AI companies want to build systems that understand the external world and overcome the limitations of LLMs. Recent developments have brought world models to the forefront of the AI discussion.

Watch a conversation with editor in chief Mat Honan, senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven, and AI reporter Grace Huckins exploring how AI might enter the physical world.

Speakers: Mat Honan, Editor in Chief, Will Douglas Heaven, AI Senior Editor, and Grace Huckins, AI Reporter

Recorded on May 21, 2026

Related Stories:

• How Pokémon Go is giving delivery robots an inch-perfect view of the world
• 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now: World Models
• Yann LeCun has a bold new vision for the future of AI

The landscape of storytelling continues to shift under our feet. Social and streaming platforms have multiplied, audiences have fragmented, and our demand for fresh, unique media is insatiable. A recent McKinsey podcast cites that we are watching upwards of 12 hours of video content daily, often on multiple devices and multiple platforms.

All this content is expensive to produce: With a baseline budget of $150M, a Hollywood feature runs $1M per minute of finished film; prestige streaming content is in the hundreds of thousands per minute. And since consumers want to engage with authentic, original material, every company is now effectively a media company. That means we all face the same pressure: more content, with the same time and budget constraints.

There is no longer a question whether to use AI for content; the math doesn’t work any other way. What leaders need to focus on now is how to adapt responsibly, protect brand integrity, uplift team creativity, and build customer trust.

A few things worth holding onto as this era accelerates:

• AI amplifies what’s already there, both good and bad. Weak strategy stays weak.
• Responsible adoption means knowing what’s in your tools and models. Provenance and transparency are the foundation, not the finish line.
• Scale without taste is just noise. Investing in your team’s judgment is what makes more content matter.
• Fundamentals of great storytelling have not changed. Regardless of format or channel, what makes audiences lean in are still characters, arc, ingenuity, and surprise.

The permanent sprint

Creative teams are trapped on the endless hamster wheel of production, and it’s not slowing down. According to Adobe research, content demand will grow 5x over the next two years. Social content shelf life is now measured in hours, not weeks. Keeping fresh work in the pipeline is a permanent sprint, requiring teams to rethink how creative production functions.

The first move is freeing creative teams by having AI absorb the repetitive work so they have space for the strategic creative decisions that require human ingenuity. In a recent study from Adobe, 94% of creatives report that AI helps them produce content faster, saving an average of 17 hours per week. That recovered time is not a productivity metric; it is renewed creative capacity.

As a use case, Nestlé offers a useful blueprint. Its teams operate across 180 countries with a portfolio of iconic brands including Nescafé, KitKat, and Purina. Using Adobe Firefly Custom Models embedded in existing content workflows allows teams to generate assets in a brand-informed style without disrupting creative flow. At Nestlé, workflow cycle times dropped 50%. “With Firefly Custom Models, we can react at the speed of culture. It’s the closest thing we’ve had to magic.” says Wael Jabi, global strategic comms lead for KitKat.

As we move into the agentic era, the possibilities expand further. Adobe’s Creative Agent thinks in systems, not tasks, orchestrating across workflows, apps, and processes to close the gap between idea and execution, and get teams out of the production cycles that consume their productivity.

Build for your brand, not every brand

A company’s brand is how the world recognizes and connects with them. And it’s more than a collection of assets—it is dynamic, subjective, and expressed in thousands of micro-decisions made every day by the people who know it best. As production scales, keeping everything tuned to the brand gets more challenging. Off-the-shelf AI cannot replicate the level of nuance creative teams bring to content, and there’s a real cost to getting it wrong; diluting a brand in market with almost-right output is not an acceptable option. Customer trust is fragile.

Starting with a bespoke AI model built with Adobe Firefly Foundry addresses this directly. Firefly Foundry starts with a commercially safe base model and trains further on a company’s IP, making it possible to produce content that genuinely reflects the team’s vision.

And to ensure that Firefly Foundry models truly represent the creatives at the helm, Adobe has partnered with film studios like Wonder Studios, Promise.ai, and B5 Studios, and the “big three” talent agencies CAA, UTA, and WME to deeply understand what it means (and what it takes) to build an IP-immersive model that keeps creatives at the center as these film studios and talent agencies scale their visions. These brand ecosystems can accelerate nearly every phase of the production process, from ideation and storyboarding to production and promotion, all while preserving artistry and authorship. And to power the next generation of creativity and content, Adobe has recently announced a strategic partnership with NVIDIA, delivering best-in-class creative control along with enterprise-grade, commercially safe content at scale.

Generic AI gives teams a starting point. But a model trained on a brand’s own IP gets them to the finish line, while still leaving room for the creative calls that matter most.

When agents become the audience

AI is not only reshaping how we create; it is reshaping how customers find and engage with brands entirely. According to Adobe Digital Insights, AI-powered shopping has surged 4,700%. Agentic web traffic is up 7,851% year over year. Yet, most businesses still have significant gaps in AI-led brand visibility. If content is invisible to AI agents, then a brand is invisible to customers.

Major League Baseball is ahead of this curve. Using Adobe LLM Optimizer, the league monitors how its content surfaces across AI interfaces and makes real-time adjustments to maintain visibility. As fans search for tickets, stats, or game-day experiences, the league ensures its brand shows up wherever that search is happening. And with Adobe’s recent acquisition of Semrush, brand visibility goes even further.

The agentic web created an entirely new content surface that did not exist two years ago, and this exponential proliferation of content illustrates precisely why scaled, on-brand content production has become a strategic imperative. A well-built agentic foundation offers full visibility into (and control over) every piece of content, from production to performance.

How to prepare for AI integration

Here are a few steps to get started:

Audit before automation. Content supply chains usually include duplicated processes, unclear ownership, and assets living in many different places. Before AI can accelerate anything, develop a clear map of how content moves through the organization today: who creates it, who approves it, where it lives, and where it breaks down. AI applied to a broken process just breaks it faster.

Walk through workflows. Resist the urge to overhaul everything at once. Start with production tasks that are high-volume, low-stakes, and well-defined: asset resizing, localization, and background generation. Use those wins to build internal confidence before expanding into more complex creative territory.

Build responsible governance from the start. Governance added as an afterthought becomes a bottleneck. Building it in from the beginning creates a competitive advantage that lets teams move fast with confidence. And this means clear policies on model training, content provenance, human review thresholds, and communicating AI use to customers. The brands that earn lasting trust will treat transparency as a feature, not a footnote.

This content was produced by Adobe. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

“Who here has shipped a pull request in the last week that was completely written by Claude?” Jeremy Hadfield, an engineer at Anthropic, asked from the main stage. Almost half the people in the packed room—many sitting with laptops on their knees, coding or prompting as they watched the talks—raised their hands.

Pull requests are fixes or updates to existing software that are submitted for review before they go live. They are the bread and butter of software development, the chunks of code that most professional developers spend their lives writing—or did until now.

“Who here has shipped a pull request that was completely written by Claude where they did not read the code at all?” Hadfield asked next. Nervous laughter. Most of the hands stayed up.

It’s not news that LLM-powered tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex have upended the way software gets made. Top tech companies now like to boast of how little code their developers write by hand. (“Most software at Anthropic is now written by Claude,” Hadfield said. “Claude has written most of the code in Claude Code.”) OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft make similar claims. Many others wish they could.

Even so, it is striking how normal this new paradigm already seems, and how fast it has set in. This was the second year that Anthropic has put on developer events, which also run in San Francisco and Tokyo. This time last year, the company had just released Claude 4. It could code, kind of. But with Anthropic’s latest string of updates—especially Claude 4.6 and then 4.7, released in February and April—Claude Code is a tool that more and more developers seem happy to hand their work off to.   

ANTHROPIC (GRAPHIC) / WILL DOUGLAS HEAVEN (PHOTO)

Anthropic says its goal is to push automation as far as it will go. Instead of using AI to generate code and then having humans clean it up and fix the mistakes, it wants Claude to check and correct its own work. “The default isn’t ‘I’m going to prompt Claude’—the default is now ‘I’m going to have Claude prompt itself,’” Boris Cherny, who heads Claude Code, said in the opening keynote.

If all goes well, human developers shouldn’t even see the error messages when something doesn’t work. That will all be handled by Claude, which will test and tweak, test and tweak, until everything runs as it should. As Ravi Trivedi, an engineer at Anthropic, put it in another talk: “The key principle is getting out of Claude’s way. We like to say: ‘Let it cook.’”

Trivedi presented a new feature in Claude Code, announced two weeks ago, which Anthropic calls dreaming. Claude Code agents write notes to themselves, recording and saving useful information about specific tasks. When another coding agent later starts to work on the same code, it can use the notes to get up to speed faster and learn from any errors that previous agents may have made.

Dreaming is a system that Claude Code uses to read through all these notes and consolidate the information they contain, spotting patterns and common issues across different tasks. In theory, dreaming should help Claude Code learn about a particular code base and get better and better at working on it.

Success stories

Code with Claude is an event aimed at developers. As well as product showcases and hands-on workshops from Anthropic, there were how-tos from a range of companies that had reshaped their software development teams around Claude Code, including Spotify and Delivery Hero as well as Lovable, Base44, and Monday.com—three startups vibe-coding apps that help people vibe-code apps.

There were no signs of unease at Code with Claude. Everybody I met wanted in.

And yet outside the conference there have been a number of reports that many coders are starting to question this bright new future. Some gripe in online forums like Reddit and Hacker News that AI coding tools are being pushed by managers chasing productivity gains, when in practice the technology makes software development harder because of all the extra code developers now have to review. “The only people I’ve heard saying that generated code is fine are those who don’t read it,” a user called pron posted on Hacker News last week. 

Others claim that their coding abilities have fallen off as they hand more tasks to AI. And researchers have warned that AI tools can produce unsafe code that will make software more vulnerable to attacks.  

I sat down with Claude engineering lead Katelyn Lesse and Claude product lead Angela Jiang and asked them what they made of the concerns that a sudden flood of code generated (and shipped) without proper human oversight was kicking serious security and maintenance problems down the road.

“All of the old software development best practices still apply. They’ve applied this entire time,” said Lesse. “I think there are a lot of people and teams that may have lost sight of them in this moment.” 

And yet as Anthropic and others push for greater automation and tools like Claude Code improve, the temptation increases to offload more and more tasks, including oversight. Lesse told me that some of the technical managers at Anthropic are exhausted by keeping up with all the code their teams now produce. “Part of things happening so much more quickly is just managing your time,” she said.

“I think that right now Claude is probably as good as a midlevel engineer at writing code,” she added. You still need expert engineers to design a system and troubleshoot harder problems, she said, “But over time we want Claude to get better and better at all different types of engineering.”

Jiang agreed: “I think the absolute end state we’re trying to get to is Claude basically being able to build itself.”

Tech researchers are suing the Trump administration over the future of online safety

For months, the Trump administration has been going after researchers who study and try to counter hate speech, harassment, propaganda, and disinformation online. Now, some of those researchers are fighting back. 

In a new lawsuit, they’re seeking to strike down a visa restriction policy against “foreign officials and other persons” announced last year by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

They say the policy violates the speech and due process rights of foreign-born workers whose “work supports greater moderation of content on the [tech] platforms.” Find out how the case could impact online safety and free speech.

—Eileen Guo

Climate tech companies are pivoting to critical minerals

We’re over a year into the second Trump administration, and support for climate causes in the US is weak. But climate tech companies are finding ways to survive and even thrive in this new environment, including by looking beyond decarbonization.

One example is Boston Metal. The startup has raised a $75 million round to produce critical metals, MIT Technology Review can exclusively report.

The company is best known for its efforts to clean up steel production, an industry that’s responsible for about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. But the new focus and fresh funds could help it survive a period of waning support for industrial decarbonization.

Read the full story on its high-stakes shift. And discover more about the new strategy for climate tech companies in our analysis of how they’re reframing their missions.

—Casey Crownhart 

Our story on the climate tech pivot is from The Spark, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things climate. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

Can AI learn to understand the world?

As the limits of LLMs become clearer, researchers are developing a new kind of AI designed to understand the physical environment: world models. 

Recent developments from Google DeepMind, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, and Yann LeCun’s new startup have pushed these systems to the forefront of AI. At an exclusive virtual event today, MIT Technology Review will examine the progress—and what comes next.

Join editor in chief Mat Honan, senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven, and AI reporter Grace Huckins for the subscriber-only Roundtables discussion on world models. Register here to take part in the session at 19:30 GMT / 2:30 PM ET / 11:30 AM PT.

World models are one of our 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now, MIT Technology Review’s new list of the technologies and ideas shaping the future of AI.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 SpaceX has filed for an IPO expected to be the largest ever
It could make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. (BBC) 
+ But he’s also a risk factor in the prospectus. (The Verge)
+ The filing exposes SpaceX’s finances for the first time. (NYT $)
+ AI spending pushed it to a $1.94 billion loss in Q1 2026. (Reuters $)
+ And rivals are challenging its launch dominance. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Nvidia reported record revenues thanks to the AI boom
It’s blown past Wall Street expectations, despite losing the Chinese market. (Guardian)
+ It has “largely conceded” China’s AI chip market to Huawei. (CNBC)
+ It generated no revenue from H200 chip sales in China. (SCMP)

3 Samsung has averted a massive strike over AI profit-sharing
It reached a tentative deal on bonuses with workers. (FT $)
+ The last-minute deal averts an 18-day walkout. (Engadget) 
+ But the compromise has exposed deep divisions. (Reuters $)
+ Anti-AI protests are increasing. (MIT Technology Review)

4 President Trump will sign a cybersecurity directive as soon as today
But it stops short of mandatory federal approval of models before they’re released. (Bloomberg $)
+ AI is making online crimes easier. (MIT Technology Review)

5 OpenAI may file for an IPO within days
The ChatGPT-maker wants to go public as early as September. (WSJ $)

6 Robotics won’t be transformed by a single AI breakthrough
Don’t expect a ChatGPT moment. (IEE Spectrum)
+ Human work behind humanoid robots is being hidden. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Rocks could generate hydrogen while storing CO2
New research shows they could also produce geothermal power. (New Scientist)
+ AI is uncovering hidden geothermal energy resources. (MIT Technology Review)

8 The EU is accelerating a Trump-fueled breakup with Big Tech
Geopolitical tensions are driving a shift toward homegrown software. (Wired $)

9 Solid-state breakthroughs could soon transform commercial batteries
They’d be faster and safer than today’s lithium-ion equivalents. (The Economist $)

10 Two researchers are rebuilding math from the ground up
By replacing the most fundamental concept in topology. (Quanta)
+ OpenAI claims its solved an 80-year-old math problem. (TechCrunch)

Quote of the day

“This isn’t a blip, it’s an inflection point.” 

—Gurjeet Grewal, CEO of UK-based Octopus Electric Vehicles, tells Reuters that the Iran war has been a boon for European EV sales.

One More Thing

ALICIA FERNáNDEZ

The new US border wall is an app

At the US southern border in 2023, asylum seekers had to request appointments with immigration officials via a mobile app. The Biden administration said the app, named CBP One, would make migration more orderly and discourage unauthorized crossings. But for many migrants, it became another obstacle.

While waiting in dangerous border cities, they reported frozen screens, facial recognition issues, spotty connectivity, and difficulty securing appointments. Advocates argue that requiring vulnerable people to rely on smartphones, internet access, and digital literacy creates a system that leaves many behind.

Find out how CBP One endangered some of the people most in need of protection.

—Lorena Ríos

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ See how big countries really are with this interactive tool.
+ Explore the entire Star Wars galaxy in detail through this interactive map.
+ Chart the origins of historical events with this interactive cause-and-effect explorer.
+ Discover the surprising origins of global currency symbols in this deep dive into financial history.

Suddenly, it feels like every climate tech company has a story to tell about topics that are politically in vogue: data centers, energy abundance, or critical minerals. In my newest story, I covered Boston Metal’s latest funding round. Largely known for its efforts to produce steel with lower greenhouse gas emissions, the company raised $75 million from new and existing investors to help support its critical metals business.

Focusing on metals like niobium and tantalum won’t have the massive climate benefit that cleaner steel would, but it could generate the cash the company needs to keep going. It’s a strategy I’m noticing more as these tough industries like steel look ever tougher to succeed in with limited federal support in the US.  

Boston Metal’s molten oxide electrolysis technology uses electricity to produce metals.

I covered the startup last year, when it announced a major milestone for its steel business, running its pilot reactor in Massachusetts and producing a literal ton of material.

Now the company’s focus has shifted, and it is going all-in on making other metals, from niobium and tantalum (used in aircraft engines and high-end steel alloys) to chromium and vanadium.

The steel industry is a difficult one: It operates at a massive scale, and the product doesn’t command too high a price. Focusing on other metals, especially ones the US government deems critical, could be a way to stay afloat, maybe even long enough to meaningfully cut emissions from the steel industry. 

“By deploying in the critical metals industry where we can go very fast, we generate the resources to continue with the development of steel,” says Tadeu Carneiro, CEO of Boston Metal.

Other companies are also hoping critical materials could help their business models.

California-based Brimstone has a new process to make cement—another heavily polluting industry that’s proving difficult to decarbonize. The company uses a new starting material to help cut down on carbon dioxide emissions. In addition to cement, it makes supplementary cementitious materials that can be added into concrete as well as smelter-grade alumina.

Last year, the US Department of Energy canceled $1.3 billion in funding that had been set aside for cement-related projects. Brimstone saw one of its awards canceled, as did Sublime Systems, another cement startup I’ve covered a lot over the years.

At the time, a Brimstone representative told me that the company saw the cancellation as a “misunderstanding” and said the facility the funding had been designated for would make not only cement, but also alumina, which would support US aluminum production.

Today, the company’s website prominently highlights that it produces critical minerals in addition to cement.

Some carbon dioxide removal companies are hoping to hop on the critical minerals train, too, aiming to work with the mining industry. Others are pitching that they can help mining operations operate more efficiently or serve as cleanup for active or abandoned mine sites.

All of this is part of a much broader messaging shift. Everyone from politicians to heads of energy companies is talking less about climate.

It’s a trend that makes me nervous, even if I understand the impulse. I worry that if we keep too quiet on climate, companies might lose the plot and make choices that won’t help cut emissions. But for some, leaning into a different priority or pushing a different message could help them stay in business long enough to make a difference. We’ll all have to wait to see how it all pans out.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

Since its earliest days back in office, the Trump administration has been going after researchers who study and try to counter hate speech, harassment, propaganda, and disinformation online. 

Now, some of those researchers are fighting back. Last week their lawsuit—which could have global repercussions for online safety and free speech—made its first appearance in court. 

This fight started a year ago, when US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on X what he called a “visa restriction policy” against “foreign officials and other persons” who were “complicit in censoring Americans.” Since then, a handful of foreign officials and researchers have been barred from travel to the US, and in theory, anyone working in fact-checking or online trust and safety more broadly could face the same restrictions. 

Still, the exact implications of Rubio’s announcement are unclear—purposefully so, argues Carrie DeCell, a lawyer representing the researchers. “This policy is expansive and incredibly vague, and the chilling effects are correspondingly enormous,” DeCell said outside the courthouse in Washington, DC, on May 13.  

The case has been brought by the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR), an advocacy organization for tech researchers. It is suing Rubio, former US secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem, and former US attorney general Pam Bondi and asking the court to strike down the policy as unconstitutional. In their complaint, the plaintiffs say the policy violates the speech and due process rights of foreign-born tech researchers and workers whose “work supports greater moderation of content on the [tech] platforms.”

CITR is represented by Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute and the legal nonprofit Protect Democracy. DeCell, a senior staff attorney at the Knight Institute, tells MIT Technology Review that they’re in court because the Trump administration is effectively “using immigration law to punish people for expressing views that it disagrees with.” 

This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s “America Undone” series, examining how the foundations of US success in science and innovation are currently under threat. You can read the rest here.

Most immediately, the plaintiffs are asking the government to halt these visa restrictions while the case proceeds. Zachariah Lindsey, the assistant US attorney representing Rubio and the other defendants, argued in last week’s hearing that the government is not targeting speech but, rather, “conduct [that] is assisting or facilitating foreign government censorship of free speech.” At the end of the week, the government filed a motion to dismiss the case.

The judge has yet to rule on either motion, and his questions so far appeared to focus on parsing what (and who) is actually affected by the State Department’s announcements, as well as other procedural issues. 

The outcome of the case may ultimately affect how much the public knows about the risks of social media and AI, says Nicole Schneidman, head of Protect Democracy’s technology and data governance team. The workers bringing this suit, she says, “serve a really, really important function in educating the public, holding tech companies accountable, doing research on the ramifications that advanced technology has on our society.” 

“A political witch hunt”

CITR’s lawsuit is the latest salvo in a yearslong battle over how the internet should be moderated, and by whom—a question that has become increasingly political and entangled in allegations of censorship. 

For years, Trump and his allies have claimed to be victims of a vast conspiracy between government agencies, civil society groups, academics, and Big Tech platforms to specifically censor conservative voices online. According to this narrative, a so-called “censorship-industrial complex” helped the Biden administration subvert First Amendment protections on speech by allegedly outsourcing censorship to these groups.

The State Department claims Rubio was able to implement the immigration policy because the Immigration and Nationality Act authorizes him to “render inadmissible any alien whose entry into the United States ‘would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.’” Before the current Trump administration, the statute was rarely invoked, and when it was, it was typically with more limited, specific criteria, rather than its current application against anyone who has participated in alleged censorship—an action that has no legal definition. 

The administration first deployed the policy in July 2025, when Rubio issued a statement announcing the revocation of visas for Alexandre de Moraes, the lead justice on the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court, and “his allies on the court” who were involved in prosecuting Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president. The prosecution was a “political witch hunt,” said Rubio, calling it evidence of a “censorship complex so sweeping that it not only violates basic rights of Brazilians, but also … targets Americans.”

Then, in early December, the State Department issued instructions to embassies to reject H-1B visa applications from individuals who had worked specifically in fact-checking, online trust and safety, and mis- or disinformation research, as Reuters first reported. 

A few weeks later, on December 23, the agency announced visa restrictions for five Europeans whom it accused of censoring Americans. This included two CITR members: Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which documents hate speech on social media platforms, and Clare Melford, cofounder of the Global Disinformation Index, which ranks websites according to how often they publish hate speech and disinformation. Also banned were the former European Union commissioner Thierry Breton, a key architect of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (which the State Department has called “Orwellian” and an example of censorship), and Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, co-CEOs of HateAid, a German nonprofit that fights online hate speech. 

Ahmed, who lives in the US with his American wife and child, quickly filed his own lawsuit to stave off deportation and halt the policy. A preliminary injunction preventing his detention and deportation is in place as the lawsuit continues. 

The Department of Homeland Security referred questions from MIT Technology Review to the State Department, which referred “specific questions” to the Department of Justice, while also writing that “the Trump Administration believes that aliens who are or were involved or complicit in censoring American citizens must face appropriate consequences. An American visa is a privilege not a right.” The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment. 

“A gut punch”

Now, more tech researchers are fighting back. 

CITR represents 500 individual and institutional members in 47 countries; 40 are based in the United States, including around 30 noncitizens. The organization argues that US-based tech researchers are experiencing a widespread chilling effect and are having to change or reframe what they’re studying so that it’s less explicitly (or less obviously) about content moderation or countering disinformation. Alternatively, some are leaving the US altogether, or making plans to do so, in order to safely carry out their work. 

CITR member Eirliani Abdul Rahman, a Singaporean online safety expert and a founding member of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, is one of these individuals. Her experience was included, though described anonymously, in CITR’s initial legal complaint. 

Back in December 2022, shortly after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, Abdul Rahman and two other Trust and Safety Council members publicly resigned. They spoke out against “red lines” the new owner had crossed, including his reinstatement of accounts that had previously been banned, and noted the marked increase in hate speech on the platform. 

Musk disbanded the council days later, but first he retweeted a post that tagged Abdul Rahman and the others and said: “You all belong in jail.” This led to a level of online harassment, doxxing, and death threats that she had never before experienced. “I was trained as an economist, and I could just see line graphs form in my head of the stochastic jump in what happened,” Abdul Rahman says, referring to the way the dangerous attention spiked after Musk effectively endorsed the other user’s provocation. 

This experience inspired her to pursue a new area of research: using quantitative methods to study and hopefully stop social media harassment “in real time,” she says. 

“The ones that are most harassed are people [who] have historically been marginalized,” she adds. “Most of us know about this already, like it’s intuitive. But until you quantify it, sometimes it’s just not seen and taken seriously.”   

But then Trump was reelected, making the work feel untenable. The US quickly became “a funding desert” for scientific research, she says, with federal support for any research perceived by conservatives to focus on mis/disinformation getting cut. At the same time, tech companies shifted their positions on content moderation to align with the president’s, meaning that her research would be unlikely to have any practical implications: “There’s simply no guardrails around social media anymore,” she says. 

Fast-forward to December 2025, and the travel bans on the five Europeans felt like “a gut punch to the stomach,” Abdul Rahman says. She and Ahmed had both testified earlier in the year before the UK Parliament on the role social media played in spreading false claims about the supposed Muslim identity of a murderer who had killed three British girls; this online activity contributed to violent anti-immigrant and Islamophobic riots across the country in the summer of 2024. 

The targeting of Ahmed and the other Europeans “was the last straw” for Abdul Rahman. Soon after, she left the US for a six-year fellowship in Germany aimed at supporting “international academic freedom”—coincidentally arriving in the country on the same day CITR filed its lawsuit. 

“My body just calmed down,” Abdul Rahman says of landing in Germany. “I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night … always wondering about the next executive order and how it pertained to my situation.”

Abdul Rahman believes this legal battle has implications that reach beyond CITR members and their families. It “pertains to all immigrants in the US to protect our First Amendment rights,” she says.

Additionally, whether fact-checkers, online trust and safety workers, and tech researchers can continue to do their work has a broader impact on anyone who uses the internet. 

Earlier this year, for example, Ahmed’s Center for Countering Digital Hate published widely cited research that Grok’s image-editing feature had generated an estimated 3 million sexualized images, including 23,000 images of children, in an 11-day period. This led to government investigations, lawsuits, and even temporary bans for Grok’s parent company, xAI, across the United States and world. 

“The threats have really sharpened”

MIT Technology Review has reported extensively on this right-wing war on supposed censorship; one of our stories revealing that State Department leadership requested communications records from a now-shuttered office focused on countering foreign disinformation has been included as an exhibit in the CITR lawsuit. This request sought insight into communications with a slew of individuals some far-right activists allege are involved in the “censorship-industrial complex,” including journalists, the German foreign minister, and numerous researchers studying disinformation and hate speech (including Medford, Ahmed, and their organizations).

DeCell tells us that over the past year and a half, there have been more lawsuits against the Trump administration regarding free speech—because “the threats have really sharpened,” she says.

Last year, the Knight Institute sued Rubio on behalf of of university faculty and students who have been arrested, detained, and deported for their pro-Palestinian speech; this past January, a judge ruled that the administration’s deportation policy was unconstitutional. The risk to free speech rights is “palpable” when the government “decides to target people specifically with the threat of rounding them off the streets, throwing them into a detention center, and then potentially deporting them from this country,” DeCell says. 

Though Abdul Rahman is safely abroad for now, she says she’s watching the CITR lawsuit closely. Ultimately, she says, she believes it will determine whether researchers will be able to continue to do their work, “which is to take social media platforms to account,” she says—“making sure there’s actual accountability and independent oversight is critical to protecting our democracies.” 

The startup Boston Metal has raised a $75 million funding round to produce critical metals, MIT Technology Review can exclusively report.  

The company has been known largely for its efforts to clean up steel production, an industry that’s responsible for about 8% of global greenhouse emissions today. With the additional money, the new focus could help it survive at a time when support for industrial decarbonization has been waning in the US.

In addition to steel, Boston Metal has also worked to use its technology with other metals, and a subsidiary (Boston Metal do Brasil) is setting up a commercial facility in Brazil to produce niobium, tantalum, and tin. The funding will help support that facility’s operation as well as future efforts to produce critical metals like vanadium, nickel, and chromium, says CEO Tadeu Carneiro. The funding comes after the company faced cash-flow problems following an industrial accident at the Brazil facility earlier this year.

Boston Metal’s core technology is called molten oxide electrolysis (MOE). It involves running electric current through a reactor filled with ore dissolved in a molten electrolyte. The electricity heats everything up to about 1,600 °C (3,000 °F) and drives chemical reactions that separate the desired metal (or metals) from the ore. The metal gathers at the bottom of the reactor, where it can be siphoned off.

In early 2025, Boston Metal completed the largest run of its pilot industrial cell in Woburn, Massachusetts, producing about a ton of steel.

But the focus is currently on making other metals, which are more valuable and can command a higher price. The company’s Brazilian subsidiary is working to test and start up an industrial-scale plant that takes in a low-grade material and makes a mixture of critical metals. Niobium, for example, is used in some steel alloys, as well as in alloys used to make jet engines and the superconducting magnets of MRI scanners. Tantalum is used in aerospace applications like rocket nozzles and turbine blades, as well as medical devices and electronics.

Construction on the Brazil plant kicked off in 2024 and took about 18 months, but the company ran into some challenges that delayed official startup.

In January there was an issue with the plant’s refractory system, the equipment that insulates the reactor and prevents corrosion. That caused electrolyte to leak. Operators shut down the system and removed the metal, and there weren’t any injuries or environmental issues, Carneiro says.

But the leak did interfere with the timeline for the plant’s opening, which meant the company missed a milestone and lost out on funding that had been committed. It restructured and laid off 71 employees in April.

This new funding will help support the plant moving forward. “Because of this delay, we had a big stress in our cash flow, so the investors came very strong to support us,” Carneiro says. Boston Metal is repairing the facility in Brazil now, and it should be ready to start up in September 2026, he adds.  

The funding will also help support other critical metals projects, Carneiro says. The company plans to eventually deploy a US plant to produce chromium, a metal the country imports nearly all its supply of today. 

Boston Metal has now raised over $500 million in total. The latest round of funding includes support from existing investors and from the massive Indian steel company Tata Steel Unlimited.

Making a higher-value critical metal now could help Boston Metal prove its technology and pave the way for future steel projects, says Seaver Wang, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute. “Nobody wants to pay a green premium for steel—hence niobium,” he adds.

Colossal Biosciences is growing chickens in a 3D-printed artificial eggshell

The baby chicks were shifting and starting to pip—or trying to hatch. But not from an egg. Instead, these chickens were growing inside transparent 3D-printed plastic cups at the Dallas headquarters of Colossal Biosciences.

The biotech company yesterday claimed it has developed a “fully artificial egg” as part of its effort to resurrect extinct avian species, including birds like the dodo and the giant moa.

Some scientists think Colossal is overstating the breakthrough. But the technology may represent an early step toward artificial wombs.

Read the full story on the science and controversy behind the artificial eggshell.

—Antonio Regalado

Inside the Musk v. Altman Trial

Elon Musk has lost his landmark lawsuit against OpenAI, which centered on allegations that its cofounders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman misled him about the company’s nonprofit mission. But what really happened in the courtroom, and what does it mean for the AI race? 

AI reporter and attorney Michelle Kim, who covered the trial for MIT Technology Review, joined our editor in chief Mat Honan to unpack it all in an exclusive Roundtables discussion yesterday.

Subscribers can watch the full recording now.

MIT Technology Review Narrated: this scientist rewarmed and studied pieces of his friend’s cryopreserved brain

L. Stephen Coles’s brain sits in a vat at a storage facility in Arizona. It has been held there at a temperature of around −146 degrees °C for over a decade, largely undisturbed. Before he died in 2014, Coles had the brain frozen with an ambitious goal in mind: reanimation. 

His friend, cryobiologist Greg Fahy, believes it could be revived one day. But other experts are less optimistic.  

Still, Fahy’s research could lead to new ways to study the brain. And using cryopreservation for organ transplantation is becoming a viable reality. 

—Jessica Hamzelou

This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.

Can AI learn to understand the world?

The limitations of LLMs are pushing AI researchers towards new systems that understand the physical environment: world models. The likes of Google DeepMind, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, and Meta’s former Chief AI Scientist, AI Yann LeCun, have brought this technology to the forefront of AI. 

To explore where this technology is heading next, MIT Technology Review is hosting an exclusive Roundtables discussion on Thursday, May 21, with editor in chief Mat Honan, senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven, and AI reporter Grace Huckins. Register here to join the session at 19:30 GMT / 2:30 PM ET / 11:30 AM PT.

World models are also one of MIT Technology Review’s 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now, our list of what’s really worth your attention in the busy, buzzy world of AI.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Google is changing its search box for the first time in 25 years
Its AI-powered overhaul centers on an “intelligent search box”. (Wired $)
+ “Information agents” will gather information on a user’s behalf. (TechCrunch)
+ Google, Gemini, and Gmail may one day be a single search box. (The Verge)
+ AI means the end of search as we know it. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Samsung workers plan to strike tomorrow over AI profit sharing
They say that their employer isn’t sharing the rewards of the AI boom. (WSJ $)
+ And want ​15% of the company’s annual operating profit. (CNBC)
+ South Korea may invoke emergency powers to stop the strike. (Reuters $)
 
3 The White House is set to release a new executive order on AI safety
It’s slated to launch this week. (Axios)
+ The order seeks early government access to advanced models. (NYT $)
 
4 The FBI plans to buy nationwide access to license plate readers
It wants “data in near real time” from cameras across the US. (Ars Technica)
+ The tech could let it track drivers nationwide. (Newsweek)
 
5 Google will launch a new line of smart glasses this fall
They’re the company’s first attempt since the Google Glass flop. (BBC)
+ Google Gemini will power the interactions with the user. (Guardian)
+ Meanwhile, Anduril and Meta are making smart glasses for warfare. (MIT Technology Review)
 
6 A new bill in Congress proposes a new annual fee for EVs
It could cost drivers an extra $130 a year. (NYT $)
+ The fee will cover highway maintenance costs. (WSJ $)
 
7 OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy has joined rival lab Anthropic
Karpathy was also previously Tesla’s director of AI. (Fortune)
+ He coined the term “vibe coding.” (MIT Technology Review)

8 The fears over Anthropic’s Mythos AI model look overstated
Cybersecurity experts say the hacking threat is exaggerated. (Reuters $)
 
9 Silicon Valley keeps misreading China’s role in tech
Viewing Chinese firms as enemies could do more to hurt than help the US. (Rest of World)
 
10 A book about AI’s effects on truth contains false quotes created by AI
It’s among a spate of controversies involving AI-generated quotes. (NYT $)
+ Yesterday, a lawyer apologised for including them in a court filing. (Reuters $)
+ A senior journalist was recently suspended for using them. (Guardian)

Quote of the day

“It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism—we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.”

—Sigrid Rausing, publisher of literary magazine Granta, casts doubts on the authenticity of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize winners, Wired reports.

One More Thing

SELMAN DESIGN

Who gets to decide who receives experimental medical treatments?

Max was only a toddler when his parents noticed there was “something different” about the way he moved. He was slower than other kids his age, and he struggled to jump. He couldn’t run. A genetic test confirmed their fears: Max had Duchenne muscular dystrophy. 

Desperate to slow its progression, Max’s parents enrolled him in an experimental gene therapy trial. The FDA had approved the medicine on weak evidence—a move that has become increasingly common. 

We urgently need to question how these decisions are made. Who should have access to experimental therapies? And who should get to decide? 

Read the full story on the intense debate over experimental treatments.

—Jessica Hamzelou

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ Trace the history of the world’s most famous plumber in this biography of Mario.
+ Watch the Earth’s spin in action as a full Milk Moon slowly disappears behind a volcano.
+ This handy tool for movie buffs lets you filter upcoming releases by territory and save them to a local watchlist.
+ A missing cat was reunited with its owner after five years and 270 km apart—all thanks to an old Facebook post.

Elon Musk lost his suit against OpenAI, in which he alleged CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman had deceived him over the company’s non-profit status.

Watch as AI reporter and attorney Michelle Kim, who covered the trial for MIT Technology Review, joins in conversation with editor in chief Mat Honan to go behind the scenes of the trial and the implications for the AI race.

Speakers: Mat Honan, Editor in Chief, and Michelle Kim, AI Reporter

Recorded on May 19, 2026

Related Stories:

• Elon Musk and Sam Altman are going to court over OpenAI’s future
• Musk v. Altman week 1: Elon Musk says he was duped, warns AI could kill us all, and admits that xAI distills OpenAI’s models
• Musk v. Altman week 2: OpenAI fires back, and Shivon Zilis reveals that Musk tried to poach Sam Altman
• Musk v. Altman week 3: Musk and Altman traded blows over each other’s credibility. Now the jury will pick a side.
• Here’s why Elon Musk lost his suit against OpenAI

Cybersecurity threats today are as menacing as ever for enterprises, as any CISO or CIO can probably confirm. But, digging behind that straightforward statement, there is a much more nuanced, complex cybersecurity landscape at play. This can make it significantly harder to plan, execute, and sustain effective strategies and solutions to protect the network—plus the often valuable—sometimes priceless—data, apps, and assets it transports and stores.

But it can be done, with the right philosophy and strategy, and the right tools and insights.

We must first understand the contemporary cybersecurity landscape. This understanding can unlock the right strategy and then onward to identify the tools and insights necessary to protect an enterprise’s network effectively.

There are five primary factors influencing the landscape, some old, some new, all dynamic. These factors are distinct but often interdependent, both within themselves and with one or more of the others. Another meaningful way of looking at them is “internal” and “external”; as ever, understanding and dealing with what is in your control can also help to navigate and mitigate what is beyond your control.

Five key factors influencing today’s dynamic cybersecurity landscape

1. Expectations

The first factor is predicated on the fundamental reality of an enterprise’s reliance on its network. Most enterprises have already undergone some form of digital transformation and are reaping the day-to-day benefits. This means that the number of people, devices, and things using the network continues to grow; it also means that people’s expectations of the network are higher than ever before – they demand that it does exactly what they need it to do, typically across a proliferation of devices and from multiple locations. Conversely, many employees might not be fully aware of cyber threats and infiltration methods, so their skillsets can easily be the weak point that admits bad actors into the network.

Equally, senior management and board members have high expectations at a meta level. Embracing digital transformation and network reliance means the enterprise’s function and reputation are inextricably tied to that. Loss of reputation due to a security breach is a chilling prospect, as is the threat of financial penalty and revenue loss. So, in the minds of leadership, the network has to be safe from cyber threats and be compliant.

2. Financial pressures

The first factor arguably contradicts its neighbor in the landscape: general financial constraints and the pressure on CISOs and CIOs to achieve more with less. Despite the strategic reliance on the network and the expectation that it will be protected from cyber threats regardless, the appropriate latticework of defenses (e.g., skilled and right-sized IT teams using progressive tools and meaningful data insights, plus constant workforce education) is not always properly funded and sustained, particularly in the current tough economic climate.

3. Complex infrastructure operations

The ongoing pursuit of digital transformation and consequent network reliance also drives the third factor. Ironically, there is another facet of enterprise protection and financial control wrapped up in this. The widespread move from one-stop shops (avoiding IT vendor lock-in in favor of more competitive pricing and autonomy) has created a more complex, multivendor environment. This is coupled with multiple IT domains required to handle many diverse functions and layers of IT infrastructure (e.g., cloud, on-prem), all connected to the network. Complex, mission-critical IT operations now need to be monitored and protected from increasingly sophisticated cyber breaches.

4. Unpredictable geopolitics and economics

Shifting from the first three factors—all internal to an enterprise—the fourth is unquestionably external and without doubt the most intractable risk for any enterprise, individual, or industry group. Global uncertainty and tension are unavoidably putting even greater pressure on already-tight IT budgets, component supply chains and power costs. This can easily exacerbate existing constraints on cybersecurity budgets when vigilance and protection are more needed than ever. Unfortunately, in cyberspace one cannot always point a finger in one direction to identify an adversary. Geopolitical alliances in cyberspace are much more difficult to track, and defending against an escalating tension becomes an all-out fight to secure the network.

5. Evolving cyber threats

The fifth factor is obviously the epicenter of today’s cyber security landscape. According to the HPE Threat Labs’ report, governments were the most frequently targeted sector globally in 2025, followed by finance, technology, defense, and manufacturing. The prevailing global geopolitical and economic situation may further accelerate the twin motivations of nation state-linked espionage and organized crime for extortion and theft.

Use the network to protect the network… and beyond

The current cybersecurity landscape calls for a re-think of the network’s pivotal role and how it can manage an enterprise’s digital defenses effectively, dynamically, and comprehensively. Overall, the network can be an excellent security sensor and enforcement point, using built-in security capabilities rather than being a collection of devices with an inflexible, bolted-on security layer.

Much as cybercriminals use agentic and generative AI to intensify their campaigns, CISOs can stay ahead more easily by leveraging AI-driven network platforms for 24×7 automated management of security policy enforcement (e.g., zero trust), threat monitoring, and mitigation, encompassing devices, things, and users. Meaningful data insights can be harvested, analyzed, and recycled back into secure networking management tools for dynamic protection.

This approach helps the progressive enterprise to overcome increasingly sophisticated, multi-step, and prolific attacks, while better managing IT costs and simplifying oversight of IT operations. It can also significantly improve the user experience, going a long way to meet and even exceed those rising expectations consistently. 

As a strategy in today’s uncertain world, embracing this self-driving network paradigm enables flexibility, visibility, and consistency in an enterprise’s frontline digital defenses.

For more, read the “In the Wild” report.

This content was produced by HPE. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.