Nature, Published online: 18 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41586-025-09180-y

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.

Why it’s so hard to stop tech-facilitated abuse

After Gioia had her first child with her then husband, he installed baby monitors throughout their home—to “watch what we were doing,” she says, while he went to work. She’d turn them off; he’d get angry. By the time their third child turned seven, Gioia and her husband had divorced, but he still found ways to monitor her behavior. One Christmas, he gave their youngest a smartwatch. Gioia showed it to a tech-savvy friend, who found that the watch had a tracking feature turned on. It could be turned off only by the watch’s owner—her ex.

And Gioia is far from alone. In fact, tech-facilitated abuse now occurs in most cases of intimate partner violence—and we’re doing shockingly little to prevent it. Read the full story. 

—Jessica Klein 

This story is from the next print edition of MIT Technology Review, which explores power—who has it, and who wants it. It’s set to go live on Wednesday June 25, so subscribe & save 25% to read it and get a copy of the issue when it lands!

Why AI hardware needs to be open

—by Ayah Bdeir, a leader in the maker movement, champion of open source AI, and founder of littleBits, the hardware platform that teaches STEAM to kids through hands-on invention. 

Once again, the future of technology is being engineered in secret by a handful of people and delivered to the rest of us as a sealed, seamless, perfect device. When technology is designed like this, we are reduced to consumers. We don’t shape the tools; they shape us. 

However, this moment creates a chance to do things differently. Because away from the self-centeredness of Silicon Valley, a quiet, grounded sense of resistance is reactivating.  Read the full story.

MIT Technology Review Narrated: Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business

In China, people are seeking help from AI-generated avatars to process their grief after a family member passes away. Our story about this trend is the latest to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we’re publishing 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.

The must-reads

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

1 Iran is going offline to avoid Israeli cyberattacks
A government spokesperson said it plans to disconnect completely from the global internet this evening. (The Verge)
+ How attacks on Iran’s oil exports could hurt China. (WSJ $)

2 Trump is giving TikTok another reprieve from a US ban
It’s been a full five years since he signed the original executive order telling Bytedance to sell it. (CNN)
+ Why Chinese manufacturers are going viral on TikTok. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Conspiracy theories about the Minnesota shooting are all over social media
Whenever there’s an information vacuum, people are all too keen to fill it with noise and nonsense. (NBC) 
+ The shooting suspect allegedly used data broker sites to find targets’ addresses. (Wired $)

4 Tensions between OpenAI and Microsoft are starting to boil over 
OpenAI has even threatened to report its formerly close partner to antitrust regulators. (WSJ $)
+ Here are the concessions OpenAI is seeking. (The Information $)
+ Inside the story that enraged OpenAI. (MIT Technology Review) 

5 California cops are using AI cameras to investigate ICE protests
And sharing license plate data with other agencies, a practice some experts say is illegal. (404 Media)
+ How a new type of AI is helping police skirt facial recognition bans. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Social media is now Americans’ primary news source
It’s overtaken TV for the first time. (Reuters)
+ They watched more TV via streaming than cable last month, too. (NYT $)

7 Weight loss drugs may not work quite as well as hoped
Researchers analysed data from 51,085 patients and found bariatric surgery delivered better, more sustainable results. (The Guardian)

8 What is AI doing to reading? 
Here’s what we stand to gain—and lose—when we outsource reading to machines. (New Yorker $) 

9 India is relying on China to build up its EV market
It’s taking a drastically different course to the US. (Rest of World)
+ Why EVs are (mostly) set for solid growth in 2025. (MIT Technology Review)

10 People are building AI tools to decipher cats’ meows 
Bet at least half of them are “feed me.” (Scientific American $)

Quote of the day

“Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”

—Remarks made by federal judge Williams G. Young this week as he voided some of the Trump administration’s cuts to National Institutes of Health grants, saying they were discriminatory, the New York Times reports. 

One more thing

STEPHANIE ARNETT/MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | GETTY

Why AI could eat quantum computing’s lunch

Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that they’ll be a game changer for fields as diverse as finance, drug discovery, and logistics.

But while the field struggles with the realities of tricky quantum hardware, another challenger is making headway in some of these most promising use cases. AI is now being applied to fundamental physics, chemistry, and materials science in a way that suggests quantum computing’s purported home turf might not be so safe after all. Read the full story.

—Edd Gent

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 or skeet ’em at me.)

+ Wait a minute, Will Smith was offered a role in Inception? Much to think about.
+ No pain, no gain? Not necessarily.
+ John Waters, you really are one of a kind.
+ Say it ain’t so—I refuse to believe that young love is dead!

When OpenAI acquired Io to create “the coolest piece of tech that the world will have ever seen,” it confirmed what industry experts have long been saying: Hardware is the new frontier for AI. AI will no longer just be an abstract thing in the cloud far away. It’s coming for our homes, our rooms, our beds, our bodies. 

That should worry us.

Once again, the future of technology is being engineered in secret by a handful of people and delivered to the rest of us as a sealed, seamless, perfect device. When technology is designed in secrecy and sold to us as a black box, we are reduced to consumers. We wait for updates. We adapt to features. We don’t shape the tools; they shape us. 

This is a problem. And not just for tinkerers and technologists, but for all of us.

We are living through a crisis of disempowerment. Children are more anxious than ever; the former US surgeon general described a loneliness epidemic; people are increasingly worried about AI eroding education. The beautiful devices we use have been correlated with many of these trends. Now AI—arguably the most powerful technology of our era—is moving off the screen and into physical space. 

The timing is not a coincidence. Hardware is having a renaissance. Every major tech company is investing in physical interfaces for AI. Startups are raising capital to build robots, glasses, wearables that are going to track our every move. The form factor of AI is the next battlefield. Do we really want our future mediated entirely through interfaces we can’t open, code we can’t see, and decisions we can’t influence? 

This moment creates an existential opening, a chance to do things differently. Because away from the self-centeredness of Silicon Valley, a quiet, grounded sense of resistance is reactivating. I’m calling it the revenge of the makers. 

In 2007, as the iPhone emerged, the maker movement was taking shape. This subculture advocates for learning-through-making in social environments like hackerspaces and libraries. DIY and open hardware enthusiasts gathered in person at Maker Faires—large events where people of all ages tinkered and shared their inventions in 3D printing, robotics, electronics, and more. Motivated by fun, self-fulfillment, and shared learning, the movement birthed companies like MakerBot, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and (my own education startup) littleBits from garages and kitchen tables. I myself wanted to challenge the notion that technology had to be intimidating or inaccessible, creating modular electronic building blocks designed to put the power of invention in the hands of everyone.

By definition, the maker movement is humble and it is consistent. Makers do not believe in the cult of individual genius; we believe in collective genius. We believe that creativity is universally distributed (not exclusively bestowed), that inventing is better together, and that we should make open products so people can observe, learn, and create—basically, the polar opposite of what Jony Ive and Sam Altman are building.

But over time, the momentum faded. The movement was dismissed by the tech and investment industry as niche and hobbyist, and starting in 2018, pressures on the hardware venture market (followed by covid) made people retreat from social spaces to spend more time behind screens. 

Now it’s mounting a powerful second act, joined by a wave of AI open-source enthusiasts. This time around the stakes are higher, and we need to give it the support it never had.

In 2024 the AI leader Hugging Face developed an open-source platform for AI robots, which already has 3,500+ robot data sets and draws thousands of participants from every continent to join giant hackathons. Raspberry Pi went public on the London Stock Exchange for $700 million. After a hiatus, Maker Faire came back; the most recent one had nearly 30,000 attendees, with kinetic sculptures, flaming octopuses, and DIY robot bands, and this year there will be over 100 Maker Faires around the world. Just last week, DIY.org relaunched its app. In March, my friend Roya Mahboob, founder of the Afghan Girls Robotics Team, released a movie about the team to incredible reviews. People love the idea that making is the ultimate form of human empowerment and expression. All the while, a core set of people have continued influencing millions through maker organizations like FabLabs and Adafruit.

Studies show that hands-on creativity reduces anxiety, combats loneliness, and boosts cognitive function. The act of making grounds us, connects us to others, and reminds us that we are capable of shaping the world with our own hands. 

I’m not proposing to reject AI hardware but to reject the idea that innovation must be proprietary, elite, and closed. I’m proposing to fund and build the open alternative. That means putting our investment, time, and purchases towards robot built in community labs, AI models trained in the open, tools made transparent and hackable. That world isn’t just more inclusive—it’s more innovative. It’s also more fun. 

This is not nostalgia. This is about fighting for the kind of future we want: A future of openness and joy, not of conformity and consumption. One where technology invites participation, not passivity. Where children grow up not just knowing how to swipe, but how to build. Where creativity is a shared endeavor, not the mythical province of lone geniuses in glass towers.

In his Io announcement video, Altman said, “We are literally on the brink of a new generation of technology that can make us our better selves.” It reminded me of the movie Mountainhead, where four tech moguls tell themselves they are saving the world while the world is burning. I don’t think the iPhone made us our better selves. In fact, you’ve never seen me run faster than when I’m trying to snatch an iPhone out of my three-year-old’s hands.

So yes, I’m watching what Sam Altman and Jony Ive will unveil. But I’m far more excited by what’s happening in basements, in classrooms, on workbenches. Because the real iPhone moment isn’t a new product we wait for. It’s the moment you realize you can build it yourself. And best of all? You  can’t doomscroll when you’re holding a soldering iron.

Ayah Bdeir is a leader in the maker movement, a champion of open source AI, and founder of littleBits, the hardware platform that teaches STEAM to kids through hands-on invention. A graduate of the MIT Media Lab, she was selected as one of the BBC’s 100 Most Influential Women, and her inventions have been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.

Nature, Published online: 18 June 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-01891-6

Nature, Published online: 17 June 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-01888-1

Last fall, while attending a board meeting in Amsterdam, I had a few free hours and made an impromptu visit to the Van Gogh Museum. I often steal time for visits like this—a perk of global business travel for which I am grateful. Wandering the galleries, I found myself before The Courtesan (after Eisen), painted in 1887. Van Gogh had based it on a Japanese woodblock print by Keisai Eisen, which he encountered in the magazine Paris Illustré. He explicitly copied and reinterpreted Eisen’s composition, adding his own vivid border of frogs, cranes, and bamboo.

As I stood there, I imagined the painting as the product of a generative AI model prompted with the query How would van Gogh reinterpret a Japanese woodblock in the style of Keisai Eisen? And I wondered: If van Gogh had used such an AI tool to stimulate his imagination, would Eisen—or his heirs—have had a strong legal claim?  If van Gogh were working today, that might be the case. Two years ago, the US Supreme Court found that Andy Warhol had infringed upon the photographer Lynn Goldsmith’s copyright by using her photo of the musician Prince for a series of silkscreens. The court said the works were not sufficiently transformative to constitute fair use—a provision in the law that allows for others to make limited use of copyrighted material.

A few months later, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, I visited a Salvador Dalí exhibition. I had always thought of Dalí as a true original genius who conjured surreal visions out of thin air. But the show included several Dutch engravings, including Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Seven Deadly Sins (1558), that clearly influenced Dalí’s 8 Mortal Sins Suite (1966). The stylistic differences are significant, but the lineage is undeniable. Dalí himself cited Bruegel as a surrealist forerunner, someone who tapped into the same dream logic and bizarre forms that Dalí celebrated. Suddenly, I was seeing Dalí not just as an original but also as a reinterpreter. Should Bruegel have been flattered that Dalí built on his work—or should he have sued him for making it so “grotesque”?

During a later visit to a Picasso exhibit in Milan, I came across a famous informational diagram by the art historian Alfred Barr, mapping how modernist movements like Cubism evolved from earlier artistic traditions. Picasso is often held up as one of modern art’s most original and influential figures, but Barr’s chart made plain the many artists he drew from—Goya, El Greco, Cézanne, African sculptors. This made me wonder: If a generative AI model had been fed all those inputs, might it have produced Cubism? Could it have generated the next great artistic “breakthrough”?

These experiences—spread across three cities and centered on three iconic artists—coalesced into a broader reflection I’d already begun. I had recently spoken with Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, about how restrictive copyright laws are in music. Song arrangements and lyrics enjoy longer protection than many pharmaceutical patents. Ek sits at the leading edge of this debate, and he observed that generative AI already produces an astonishing range of music. Some of it is good. Much of it is terrible. But nearly all of it borrows from the patterns and structures of existing work.

Musicians already routinely sue one another for borrowing from previous works. How will the law adapt to a form of artistry that’s driven by prompts and precedent, built entirely on a corpus of existing material?

And the questions don’t stop there. Who, exactly, owns the outputs of a generative model? The user who crafted the prompt? The developer who built the model? The artists whose works were ingested to train it? Will the social forces that shape artistic standing—critics, curators, tastemakers—still hold sway? Or will a new, AI-era hierarchy emerge? If every artist has always borrowed from others, is AI’s generative recombination really so different? And in such a litigious culture, how long can copyright law hold its current form? The US Copyright Office has begun to tackle the thorny issues of ownership and says that generative outputs can be copyrighted if they are sufficiently human-authored. But it is playing catch-up in a rapidly evolving field. 

Different industries are responding in different ways. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recently announced that filmmakers’ use of generative AI would not disqualify them from Oscar contention—and that they wouldn’t be required to disclose when they’d used the technology. Several acclaimed films, including Oscar winner The Brutalist, incorporated AI into their production processes.

The music world, meanwhile, continues to wrestle with its definitions of originality. Consider the recent lawsuit against Ed Sheeran. In 2016, he was sued by the heirs of Ed Townsend, co-writer of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” who claimed that Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” copied the earlier song’s melody, harmony, and rhythm. When the case finally went to trial in 2023, Sheeran brought a guitar to the stand. He played the disputed four-chord progression—I–iii–IV–V—and wove together a mash-up of songs built on the same foundation. The point was clear: These are the elemental units of songwriting. After a brief deliberation, the jury found Sheeran not liable.

Reflecting after the trial, Sheeran said: “These chords are common building blocks … No one owns them or the way they’re played, in the same way no one owns the colour blue.”

Exactly. Whether it’s expressed with a guitar, a paintbrush, or a generative algorithm, creativity has always been built on what came before.

I don’t consider this essay to be great art. But I should be transparent: I relied extensively on ChatGPT while drafting it. I began with a rough outline, notes typed on my phone in museum galleries, and transcripts from conversations with colleagues. I uploaded older writing samples to give the model a sense of my voice. Then I used the tool to shape a draft, which I revised repeatedly—by hand and with help from an editor—over several weeks.

There may still be phrases or sentences in here that came directly from the model. But I’ve iterated so much that I no longer know which ones. Nor, I suspect, could any reader—or any AI detector. (In fact, Grammarly found that 0% of this text appeared to be AI-generated.)

Many people today remain uneasy about using these tools. They worry it’s cheating, or feel embarrassed to admit that they’ve sought such help. I’ve moved past that. I assume all my students at Harvard Business School are using AI. I assume most academic research begins with literature scanned and synthesized by these models. And I assume that many of the essays I now read in leading publications were shaped, at least in part, by generative tools.

Why? Because we are professionals. And professionals adopt efficiency tools early. Generative AI joins a long lineage that includes the word processor, the search engine, and editing tools like Grammarly. The question is no longer Who’s using AI? but Why wouldn’t you?

I recognize the counterargument, notably put forward by Nicholas Thompson, CEO of the Atlantic: that content produced with AI assistance should not be eligible for copyright protection, because it blurs the boundaries of authorship. I understand the instinct. AI recombines vast corpora of preexisting work, and the results can feel derivative or machine-like.

But when I reflect on the history of creativity—van Gogh reworking Eisen, Dalí channeling Bruegel, Sheeran defending common musical DNA—I’m reminded that recombination has always been central to creation. The economist Joseph Schumpeter famously wrote that innovation is less about invention than “the novel reassembly of existing ideas.” If we tried to trace and assign ownership to every prior influence, we’d grind creativity to a halt.

From the outset, I knew the tools had transformative potential. What I underestimated was how quickly they would become ubiquitous across industries and in my own daily work.

Our copyright system has never required total originality. It demands meaningful human input. That standard should apply in the age of AI as well. When people thoughtfully engage with these models—choosing prompts, curating inputs, shaping the results—they are creating. The medium has changed, but the impulse remains the same: to build something new from the materials we inherit.

Nitin Nohria is the George F. Baker Jr. Professor at Harvard Business School and its former dean. He is also the chair of Thrive Capital, an early investor in several prominent AI firms, including OpenAI.

MIT Technology Review’s editorial guidelines state that generative AI should not be used to draft articles unless the article is meant to illustrate the capabilities of such tools and its use is clearly disclosed. 

Nature Biotechnology, Published online: 16 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41587-025-02698-6

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 AI can help make cities work better

In recent decades, cities have become increasingly adept at amassing all sorts of data. But that data can have limited impact when government officials are unable to communicate, let alone analyze or put to use, all the information they have access to.

This dynamic has always bothered Sarah Williams, a professor of urban planning and technology at MIT. Shortly after joining MIT in 2012, Williams created the Civic Data Design Lab to bridge that divide. Over the years, she and her colleagues have made urban planning data more vivid and accessible through human stories and striking graphics. Read the full story.

—Ben Schneider

This story is from the next print edition of MIT Technology Review, which explores power—who has it, and who wants it. It’s set to go live on Wednesday June 25, so subscribe & save 25% to read it and get a copy of the issue when it lands!

Inside OpenAI’s empire with Karen Hao

AI journalist Karen Hao’s newly released book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, tells the story of OpenAI’s rise to power and its far-reaching impact all over the world.

Hao, a former MIT Technology Review senior editor, will join our executive editor Niall Firth in an intimate subscriber-exclusive Roundtable conversation exploring the AI arms race, what it means for all of us, and where it’s headed. Register here to join us at 9am ET on Monday June 30th June.

Special giveaway: Attendees will have the chance to receive a free copy of Hao’s book. See registration form for details.

The must-reads

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

1 The White House is sharing tasteless deportation memes
Its digital strategy revolves around boosting policies for cheap laughs. (WP $)
+ Trump’s immigration raids are a rapid escalation of his deportation tactics. (Vox)
+ The administration is revelling in the outraged reaction to its actions. (The Atlantic $)
+ But New Yorkers are fighting back. (New Yorker $)

2 New York is asking companies to disclose when AI contributes to layoffs
It’s the first official step towards measuring AI’s impact on the labor market. (Bloomberg $)
+ People are worried that AI will take everyone’s jobs. We’ve been here before. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Regeneron isn’t buying 23andMe after all
A non-profit controlled by its cofounder has made a higher bid. (WSJ $)
+ Anne Wojcicki says she has the backing of a Fortune 500 company. (FT $)
+ How to… delete your 23andMe data. (MIT Technology Review)

4 RFK Jr has filled the CDC’s vaccine committee with allies
Robert Malone, one of the appointees, has encouraged the public to embrace the term anti-vax. (The Atlantic $)
+ Here’s what food and drug regulation might look like under the Trump administration. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Americans are commissioning animal torture videos
The US government has revealed details of residents accused of paying people in Indonesia to abuse helpless monkeys. (Ars Technica)

6 China has conducted its first brain implant clinical trial
Making it only the second country to do so, after the US. (Bloomberg $)
+ Brain-computer interfaces face a critical test. (MIT Technology Review)

7 The US Navy wants your startup
It’s more open to partnerships than ever before, apparently. (TechCrunch)
+ China is stockpiling intercontinental ballistic missiles. (Insider $)
+ Generative AI is learning to spy for the US military. (MIT Technology Review)

8 The UK is working on a chemotherapy-free approach to treating leukaemia
Combining two targeted drugs appears to perform better. (The Guardian)

9 Brace yourself for AI sponcon
Just when you thought product placement couldn’t get any worse. (The Verge)

10 Zines are staging a comeback
Creatives are turning their backs on social media in favor of good old-fashioned booklets. (Wired $)

Quote of the day

“Being a highly “online” person is a very embarrassing thing and should be relegated to basement losers.”

—Derek Guy, aka The Menswear Guy on X, explains to Wired why he thinks a significant proportion of the Republican coalition need to step away from their keyboards.

One more thing

Bright LEDs could spell the end of dark skies

Scientists have known for years that light pollution is growing and can harm both humans and wildlife. In people, increased exposure to light at night disrupts sleep cycles and has been linked to cancer and cardiovascular disease, while wildlife suffers from interruption to their reproductive patterns, and increased danger.

Astronomers, policymakers, and lighting professionals are all working to find ways to reduce light pollution. Many of them advocate installing light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, in outdoor fixtures such as city streetlights, mainly for their ability to direct light to a targeted area.

But the high initial investment and durability of modern LEDs mean cities need to get the transition right the first time or potentially face decades of consequences. Read the full story.

—Shel Evergreen

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 or skeet ’em at me.)

+ As commencement speeches go, Steve Jobs’ is definitely one of the best.
+ I love this iconic Homer moment recreated in Lego.
+ The remains of a beautiful Byzantine tomb complex has been uncovered between Aleppo and Damascus.
+ I want to believe: check out this short, bizarre history of alien abductions in America