EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The police-tech giant Flock is announcing today that it will change officers’ access to its nationwide network of license plate readers, in an apparent effort to quell a growing backlash and win back contracts lost amid concerns about mass surveillance and police abuse. Several changes aim directly at a problem that has made recent headlines: officers abusing Flock’s technology to stalk and harass current or former romantic partners. Flock’s 120,000 cameras form a nationwide network that police departments can use, giving officers access to an enormous pool of searchable location data. A recent Washington Post investigation found 46 cases in which officers were accused of using Flock’s cameras for unauthorized purposes like stalking. To combat that, the company will start requiring officers to enter a criminal case number before conducting a search. The system was launched as an option last year but is now required. It’s meant to verify that each search has a legitimate purpose.  This is a baseline standard that civil liberties groups have asked for, but officers have found ways around similar safeguards. The ACLU recently found that when Flock required officers to enter a reason for a search, some used generic terms like “investigation” or mocked the prompt entirely; at one Oregon department, officers entered “hehehe” 20 times. Because Flock won’t verify case numbers, officers could circumvent the new safeguard just as easily.
But Flock is now expanding an automatic auditing system that is supposed to catch those who try that, the firm announced today. The feature analyzes officer search activity and flags to administrators anyone with suspicious searches. This was also introduced as an option last year but is now mandatory. Flock has not shared specifics on how accurate the automatic auditing tool is, nor opened it up to independent evaluators. Beyond trying to prevent officer abuse, Flock is making changes meant to address broader backlash about how much data its network collects and who can search it. The company now recommends that agencies hold onto data for seven days rather than 30 (though they can choose to overrule this). Departments can also now limit other departments’ searches of data from their cameras to those made for certain stated reasons; for example, they might allow investigations related to “kidnapping” but not for purposes of “immigration enforcement.” It’s another safeguard that depends on officers to accurately report why they’re conducting a search.
The changes come as a backlash against Flock has started to come from all angles. Tucker Carlson has said its technology is contributing to a “slave state.” Some cities have reportedly dropped Flock contracts because of such protest, though it’s difficult to estimate how many: In February, NPR found that at least 30 cities had dropped in the last year, but the activist group DeFlock puts the number higher. Some states or municipalities are passing laws to ban license plate readers altogether, while some that allow them are switching away from Flock to the other industry leaders, Axon and Motorola. Flock has said these cancellations represent a small number of the 5,000 agencies that have contracted with the company.  Chad Marlow, a senior policy counsel at the ACLU who has become a sort of nemesis to Flock and other companies making automatic license plate readers, says the backlash is driven less by individual abuses—though those don’t help—than by the sheer scale of surveillance that Flock’s cameras enable. “In America, you only get to investigate someone if you think they’ve done something wrong,” Marlow says. As license plate readers grow more ubiquitous, officers have increasing latitude to investigate people without first establishing suspicion of a crime, since searching the troves of data the readers collect does not require a warrant. He adds, “Is it worth it to catch a certain number of criminals, return a certain number of stolen cars, to eviscerate Americans’ privacy?” Flock CEO Garrett Langley traces the backlash to a different issue. “If you look at the main reason we’ve lost customers, it’s misinformation,” Langley told MIT Technology Review. He says people mistakenly believe Flock does facial recognition or sells the data it collects to commercial buyers. (The misinformation charge cuts both ways, however; the ACLU and other critics have published accounts of the company repeatedly lying to city councils and other decision-makers about what its technology can do.) Though the company has taken steps in response to public concerns, “our change in stance is more of one from building things that are optional,” Langley says, to “building more confidence that as a technology company we have a responsibility to enforce guardrails, not provide optionality.” Flock’s new rules are undeniably small and incremental compared with what the ACLU has advocated. Marlow is broadly supportive of them but notes that judging whether they reduce abuse would require the company to open its systems to independent researchers for the first time rather than citing internal studies.  More broadly, though, he says the backlash is putting the company at a crossroads. “Flock has come to the table because this incredible, unprecedented nationwide uprising against their company has scared them,” Marlow says. “But at the same time, they are just absolutely unwilling to make the actual changes they need to make in order to legitimately respond to these concerns. So this is the best that the company is willing to do.”

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 kids feel about AI, in their own words —Jen Swetzoff and Keeley McNamara, the founding editors of Anyway, an independent print magazine for tweens and teens When we set out to talk to kids about AI, we thought we knew what we’d hear. We expected stories about cheating, inspiring uses, and concerns like deepfakes or job destruction. But what we actually heard from kids aged 10 to 18 had tons of nuance. Many were so deeply against AI or uninterested in making it part of their lives that they didn’t want to talk about it at all. Others worried about cheating, the environmental impact, or AI’s effect on creativity and critical thinking.
AI doesn’t yet seem to be something a lot of them are focused on—and they aren’t begging for it, the way they do for iPhones and Snapchat. But what surprised us most was how much young people could teach adults about AI.  Meet the kids navigating an AI-filled future—and hear what they think of it.
Scientists just created female clones of male mice Scientists have deliberately turned male mouse embryos into females for the first time. A team based in Japan used a CRISPR-based approach to remove the Y chromosome from male cells and create female clones of male mice.  The feat could change the way scientists think about reproduction, says Takashi Ishiuchi, a reproductive biologist at the University of Yamanashi, who co-led the work. “There’s a fixed concept in our scientific field that we need both females and males for reproduction,” says Ishiuchi. “I think we could change this concept.” He also hopes the technique could help rescue endangered species, particularly in cases where only a few individuals remain. Find out how it works—and what it could mean for the future of reproduction and conservation. —Jessica Hamzelou What’s behind this summer’s heat, and why 2027 could be worse This summer has been a scorcher for much of the Northern Hemisphere. June and July marked the hottest two-month stretch in Europe since record-keeping began, the contiguous US endured its hottest month on record in July, and South Korea saw its highest-ever recorded temperature.   Climate change makes heat waves more likely and more intense. But there’s another factor at play: El Niño, which is already ramping up and is expected to have a bigger effect on global temperatures next year. Here’s what’s behind this summer’s extreme heat—and why 2027 could be even hotter. —Casey Crownhart

This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday. Inside the “censorship-industrial complex” idea shaping US policy For years, the idea of a “censorship-industrial complex” that suppressed conservative and populist speech spread in right-wing circles online. But now, the theory has made its way into the Trump administration. Over the past nine months, MIT Technology Review investigated its origins and traced its rise.  In a virtual Roundtables session today, senior reporter Eileen Guo and executive editor Amy Nordrum will explore what they discovered, where the theory is going, and what it could mean for the future of democracy and the internet. Register here to join the session at 19:00 GMT / 2:00 pm ET / 11:00 am PT. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Trump has authorized businesses to conduct cyberattacks on criminalsVetted firms could use cyber tools against foreign criminal groups. (Reuters $)+ They would operate under the control of the US government. (Bloomberg $)+ Risks include escalation and inadvertent consequences. (Independent)
2 Chinese censorship is leaking into answers from American AIChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can all echo authoritarian propaganda. (WSJ $)+ Turkey’s new cyber law has stoked fears of a digital police state. (FT $)+ Censorship conspiracy theories have entered the US policy mainstream. (MIT Technology Review)  3 Twitch is mining people’s streams to train Amazon’s AIAll streamers are opted in to train AI with their content by default. (404 Media)+ Users can now opt out, but the announcement has sparked uproar. (BBC)+ AI’s memories are privacy’s next frontier. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Trump has been sued over a service selling faster access to his social postsThe Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation filed the suit. (NPR)+ They call the service “corrupt” and “unconstitutional.” (Ars Technica)+ And say it violates the right of equal access to official information. (Reuters $) 5 Police officers are using Flock cameras to stalk peopleThree Georgia deputies are the latest officers accused of abuse. (NYT $)+ But the surveillance devices still have some supporters. (Atlantic $) 6 AI reporters are now breaking big newsOne just beat human journalists to a story about hacking at OpenAI. (Wired $)+ The milestone has sparked debate about the future of journalism. (Gizmodo) 7 The web’s newest weapon against AI scrapers is a fontShieldFont foils scrapers but keeps pages readable to people. (Ars Technica) 8 Live streaming has turned us all into Perez HiltonIt’s made us both the celebrity and the paparazzi. (New Yorker $) 9 A fossil discovery suggests live birth emerged far earlier than thoughtIt pushes the origin of mammalian live birth back 95 million years. (New Scientist $)
10 Scientific progress may not be slowing after allNew research disputes claims that science is getting less disruptive. (Economist $) Quote of the day “Trump is trying to enrich himself by privatizing government information that he has no right to sell. We won’t let it stand.”  —Ben Muessig, editor-in-chief of The Intercept, explains why his media organization is suing President Trump over his fast-access service to Truth Social posts. One More Thing
Puerto Rico’s power struggles Carmen Suárez Vázquez lives just minutes from Puerto Rico’s only coal-fired power plant. Black dust coats her windowpanes and the leaves of the blooming vines around her home. She doesn’t know exactly how the coal pollution got inside, but she is certain it ended up in her youngest son, Edgardo, who died of a rare form of cancer. The plant was supposed to close in 2027. Instead, it will stay open for at least another seven years, while Puerto Rico rolls back clean-energy targets and moves ahead with new gas plants. Meanwhile, residents are still dealing with frequent blackouts and high electricity prices. And an unelected fiscal control board has veto power over all spending by the island’s elected government, leaving Puerto Ricans with little say over their energy future. Here’s why Puerto Rico can’t seem to escape its energy crisis. — Alexander C. Kaufman 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 double amputee has climbed the tallest mountain on every continent.+ Enjoy a gorgeous coastal wander with Paul Theroux along the newly opened King Charles III England Coast Path.+ A shrine for plush toys has opened in Kyoto, offering a place where visitors can pray with their favourite stuffed companions.+ CrankGPT is a fully offline, off-the-grid AI box that makes a compelling argument that intelligent machines don’t need a data center.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This summer has been a scorcher for much of the Northern Hemisphere. June and July marked the hottest two-month stretch in Europe since record-keeping began. The contiguous US endured its hottest month on record in July. South Korea saw its highest-ever recorded temperature.   The heat isn’t over yet, but some scientists are already looking ahead to 2027. Experts say the latest El Niño event is going to affect next year’s temperatures more than this year’s. So as the summer (slowly) starts to wane and temperatures (hopefully) start to come down, why has it been so hot this summer? What’s coming next year, and how should we prepare for it? As we burn fossil fuels and fill up the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, temperatures all over the globe are on the rise—climate change makes heat waves more likely and more intense. But different regions see different warming rates, and Europe takes the prize for the world’s fastest-warming continent. (It’s second only to the Arctic in terms of regional warming.)
So it’s not terribly surprising that Europe has seen a particularly brutal summer, battered with heat wave after heat wave. One study looked at the continent’s May heat wave and found that climate change played a major role: A similar heat wave in 1976 would have been about 3.5 °C (6.3 °F) cooler than it was under today’s conditions. The US hasn’t been excused from the heat either. July’s record for the contiguous US (which excludes Alaska and Hawaii) officially ends one held by July 1936 for nearly a century. It’s concerning that we’re breaking records set during the Dust Bowl, an environmental disaster across much of the country.
But looking ahead to next year, El Niño could have even more in store. A quick crash course here: There’s a natural variation in patterns across the oceans and atmosphere called the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. Basically, over the course of several years, feedback systems between the ocean and wind patterns shift one way and then another. (These two states are the El Niño and La Niña events.) The Pacific Ocean gets a lot of sunlight, warming up the water’s surface. In normal conditions the trade winds, caused by Earth’s rotation, carry that warm water west,  forcing colder water deep in the ocean up toward the surface in the east. In turn, warm air rises, flows east, and sinks again. During an El Niño, the trade winds weaken and heat stored in the central Pacific builds up, warming up the air above it and creating a pocket of air that disrupts movement in the atmosphere and oceans, altering rainfall and weather across the globe. We’ve already entered an El Niño phase, defined by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as a period when we see the temperature in a specific part of the Pacific Ocean get 0.5 °C hotter than usual, plus associated changes in the atmosphere. And this could be a big deal for global temperatures. El Niño doesn’t actually add energy into the climate system or warm up the entire globe on a long-term scale. It’s essentially just taking heat that’s been stored in the oceans and releasing it into the atmosphere.   But climate change has pushed a lot of heat into storage in the atmosphere and oceans—so combining the effects of this year-to-year variation with that long-term trend could have brutal results. This El Niño is expected to be an especially notable one. Some forecasts predict that the event could peak at over 3.5 °C above the average, potentially making it the strongest on record. It also came on quite quickly, representing “one of the fastest onsets in the observational record,” writes climate scientist Zeke Hausfather in an analysis for Carbon Brief.

And while this El Niño is already starting to have an effect on temperatures, it’s still ramping up. El Niño’s effect on global temperatures tends to lag development of the ocean pattern by several months, and the effects will likely be more significant next year.  In some recent El Niño periods, record-breaking temperatures came during the second calendar year of the event, Hausfather points out in his analysis. The most recent El Niño developed in 2023 and ran into 2024, and 2024 is the reigning hottest year on record. There’s some uncertainty in trying to predict how the rest of this El Niño will play out, but so far, it is set to be a doozy. Given how brutal these summer heat waves have been, there’s a pretty high likelihood that much of the world could see even higher temperatures next year. “El Niño conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video statement in June. It’s time to start preparing for it, and individuals can take some actions in the near term: If you’ve been putting it off, I’d buy that air conditioner, install solar and a backup battery, or upgrade the insulation in your home.  In the longer term, though, temperatures will keep climbing because we’re still burning fossil fuels and driving climate change. As Guterres said in his statement, “The only effective response is climate action equal to the crisis: ending the addiction to fossil fuels, accelerating the shift to renewables, protecting the most vulnerable, and delivering early warning systems for all.” This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

When we set out to talk to kids about artificial intelligence, we thought we knew what we’d hear. We expected some to tell us they were using it to cheat a little, the way Millennials and Gen Xers opened up CliffsNotes or programmed formulas into their TI-82s, and others to share inspiring ways they were using it. We were also listening for concerns that were less kid-specific, like deepfakes or job destruction. But what we actually heard when we asked kids aged 10 to 18 about AI had tons of nuance.  Many of the same kids who can go on and on about music, rock climbing, or soccer met our questions with words like “bruh” and “meh”—or were so deeply against AI or uninterested in making it part of their lives that they didn’t want to talk about it at all. One teen said his peers use it for things they know they shouldn’t, like writing papers. One told us she won’t touch AI because of the environmental impact. A few said they find the whole field disheartening: “AI isn’t the solution to our problems,” said Winter, a 17-year-old. “I’m afraid it’s going to be the end of creativity and critical thinking.” Yet most of the kids we asked admitted to using AI at least a little bit. AI doesn’t yet seem to be something a lot of elementary- or middle-school-age kids we spoke to are focused on—and they aren’t begging for it, the way they do for iPhones and Snapchat accounts. Many told us that some of their first AI encounters came from their parents or schools. Sometimes, they said, it’s just embedded in the devices and apps they already rely on. It’s just there, in things like a Google search.  What we heard tracks with the data. In a survey published in February 2026, the Pew Research Center found that 57% of teens in the US had used chatbots to search for information, 54% tapped them to help with schoolwork, and 47% had used them for fun or entertainment. Only 12% had used them for emotional support or advice. Teens are over four times more likely to be using AI in innocuous ways than potentially harmful ones. Some are even using it to build things, whether it’s a character, a tech platform, or a tutor to help other kids study.
None of that means the worries are misplaced. Kids can stumble into unfiltered content, lean on a chatbot instead of their own judgment, or trust an answer that’s wrong—and they should be protected from those dangers. But the danger is the reason to teach the thing, not to avoid it. We don’t teach teens to never drive. We teach them to check their blind spots. What surprised us most was how much young people might be able to teach adults about AI, and how clearly the kids who use it could name what they will and won’t hand over. They’re not as worried that it will take their jobs as they are that it might impact society. And, with increasing access to tools that could in theory do their thinking, their talking, or even their friend-­making for them, it sounds as if most want to keep their hands on the wheel.
Interviews have been edited for length and clarity. JUSTYNA STASIK The Coder Remy, 16, New York What’s something AI did that surprised you?“A group of hackers used Instagram’s chatbot to gain access to famous accounts. The hackers convinced it to reset the passwords to accounts like Obama’s and send the reset email to their own email. Then they changed the account and posted things from several famous accounts at once, using a vulnerability that came only from AI.” The word that comes to mind when I think about AI is “indifferent.” I just don’t find the current applications that exciting for my own use. I go to school. I teach tae kwon do. I read. I play games with friends. None of that needs AI. I mean, I use it. I mostly use Claude, the free version, for programming outside of school. I had it help me write a program to see if I could tweak my computer’s overclock. So I see the appeal.  But at school, I actually think AI mostly makes my assignments worse, not better. In English, everything is now in-class writing, because teachers don’t want kids cheating. So we have only 70 minutes to write a whole essay, and I think that hinders my writing. (Did you know Princeton voted to let faculty proctor exams for the first time in over a century? Their honor code goes back to 1893, and now it’s over because of AI.) As far as code goes, I’d also rather build things myself. I’ve been making a reinforcement-learning model in a game engine with a friend; it moves randomly at first, gets rewarded for walking toward a coin, and after enough iterations it teaches itself the most efficient path. I’ve also tested AI for game development, and it isn’t there. It makes sloppy code, and it’s bad at blending mechanics into something cohesive. I’d spend more time correcting it than writing it myself. I think AI right now is sort of like the first car or the first airplane. It’s interesting but crude. It’s obviously an amazing invention but not actually good yet. Overall, I think AI right now is sort of like the first car or the first airplane. It’s interesting but crude. It’s obviously an amazing invention but not actually good yet. It’ll get somewhere. One thing I read about was AI flagging breast cancer more accurately, trained to catch its own false positives so a human still verifies. That’s the version I care about. The Organizer Danielle, 18, California What most excites or worries you about AI?“I’m most worried about our ability to think critically and the potential for misinformation, disinformation, and biases to be spread through too much trust in AI.” I’m studying engineering, and my life goal is to innovate technology that will help as many people as I can. The way I see it, AI isn’t inherently good or bad; that’s decided by the people using it. It’s already being used for lots of good. Just think about how it helps people with personalized education and more accessible medical diagnoses. So far, the biggest project I’ve worked on with AI is called Next Voters. My teammates are more on the technical side, and I’m working on scaling. Right now, we’re focusing mostly on city councils as well as states. Our system turns dense, hundred-page documents into a headline and a few plain-language bullet points in your inbox. And everything is cited, so you can click straight to the actual policy to learn more. The information comes to you, instead of you having to remember to go search or prompt for it.  One AI agent finds official government sources for a given city or state—the council website, the proposed bills, the meeting transcripts. Another verifies they’re real and credible; another scrapes them every week for the latest updates; another sorts them into categories like civil rights, immigration, and economics; and the last one writes our weekly newsletter.

The project’s goal is to reduce the barriers to democratic participation—to make sure anyone, regardless of race, gender, income, or education level, has an easy way to get the information they need and then think critically about how they want to use it. We made it because right now, it feels as if most teens aren’t very engaged. I was in English class when the war in Ukraine came up and someone said, “There’s a war going on?” That gap, plus all the emotionally charged social media misinformation that gets promoted because it earns the most clicks, makes me nervous for the next generation of voters. We don’t want AI to think for people; we want to use it to disperse knowledge. In other words, we want to deal people the cards and let them play them however they want, but we have to make sure they have the cards in the first place.  The Cringe-o-meter We asked kids to rate a range of AI uses from totally fine to not okay. CHRIS PIASCIK The Naturalist Hazel, 17, New York How would you describe how AI makes you feel in one word?“Angry.”Any advice for other kids?“Just stop using it.” When ChatGPT first came out, my dad showed it to me and it seemed fun. But as it got more prominent and seemed to be everywhere, I started to feel uneasy. Then I learned about the environmental impact. I’m a rock climber and I hike a lot. It’s good because when I’m on a wall, I’m just focused on staying on that wall. I’m not thinking about my phone or anything else. That’s why I love it. I also love the views and being around animals—even insects. I want to be an ecologist, and the more time I spend in nature, the more I want to protect those wild spaces. The part that bothers me most about AI is the data centers that companies are building to enable it. They house these huge blocks of servers that use enormous amounts of water. They take it from local towns and don’t leave enough behind for the people who actually live there. And when they get big enough, they put off so much heat they can raise the local temperature a degree or two. So I make small choices. When AI pops up somewhere, I just don’t engage with it. It can feel isolating when everyone around me is using it, but I don’t want AI to be the thing that kills the places I love. The Storyteller Wesley, 14, Ohio What do you most want to keep doing yourself? “I want to have my creativity be my own and not have AI influence it, so I don’t want AI to help with any creative projects.”How can you use AI and still be creative or imaginative? “You can use AI for technical help, like grammatical checking, instead of having it generate parts of the project or write a paper for you.” My friends and I have all heard about AI and seen videos made by AI, but I mostly use it for school. I wrote a short story and ran it through ChatGPT to catch my grammar and spelling errors, and I used it to debug a little game I’d coded for a project. What I worry about is it robbing us of our ability to think creatively, or to think for ourselves. But I have tried using AI for fun. When I was bored, I tried to have a conversation with ChatGPT once or twice, but I didn’t really like it. Character.AI is more fun. You type in all this information, give it a bunch of prompts and a profile picture, and then you can post your AI character for anyone to use. You just put what you’ve made out there. Then you talk to it. My favorite show is One Piece on Netflix, so I threw myself onto its pirate crew using a character I found. 
Other people have used Character.AI to build whole games. There’s a rap-star simulator where you pick your difficulty and where you’re from, and the AI creates a game out of that. There are also World War II simulators, and chats where you’re working with assassins from a TV show. You can find pretty much anything. I guess I’d recommend it, but with caution. The content is pretty unfiltered, so you have to be careful what you click on. You learn its limits fast, too. On the free version the memory runs out: Get far enough into a chat and it slows down and forgets what happened. It’s like everything else with AI. If you trust it to run on its own, it falls apart. You have to keep steering it where you want it to go. 
I guess I’d recommend it, but with caution. The content is pretty unfiltered, so you have to be careful what you click on. You learn its limits fast, too. JUSTYNA STASIK The Artist Sylvia, 10, Michigan How do you think AI might affect your future? “I might not need to take a math test by myself. Like AI won’t tell me the answer, but it will help me.” I haven’t used tools like ChatGPT or Claude myself, but my mom does. I really like to draw and write songs, but I don’t use AI for that. I don’t really have big feelings about AI either way. It’s a little like a calculator. A calculator does the math for you, and AI does other things for you. But I don’t like when AI tricks you, like when my mom found some songs she liked on Spotify and then looked up the artist to see what they looked like. It turns out the whole thing was made by AI. I was surprised, even though I still like the song. I do use AI at school, through a program called SchoolAI. Mostly I put my writing in and it gives me ideas or helps me revise. You can’t have it just write for you, but you can use it to help. When I’m older I want to be an artist, or maybe a librarian. I’d probably use some technology either way. But the drawing and the songwriting? Those I want to keep doing myself.  What most excites or worries you about AI?“I don’t think we should be so reliant on AI. I think if we’re using it so much, especially kids will stop trying in school. They’ll think that they don’t need it, since we have AI.”What is something you’d never want AI to do for you? “I never want it to be my doctor.” In January, I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and that’s when AI became a bigger part of my life. Now when we’re cooking, we can run a recipe through ChatGPT, tell it the serving size, and it works out how many carbs there are. We use AI like that a lot. My glucose monitor and my insulin pump also talk to each other using their own kind of AI to predict dosing. The monitor tracks what my blood sugar actually is, and the pump does the math. So if it predicts that my blood sugar will be high in 30 minutes, it gives me a correction dose, and if it predicts I’m about to go low, it stops the insulin before that happens. When I was first diagnosed I was still doing shots, and I went low almost every night. It was really stressful. Now the pump can catch it, and at night my phone goes off if I drop, so I wake up and drink juice. Mostly, I just get to sleep more because of it. But the hardest part of having diabetes isn’t something I can use AI for. It’s remembering to carry all my supplies everywhere—to school, to a long day of anything. I do use AI for school sometimes. Memory tricks when I’m studying for a test, ideas to get a project started. It’s a really good tool for that. But I don’t know exactly how I’ll use AI in the future. I want to be an endocrinologist someday, so I figure something will come up, since I’m already using it to help with my diabetes. I know other people worry that AI is going to take over the world. I don’t really think so. I still think we’re in control of it, and I think the benefits outweigh the risks.
I don’t know how exactly I’ll use AI in the future. I want to be an endocrinologist someday, so I figure something will come up, since I’m already using it to help with my diabetes. The Inventor Krishiv, 17, Ontario, Canada Any advice for other kids?“With billions of dollars of investment being poured into agentic AI, it’s clear that initiative, judgment, and self-direction are becoming some of the most important skills you can build.”When I was growing up, I always liked building things: Lego builds, Minecraft worlds, and then video games in Scratch. I’d make a little game, post it for other kids to play, read the comments, and make it better. Then, when I started high school, I had to spend way more time studying than I ever had, and honestly I just wanted to build things. So I went looking for ways to get good grades while studying less. Khan Academy had an AI tutor in the works, but it was stuck behind a waitlist, so I figured, why not build my own?  After months of launching random stuff, I created an AI tutor called Aceflow. You could feed it anything a teacher assigned—a 30-minute lecture video on YouTube, a blog post, a PDF of the textbook or presentation slides—and it would spin up endless practice questions, with a tutor on the side that explained things the way my teacher did. I built it just for myself, showed it to my friends, then put it on TikTok. It got tons of views on TikTok and thousands of users. JUSTYNA STASIK Was I worried people would call it cheating? Not really. I knew how to defend it: A tool like this isn’t so different from well-off families hiring expensive private tutors, except everyone gets one. That part mattered to me. Back in eighth grade, a teacher had me run a little computer science class for about 30 kids with special needs, and once they got personalized attention, they were building games nobody expected of them. That convinced me that kids are capable of so much more than people think, and AI can help scale that level of personalized attention to everyone. That unlocks so much potential. That first AI tutoring project ended up helping me land part-time roles at BenchSci (one of Canada’s biggest AI companies) and Simple Ventures (a venture firm). More recently, I joined an AI lab at MIT; co-instructed an AI agents course with an MIT professor; and launched CheetahPrep.com, an SAT prep platform that uses AI to adapt to each student. I’m generally optimistic about how AI will impact humanity, but when other kids’ first reaction is fear, I think that’s an important sign too. It’s a reminder that we should be excited about the future while still being mindful of the risks, working together to make AI work for humanity. Jen Swetzoff and Keeley McNamara are the founding editors of Anyway, an independent print magazine for tweens and teens.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Scientists have deliberately turned male mouse embryos into females for the first time. A team based in Japan used a CRISPR-based approach to remove the Y chromosome from male cells and create female clones of male mice.  “No one has done this before,” says Monika Ward, a reproductive biologist at the University of Hawaii, who was not involved in the research. The feat could change the way scientists think about reproduction, says Takashi Ishiuchi, a reproductive biologist at the University of Yamanashi, who co-led the work. The findings were published in a preprint paper shared on bioRxiv earlier this month, which has not yet been through the peer-review process. “There’s a fixed concept in our scientific field that we need both females and males for reproduction,” says Ishiuchi. “I think we could change this concept.” He and his colleague Shogo Matoba of the Riken BioResource Research Center in Ibaraki also hope their technique could help rescue endangered species, particularly in cases where only a few individuals remain.
“It’s exciting to see,” says Ben Novak, lead scientist at the wildlife conservation organization Revive & Restore, who was not involved in the work. “I am confident there will be plenty of applications, particularly for conservation purposes.” Sex change Ishiuchi says he and his colleagues were inspired by the Okinawa rubble goby, a fish that can change its sex in certain situations. If no males are present, a female can do this in order to reproduce with the other females. Males can also change sex to female.
This ability to change sex might be useful when it comes to rescuing endangered species, including mammals. There’s some precedent in the lab—albeit not intentional. In 2009, researchers reported the accidental birth of a single female pup in a batch of 27 clones created from male mouse cells. Sometimes the surviving population of a species falls so low that scientists will try to clone those animals. Cloning isn’t perfect—it can be tricky and inefficient, and it creates genetically identical individuals whose offspring might be more vulnerable to disease. But it has helped scientists with efforts to bring some species back from the brink of extinction, including black-footed ferrets and Przewalski’s horse. Cloning an individual can only replicate its genes, so cloning a male animal will create all male offspring, for example. That won’t help much in the hypothetical situation where only male individuals of a species are left. Ishiuchi has been working on a way to overcome this challenge by altering the chromosomes in cells. Mammals’ DNA is organized in pairs of chromosomes, including one pair of sex chromosomes. These sex chromosomes are typically XX in females and XY in males. It’s the Y chromosome that makes mammals male. Ishiuchi and his colleagues have developed a CRISPR-based tool to get rid of it. Their approach targets a section of the Y chromosome that plays an important role in ensuring that, each time a cell divides, the “daughter” cells inherit the Y chromosome. Cutting the Y When the researchers tested their technique—which they call Y-CUT—in early-stage mouse embryos, they found they were able to eliminate the Y chromosome. Treated XY embryos were transferred to surrogate mice, which gave birth to female pups. The effect can be described as a “sex reversal,” say the researchers. The female pups had XO chromosomes, which means they had one X chromosome rather than the usual two. But this didn’t seem to affect the animals, which grew up healthy and fertile, say Ishiuchi and Matoba. In a second experiment, the researchers found they could also use Y-CUT to create female clones from male mice.

A standard approach to cloning involves taking the DNA-containing nucleus of a cell from an adult animal and inserting it into an egg cell that has had its own DNA removed. Under the right conditions, the resulting cell can develop into an animal that is genetically identical to the original donor. Matoba and his colleagues used a similar method. Once they had a glut of these cloned cells, they treated some with Y-CUT before transferring them to surrogate mice to carry the pregnancies. This allowed them to create female clones of male mice. The females are genetically identical to the original male, apart from the missing Y chromosome, says Matoba. “It’s like sci-fi,” says Ishiuchi. Courtesy of Takashi Ichiushi and Shogo Matoba, as published in their bioRxiv preprint. In other experiments, the scientists were able to create female clones from male cells that had been cryopreserved—and the cloned males and females could mate to produce healthy pups. This suggests the Y-CUT approach might allow scientists to create female clones from male samples in “frozen zoos” that store cryopreserved cells and tissues from a range of animal species. It could have uses beyond conservation efforts, too. “This could be used potentially for producing genetically engineered animals,” says Ward. Creating an animal with multiple genetic edits can be time-consuming and expensive; creating male and female clones of that animal could help scientists time and money. Ward also hopes the technique could be a useful tool to study the biology of sex chromosomes. Complementary techniques The Y-CUT approach isn’t perfect. For now, it still requires hollowed-out egg cells, which need to come from females of the same species or at least a closely related one. And it won’t be useful for endangered species in which only females survive. The technique works well in mice, partly because XO female mice are fertile. But while the approach might help some of the 355 endangered and vulnerable species of rodents, other mammals with XO chromosomes tend to experience infertility. But other new technologies could complement Y-CUT. In 2023, Katsuhiko Hayashi of Osaka University and his colleagues showed they could turn cells taken from male mice into egg cells. This enabled them to create mice with two dads—but the same approach could also provide the hollowed-out egg cells needed for the Y-CUT technique. “It’s a complementary story,” says Matoba.
Ishiuchi is also working on a technique that involves inserting a second X chromosome into cells, which might restore the fertility of the resulting female animals. In addition, there might be a work-around for situations where scientists have females but need males. A couple of months ago, Sayaka Wakayama of the University of Yamanashi in Japan and colleagues showed they could insert rat chromosomes into mice. That could potentially be used to create XY male embryos, says Novak. That would be useful in cases like that of the black-footed ferret, he adds. A conservation team recently cloned a female ferret using cells taken from another animal in the 1980s. That female is considered incredibly valuable, says Novak. But females can produce only a few litters in their lifetime. A male clone, which might be able to contribute to dozens of litters in a lifetime, would be “desirable.” “It’s really exciting to see more diverse tools being developed,” says Novak. “There are so many different scenarios in which they could be used for rare and endangered species.”

In partnership withGoogle Cloud Business and technology leaders need no convincing that the time of agentic AI is here. Organizations are rapidly adopting agents, and few executives doubt the technology’s potential to transform work. But many organizations find that realizing the desired return on investment (ROI) from AI hinges on having the right foundation, with inadequate infrastructure and data being major blockers. Agentic AI places considerable new demands on enterprise data systems. The shift from answering questions to taking actions means AI agents need data from across the enterprise, in all its structured and unstructured forms, and with the right business context. To make decisions and act in real time, agents also need frictionless access to the organization’s operational systems—for example, those storing its supply chain, point-of-sale, or human resources data. Legacy data systems, even those updated just a few years ago, struggle to meet these demands. As AI agents become embedded more widely in enterprise operations, the need to overcome the restrictions of legacy data systems grows more urgent. If Gartner’s prediction that AI agents will augment or automate 50% of business decisions by 2027 proves correct, organizations must eliminate bottlenecks or risk depriving agents of the data they need to make the right decisions at speed. This report, based on a survey of 300 data and technology executives, explores how legacy systems are limiting the effectiveness of AI agents in many organizations. It finds that a handful of organizations—the data leaders—are having greater success with agentic AI and experiencing fewer data limitations as a result of legacy systems. These leaders offer a guide to creating the right data environment for agents to flourish and trusted systems to scale.
Key findings from the report include: Few companies currently provide agentic AI with ample access to enterprise data. Across all the surveyed organizations, AI only has access to an average of 45% of company data. That number falls to 30% or less in organizations categorized as “data laggards”. A select group, however, ensures access to over 70% of their data. These “data leaders” are having greater success with their agents than the rest.
Trust in agent decisions is a reflection of data readiness. Today, only around half of surveyed organizations trust that the decisions their AI agents make are accurate and relevant. By contrast, 100% of the data leaders trust their agents’ decisions, a strong indicator that reliable AI requires a reliable data foundation. Data leaders find it easier to achieve agent scale and speed. Two-thirds of data laggards say legacy data systems limit AI agent scaling (66%) and prevent agents from making decisions at speed (68%). Having largely overcome legacy data constraints, the leaders have mostly cleared these roadblocks, with just 8% reporting either constraint. The pressure is on to make data estates agent-ready. Within two years, 100% of respondents plan to be using agentic AI, with 69% expecting to use it widely. Without removing data system constraints, agentic AI will fail to deliver the desired speed and efficiencies it promises. Data access and context are top priorities. The most important initiative to enable scaling among all respondents is improving access to structured and unstructured data for AI agents. Also high on the list is enhancing data and AI governance with business context. Data leaders are also focusing heavily on the automation of data management. Download the full report. This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.