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.

What it’s like to be banned from the US for fighting online hate  

Just before Christmas the Trump administration dramatically escalated its war on digital rights by banning five people from entering the US. One of them, Josephine Ballon, is a director of HateAid, a small German nonprofit founded to support the victims of online harassment and violence. The organization is a strong advocate of EU tech regulations, and so finds itself attacked in campaigns from right-wing politicians and provocateurs who claim that it engages in censorship. 

EU officials, freedom of speech experts, and the five people targeted all flatly reject these accusations. Ballon told us that their work is fundamentally about making people feel safer online. But their experiences over the past few weeks show just how politicized and besieged their work in online safety has become. Read the full story. 

—Eileen Guo

TR10: AI companions

Chatbots are skilled at crafting sophisticated dialogue and mimicking empathetic behavior. They never get tired of chatting. It’s no wonder, then, that so many people now use them for companionship—forging friendships or even romantic relationships. 

72% of US teenagers have used AI for companionship, according to a study from the nonprofit Common Sense Media. But while chatbots can provide much-needed emotional support and guidance for some people, they can exacerbate underlying problems in others—especially vulnerable people or those with mental health issues. 

Although some early attempts to regulate this space are underway, AI companionship is going nowhere. Read why we made it one of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies this year, and check out the rest of the list.

And, if you want to learn more about what we predict for AI this year, sign up to join me for our free LinkedIn Live event tomorrow at 12.30pm ET.

Why inventing new emotions feels so good  

Have you ever felt “velvetmist”?  

It’s a “complex and subtle emotion that elicits feelings of comfort, serenity, and a gentle sense of floating.” It’s peaceful, but more ephemeral and intangible than contentment. It might be evoked by the sight of a sunset or a moody, low-key album.  

If you haven’t ever felt this sensation—or even heard of it—that’s not surprising. A Reddit user generated it with ChatGPT, along with advice on how to evoke the feeling. Don’t scoff: Researchers say more and more terms for these “neo-­emotions” are showing up online, describing new dimensions and aspects of feeling. Read our story to learn more about why. 

—Anya Kamenetz

This story is from the latest print issue of MIT Technology Review. If you haven’t already, subscribe now to receive the next edition as soon as it lands (and benefit from some hefty seasonal discounts too!)

The must-reads

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

1 Ads are coming to ChatGPT 
For American users initially, with plans to expand soon. (CNN)
+ Here’s how they’ll work. (Wired $)

2 What will we be able to salvage after the AI bubble bursts? 
It will be ugly, but there are plenty of good uses for AI that we’ll want to keep. (The Guardian) 
+ What even is the AI bubble? (MIT Technology Review)

3 It’s almost impossible to mine Greenland’s natural resources 
It has vast supplies of rare earth elements, but its harsh climate and environment make them very hard to access. (The Week)

4 Iran is now 10 days into its internet shutdown
It’s one of the longest and most extreme we’ve ever witnessed. (BBC)
+  Starlink isn’t proving as helpful as hoped as the regime finds ways to jam it. (Reuters $)
+ Battles are raging online about what’s really going on inside Iran. (NYT $)

5 America is heading for a polymarket disaster 
Prediction markets are getting out of control, and some people are losing a lot of money. (The Atlantic $)
+ They were first embraced by political junkies, but now they’re everywhere. (NYT $)

6 How to fireproof a city 
Californians are starting to fight fires before they can even start. (The Verge $)
+ How AI can help spot wildfires. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Stoking ‘deep state’ conspiracy theories can be dangerous 
Especially if you’re then given the task of helping run one of those state institutions, as Dan Bongino is now learning. (WP $)
+ Why everything is a conspiracy now. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Why we’re suddenly all having a ‘Very Chinese Time’ 
It’s a fun, flippant trend—but it also shows how China’s soft power is growing around the globe. (Wired $) 

9 Why there’s no one best way to store information
Each one involves trade-offs between space and time. (Quanta $)

10 Meat may play a surprising role in helping people reach 100
Perhaps because it can assist with building stronger muscles and bones. (New Scientist $)

Quote of the day

“That’s the level of anxiety now – people watching the skies and the seas themselves because they don’t know what else to do.”

—A Greenlander tells The Guardian just how seriously she and her fellow compatriots are taking Trump’s threat to invade their country. 

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, many of them trafficked like Gavesh, to carry out the frauds from large compounds, several of which operate openly in the quasi-lawless borderlands of Myanmar.

Big Tech may hold the key to breaking up the scam syndicates—if these companies can be persuaded or compelled to act. Read the full story.

—Peter Guest & 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 or skeet ’em at me.)

+ Blue Monday isn’t real (but it is an absolute banger of a track.) 
+ Some great advice here about how to be productive during the working day.
+ Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s most fun plays—as these top actors can attest. 
+ If the cold and dark gets to you, try making yourself a delicious bowl of soup. 

npj Digital Medicine, Published online: 19 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41746-026-02362-6

LLM-driven collaborative framework for knowledge-enhanced cancer pain assessment and management

npj Digital Medicine, Published online: 19 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41746-025-02295-6

UroFusion-X: a unified multimodal deep learning framework for robust diagnosis, subtyping, and prognosis of urological cancers

npj Digital Medicine, Published online: 17 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41746-026-02344-8

Wearable device derived electrocardiographic age and its association with atrial fibrillation

Nature Medicine, Published online: 16 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-025-04073-z

Analyses of liver biopsies from a child with spinal muscular atrophy treated with adeno-associated virus gene therapy who developed hepatitis reveal contaminating manufacturing plasmids and disrupted vector genomes, possibly resulting from recombination events.

In this exclusive subscriber-only eBook, you’ll learn about how the idea that machines will be as smart as—or smarter than—humans has hijacked an entire industry.

by Will Douglas Heaven October 30, 2025

Table of Contents:

• How Silicon Valley got AGI-pilled
• The great AGI conspiracy
• How AGI hijacked an industry
• The great AGI conspiracy, concluded

Related Stories:

• How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time
• The New Conspiracy Age

Access all subscriber-only eBooks:

arXiv:2601.09072v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Developing safe, effective, and practically useful clinical prediction models (CPMs) traditionally requires iterative collaboration between clinical experts, data scientists, and informaticists. This process refines the often small but critical details of the model building process, such as which features/patients to include and how clinical categories should be defined. However, this traditional collaboration process is extremely time- and resource-intensive, resulting in only a small fraction of CPMs reaching clinical practice. This challenge intensifies when teams attempt to incorporate unstructured clinical notes, which can contain an enormous number of concepts. To address this challenge, we introduce HACHI, an iterative human-in-the-loop framework that uses AI agents to accelerate the development of fully interpretable CPMs by enabling the exploration of concepts in clinical notes. HACHI alternates between (i) an AI agent rapidly exploring and evaluating candidate concepts in clinical notes and (ii) clinical and domain experts providing feedback to improve the CPM learning process. HACHI defines concepts as simple yes-no questions that are used in linear models, allowing the clinical AI team to transparently review, refine, and validate the CPM learned in each round. In two real-world prediction tasks (acute kidney injury and traumatic brain injury), HACHI outperforms existing approaches, surfaces new clinically relevant concepts not included in commonly-used CPMs, and improves model generalizability across clinical sites and time periods. Furthermore, HACHI reveals the critical role of the clinical AI team, such as directing the AI agent to explore concepts that it had not previously considered, adjusting the granularity of concepts it considers, changing the objective function to better align with the clinical objectives, and identifying issues of data bias and leakage.

arXiv:2601.08838v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large-scale Text-to-SQL benchmarks such as BIRD typically assume complete and accurate database annotations as well as readily available external knowledge, which fails to reflect common industrial settings where annotations are missing, incomplete, or erroneous. This mismatch substantially limits the real-world applicability of state-of-the-art (SOTA) Text-to-SQL systems. To bridge this gap, we explore a database-centric approach that leverages intrinsic, fine-grained information residing in relational databases to construct missing evidence and improve Text-to-SQL accuracy under annotation-scarce conditions. Our key hypothesis is that when a query requires multi-step reasoning over extensive table information, existing methods often struggle to reliably identify and utilize the truly relevant knowledge. We therefore propose to "cache" query-relevant knowledge on the database side in advance, so that it can be selectively activated at inference time. Based on this idea, we introduce Companion Agents (CA), a new Text-to-SQL paradigm that incorporates a group of agents accompanying database schemas to proactively mine and consolidate hidden inter-table relations, value-domain distributions, statistical regularities, and latent semantic cues before query generation. Experiments on BIRD under the fully missing evidence setting show that CA recovers +4.49 / +4.37 / +14.13 execution accuracy points on RSL-SQL / CHESS / DAIL-SQL, respectively, with larger gains on the Challenging subset +9.65 / +7.58 / +16.71. These improvements stem from CA's automatic database-side mining and evidence construction, suggesting a practical path toward industrial-grade Text-to-SQL deployment without reliance on human-curated evidence.

arXiv:2405.10045v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents Global Benchmark Database (GBD), a comprehensive suite of tools for provisioning and sustainably maintaining benchmark instances and their metadata. The availability of benchmark metadata is essential for many tasks in empirical research, e.g., for the data-driven compilation of benchmarks, the domain-specific analysis of runtime experiments, or the instance-specific selection of solvers. In this paper, we introduce the data model of GBD as well as its interfaces and provide examples of how to interact with them. We also demonstrate the integration of custom data sources and explain how to extend GBD with additional problem domains, instance formats and feature extractors.

arXiv:2506.12382v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ensuring the safety and alignment of Large Language Models is a significant challenge with their growing integration into critical applications and societal functions. While prior research has primarily focused on jailbreak attacks, less attention has been given to non-adversarial failures that subtly emerge during benign interactions. We introduce secondary risks a novel class of failure modes marked by harmful or misleading behaviors during benign prompts. Unlike adversarial attacks, these risks stem from imperfect generalization and often evade standard safety mechanisms. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce two risk primitives verbose response and speculative advice that capture the core failure patterns. Building on these definitions, we propose SecLens, a black-box, multi-objective search framework that efficiently elicits secondary risk behaviors by optimizing task relevance, risk activation, and linguistic plausibility. To support reproducible evaluation, we release SecRiskBench, a benchmark dataset of 650 prompts covering eight diverse real-world risk categories. Experimental results from extensive evaluations on 16 popular models demonstrate that secondary risks are widespread, transferable across models, and modality independent, emphasizing the urgent need for enhanced safety mechanisms to address benign yet harmful LLM behaviors in real-world deployments.

arXiv:2601.08183v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show promise in gastroenterology, yet their performance against comprehensive clinical workflows and human benchmarks remains unverified. To systematically evaluate state-of-the-art MLLMs across a panoramic gastrointestinal endoscopy workflow and determine their clinical utility compared with human endoscopists. We constructed GI-Bench, a benchmark encompassing 20 fine-grained lesion categories. Twelve MLLMs were evaluated across a five-stage clinical workflow: anatomical localization, lesion identification, diagnosis, findings description, and management. Model performance was benchmarked against three junior endoscopists and three residency trainees using Macro-F1, mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU), and multi-dimensional Likert scale. Gemini-3-Pro achieved state-of-the-art performance. In diagnostic reasoning, top-tier models (Macro-F1 0.641) outperformed trainees (0.492) and rivaled junior endoscopists (0.727; p>0.05). However, a critical "spatial grounding bottleneck" persisted; human lesion localization (mIoU >0.506) significantly outperformed the best model (0.345; p

Background: The digital health research field is growing rapidly, and a summary of the available digital tools for triaging musculoskeletal conditions is needed. Effective and safe digital triage tools for musculoskeletal conditions could support patients in making informed care decisions, aid clinicians and patients in navigating care, and may contribute to reducing ED overcrowding and healthcare costs. Objective: To identify and describe digital health tools for use by adults to triage musculoskeletal conditions across primary, urgent, or emergency care settings. Methods: Our scoping review was conducted following the Johanna Briggs Institute recommendations for scoping reviews and Arksey & O’Malley’s framework. Systematic searches in MEDLINE (OVID), CINAHL (EBSCO), PsycINFO (EBSCO), Embase (OVID), Cochrane Library, Web of Science, OpenGrey, GoogleScholar, arXiv.org, medRxiv.org, and an extensive grey literature search were conducted with a librarian scientist from inception to Sept 18, 2025. Studies had to recruit adults (18+ years) with musculoskeletal conditions that identified a digital health tool designed to triage or diagnose in primary, urgent, or emergency care settings and report primary data to be included. Two reviewer pairs independently screened abstracts and full-text articles Relevant data were extracted in duplicate, and results were summarized descriptively. Results: The search yielded 5695 records, and we screened 189 full-text articles. Thirty-four studies (n=37,509 patients) met the inclusion criteria. The most common musculoskeletal conditions reported were rheumatoid/inflammatory arthritis (n=13, 38%). Nineteen (59%) studies reported on symptom checkers, 13 (44%) studies on triage/diagnosis tools, and 2 (6%) were studies of diagnostic predictor tools. There were 16 unique digital health tools. Two tools were built for triaging musculoskeletal conditions, and were not publicly available outside the UK National Health Service. Most tools were generic tools designed to screen for general health problems, including musculoskeletal conditions. The most common approach to evaluating performance (eg, accuracy) of the tools was to compare the concordance of the tool to a clinician diagnosis or triage recommendation. Sensitivity and specificity ranged from 39%-91% and 23%-80%, respectively. Reported accuracy of included tools ranged from 33% to 98%. Conclusions: Musculoskeletal conditions remain a blind spot for people designing, implementing, and evaluating digital health for triage: few tools were specifically designed for musculoskeletal conditions, and most existing tools performed poorly when applied to musculoskeletal populations. The evidence base supporting accuracy of digital health for triaging and diagnosing musculoskeletal conditions is weak, and tool performance was inconsistent and lacking transparency. We recommend health systems and clinicians use a multi-modal approach, integrating both digital health tools and clinical decision-making to safely triage and diagnose until a more robust tool for musculoskeletal conditions is available. Future tool developers need to use transparent, standardized processes that prioritize tool safety, clinical value, and trustworthiness when designing for clinicians and patients.

Digital innovations hold immense potential to transform health care delivery, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where financial, geographical, and infrastructural constraints continue to hinder progress toward universal health care delivery. Although a growing health tech sector offers creative solutions, few digital health interventions reach scaled implementation. In this paper, we present the digital fit/viability model—an adapted determinant framework to describe facilitators and barriers to moving from digital tools to integrated digital health implementation. We then use this model to describe the specific challenges and recommended solutions when developing digital health tools for health systems in sub-Saharan Africa.

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 next-generation nuclear reactors break out of the 20th-century blueprint  

The popularity of commercial nuclear reactors has surged in recent years as worries about climate change and energy independence drowned out concerns about meltdowns and radioactive waste. The problem is, building nuclear power plants is expensive and slow.  

A new generation of nuclear power technology could reinvent what a reactor looks like—and how it works. Advocates hope that new tech can refresh the industry and help replace fossil fuels without emitting greenhouse gases.  Here’s what that might look like.

—Casey Crownhart

Next-gen nuclear is one of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies this year. If you want to learn more about why it made the list, sign up to receive The Spark, our weekly newsletter all about energy and climate change, tomorrow. You can also check out the rest of the technologies on the list here.

Data centers are amazing. Everyone hates them.

The hyperscale datacenter is a marvel of our age. A masterstroke of engineering across multiple disciplines. They are nothing short of a technological wonder. People hate them.  

People hate them in Virginia, which leads the nation in their construction. They hate them in Nevada, where they slurp up the state’s precious water. They hate them in Michigan, and Arizona, and South Dakota. They hate them all around the world, it’s true. But they really hate them in Georgia. Read our story about why they’re provoking so much fury. 

—Mat Honan

This story first featured in The Debrief with Mat Honan, a weekly newsletter about the biggest stories in tech from our editor in chief. Sign up here to get the next one in your inbox on Friday.

The must-reads

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

1 Iran is systematically crippling Starlink
The satellite internet service is meant to be impossible to jam—but the Iranian authorities are doing just that. (Rest of World)  
+ Messages getting around Iran’s internet block suggest that thousands of people have been killed. (NYT $)
+ On the ground in Ukraine’s largest Starlink repair shop. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Studies claiming microplastics harm us are being called into question
Some scientists say the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives. (The Guardian) 

3 Trump is trying to temper the data center backlash 
He hopes cajoling tech companies to pay more and thus reduce people’s energy bills will do the trick. (WP $) 
+ Microsoft has just become the first tech company to promise it will do just that. (NYT $)
+ We know AI is power hungry. But just how big is the scale of the problem? (MIT Technology Review) 

4 US emissions jumped last year
Thanks to a combination of rising electricity demand, and more coal being burned to meet it. (NYT $)
+ But it’s not all bad news: coal power generation in India and China finally started to decline. (The Guardian)
+ Four bright spots in climate news in 2025. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Elon Musk needs to face consequences for his actions
If we tolerate him unleashing a flood of harassment of women and children, what will come next? (The Atlantic $) 
+ The US Senate has passed a bill that could give non-consensual deepfake victims a new way to fight back. (The Verge $)

6 Why the US is set to lose the race back to the moon 
Cuts to NASA aren’t helping, but they’re not the only problem. (Wired $)

7 Google’s Veo AI model can now turn portrait images into vertical videos
Really slick ones, too. (The Verge $)
+ AI-generated influencers are sharing fake images of them in bed with celebrities on Instagram. (404 Media $)

8 Former NYC mayor Eric Adams has been accused of a crypto ‘pump and dump’ 
He promoted a token that saw its market cap briefly soar to $580 million before plummeting. (Coindesk)

9 Are you a middle manager? Here’s some good news for you
Your skills are not being replaced by AI any time soon. (Quartz) 

10 Even miniscule lifestyle tweaks can extend your lifespan
A study of 60,000 adults found just a little bit more sleep and exercise makes a huge difference. (New Scientist $)
+ Aging hits us in our 40s and 60s. But well-being doesn’t have to fall off a cliff. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“What I’m hopeful for in ’26 is for more people speaking up. Speaking truth to power is the point of freedom of speech, is the point of American society.”

—LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman tells Wired he wants more people in Silicon Valley to start pushing back against the Trump administration this year. 

One more thing

What Africa needs to do to become a major AI player

Africa is still early in the process of adopting AI technologies. But researchers say the continent is uniquely hospitable to it for several reasons, including a relatively young and increasingly well-educated population, a rapidly growing ecosystem of AI startups, and lots of potential consumers.  

However, ambitious efforts to develop AI tools that answer the needs of Africans face numerous hurdles. Taken together, researchers worry, they could hold Africa’s AI sector back and hamper its efforts to pave its own pathway in the global AI race. Read the full story.

—Abdullahi Tsanni

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.)

+ Still keen to do a bit of reflecting on the year behind and the one ahead? This free guide might help!
+ Turns out British comedian Rik Mayall had some pretty solid life advice.
+ I want to stay in this house in São Paolo.  
+ If you want to stop doomscrolling, it’s worth looking at your sleep habits. ($)

Nature, Published online: 14 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-025-09940-w

In mice, a SPOCD1–TPR-dependent ‘nowhere-to-hide’ mechanism is required for complete non-stochastic piRNA-directed LINE1 DNA methylation by preventing transposons from escaping surveillance within heterochromatin.

npj Digital Medicine, Published online: 14 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41746-025-02243-4

When better data meets better design: How EHR data usability and system usability shape physicians’ cognitive load