March 6, 2026

Is the Pentagon allowed to surveil Americans with AI?

The ongoing public feud between the Department of Defense and AI company Anthropic over its technology has raised a deep open question: does the law actually allow the US government to conduct mass surveillance on Americans? Surprisingly, the answer is not straightforward. More than a decade after Edward Snowden exposed the NSA’s collection of bulk…

Technology

The Download: protesting AI, and what’s floating in space

March 2, 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. I checked out one of the biggest anti-AI protests ever Pull the plug! Pull the plug! Stop the slop! Stop the slop! For a few hours this Saturday, February 28, I watched as…

I checked out one of the biggest anti-AI protests ever

March 2, 2026
Pull the plug! Pull the plug! Stop the slop! Stop the slop! For a few hours this Saturday, February 28, I watched as a couple hundred anti-AI protesters marched through London’s King’s Cross tech hub, home to the UK headquarters of OpenAI, Meta and Google DeepMind, chanting slogans and waving signs. The march was organized…

MIT Technology Review is a 2026 ASME finalist in reporting

February 27, 2026
The American Society of Magazine Editors has named MIT Technology Review as a finalist for a 2026 National Magazine Award in the reporting category.  The shortlisted story—“We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard”—is part of the publication’s Power Hungry package on AI’s energy burden.  AI is often described…

The Download: how AI is shaking up Go, and a cybersecurity mystery

February 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. AI is rewiring how the world’s best Go players think Ten years ago AlphaGo, Google DeepMind’s AI program, stunned the world by defeating the South Korean Go player Lee Sedol. And in the…

AI is rewiring how the world’s best Go players think

February 27, 2026
Burrowed in the alleys of Hongik-dong, a hushed residential neighborhood in eastern Seoul, is a faded stone-tiled building stamped “Korea Baduk Association,” the governing body for professional Go. The game is an ancient one, with sacred stature in South Korea.  But inside the building, rooms once filled with the soft clatter of hands dipping into…

Finding value with AI and Industry 5.0 transformation

February 26, 2026
For years, Industry 4.0 transformation has centered on the convergence of intelligent technologies like AI, cloud, the internet of things, robotics, and digital twins. Industry 5.0 marks a pivotal shift from integrating emerging technologies to orchestrating them at scale. With Industry 5.0, the purpose of this interconnected web of technologies is more nuanced: to augment…

This company claims a battery breakthrough. Now they need to prove it.

February 26, 2026
When a company claims to have created what’s essentially the holy grail of batteries, there are bound to be some questions. Interest has been swirling since Donut Lab, a Finnish company, announced last month that it had a new solid-state battery technology, one that was ready for large-scale production. The company said its batteries can…