February 2, 2026

What we’ve been getting wrong about AI’s truth crisis

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. What would it take to convince you that the era of truth decay we were long warned about—where AI content dupes us, shapes our beliefs even when we catch the lie, and…

Technology

Roundtables: Why AI Companies Are Betting on Next-Gen Nuclear

January 28, 2026
AI is driving unprecedented investment for massive data centers and an energy supply that can support its huge computational appetite. One potential source of electricity for these facilities is next-generation nuclear power plants, which could be cheaper to construct and safer to operate than their predecessors. Watch a discussion with our editors and reporters on…

What AI “remembers” about you is privacy’s next frontier

January 28, 2026
The ability to remember you and your preferences is rapidly becoming a big selling point for AI chatbots and agents.  Earlier this month, Google announced Personal Intelligence, a new way for people to interact with the company’s Gemini chatbot that draws on their Gmail, photos, search, and YouTube histories to make Gemini “more personal, proactive,…

Rules fail at the prompt, succeed at the boundary

January 28, 2026
From the Gemini Calendar prompt-injection attack of 2026 to the September 2025 state-sponsored hack using Anthropic’s Claude code as an automated intrusion engine, the coercion of human-in-the-loop agentic actions and fully autonomous agentic workflows are the new attack vector for hackers. In the Anthropic case, roughly 30 organizations across tech, finance, manufacturing, and government were…

The Download: A bid to treat blindness, and bridging the internet divide

January 28, 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. The first human test of a rejuvenation method will begin “shortly” Life Biosciences, a small Boston startup founded by Harvard professor and life-extension evangelist David Sinclair, has won FDA approval to proceed with…

The first human test of a rejuvenation method will begin “shortly” 

January 27, 2026
When Elon Musk was at Davos last week, an interviewer asked him if he thought aging could be reversed. Musk said he hasn’t put much time into the problem but suspects it is “very solvable” and that when scientists discover why we age, it’s going to be something “obvious.” Not long after, the Harvard professor…

OpenAI’s latest product lets you vibe code science

January 27, 2026
OpenAI just revealed what its new in-house team, OpenAI for Science, has been up to. The firm has released a free LLM-powered tool for scientists called Prism, which embeds ChatGPT in a text editor for writing scientific papers. The idea is to put ChatGPT front and center inside software that scientists use to write up…

Stratospheric internet could finally start taking off this year

January 27, 2026
Today, an estimated 2.2 billion people still have either limited or no access to the internet, largely because they live in remote places. But that number could drop this year, thanks to tests of stratospheric airships, uncrewed aircraft, and other high-altitude platforms for internet delivery.  Even with nearly 10,000 active Starlink satellites in orbit and…

The Download: OpenAI’s plans for science, and chatbot age verification

January 27, 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 OpenAI’s big play for science  —Will Douglas Heaven In the three years since ChatGPT’s explosive debut, OpenAI’s technology has upended a remarkable range of everyday activities at home, at work, and in…

Inside OpenAI’s big play for science 

January 26, 2026
In the three years since ChatGPT’s explosive debut, OpenAI’s technology has upended a remarkable range of everyday activities at home, at work, in schools—anywhere people have a browser open or a phone out, which is everywhere. Now OpenAI is making an explicit play for scientists. In October, the firm announced that it had launched a…

Why chatbots are starting to check your age

January 26, 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. How do tech companies check if their users are kids? This question has taken on new urgency recently thanks to growing concern about the dangers that can arise when children talk to…