September 13, 2026

Obama urges Democrats to have a ‘clear plan’ for AI safeguards

Obama recently said that Democrats need to make artificial intelligence one of their “central agendas” and “have a very clear plan” to address concerns around the technology’s economic impact and safety.

The Download: a “God-driven” cryptocurrency and a solar engineering roadmap

September 10, 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. God told them to sell crypto. Their investors lost everything. When Eli Regalado first heard God speak to him, he wondered whether he was hallucinating. According to Eli and his wife,…

Powering AI is an architecture problem

September 10, 2026
On July 22, 2026, a transmission line fault in Ashburn, Virginia—the heart of the world’s largest data center cluster—knocked more than 3 gigawatts of load off the grid in seconds. And it wasn’t the first time. Two years earlier, a single failed surge arrester dropped roughly 60 Virginia facilities and 1,500 megawatts at once. No…

This road map could help us decide whether to deploy solar geoengineering

September 10, 2026
A San Francisco nonprofit has published a detailed road map of the experiments, studies, and infrastructure that it says would be needed to make informed decisions about the use of solar geoengineering, MIT Technology Review can reveal. Scientists have now spent half a century exploring the possibility that we could counteract climate change by releasing…

Can the US battery market untangle from China?

September 10, 2026
The US is hitting records for the rapid growth of its energy storage market. That’ll go a long way to shoring up the grid, increasing reliability and also cutting emissions, since batteries can help store energy from intermittent renewables like wind and solar. Crucially, this is all happening with the help of cheap Chinese batteries,…

God told them to sell crypto. Their investors lost everything.

September 10, 2026
This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations and with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. When Eli Regalado first heard God speak to him, he wondered whether he was hallucinating. Now he likens the experience to having “a thought that is not my thought.” Divine words echo in his mind like a…

Healthcare AI’s next test is integration

September 10, 2026
The entrance of major AI companies into healthcare is a meaningful and welcome development, accelerating the technical foundation available to the industry. Their models are increasingly capable of processing long clinical records, interpreting complex terminology, comparing documentation against evidence and generating coherent summaries from large volumes of information. For clinicians, operators, and administrative teams who…