleneck debates, and BCI trials take off

June 19, 2026
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that’s holding back LLMs AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth last month with a huge claim: it had solved a mathematical bottleneck…

A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that’s holding back LLMs

June 19, 2026
Miami-based AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth mode last month with a huge claim. It announced that it had solved a mathematical bottleneck that had been holding back large language models for almost a decade. The details were thin, and many people were unconvinced. But Subquadratic has started to bring the receipts, sharing the…