The Download: AI agents’ autonomy, and sodium-based batteries

June 12, 2025
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. Are we ready to hand AI agents the keys? In recent months, a new class of agents has arrived on the scene: ones built using large language models. Any action that can be…

Are we ready to hand AI agents the keys?

June 12, 2025
On May 6, 2010, at 2:32 p.m. Eastern time, nearly a trillion dollars evaporated from the US stock market within 20 minutes—at the time, the fastest decline in history. Then, almost as suddenly, the market rebounded. After months of investigation, regulators attributed much of the responsibility for this “flash crash” to high-frequency trading algorithms, which…