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.

OpenAI called the Hugging Face attack unprecedented. But we’ve been here before. 

—Will Douglas Heaven, senior AI editor

Reading OpenAI’s account last week of how some of its models broke their containment and hacked into the computer systems of Hugging Face, another AI company, was the first time I got genuine chills about what large language models are now able to do. But this is a case of human hubris, not rogue AI.

I am not an alarmist. In fact, I have been pushing back against AI scare stories for years. Even so, this incident crossed a line. I think it’s the clearest illustration yet of how the people building and testing this technology do not fully understand what they’re doing. 

Here’s why OpenAI could—and should—have seen this coming.

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

The must-reads

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

1 There’s a growing global AI stock sell-off underway 
Chip and memory stocks are bearing the brunt so far. (FT $)
+ It was partly sparked by a report that a Chinese company has started making a key piece of chip equipment for the first time. (The Information $)
+ Like their US rivals, Chinese AI firms are struggling to find a path to profitability. (NYT $)
+ What even is the AI bubble? (MIT Technology Review)

2 Some people’s chats with Claude were open to anyone online
OpenAI had a near-identical issue with ChatGPT last year. (BBC)
+ Is a secure AI assistant even possible? (MIT Technology Review)

3 France just witnessed its first ever “fire cloud”
It’s a scary sign of the intensity of the blazes burning there. (Wired $)

4 Meta is screwing up its smart glasses rollout
Privacy issues keep cropping up, and its response is invariably too little, and too late. (The Verge $)
+ They even have a nickname: “pervert glasses.” (Vox $)

5 Efforts are underway to measure Spotify’s AI slop problem
People are desperate for it to start labelling AI-generated music. (404 Media)
+ We’re in a weird era regarding AI’s role in literature. (The Atlantic $)

6 People are renting out their faces to AI in China
Often for microdramas, which are big business and increasingly rely on AI. (Rest of World)
+ How Chinese short dramas became AI content machines. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Microsoft is having a torrid year
Rivals building better AI tools are threatening its business on multiple fronts. (Business Insider $)

8 How bots took over the internet
They now outnumber humans, in terms of overall web traffic. (New Yorker $)

9 Robotaxis are hitting London’s streets this summer 
Just for testing for now, though there are plans to launch rides to the public next year. (Engadget)

10 Why video games are obsessed with Backrooms
These spaces, which players aren’t supposed to access, can provoke a strange, liminal sort of discomfort. (Guardian)

Quote of the day

“It’s going to be a wild ride.”

—Christine Peterson, co-founder of the grantmaking group Foresight Institute, tells Wired charities anticipate a huge philanthropy windfall from Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs.

One More Thing

On the ground in Ukraine’s largest Starlink repair shop 

Starlink is critical to Ukraine’s ability to continue in the fight against Russia, but Donald Trump’s fickle foreign policy and reports suggesting Elon Musk might remove Ukraine’s access to the services have cast the technology’s future in the country into doubt. 

For now Starlink access largely comes down to the unofficial community of users and engineers, including the expert “Dr. Starlink”—famous for his creative ways of customizing the systems—who have kept Ukraine in the fight, both on and off the front line. 

He gave MIT Technology Review exclusive access to his unofficial Starlink repair workshop in the city of Lviv. Read the full story.

—Charlie Metcalfe

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.)

+ As these retirees have discovered, dancing is incredibly good for you.
+ Do you feel lucky, punk? Life feels a lot easier if you do!
+ 100% would visit this cat every day if I lived in Istanbul. 
+ Watch this to understand how the movie Sinners had such impressive visual effects. 

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.

How lasers could help provide fuel for nuclear reactors 

Nuclear power provides about 9% of global electricity today, and that fraction could tick up as countries look to build new reactors. New, cheaper methods to obtain fuel could help ensure that those nuclear projects stay on track.

One of those methods is called laser enrichment. It allows you to separate out the material you want (in this case, uranium) from others in a mixture of old waste.

A company called Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) is about to start testing whether the technology works at commercial scale. Read our story about their efforts.

—Casey Crownhart

The quest to keep organs alive outside the body

It’s super difficult to freeze organs. Once ice forms in them, they’re done. The ice crystals create all kinds of damage and render the organs unusable. That hasn’t stopped many researchers from trying.

In new research, one team has been able to supercool the kidneys of pigs and preserve them for days. The kidneys survived being stored at −4 °C (25 °F) and eventually reimplanted back into pigs. And that’s just the latest development in a field that is positively buzzing.

Read about why it’s such an exciting time for organ preservation—and what could be coming next. 

—Jessica Hamzelou

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter. Sign upto receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

The must-reads

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

1 Silicon Valley is split over how to respond to Chinese AI
It boils down to whether AI models should be open or closed. (NYT $)
+ Nvidia, Microsoft and Meta warn that restricting open models would backfire. (CNBC)
+ AI companies are spending record sums on lobbying Washington. (FT $)
+ China’s AI models have Trump’s AI world at war with itself. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Trump can’t post his way out of this war 
Iran has revealed hard limits to his ability to bend reality to his will. (Atlantic $)
+ Trump has been forced to abandon further escalation due to dwindling munitions stockpiles. (NYT $)
+ An Iranian strike on CIA facilities has raised questions about Russian involvement. (Reuters $)

3 Wildfires are surging across Europe
Repeated heat waves have turned parts of the continent into a tinder box. (BBC)
+ One of the fires forced NASA to evacuate a tracking station in Spain. (Ars Technica)
+ Americans are increasingly grappling with smoky skies too. (Atlantic $)

4 OpenAI didn’t notice its agent going on a days-long hacking spree
It only cottoned on after the threat was contained and the FBI had been alerted, sources say. (Reuters $)

5 The AI jobs wipeout still hasn’t arrived
In fact, a lot of companies are now embarking on hiring sprees. (WSJ $)
+ AI’s impact is increasingly falling short of expectations. (The Guardian) 
+ Here’s a much-needed reality check on the AI jobs hysteria. (MIT Technology Review)

6 A six-year-old girl died in a Chinese gene-editing trial
Experts say it should have never been allowed to go ahead. (Science)
+ This baby boy was treated with the first personalized gene-editing drug. (MIT Technology Review)

7 What it’s like to use a North Korean smartphone
They’re growing in popularity—but represent another avenue for government control. (WP $)

8 The FCC’s ban on foreign-made drones is not working
You can’t change global supply chains at the stroke of a pen. (The Verge $)

9 The “summer of Ludd” shows it’s fun to be a Luddite 
A growing anti-tech movement is all about raw, anarchic joy. (404 Media)
+ We’re in the era of AI malaise. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Why Jimothy the racoon is the internet’s latest obsession 
It’s his irresistible combination of chaos and cuteness. (BBC)

Quote of the day

“I think that [AI] should stand for artificial idiot.”

—Marian Agnew, a nine-year-old, from Norman, Oklahoma, tells Wired she’s not impressed by AI models’ tendency to make up facts.  

One More Thing

Inside a romance scam compound—and how people get tricked into being there  

Gavesh’s journey started, seemingly innocently, with a job ad on Facebook promising work he desperately needed. 

Instead, he found himself trafficked into a business commonly known as “pig butchering”—a form of fraud in which scammers form close relationships with targets online and extract money from them. 

The Chinese crime syndicates behind the scams have netted billions of dollars, and they have used violence and coercion to force their workers to carry out the frauds from large compounds, several of which operate openly in the quasi-lawless borderlands of Myanmar. 

Read our story about these scam syndicates and how they could be broken up. 

— Peter Guest and Emily Fishbein

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.)

+ I want to make every single one of these delicious-looking Korean dishes. 
+ If you like origami, you’ll love this guy’s tutorials.
+ How to deal with those old gadgets that are collecting dust in your drawer.
+ Enjoy these old art deco public transport posters from London.

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.

Supercooled kidneys have been transplanted into pigs in a “landmark achievement” 

When it comes to organ donation, time is everything. As soon as an organ has been removed from a donor’s body, it starts to deteriorate. Surgeons have only a matter of hours to get it into a recipient.

In most cases, organs will be kept on ice during that time, at around 4 °C (39 °F). They cannot be frozen—in previous attempts, ice has formed, causing all kinds of damage.

But now, scientists have come up with a device that allows organs to be cooled to -4 °C (25 °F) without forming any ice. They’ve tested it with pig organs and shown that kidneys, at least, can be preserved in the device for days then successfully transplanted. 

Read our story about their breakthrough, and why it raises hopes for longer-term storage of donated human organs.

—Jessica Hamzelou

If you want to read more about this story and its implications for organ preservation and transplantation, sign up to receive The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter, later today.

The must-reads

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

1 Inside China’s epic push to replace US chips 
The gap between their chips’ capabilities remains large—for now. (WSJ $)
+ How China is using open source AI as a new form of soft power around the globe. (NYT $)
+ A new bill in the US takes aim at Chinese AI companies’ training practices. (NBC)
+ US lawmakers are also mulling banning the military from using Chinese humanoid robots. (SCMP)

2 Space data centers don’t exist yet, but people already oppose them
Environmental experts warn it’ll further pollute the stratosphere. (Guardian)
+ Four things we’d need to put data centers in space. (MIT Technology Review)
+ What it’s like inside the data centers powering AI down here on Earth. (Axios)
+ The left and right are finding common cause with data center protests in the US. (The Verge)

3 US lawmakers are pushing for an AI ‘kill switch’
After OpenAI’s models went rogue and hacked Hugging Face. (BBC)

4 Peptides seem on the cusp of going mainstream in the US
A lack of scientific evidence didn’t stop the FDA just voting to let some pharmacies to legally dispense them. (Wired $)
+ How does Make America Healthy Again hold up to scientific scrutiny? (Nature)
+ US measles cases are reaching levels not seen for three decades. (Wired $)
+ Peptides are everywhere. Here’s what you need to know. (MIT Technology Review)

5 The EU just fined Google almost $1 billion
For competition breaches over apps and search. (FT $)
+ It came just a day before Trump renewed tariffs on 60 trading partners, including the EU. (BBC)

6 Electric vehicles are selling well in Europe
And the share made by Chinese firms has doubled in the last year. (The Next Web)
+ Hybrids are hot property in the US this summer. (Wired $)

7 There’s a worsening shortage of computer science professors
You can blame AI companies—they keep snapping them up, to our general detriment. (The Atlantic $)

8 A judge caught a stenographer allowing AI errors into their transcript 
It’s apparently the first time this has happened, but it certainly won’t be the last. (404 Media)
+ Even judges themselves are falling for AI. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Here’s what new tech millionaires will do with their IPO wealth 
What a nice problem to have to grapple with! (Quartz $)

10 Dating apps’ latest wheeze? In-person events 
Well well well, it seems we’ve come full circle. (Bloomberg $)

Quote of the day

“Call us optimists, call us dreamers. Just as we’ve always done, we’re betting on people.” 

—The voiceover from a new advert from Meta, which exhorts us to be more optimistic about AI.

One More Thing

AI is changing how we study bird migration

In a warming world increasingly full of human infrastructure that can be deadly to them, like glass skyscrapers and power lines, migratory birds are facing many existential threats. 

Scientists rely on a combination of methods to track the timing and location of their migrations, though each has shortcomings. But now, machine-learning tools are unlocking a treasure trove of acoustic data for ecologists. 

Read our story about the technology that’s making it easier to detect and identify birds and their movements.

—Christian Elliott

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.)

+ It’s never too late to live your dreams. Here’s how these late bloomers did it.
+ Limbs feeling a bit tight? Try these stretches!
+ These English football fans went to the 1986 World Cup—and loved it so much they never came home.
+ How the invention of the humble paint tube revolutionized the world of art.

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 power line that could reshape New York’s grid is hitting snags 

During a heat wave on July 3, New York State’s grid imported enough electricity from Canada to meet about 9% of its total demand that day.

Some of that power shuttled in on a 339-mile power line stretching from Quebec to Queens. It opened in May and is officially the longest underground transmission line in North America. It could provide up to 20% of New York City’s electricity demand, largely with abundant hydropower from Quebec.

One wrinkle: The line has been down for most of this month, and some experts are concerned about how drought will affect the power supply feeding it. 

Still, the line could help shape the future of our grid, if it can overcome these sorts of snags. Read our story to understand how.

—Casey Crownhart

This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

The must-reads

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

1 The US Treasury is threatening to sanction Chinese AI companies
Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has accused Moonshot of improperly distilling Anthropic’s Fable model. (TechCrunch)
+ Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is arguing that America has nothing to fear from Chinese AI. (Axios)
+ Like it or not, Chinese models are now part of the global AI infrastructure. (Rest of World)
+ China’s AI models have Trump’s AI world at war with itself. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Why the OpenAI hack is the scariest AI mishap yet
AI’s capabilities seem to be starting to outpace our current ability to control them. (The Economist $)
+ Hugging Face had to turn to a Chinese AI model to rescue it from the hack. (BI)

3 Visually impaired Europeans can now get an implant that restores sight
And Americans may not have to wait long to receive it, too. (STAT)
+ This retina implant lets people with vision loss do a crossword puzzle. (MIT Technology Review)

4 A bellwether lawsuit suing Meta for social media addiction has been dropped
There are, however, many more waiting in the wings. (NYT $)

5 Here’s how ICE gets its hands on Americans’ data
As soon as you open a credit card or phone account, its agents can see where you live. (404 Media)
+ States are warring with the Trump administration over the right to see ICE agents’ faces. (Wired $)

6 We urgently need to grapple with AI’s environmental impact
As the world warms, is the price we’re paying worth it? (The Verge)
+ We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Privacy issues with smart glasses need an industrywide fix
That’s according to Samsung, which is unveiling glasses it developed with Google this fall. (Bloomberg $)

8 The US Army is begging soldiers to limit their AI use
The token crisis comes for us all eventually, it seems. (Ars Technica)

9 Why does lettuce keep making Americans sick? 
It’s pretty simple: a lot of people eat it, and it doesn’t get cooked. (Wired $)

10 Pokemon Go is the perfect game to play this summer
It’s fun, collaborative, and it gets you outdoors. (Guardian)

Quote of the day

“It went off and did this hack all by itself, as far as we can tell. This is the highest level of autonomy that we’ve seen in the use of a large language model for cyber operations.”

—Colin Shea-Blymyer, a cybersecurity research fellow at Georgetown University, tells NPR why the OpenAI hack on Hugging Face is so alarming. 

One More Thing

Welcome to the dark side of crypto’s permissionless dream 

Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen is a founder of THORChain, a blockchain through which users can swap one cryptocurrency for another and earn fees from making those swaps.  

But is he responsible for what it’s used for? It’s a question that matters because in January last year, its users lost more than $200 million in cryptocurrency after THORChain transactions and accounts were frozen by an admin override, which users believed was not supposed to be possible given the decentralized structure. It’s also been used by North Korean hackers to move $1.2 billion of stolen ethereum. 

Thorbjornsen explains this all away as a function of THORChain’s decentralized and permissionless nature. Read our story exploring whether we should believe him or not. 

—Jessica Klein

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.)

+ A musician developed an ingenious way to strum a guitar with an electric fan.
+ Ukraine’s tunnel of love is a leafy green corridor of romance that’s straight out of a fairy tale.
+ The driver of a giant banana has been pulled over 100s of times, but still won’t ditch his treasured ride.
+ Ever wonder which albums and songs truly stand the test of time? The Greatest Music tries to answer that via an algorithm that analyses hundreds of “best of” lists.