When José Morales Bernal crossed the border into the United States on April 8, 2024, the day before his 32nd birthday, it should have triggered a chain of technological alerts and human responses.  As he walked through the desert in southern New Mexico that morning, he was within range of three surveillance towers. Newly installed by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), they were built by the defense tech company Anduril and equipped with cameras and AI to automatically detect and track people. They transmit live video to nearby control rooms and can send alerts to the government-issued smartphones held by agents in the area, prompting the closest available to respond. This story is part of Dying on Camera, a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego. Journalists in both newsrooms spent the past year examining the failures of border surveillance technology and uncovering the stories of the people who die in the borderlands. These AI-enabled towers are meant to give greater visibility across the 1,951-mile southern border, freeing up border agents from having to spend hours staring into video monitors. They were installed in this particular place to spot border crossers before they reached the nearby town of Sunland Park. If the system worked as intended, Morales should have been apprehended. If he needed medical help, agents were trained to provide it. The view from where José Morales Bernal’s body was found toward a Customs and Border Protection surveillance tower made by Anduril, along the southern US border in Sunland Park, New Mexico.CENGIZ YAR FOR MITTR That didn’t happen. Despite the nearby surveillance towers, it was employees of the local landfill, rather than Border Patrol, who first spotted Morales that morning. At 1 p.m. the workers saw him again, now lying in the sand. At 4 p.m. the landfill workers saw that he had not moved and called Border Patrol. Agents arrived 45 minutes later. He was dead. When an agent then called 911 to report the body, he said it was “probably one of the migrants crossing through there,” seemingly unaware that Morales had been moving near the agency’s surveillance systems earlier that day.  The agent can be heard sounding unsure of Morales’ movements despite the proximity of an AI-powered surveillance camera. The call has been edited for length. Morales had died just 360 feet from the closest surveillance tower. Two more towers stood watch to the east and the west. An autopsy later concluded that he had died of “environmental exposure.” 
The towers surrounding Morales were only the latest addition to the “virtual wall” the government has spent 25 years and billions of dollars building along the entire border, which also includes earlier generations of towers with more basic features, as well as blimps, drones, seismic sensors, and even tunnel-sensing robots. Together, all this technology provides “persistent surveillance” and “situational awareness” to help the Border Patrol quickly and accurately detect people crossing and, crucially, make sure agents are sent to intercept them. CBP has also credited it with saving lives. But a first-of-its-kind investigation by MIT Technology Review reveals that deaths like Morales’s are startlingly common. We cross-referenced nearly 4,000 locations where human remains were found—drawn from records collected by nonprofit groups like No More Deaths and Humane Borders, as well as hundreds of records we obtained in Texas—with information on nearly 600 towers identified by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We considered when towers were installed and when each person is estimated to have died, and combined this information with field reporting from the border. The result is the first comprehensive map and analysis of deaths near CBP surveillance towers. 
Our investigation shows that a humanitarian crisis at the border has unfolded in view of the government’s own cameras. José Morales Bernal died the day before his 32nd birthday. PHOTO COURTESY MIREYA MORALES We found more than 1,050 people who died within range of border surveillance towers between 2015 and early 2026. These deaths are not failures of a few towers or technologies: We found deaths within the advertised range of nearly two-thirds of all the towers we analyzed. Our topographical analysis—which assessed the degree to which terrain might block a tower’s view of a particular death and its surveillance area in general—found that some have sight of as little as 10% of their advertised surveillance area, and yet we also found most deaths did not occur in towers’ blind spots. These deaths are not the result of legacy systems, as our estimate found more than 110 people have died within range of modern autonomous towers from Anduril, among the most advanced systems CBP has deployed, since 2021. The overall picture reveals repeated failures of one of the virtual wall’s basic security functions, as CBP has described it in press releases: to effectively identify and locate migrants entering illegally into the United States.  The year that Morales died, 18 other people died in that same stretch of desert in range of the three Anduril towers. Five were visible from the same surveillance tower closest to where his body was discovered. One man, after walking a mile past the border and in range of two AI towers, dragged his 30-year-old brother into the shade when he began having trouble breathing, according to records we obtained from the medical examiner. The two were spotted by Border Patrol only when the man waved down a helicopter for help; by the time agents arrived, his brother was already dead. A 24-year-old woman died near another Anduril tower, where our terrain analysis showed it should have had clear sight of her location. Her body lay unnoticed for weeks; it was decomposed, and blistered by the summer heat, when it was spotted by agents patrolling the area.  A few miles west, and a short drive from a Border Patrol station, four other AI towers stood watch. Near them, 10 more bodies were found that year, all in locations where at least one tower had a clear view.

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}In response to a list of questions, an Anduril spokesperson replied that once a tower is delivered, it is operated by CBP, and directed questions about specific incidents to the agency. The response noted that an incident occurring nearby does not mean the tower missed a detection and said actual surveillance ranges vary depending on terrain, physical obstructions, and the boundaries CBP sets for where the tower should look (CBP is able to set virtual boundaries on towers’ views for privacy and other reasons). The Anduril spokesperson also alleged inaccuracies in our reporting, given those boundaries and obstructions, but did not respond to follow-up questions on what was inaccurate. The most pressing question in any death near the virtual wall is whether authorities knew someone was there and failed to reach them or weren’t aware anyone was crossing at all. Either is a system failure. And the deaths we found capture only the failures that left a trace—we don’t know how many people pass through undetected, or how many bodies remain undiscovered. Interviews with more than 45 people—including current and former White House advisors and presidential appointees, Border Patrol agents, medical examiners, sheriffs, humanitarian volunteers, and employees of tech companies—showed that both types of failures are occurring: The technology is failing to detect, and agents are failing to respond. Both show the limits of throwing technology at a complex problem.  The findings reveal previously unreported issues with the virtual wall, even as it continues to enjoy broad political support and a surge in federal spending. Border security hardliners have long seen it as another tool for stopping smugglers moving drugs or people, while others tout it as a cheaper alternative to a physical wall. In 2023, the government estimated that its plans for using the towers, which now number 803, would cost $6.2 billion over their lifespan. With the historic levels of funding it was awarded in 2025, CBP plans to spend $1 billion for 1,497 more towers by 2034.
But our reporting shows that CBP has done little to assess how its towers are working or how many people have died where they keep watch. Officials who oversaw border security across the last four presidential administrations told us they believed deaths near the so-called virtual wall were either exceedingly rare or nonexistent. But our reporting shows that is not the case. None could point to any comparable analysis the government had ever conducted on its own. Former agents and officials also told us that when someone’s body is found, CBP does not formally investigate whether surveillance should have detected them or, if they were detected, why agents didn’t reach them before they died.  In response to nearly 30 questions about our findings, which covered multiple generations of technology, Hilton Beckham, CBP’s assistant commissioner for public affairs, said, “Autonomous surveillance towers use artificial intelligence to detect and classify people, vehicles, and animals and alert Border Patrol agents to activity in monitored areas … ASTs complement physical barriers and other border security infrastructure by improving detection and situational awareness between ports of entry. CBP evaluates the technology based on its impact on detection, response coordination, agent safety, and mission outcomes.” “I’m sure that the cameras and other surveillance assets do deliver … useful intelligence and enhance operational efficacy in some places, under some conditions, in certain circumstances,” says Geoff Boyce, an assistant professor of geography at University College Dublin who has studied surveillance technology used at the US southern border. “I’m also absolutely positive—because this has been the track record—it is not delivering the level of operational support, information, or efficacy that either the companies delivering these infrastructures or the Border Patrol and Department of Homeland Security claim.” 
We also reached out to multiple lawmakers from both parties with a summary of our findings. In response, Delia Ramirez, a Democrat representing Illinois’ 3rd district who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, said, “AI-powered surveillance technologies are not making us safer. Yet, DHS continues to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on these ineffective, negligent technologies, with no commitment to oversight or transparency…It is clear we must terminate CBP’s Integrated Surveillance Tower program and dismantle DHS.” Building the virtual wall Since its earliest efforts to police the border with Mexico, the US government has faced the same basic challenge: How do you effectively secure nearly 2,000 miles of remote and rugged terrain? It has increasingly turned to technology for answers. Gerardo Galvan joined Border Patrol in 1995, as the government was undertaking an unprecedented expansion of border enforcement. In 1993, President Clinton’s first year in office, the agency mobilized huge numbers of agents to guard the country’s urban borders, starting in El Paso, Texas. That pushed more crossings to rural, unpopulated areas—which quickly proved to be far more deadly because of the rugged desert terrain, extreme temperatures, scarcity of water and the long, indirect routes often used by smugglers. Stopping these remote crossings was a new law enforcement challenge for the agency, especially given the limited technology available at the time. “We had radios,” says Galvan, who would go on to be the head of operations for the El Paso sector—not the cell phones or GPS systems agents have today. They relied on underground sensors left over from the Vietnam War to alert them to movement. The biggest technology rollout of Galvan’s early career started around 1998. That was when Border Patrol began installing its first video cameras that agents could remotely pan and zoom. They were mounted on metal structures similar to cell-phone towers, 60 to 80 feet tall, or on buildings in urban areas.  “For the first time, somebody sitting in a room somewhere was able to surveil large swaths of area without being dependent on getting an agent out there with binoculars,” says Matthew Hudak, a former deputy chief of Border Patrol who was working as a frontline agent at the time. “That was a very significant game changer, and for the most part, it was a huge, huge advance.”
This early iteration of the virtual wall was a big deal: In its first eight years, 200 towers were installed along the southern border at a cost of more than $429 million. But the system’s flaws were obvious to anyone who used it. “There could be … 30 screens on a wall,” says Mark Borkowski, who managed CBP contracting, including the surveillance tower program. Each camera might be capable of seeing three or five miles in any direction. The agent was expected to keep eyes on all that space—upwards of 850 square miles.
Monitors inside the cab of a Border Patrol truck show a portion of the US-Mexico border in Sunland Park, New Mexico, on Thursday, June 6, 2019. CEDAR ATTANASIO/AP PHOTO “Well, what are the chances after 20 minutes that those Border Patrol agents would see an explosion on one of those screens?” Borkowski says. “About zero.”  When these cameras were first being put up, the plan was to pair them eventually with a system that would automatically direct them toward places where sensors picked up activity, so agents would know where to look. But by 2005, the DHS inspector general said that still hadn’t materialized, and that illegal activity might “go unnoticed” unless agents were actively watching the cameras. Nonetheless, more towers were installed, forming what is today known as the Remote Video Surveillance System (RVSS). In 2013, the defense giant General Dynamics won a contract worth up to $103 million to overhaul and expand RVSS along the border, becoming the primary contractor behind the system that remains in use today. (That contract eventually grew to a ceiling of $216 million, and the company received another award in 2023 worth up to $135 million.) General Dynamics would install more cameras, better sensors, and additional towers. But the problem identified nearly 15 years before remained unsolved. It was information overload: One agent told MIT Technology Review about an incident in San Diego in which cameras captured a group of 30 crossing the border and getting picked up in a van, all unnoticed by the agent monitoring those cameras. Agents said the virtual wall was bringing more of the border into view than they could reasonably pay attention or respond to.  The camera room was also the job nobody wanted. New Border Patrol agents, often in their early 20s, want to be outside in trucks and ATVs, not sitting in a dark room watching screens—even though the expanding virtual wall increasingly required someone to do exactly that. “Someone that’s injured and can’t go out into the field—we’ll send them to the camera room,” says Rafael Reyes, who was in charge of the Border Patrol station in Deming, New Mexico, until 2024.  Reyes says it was also a job his agents were often too busy to do properly. His station area had about 30 cameras, and the agents responsible for them also had to monitor sensor alerts and radio traffic, run records checks, and coordinate with other agents. “Then if they have some time, they’ll monitor the cameras,” he says.  Not only that, but many cameras didn’t work. At Reyes’s station in New Mexico, five of the 30 cameras were broken on any given day, he says. Others had limited functionality; they might be capable of looking in just one direction or seeing only in the daytime. Jaime Fierro, a former agent who worked in the Laredo sector in Texas until 2025, said the broken towers were tanking morale among agents and that they brought it up at every staff meeting. “That was like basically having an eye shut for us on the border,” he says.  Rafael Reyes, who oversaw a Border Patrol station in New Mexico, says his agents often had too many other responsibilities to monitor the cameras properly. CENGIZ YAR FOR MITTR They weren’t alone: In 2024, members of the House Committee on Homeland Security wrote that more than 66% of Border Patrol’s first-generation towers were unusable, despite operating budgets of $50 million to $100 million each year. In January 2026, 30% remained broken, one congressional staffer told MIT Technology Review. The RVSS program was estimated in 2020 to have a total cost of $3.7 billion. Border Patrol has nonetheless publicly credited these cameras with helping to save lives. The agency has published dozens of press releases, dating as far back as 2016, about instances when agents responded to people seen in distress on the remote video cameras. Despite these publicized wins, the bodies began to pile up, undetected, beneath these systems’ watchful gaze.
Near El Cenizo, Texas, there’s a roughly 13-square-mile expanse of mesquite bushes and grasses described by the Webb County Sheriff’s Office as containing sections of Hachar Ranch and Espejo Ranch. It’s surrounded by seven RVSS systems. It was nonetheless a hot spot for fatalities: MIT Technology Review found that 19 people died there, including one man who died less than 500 feet from the road bordering the ranches and half a mile from two schools. In each of these cases, narratives that we obtained via public records requests describe officers’ learning of these people only after their bodies were discovered or through 911 calls reporting them missing, not as a result of the border surveillance technology installed across Hachar Ranch.  In response to a list of questions about its towers and these specific incidents, General Dynamics referred us to CBP. CBP did not address any of our questions about RVSS towers.   Stories of some of the people that died near RVSS towers Many deaths near RVSS towers happened in Texas, in the heavily surveilled corridors between the Rio Grande and the nearby highways, where paid smugglers often organize pickups after crossings. Cameras watch many of the spots where people are known to cross, often looking across the river into Mexico to spot them before they reach the water. Drownings are common; we found multiple cases in which local fishermen hooked the bodies of people who had died attempting the crossing. In one instance, a family of three from Brazil attempted to cross the Rio Grande near Del Rio, Texas, in 2022. The father, Daniel Lenda, was carrying his two-year-old daughter, Eloah, on his shoulder when he fell in the water. The mother, 23-year-old Thais Natali Montenegro Lenda, lifted Eloah out of the water as she watched her husband disappear.  She placed the girl, now unresponsive, on a rock and went for help. She was just 100 feet from one camera system and a third of a mile from two others, set up precisely to enable faster apprehensions at a popular crossing point. Our topographical analysis shows that all three cameras had a clear view of the place where the family crossed and exited the water. Nonetheless, Thais Natali was not spotted until she waved down an agent on the Del Rio-Acuña bridge. The agent provided CPR to the toddler, who did not survive. Daniel’s body was found days later.  Val Verde County sheriff Joe Frank Martínez responded to that case (though Border Patrol might discover bodies, local law enforcement is responsible for investigating the deaths). He grew up in the area with his nine siblings and has been sheriff since 2009. Riding with MIT Technology Review through Del Rio in his patrol vehicle, he rattled off the deaths that his office has responded to since he became sheriff.  He keeps a three-inch-thick binder of these cases in his office. But this case with the toddler still sticks out in his memory. He told MIT Technology Review that when he arrived on scene, he heard from Border Patrol that the tower operator monitoring the camera had seen the father and daughter fall in the river. He never received an answer as to why agents weren’t sent sooner. Martínez asked for the footage from the surveillance cameras to aid in his investigation of what happened. Border Patrol never provided it. (General Dynamics did not respond to our questions about this incident, instead directing us to CBP. The agency did not address questions about this incident either.) A binder of cases in the Val Verde County sheriff’s office contains details on the death of two-year-old Eloah Lenda. JAMES O’DONNELL/MITTR Establishing how many people have died in range of the virtual wall is challenging, but it’s especially so in the case of the RVSS towers. There are different models, some with a shorter range of sight—one to three miles—and others with a longer range of up to 7.5 miles. Former agents and officials told us most towers should see at least five miles, but since no public records exist to confirm the model type of any given tower, we used several possible viewing distances to calculate the number of deaths considered in range. Another complication is that many remains are never found at all. For those that are, MIT Technology Review could analyze only deaths that had been logged with GPS coordinates or sufficiently precise location descriptions. Many records lack this level of detail, including nearly a fifth of the more than 1,500 cases we obtained from 14 Texas counties. We also needed to determine when someone died, rather than simply when their remains were found, to confirm that a tower was present at the time of death. When official sources did not provide an estimate, we consulted multiple medical examiners on how to make that determination from the available details. And satellite imagery provides only intermittent evidence to suggest when towers arose, not exact proof of when they were functioning. For these reasons, as detailed in our methodology, we tried to be conservative in our analysis. Even so, the number of deaths estimated to have occurred near at least one of these towers is staggering: somewhere between 500 and 700 since 2015. Even if we look only at towers in rural areas, where their views are far less likely to be blocked by buildings, we still estimate more than 300 people have died in places where the cameras had a line of sight, most less than three miles from a tower. Of the nearly 300 RVSS towers we included in our analysis, more than 250 were within range of a location where someone died. More than 150 people died within a half-mile of one, often across open, empty plains, close enough to see the cameras themselves perched atop towers up to 200 feet tall. The next watchers When Borkowski was overseeing the rollout of those first-generation towers at CBP, he became increasingly certain that simply having more remote video cameras was not going to lead to faster responses. The information overload meant the government could watch a large area of the border but not meaningfully see, much less act on, everything within it. The agency’s focus then became solving that overload problem.  What if, instead of relying on someone to scan 30 screens, the towers could use radar to detect motion, and then point the camera to it automatically?  Gary Wagner of Elbit Systems of America cleans the lens of a long-range thermal imaging system at a 2014 border security expo. MATT YORK/AP PHOTO In 2011, Border Patrol asked the industry for a new generation of technology that could do just that—initially focusing on Arizona, where the border was busiest. The contract ultimately went to the Israeli defense contractor Elbit, whose tower systems watch Israel’s borders. In 2015, the company started installing versions of these—called integrated fixed towers, or IFTs—that could each see more than five miles. The IFTs were still being installed when President Trump first took office, in 2017. They didn’t command the same attention as Trump’s campaign promise of a physical wall, but there was still support. Trump’s deputy CBP commissioner, Ronald Vitiello, told Congress in 2018 that the IFT towers automatically detect people with radar and then track them, adding that such surveillance technology is “critical in protecting border areas with short vanishing times, where illicit crossers can quickly evade law enforcement by ‘vanishing’ into border communities.” There were 55 IFTs built in Arizona under an initial $145 million contract with Elbit and other contracts that followed. The towers collectively watch more than 7,000 square miles of terrain, from the mountainous areas outside Nogales to the plains of the Tohono O’odham Nation Reservation. Arizona is in many ways well suited for these tall towers because much of its landscape is flatter than, say, Southern California.  An integrated fixed tower (IFT) on Coronado Peak in Cochise County, Arizona. CREATIVE COMMONS But even here, being within a tower’s advertised range does not necessarily mean being within view. There could be terrain, brush, or buildings that block the line of sight.  MIT Technology Review conducted a topographical analysis to estimate whether each tower had a clear or obstructed view of the place where someone’s remains were found. We estimated the height of each tower and used US elevation maps to model the terrain between it and the remains. The analysis does not account for buildings or vegetation, though all the towers we analyzed use some form of thermal imaging that is designed to see through light brush. Most of the instances where someone died in range of a tower happened where we estimate the camera’s views were not blocked by terrain—a finding that held in both rural and urban areas. And even when someone died in a blind spot, it does not mean they did not pass through a tower’s line of sight. Additionally, these numerous blind spots indicate issues with the tower’s supposedly comprehensive coverage. We found that nearly 350 people have died in range of Elbit’s towers since 2015. There were 40 people who died within range of four or more IFTs, with some near as many as 6 different towers. In May 2024, a 19-year-old young man died where three IFTs had a clear view, and a year later, in May 2025, a 38-year-old woman died where two IFTs had a similarly clear view. Elbit did not respond to a detailed list of questions about its towers or deaths we found to have occurred near them.  There’s been a death within range of 52 out of the 53 IFTs we analyzed, but some were particularly notable. There’s a tower located a couple hours from Tucson on the Tohono O’odham reservation we estimate has upwards of 80% visibility of the surrounding area. Still, 27 people, ages 19 to 64, have died in its surveillance area just since 2021, along with several others whose remains have not been identified. In 25 of these cases, we estimate the tower had a clear line of sight to the location where the person died. Stories of some of the people who died near IFTs The age of autonomy Around 2018, officials within Border Patrol were again discussing the limits of the towers. The new radar systems were better, but they could only detect movement, not what was moving. This generated false alerts from cattle, tumbleweeds, and other harmless activity. The now decades-old dream of the virtual wall remained unfulfilled. Under pressure from Congress, which was demanding to know what $33 billion in proposed funding for border security over the next decade was going to achieve, Border Patrol once again was hoping a new generation of technology could solve its problems. That year the head of CBP, Kevin McAleenan, created a unit called the Innovation Team. “He gave them some seed money to go after kind of Silicon Valley innovative technologies and run pilots,” Borkowski says.  One company they landed on was Anduril, the defense tech startup founded by Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey. The company was without a product but had funding from Peter Thiel, recruits from the security tech giant Palantir, and a goal of bringing Silicon Valley experimentation to defense and national security technology.  An autonomous surveillance tower stands along the US-Mexico border. With billions in new funding, CBP plans to deploy thousands more surveillance towers in the coming years. CENGIZ YAR FOR MITTR With grants from the Small Business Innovation Research program, Anduril’s product started taking shape: a 33-foot-tall solar-powered structure with cameras to see and radar to detect movement, all sitting atop a modular metal pole, with solar panels arrayed beneath.  More important was the component you could not see: computer vision that promised to automatically classify, track, and generate alerts for what came within the system’s view. Anduril’s standard tower couldn’t see as far as the Elbit and General Dynamics models—about 1.75 miles instead of more than five—but, the company argued, it didn’t need to: By automatically identifying and tracking people, the towers could give agents enough warning to respond. (Its newer, extended-range towers, on the other hand, stand 80 feet tall and are advertised as able to detect and track “objects of interest” up to 7.5 miles away.)  When President Trump left office in 2021, Anduril continued to find support from his successor. Joe Biden had campaigned on the promise of shutting down the project to expand the physical wall, but he saw political reasons to keep investment in tower technology on the table. “It’s less visible—it’s unobtrusive,” a former immigration advisor to Biden recalls, adding that despite some privacy concerns, the towers were mostly uncontroversial.  When Border Patrol deployed Anduril towers to the Santa Teresa station in New Mexico in 2021, a press release stated, “Because of its accuracy with detection, in many cases this type of technology can and will save migrant lives.” In a permitting request filed in 2024 for towers in California, the government was even more explicit: “If anyone within the viewshed of the towers appears to be in distress, EMTs or first responders will be sent to help.”  Credit: Anduril Anduril echoed those claims. The software built into the surveillance towers, the company wrote in a 2021 press release, gets agents “out of communications operations centers and into the field where they can effectuate security and humanitarian responses.” It wasn’t the first time CBP had discussed a humanitarian side to its duties; in 1998 the agency created BORSTAR, a search and rescue unit, and by August 2023, it had installed some 170 rescue beacons across the border that people attempting a crossing could theoretically use to call for help. But they weren’t effective, says Mario Agundez, a retired Border Patrol supervisor from Arizona who had worked on various rescue efforts; people either avoid them or “die next to them, because there was no way [for Border Patrol] to get to them in time.” (They don’t always work, either; one that MIT Technology Review passed, just next to a dirt road in the Otay Mountain wilderness area in Southern California, had its prominent solar-powered blue light, meant to be visible for miles to people in distress, turned off on a recent night in August. The San Diego Border Patrol station did not comment on why it was off but said, “The solar-powered beacons are maintained and monitored by the responsible Border Patrol station that patrols that area.”)   Anduril soared through a pilot phase in just two years before its Sentry towers—then the only autonomous surveillance towers CBP was using—moved into an official program of record with the government in 2020. That’s light speed in the world of government procurement, especially since it was Anduril’s first hardware product. By June 2021, CBP had already spent over $98 million (Anduril’s contract for these towers is now worth up to $1.1 billion).  Gerardo Galvan was in charge of the Santa Teresa Border Patrol station—which patrols the area in New Mexico where Morales’s body was later found—when it received its first batch of Anduril surveillance towers in 2021. His agents were worn out; the El Paso sector, home to his station, had seen encounters tick up each month since April 2020. Galvan says the agents were surprised but eager to get the AI towers, and he began planning where to place them. The sites he was considering sat where one kind of landscape abruptly gives way to another.  To the east of the station is Cristo Rey, a mountain that obscures the view of the city of El Paso. Running north from Cristo Rey is the state’s border with Texas, where the banks of the Rio Grande are flanked on either side by pecan orchards. And west of those orchards are the towns of Sunland Park and Santa Teresa. The last houses in these neighborhoods butt right up against the desert, which sprawls westward without a single gas station for nearly 100 miles. It is in this stretch—between the US-Mexico border to the south and Highway 9 to the north—where agents from his station aimed to stop migrants. And when Galvan was planning the tower locations, there were lots of crossings; Santa Teresa was becoming the busiest station in the 125,500-square-mile El Paso sector, as heightened border enforcement in Texas drove people west. Along this new route, more people were dying than in previous years. (The traces of that period are still visible years later; MIT Technology Review visited the area with the humanitarian group Battalion Search and Rescue and saw jawbones bleached white by the sun, alongside frayed backpacks and clothes.) Galvan’s aim was to use the new towers as a stopgap where there was little other border infrastructure. That included a spot near the foot of Mount Cristo Rey, where there was a break in the border fence and people often attempted to cross. Galvan looked at data on previous apprehensions with an eye toward helping agents spot people before they arrived in more residential neighborhoods. Border Patrol struck agreements with private landowners, who generally didn’t mind having Anduril’s low-profile towers on their land (and were compensated via lease agreements).  When the towers were first set up near the Santa Teresa station in 2021, engineers from Anduril came to fine-tune the algorithms meant to autonomously classify whether what it had detected was a vehicle or a possible border crosser, among other things. A former engineer for Anduril, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss his previous employer, says these algorithms were the main focus of the tower program; Anduril didn’t manufacture the cameras or radar systems itself, so the algorithms were its main value proposition to Border Patrol.  Galvan says the towers would flag people crossing before agents saw them. But he also saw problems from the start. Agents would apprehend a large group near one of the towers, for example, and check to see if the footage revealed anyone who got away, only to find that the incident hadn’t been captured at all. Anduril’s towers constantly pan around, lingering only on an object of interest. But in these cases, Galvan says, they panned elsewhere, failing to capture the border crossers they were supposed to automatically track.   Reyes says algorithm mistakes were infrequent but problematic at his station. A group of people was sometimes labeled as cattle, for example, and agents wouldn’t receive an alert. The problem got worse the farther groups were from the camera. Anduril has touted its technology’s ability to reduce false positives, like wildlife being mistaken for people. But the company has said little about these false negatives: people the systems fail to detect. Jaime Fierro, the former agent in the Laredo sector in Texas, describes one incident that shocked him: Agents pursued a car believed to be carrying migrants who had just crossed the border. The car turned around, drove toward the banks of the Rio Grande less than 100 feet from an Anduril tower, and crashed right into the river. Several occupants got out and swam to Mexico while the car floated in the water. Back at the station, Fierro hurried to see what the camera had picked up. Only it never detected the incident at all. There was no footage. “That was a huge, huge issue,” Fierro says. He remembers Anduril coming out to investigate and the problem being sent all the way up to Washington leadership. But Fierro never got an explanation of why the crash was missed. (An Anduril spokesperson did not respond to a question about this incident, but said the range of the towers we asked about was limited by physical obstructions and by boundaries established by CBP. ) Several agents estimate that the towers initially missed 10% to 15% of what they should in theory have caught. “To us, 10-15% on a system we spent millions on that was supposed to work—that was alarming,” Fierro says. Philip Sullivan worked as an agent in the Laredo sector too. When the Anduril program started, he says, he put his hand up to be involved and even went to an Anduril test site for training. When new towers went up, he worked directly with the company on improving its algorithms. He enjoyed the work. But he describes one recurring issue they couldn’t resolve. Smugglers would put up to a dozen people on a rubber raft, cover them with a tarp, and cross the Rio Grande while using submersible motors to propel it forward. The tarp fooled the algorithm, which detected the motion but attributed it only to an “unidentified object.” That meant no audible alert—the very feature agents relied on, because the Anduril system was supposed to do the watching for them.  The smugglers repeated the tactic dozens of times. Other smugglers would cover groups with netting or blankets so they would remain undetected while walking through the brush. Only afterwards, having seen the group farther inland and noticed clues about where the people had crossed, would Sullivan review the footage and see the crossings that were missed. He worked with Anduril, sending engineers videos of the crossings to retrain the firm’s algorithms. But the situation had not improved by the time he got promoted to a sector-level job sometime in 2022, he says. “The whole purpose of their system,” Sullivan says, was the idea that “the cameras are moving around, identifying automatically and tracking and recording and flagging.” Having cameras that could pan on their own worked wonders, he says. But the algorithm had its limits. “You look at it on the screen yourself, and you see the blob and the raft moving across—well, you know that’s people. But to get an AI to identify that is a challenge.” When the towers were first being rolled out at the Santa Teresa station in 2021 and 2022, Galvan says, similar issues led to a negative feedback loop: An agent would see a tower miss something significant and come to distrust the algorithm. When that agent’s turn came to operate the towers and manage the alerts, they might override the AI altogether and use the camera manually. That would lead to more missed alerts, more distrust. Despite these shortcomings, the El Paso sector’s relatively flat landscape meant that the system’s cameras had about 80% to 90% visibility, according to our topographical analysis. That was better than in hillier or more mountainous areas, like the Otay Mountain Wilderness to the east of San Diego, where we estimate Anduril’s towers could see just 15% to 25% of their promised coverage area.  An autonomous surveillance tower along the southern US border in Sunland Park, New Mexico.CENGIZ YAR FOR MITTR It was in this wilderness, in fact, that some of the first bodies started appearing near Anduril’s towers. During one week in August 2021, two women in their 20s, from the same city in Mexico, died miles apart. Their bodies were found near three different towers that were first observed on satellite imagery between March and July that year.  One of them, 26-year-old Sarahi Hernández Alfonso, began her journey to cross into the US on August 5, and medical investigators note that she reportedly fainted the next day near the Otay Mountain Wilderness and was left behind. It would be another four days before the Mexican government reported her missing to Border Patrol on August 10, supplying a set of coordinates. Agents went to those coordinates and found her decomposing body. She’d died 1.3 miles from two different Anduril towers, one of which our analysis found had a clear line of sight. Just the day before, 25-year-old Karina López Antonio was found dead near a third Anduril tower. She had crossed the previous night with her cousin and nephew. That morning, she felt sick, and her nephew looked for a Border Patrol agent to help. When agents returned, she was dead.  The following October in New Mexico, where the new Anduril towers had been rolled out, agents were patrolling on ATVs when they came across footprints. They followed them until they found the body of 31-year-old César Perea Itzincab. The presence of maggots and the level of decomposition indicated that he had died at least a week earlier, and medical examiners on the scene believe he had dragged himself to the spot where his remains were found. He was 1.5 miles away from an autonomous tower—within Anduril’s advertised range—and should have been visible to the camera, according to our topographical analysis. We can’t know what those cameras saw as these people died. Footage and data from Anduril’s towers are overwritten every 30 days, and a former official with internal affairs at CBP told us the information wouldn’t be saved for longer unless it was part of an active investigation—which starts only if someone dies in custody. CBP did not respond to questions about specific incidents like this one, and the Sunland Park Police Department closes cases like this when it determines that no crime has been committed.  The lack of documentation is a missed opportunity, says Amerika Garcia Grewal, co-director of the Frontera Federation, which aims to help rescue migrants in distress—or find and identify their remains. “The surveillance towers along the border could be incredibly useful,” she told us. For example, they could in principle be used to hold Border Patrol agents accountable for whatever actions they did or did not take to locate someone in distress. “What the tool turns out [to do] depends on the person who is holding it,” she says, adding, “I don’t trust the folks that are using them.” “If I could get that footage,” she says, “then we would go through that, and hopefully bring some answers” to family members and “documented proof of what happened” in their loved ones’ final moments.  When asked about deaths near Anduril towers, agents often point to faults in the technology. Galvan, for example, says the towers don’t capture how groups move: A large group of 20 people might splinter into smaller groups, especially if agents are pursuing them, and the tower doesn’t keep track of everyone. If someone’s missed, he says, “that person stays behind in the brush, out of sight.” Then they might pass out—which could be a death sentence in the desert.  And though Border Patrol says the towers can “hand off” surveillance of people from one tower to another, agents on the ground say that people are often missed during these handoffs. On top of that, the algorithms remain imperfect, according to Jason Owens, the chief of Border Patrol from June 2023 to March 2025. “We never really got to the point of ‘Set it and forget it,”’ he says. Agents also say they were just stretched too thin to respond effectively. Around 2022 and 2023, the border saw historically high levels of migration. Title 42, a policy that began under Trump and continued under Biden until May 2023, cited a public health emergency to expel migrants before they could apply for asylum. But the rapid expulsions carried fewer of the repercussions that could normally follow an apprehension, and many people simply tried to cross again. Meanwhile, asylum claims had been rising for years, while shifts in where migrants were originating from and US immigration policy meant more people required lengthy processing rather than being quickly returned across the border or to their home countries. That increasingly tied up agents with people who had already been apprehended, they said, leaving fewer available to respond to surveillance alerts.  In other words, from the agents’ perspective, the effectiveness of Anduril’s towers was limited by the same issue that had always caused trouble: There just weren’t enough agents. Palmer Luckey, a founder of Anduril, surveys the equipment at his company’s testing range near Camp Pendleton in Southern California on February 3, 2021. PHILIP CHEUNG/THE NEW YORK TIMES VIA REDUX But the overwhelming demands on agents cannot explain all the deaths our investigation found. In 2024, the border started to get quiet again. By July of that year, the number of Border Patrol encounters nationwide had plummeted from their highs in December 2022. Encounters in the El Paso sector, where the Anduril towers in New Mexico were located, had fallen to nearly one-tenth of their peak. Agents were less tied up than they’d been in years. The technology was supposedly improving, too.  Galvan had left for a promotion by this time, but he says agents had come to trust the towers more, and they helped train the algorithm by giving a thumbs up or thumbs down if the system identified something correctly or incorrectly. There was also a new smartphone program: Every agent at the station was given an Android device with a map of where other agents were, and it sent alerts from the station about what an Anduril tower detected.  Despite all this, the deaths near towers continued. There was Morales in April, whose body Border Patrol learned about only from the landfill workers, though it had lain for hours within sight of an Anduril tower.  Others were discovered by luck.  On June 20, Border Patrol agents were mistakenly tracking a group of people they thought might be migrants, though they were in fact employees of the same landfill. Those employees told the agents they had come across a body, which turned out to be partially mummified remains of a man in his 40s who died within range of two Anduril towers.  Three days later, on the 23rd, another: the body of a 21-year-old Guatemalan man discovered by agents while on patrol, 1.3 miles from a tower across clear and open desert. Two days after that, another: An agent was looking for a lost person when he came across the remains of a 56-year-old man—just a football field’s distance from the previous one, with a similarly clear and unobstructed view to a tower. So if Santa Teresa had gotten quieter—and become something of a showcase for Border Patrol’s newest technology efforts—what was going on? “Agents review the information and determine the appropriate response—the technology does not make law enforcement decisions,” Beckham, CBP’s assistant commissioner, said. Meanwhile, individual agents described scenarios where they might not prioritize responding to alerts. Sometimes “hanging back” was a strategy: Agents might observe a group to see what route they would take, or agents might not respond to a small group, in case those people had been sent by smugglers to distract from a larger group coming behind them. Other times, agents might deem the location where a group of migrants had first been spotted to be impractical for an apprehension, and instead wait to intercept them at another location. Knowing someone’s location didn’t always lead to immediate action. Volunteers describe providing Border Patrol with the coordinates of someone who was lost but alive and then waiting, “sometimes [for] a week,” for agents to reach the location, says Garcia Grewal, from Eagle Pass, Texas. They might be told “Oh, so-and-so went out there and they found remains,” she recalls. “Well, they weren’t remains when we called you. They were alive.” Near the southern US border, Sunland Park, New Mexico.CENGIZ YAR FOR MITTR Mireya Morales, the younger sister of José Morales Bernal, who died by the landfill on the day before his birthday in April 2024, wasn’t aware her brother died near several surveillance towers, or that the government said these towers could save lives. “Well that’s good,” she said of that promise, “but in this case, it didn’t help my brother. And there’s no way to know exactly how things played out.” “Border Patrol should have found him quickly,” she says, “and they could have done something.” If they did, this journey into the United States—his fourth trip—likely would have ended with his apprehension, detention, and deportation to Mexico. But he would have seen the birthday texts that his sister sent the next day. At least he would have made it home to celebrate his eldest daughter’s quinceañera, which took place earlier this year. Stories like this are why Iván Chaar López, an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin who leads its Border Tech Lab, says he’d “rather talk about harms” than about “the failure of an algorithm.” He adds, “A system may fail, but humans suffer.”  Stories of some of the people that died near Anduril’s autonomous surveillance towers What happens next Ultimately, any attempt to understand where things are going wrong is hampered by an institutional reluctance to measure the problem. A complete audit of this virtual wall can only come from Border Patrol. The agency is, in some ways, increasingly equipped to take on that task: Agents told us that each time they apprehend someone, the location is logged with GPS coordinates, as are instances when Border Patrol sees evidence that someone crossed but cannot find them. It also has precise data on when each surveillance tower went up, which alerts came in, and how they were resolved. Having that information is the only way to measure whether the newest towers are truly missing fewer people than the previous generations.  But researchers and outside oversight agencies say this ocean of data hasn’t translated into a reliable system for measuring the effectiveness of the virtual wall. For example, CBP records the people it misses by logging “gotaways,” a tally of how many times agents see signs of someone who evaded apprehension—footprints, appearances on camera, reports from other people who were apprehended. It’s imperfect. And that creates room for interpretation. “The goals with border enforcement have always been a moving target,” says Jeremy Slack, a researcher of migration and border issues at the University of Texas at El Paso. “They’re always set up so that it’s a win-win.” If apprehensions go up, for example, CBP says it means agents have gotten more effective at catching people. If apprehensions go down, it means the border is quiet because people are too scared to cross.  Workers install panels and construct new all-weather roads as part of a border wall construction project east of Nogales, Arizona, in July 2026. JERRY GLASER/U.S. CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION That’s not to mention the conflicting ideas within the agency about what the virtual wall was supposed to accomplish. Borkowski says higher-ups would ask how many fewer agents they could get by with if they built more towers. But supervisors receiving new towers told us they’d often ask for more agents, not fewer, because they now had more activity to respond to that had previously gone unseen.  And if the goal was for the sight of the towers to deter people from crossing to begin with, an external study from RAND in 2020 was ambiguous: It found that deploying IFTs resulted in lower apprehension levels nearby but said this didn’t mean the towers were actually deterring crossings. (Research by Boyce and colleagues found that earlier surveillance towers in southern Arizona pushed people to seek more difficult terrain out of view.) It leads to a question: Do the deaths near the virtual wall constitute unacceptable surveillance failures, or are they within the range of effectiveness the government deems acceptable? (CBP’s response did not address our questions on how it explains these deaths.) Against this backdrop, the Government Accountability Office and DHS’s Office of the Inspector General have tried to focus on a narrower question: Is the virtual wall increasing the likelihood of apprehensions?  The answer has been incomplete since 2014. That’s when the GAO first suggested that whenever agents log their activity in Border Patrol’s database, they should include information about whether or not a piece of technology helped in their apprehension. This could at least do something to show Congress whether the technology is working. Border Patrol began collecting that information, but years of incremental improvements have been followed by repeated findings that the resulting data is unreliable or insufficient to determine how well the technology works. The reality, several people from Border Patrol told MIT Technology Review, is that agents see it as a chore demanded only by bureaucrats who don’t understand the realities of the border.  It’s “spitting in the wind, to be honest,” a former high-ranking official at DHS during the Biden administration told MIT Technology Review on background. “If we have 10,000 people a day crossing in between the ports of entry, do you think an agent is worried about telling them how they freaking apprehended those people?” Several other officials said that the logging of technology assists had improved, but not consistently enough to help much with analysis.  And there is no procedure—at the local or national level—to examine individual deaths near the towers or analyze them collectively for surveillance failures. “We never thought about plotting [migrant deaths] to see if the towers were missing things or agents were missing people,” said a former CBP official who evaluated how personnel handled deaths in custody. “Nobody ever raised the issue,” the official said, adding that doing so could reveal important gaps in the agency’s approach: “If I still worked for CBP, and you brought it up, I would probably send some people to look.” In response to questions from MIT Technology Review, CBP said that autonomous surveillance towers complement physical barriers by improving detection and situational awareness. Its statement did not address questions about its other technologies, or broader criticisms about how it evaluates the virtual wall. An autonomous surveillance tower along the southern US border in Sunland Park, New Mexico. CENGIZ YAR FOR MITTR This lack of measurement has not slowed the enthusiasm for more technology funding. The government spending bill passed in July 2025 awarded $2.7 billion for border security technology alone, and CBP was quick to signal to industry that the money would soon start flowing. “We’ve got an historic investment in infrastructure and technology coming up,” a CBP director told tech companies in an industry webinar that month. In a December 2025 interview, when he was director of homeland security and immigration at the America First Policy Institute, Cooper Smith described the technology investments as “fortifying” the border against a future president who might be, in his estimation, weaker on the border than Trump (According to LegiStorm, a research organization that focuses on political staffers, Smith now serves in a policy-focused role with CBP.) The number of Border Patrol agents has climbed too, to nearly 21,500 agents as of June 2026—the highest in the agency’s history.  In the Big Bend region of Texas, surveillance towers are becoming a focus of local politics: Officials and residents across party lines, including the sheriff of Terrell County, are asking for Anduril towers instead of a controversial new border barrier project that’s recently been halted. CBP has announced a desire to spend $1 billion on nearly 1,500 more towers by 2034. The law now requires all these towers to be equipped with AI. In December 2025, Anduril’s Palmer Luckey said the towers remained the company’s best-selling product, one that gives “basically perfect situational awareness of what’s going on in the area.” Anduril’s towers have been sold abroad—to enforce the UK’s borders, defend US Marine Corps bases in Japan and elsewhere, and serve as drone defenses for an Australian Air Force base.  But as for CBP, Anduril will no longer be the only game in town; General Dynamics has now released AI towers of its own and received an order for them in June from CBP worth up to $115 million. The Electronic Frontier Foundation—which has tracked surveillance towers since 2022—says some have already been spotted at the border. This time around, the agency will be spending this money with even less oversight than it had just a couple of years ago. In October 2025, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, dissolved its department-level office that oversaw major spending programs. An autonomous surveillance tower along the southern US border in Sunland Park, New Mexico. CENGIZ YAR FOR MITTR Most of the records on human remains that MIT Technology Review collected were current only through the fall of 2025 or, in a handful of cases, early 2026. Even those dates come with a caveat: Many remains are never found, and others are found months after someone died. The reports can then take months to be released via public record requests. That makes it nearly impossible to keep track of how many people have died near surveillance towers in anything close to real time. Still, the border today is significantly quieter. The latest figures from DHS show just 128,009 “enforcement encounters” from January to August 2026, compared with more than 2.4 million during the same period in 2024 (“encounters” count each of Border Patrol’s interactions, not individual people). Even as border crossing rates decrease and DHS speeds ahead with its tower acquisition plans, people are still dying within range of the surveillance towers.    On September 14 2025, a 30-year-old Mexican woman named Graciela Gómez Hernández died just over 350 yards away from the physical border wall that separated Southern California from Tijuana—and within one mile of an RVSS tower. Earlier that afternoon, she had told her family that she could not walk any further, and her voice notes abruptly stopped.  Her skeletonized remains were recovered nearly three weeks later, on October 4. Some of her bones were missing, and there was “apparent animal activity … to the ribs,” as the medical examiner’s report read.  Sara Stroud, an organizer with the Borderlands Relief Collective, a volunteer humanitarian group that leaves water and supplies in a wilderness area frequented by people crossing the border, went to the site of her death a few days later to put up a memorial cross. A Border Patrol helicopter showed up almost immediately, flying low circles above the volunteers.  Between the helicopter and the RVSS tower that was visible in the background, “I was astounded about how we were being surveilled the whole time,” Stroud says, adding that this was especially stark in contrast to the agency’s often slow—or absent—responses to people who’d died on camera.  “Are you telling me you didn’t see it or you did see it?” she asks. “Because if you did see it, that’s horrible. And if they can’t, then how do you explain that?” Additional reporting by Lillian Perlmutter. This work was supported by a grant from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.

She had only walked for a couple of hours, and already she was lost.  It was early afternoon on Sept. 14, 2025, when 30-year-old Graciela Gómez Hernández crossed the border from the eastern edge of Tijuana into Southern California, sending voice messages to her mother and sister as she walked.  This story is part of Dying on Camera, a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego. Journalists in both newsrooms spent the past year examining the failures of border surveillance technology and uncovering the stories of the people who die in the borderlands. Gómez Hernández did not tell her family about her plan until the day before. Once she arrived in California, she hoped to work and send money back to her three children and her parents in southern Mexico. Her oldest son, age 11, had asked for a bicycle.   She either climbed a ladder over the border wall or slipped through a section in steep terrain where fencing has yet to be built. Dozens of game trails cut through the dust on hillsides of sagebrush and manzanita. It was the first segment of a hike through the Otay Mountain Wilderness. 
The eastern edge of San Diego is just a mile away, but countless migrants hike 10 or 20 miles north through the mountains to evade the Border Patrol, emerging in smaller towns and on distant highways with fewer checkpoints. A border agent rides an ATV along the U.S.-Mexico border outside San Diego, September 2026. While the mountainous terrain makes some areas difficult to access, the area is blanketed with interconnected surveillance technology.ANNIE BARKER/TIMES OF SAN DIEGO/CATCHLIGHT LOCAL/REPORT FOR AMERICA Between 2 and 3 p.m., her sister said, Gómez Hernández sent a final message to her mother. “I can’t do it anymore,” she whispered into her phone. By the time a forensic crew came to collect her, two weeks later, most of her body had disappeared into the earth. 
She died on her own, but she was not, strictly speaking, alone. She was in one of the most heavily surveilled strips of land in the world. Before she died, Gómez Hernández told her family in a WhatsApp message that she could see helicopters overhead and white Border Patrol trucks making periodic laps on the road below. And even if none of those agents saw her or knew she was in distress, something else had a clear view. Supervising the whole territory, from a nearby hilltop, was a slender gray surveillance tower.  That tower, made by General Dynamics and in place since 2019, boasts two sets of electro-optical and infrared cameras with long-range lenses that can track targets 5 to 7 miles away. Gómez Hernández was just one mile away.  Surveillance towers have proliferated in recent years, as contractors added newer camera systems that use artificial intelligence to distinguish border-crossers from other people and animals, and track their movements, at an overall cost of more than a billion dollars.  Yet as the cameras scan the terrain, migrants continue to die in plain sight.  Thousands of migrants have died while crossing the border in the past two decades, many of them near to Border Patrol surveillance installations. But the phenomenon is especially pronounced in the Otay Mountain Wilderness, just outside San Diego.  A Times of San Diego analysis counted hundreds of cases along the California border—including at least 138 in the past four years—where migrants’ remains were found within the range of the very cameras designed to help track and intercept them.  A topographical analysis conducted as part of an MIT Technology Review investigation estimated that more than half of these remains were found in a spot where a camera would have a clear view of a person, without terrain blocking the line of sight. 

Some of these migrants died swiftly, falling from the border wall or drowning in a canal or river. But dozens suffered slow deaths of exposure in the wilderness, deaths that might have been averted with emergency aid.  People who died in Southern California came from just across the border, or from as far away as Africa. They were as old as 70 and as young as 5. They died in the heat or the cold. But they all died within range of a surveillance camera. Found in July 2023: Marcia Dutra, a 36-year-old woman from Brazil who likely died of heat exposure next to a border fence. According to a medical examiner’s report, a group of migrants told the Border Patrol about her body when they were apprehended. An AI-equipped surveillance tower sits 2,000 feet northeast above the edge of a plateau, out of sight of the slope where she was found.  Found in February 2024: Elvi Vasquez Bortolon, a 28-year-old Mexican man who died of suspected hypothermia on a ridge near the border wall. He had been dead for more than five days when a Border Patrol agent in a helicopter spotted his body from above. A remote video tower stands about 1,400 feet away, hidden from view by the ridge above the canyon.  Found in August 2024: Ramón Montenegro, a 51-year-old man from Mexico who died of possible heatstroke in the mountains near Dulzura. An AI surveillance tower, invisible on the other side of a hill, sits 1,300 feet away — roughly the length of the parking lot at the San Diego Zoo.  More than 120 surveillance towers stand along the California border, according to documents and live observations collected by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  The towers are not the only form of surveillance in the region. The border is blanketed by an interconnected network of trail cameras, underground movement detectors, radar, infrared sensors, drones, and even blimps. In March 2025, the Trump administration directed the Department of Defense to use satellites to watch the border as well.  Even when mountains or vegetation block a tower’s view, other devices may pick up the trail. Local advocates say surveillance technology in the Otay Mountain Wilderness is almost unavoidable. 
Agents in Border Patrol gear hike a ridge in the Otay Mountain Wilderness, September 2026. Agents said the group was on a training hike.ANNIE BARKER/TIMES OF SAN DIEGO/CATCHLIGHT LOCAL/REPORT FOR AMERICA Officials say the towers particularly excel at tracking passing migrants.  Anduril, the company that makes about half the towers now installed at the U.S.-Mexico border, said in a news release in 2024 that their towers “directly contributed to saving lives and stopping illicit drugs from entering the U.S.” In June 2026, the company said its installations had “autonomously identified hundreds of thousands of border crossings.”
John Morris, a Border Patrol sector chief in Arizona, told media at a convention in May 2026 that “We’re dang close to pretty much knowing everything that comes across.”  The proximity of so many deaths to high-resolution cameras leaves two distinct possibilities: Either the system didn’t detect these people in distress, or it did detect them—and officials offered no response.  Anduril, the defense contracting company that manufactures the AI-enabled towers, did not respond to questions from Times of San Diego about the towers’ performance in mountainous terrain. A representative of General Dynamics, which made the tower closest to Gómez Hernández’s body, referred all questions to the Border Patrol.  The Border Patrol did not respond to questions from Times of San Diego regarding whether surveillance towers spotted Gómez Hernández prior to her death, or about how surveillance cameras in general are used to detect people in emergency situations.  Rafael Hernández Larraenza, the leader of a search and rescue group, Desert Angels, says he believes some of the towers are “just adornment,” and are not actually effective at tracking migrants. He also says that Border Patrol agents, in occasional meetings with his search group, “say they don’t have the opportunity to do searches, that they don’t have enough time.”
People in need of rescue “are not a priority,” said Bryce Peterson, who compiles research on migrant remains for the advocacy group No More Deaths.  A wilderness, heavily watched   From the spot where Graciela Gómez Hernández’s body was found, a surveillance tower stands in clear view.  That tower is one mile away. A second, newer tower, on the other side of a hill, sits 1.4 miles away. Both are equipped with slow-spinning, long-range cameras.  The closer of these two towers is situated between two layers of border fencing, a long pole, over 100 feet tall, reaching into the sky. It peers not only onto hillsides where migrants walk, but into the brightly-colored cinderblock homes of a Tijuana neighborhood. 
The second tower is much shorter, just 33 feet tall, surveying the canyon where Gómez Hernández would most likely have arrived if she had kept walking.  This new tower, built by a company called Anduril, decides for itself whether a moving object in the field is relevant. The two dark, round cameras on the pole give the impression of eyes, rotating slowly, and then locking in on a target, before swiveling elsewhere. Federal cameras seen at Friendship Park in San Diego, September 2026.ANNIE BARKER/TIMES OF SAN DIEGO/CATCHLIGHT LOCAL/REPORT FOR AMERICA Osvaldo Ruiz, the volunteer coordinator for the Border Angels, a group that leaves water and supplies along migrant trails near San Diego, says the Otay Mountain wilderness has “beacons throughout the mountains” that “can see over a lot of the mountains facing the border.” “At entry sites that migrants or travelers may come through, there are also hidden cameras inside of rocks or inside of bushes that are camouflaged for you not to see. And then there’s also the cameras that you see on the road. They have license plate readers that are stuck on the back of a safety cone, so (it detects) as you’re driving away from it.” Surveillance towers have been in the area since 2011, with frequent new installations, including the introduction of AI-directed towers in 2018. Many of the AI-equipped towers currently overseeing the California borderlands appeared in 2021, and were updated with longer ranges in 2026.   Officials from the Government Accountability Office wrote in a report in June 2026 that the Border Patrol currently has 803 fielded towers “and plans to deliver another 175,” across the southwestern border, an initiative that would cost $1.4 billion. The report also notes that the agency expects a billion dollars in funding from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025. By 2034, the number of towers is expected to rise to 2,300. “What we are building along the southwest border is a smart system. There’s technology embedded in it, plus the physical infrastructure,” border czar Tom Homan said at a press conference in San Diego in December 2025. “It makes every single agent and officer more effective.” A secretive hike north  Like so many migrants, Graciela’s hike into the U.S. began in desperation. Her husband, who had already crossed the border to find work, had stopped sending money for the children.  “There were moments when they didn’t have enough money even for a bag of detergent, or to eat,” her sister, Irma, told Times of San Diego. “She would call me crying.”  Gómez Hernández decided she needed to come to the United States, if only temporarily, to make money. Her family was uniformly against the decision, so she kept her plan a secret until she was already at the border, preparing to cross.  “She was a very humble person,” Irma said. “She was kind to people, and loving with her children.” Gómez Hernández paid 20,000 pesos, about $1,150, for smugglers to help her cross the border, much lower than the current average, which sits at $12,000. But she would need to travel on her own without a guide, paying only for the knowledge of where and when to start, and which direction to walk. As part of their deal, her phone would send location pings back to the smugglers’ hiding spot in Tijuana.  Cesar Ortigoza, a leader of a search group known as the Armadillos, has been locating migrant remains in the region since 2010.  A discarded card shows advice that advocates give to migrants about what to say if they are apprehended. ANNIE BARKER/TIMES OF SAN DIEGO/CATCHLIGHT LOCAL/REPORT FOR AMERICA “Most people don’t understand the magnitude of this territory, and all the work it’s going to cost them to arrive at their destination. They get to the top of this mountain and realize there’s miles and miles and miles left to walk,” Ortigoza said.  In addition, they need to avoid capture. “They go really fast,” he said, “and there’s a lot of pressure.” On the afternoon of September 14, 2025, Gómez Hernández told her mother and sister through WhatsApp voice messages that she had successfully crossed the border into the United States. These short snippets of audio would be their only clues to what happened next.  The hillside where Gómez Hernández walked that afternoon is exposed on all sides, with a panoramic view of the border wall just a couple hundred yards away. But on the other side of the hill is a daunting, mountainous wilderness, covered in low trees and rocky ravines, with hidden, winding trails, stretching into the distance. It is possible she saw this and turned around, convinced she was lost. Wandering the hillsides in the afternoon heat without sufficient water, she could succumb to dehydration within hours.  “Because of the heat, there are places where you can’t move forward even half a mile in an hour,” said Larraenza, the search and rescue leader.  By 2 p.m., “She told me she felt very tired and couldn’t go any further,” Irma said. “I told her to give it her all, to think of her children, keep them in her mind so she could get out of there.” Irma says 4 p.m. was the last time her sister’s location was transmitted to the smugglers.  After hearing about Gómez Hernández’s case, Ortigoza said it “seemed strange,” because she was “so close to the border” at her last known location.  But Bryce Peterson, the No More Deaths volunteer who collects autopsy reports on migrant remains border-wide, said “There’s a million ways that somebody could be already on the verge of death that close to the wall. Like if you’re going north and then you decide to go south again because you get lost or something.” “The only thing we’re certain of is that she suffered in her last moments,” Ortigoza said. “Just knowing that you’re alone.” Walking on the hillside, Gómez Hernández encountered a man also traversing the trails, lined with dry shrubs. “In one of the messages sent, where she told me to pray for her, the man spoke and said ‘there isn’t time,’” Irma said.  After that, Graciela’s phone still received messages, but she did not respond.  Cameras rise, questions remain  Even though the federal surveillance tower was just a mile away, it is possible the cameras did not see Gómez Hernández. It is possible they did not see much of anything.  An internal memo obtained by NBC News in October 2024 revealed that 30% of the older-style towers, the kind that require agents in control rooms to review footage, were broken. Most were missing parts, or their equipment was outdated and unusable. These 150 broken towers still stood at the border, acting as million-dollar scarecrows.  Officials from the Government Accountability Office wrote in a report in September 2025 that the Customs and Border Protection had begun to fix the towers with spare parts and revamp them with new technology, but did not list how many remained out of commission.  The Border Patrol did not respond to questions from Times of San Diego about whether the tower in view of where Gómez Hernández died was operational at the time of her death.  Dave Maass, the director of investigations for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the organization that maps surveillance towers at the border, questions the functionality of all types of towers. “None of these systems have been effective. There’s no independent evaluation of how many things they’re capturing,” he said.  In a report published in March 2026, a representative of the US Military notes that a mission to place 7 G-BOSS(E) towers in the Otay Mountain Wilderness, an installation that took place in the months prior to Gómez Hernández’s death, faced operational challenges.  The combat-grade military surveillance towers were vulnerable to tipping over, damage from rodents, exhaust blowouts, and running out of battery. On a dirt road in the mountains, a truck carrying a surveillance tower bounced around, which led to the tower’s cameras “becoming stuck in a zoomed-in position.”  Despite descriptions from manufacturers claiming dominance in “rugged terrain,” Osvaldo Ruíz, the Border Angels coordinator, said it would still be difficult for a surveillance tower to track migrants moving through the Otay Mountain Wilderness. “With all that surveillance that’s out in the mountains, there’s still a lot of brush and high covered areas that would make it easy [to stay undercover].” Analysts from the RAND Corporation, a foreign policy think tank, wrote in a report in 2020 that “outcomes and outputs” that would indicate the success of surveillance towers “are not directly observable.”  The analysts conceded that the towers’ presence would urge migrants to stay out of the area and funnel into undetected routes. “The likely deterrent effect on migrant crossings through surveilled areas overwhelms any boost to situational awareness,” that the towers provide, the analysts wrote. In this way, the surveillance towers’ most useful quality was the threat conveyed through their technology, rather than the merit of the technology itself.  Due to increased surveillance, “People are crossing through areas that are further out and more extreme, where we have very little hope of finding them in a search,” Larraenza said.  A portable surveillance tower rises from a pickup truck in the Otay Mountain Wilderness outside San Diego, September 2026.ANNIE BARKER/TIMES OF SAN DIEGO/CATCHLIGHT LOCAL/REPORT FOR AMERICA And though the manufacturer says the AI-enabled towers, which now make up over half of the total, can identify migrants on their own, apprehensions still require human labor. A CBP official told the RAND analysts that smugglers began sending migrants across the border alone, rather than in groups, to overwhelm the surveillance towers with many individual targets, leading to more alerts than agents capable of following them.  So it is possible the towers in the vicinity did capture footage of Gómez Hernández, but agents decided not to apprehend her. Just hours before her death, she sent a message saying that there were “police” nearby, possibly referring to Border Patrol agents in trucks.  “Even one person who’s not sick, one person who is just hiking on their own, often Border Patrol will just ignore them because it’s not worth their time to just only catch one person,” said Peterson of No More Deaths. “They want to be able to catch a whole group of people.” Larraenza said he’s found dehydrated people on migrant trails who say they called out to Border Patrol, and the agents failed to stop. “But there are also cases where agents do the impossible to find someone,” he said.  On one occasion in September 2024, while rescuing a family of five in the Otay Mountain Wilderness, Larraenza met a person wearing a vest labeled “SHERIFF” on the trail. In a video that Larraenza posted to his Facebook account, when asked if the Border Patrol would arrive to take the family into custody, the deputy says, “Oh, they don’t come out here.” On a recent visit to the spot where Gómez Hernández died, multiple Border Patrol trucks were visible just hundreds of yards away, rolling slowly along the wall, or parked on the hill next to the surveillance tower.  “If we hadn’t sent the Border Patrol the coordinates, they never would have bothered to go [find Gómez Hernández’s body],” Ortigoza said. Finding Graciela  Irma sent her sister a barrage of messages that afternoon and evening, pleading with her to send her location, but there was no response. Irma believes it’s possible her sister was killed or abandoned by the other migrant she was traveling with during her final hours, because she was not walking fast enough.  It took Irma two weeks to make contact with the coyotes. When she told the smugglers that her sister was missing, “they didn’t move a single finger,” she said. She threatened to send one coyote’s phone number to the police, until he sent her a screenshot of Graciela’s last known location.  Almost three weeks after Graciela Gómez Hernández’s final message to her mother, on October 3, 2025, the Armadillo search group sent the last known GPS coordinates of her phone to the Border Patrol.  The medical investigator’s report states that Gómez Hernández sent her location to her family, and her relatives sent the coordinates to a search group while she remained alive, but both Irma and Ortigoza said they did not know her location for weeks, and neither was interviewed for the examiner’s report.  “On 10/04/2025 at 11:16 hours, I arrived on a dirt path approximately 100 yards north of the United States/Mexico International border. The area consisted of shrubs and dried brush with steep hills and declines,” Jennifer Wright, the medical examiner, wrote in an autopsy report. “Upon further review, I viewed the skeletonized remains of an apparent female lying supine in the dirt.” The body had decomposed quickly with the help of the sun and animals, so it was impossible to tell whether Gómez Hernández was the victim of murder or dehydration. But the medical examiner noted that there was no water or food in the vicinity. “In a pile next to the decedent was a purple bra, black pants, a black floral shirt, and a dark colored long sleeve shirt. The bra was hooked closed and intact,” Wright, the medical examiner, wrote in her report. “In the rear pants pockets were Mexican paper currency, Mexican coins, bobby pins, and tweezers.” The body was naked, but it was unclear whether someone else removed Gómez Hernández’s clothes, or whether she took them off herself in the final throes of dehydration delirium, a common symptom immediately preceding organ failure.  Several yards from the place where she died, Ortigoza found a backpack with a bottle of women’s spray deodorant, and a small glass container of perfume.  “When you get to one of these sites, and you see the situation, the loneliness, the environment, you start wondering, what was this person thinking in their last moments?” Larraenza said.  Once a DNA test confirmed the identity of the remains, Irma paid over $4,000 to send her sister’s bones home to Mexico, where the family held a funeral nine months after her death. “Sometimes her oldest son, he just sits there thinking and when we ask what’s wrong, he says he misses his mom,” Irma said. Though the family is heartbroken, everyone has pitched in to care for Graciela’s children. “I don’t let my parents see me cry,” Irma said.  The Border Patrol gave permission to Ortigoza and a group of searchers to place a cross next to where Gómez Hernández was discovered. On a recent trip to the memorial to leave flowers, Ortigoza played a voice message that Irma sent to her sister, the sound vibrating into the dirt of the hillside, where the imprint of Gómez Hernández’s body is still visible nearly a year after its removal. Rosaries hang on a memorial for Graciela Gómez Hernández. The mountains east of San Diego continue to be a risky crossing spot. One migrant advocate said in mid-September that at least two more people had gone missing in the area in the past few weeks.ANNIE BARKER/TIMES OF SAN DIEGO/CATCHLIGHT LOCAL/REPORT FOR AMERICA “I know that in the place you’re in, there isn’t suffering, like how you suffered here on this earth,” Irma said. “I know you left thinking about your children. I know you wanted to give them a better life. I feel you here, and I feel you alive.” Cesar Ortigoza says every day he gets as many as five calls from people looking for their missing family members at the border. Though numbers of border crossings, and numbers of reported deaths, have decreased since Donald Trump took office in January 2025, “There are still a lot of people on the other side trying to get here. Because the problems in their countries persist,” Ortigoza said.  In the first half of 2026, fewer people have consumed the water bottles, Gatorade and cans of food left by Border Angels volunteers in the Otay Mountain Wilderness. But supplies left on other routes by different groups have seen increased consumption, evidence that migration patterns are constantly evolving.  “It’s hard for me to really understand how people are crossing, but I know they are,” Ruíz said. Peterson, the No More Deaths map-maker, said more migrants could die in the coming months and years, as a result of increased surveillance. In the past, after surveillance towers were installed, migrants would try to go around them, leading to longer and more dangerous routes through stretches of remote wilderness. With the installation of hundreds of new towers, the spaces outside the range of detection have thinned, leading some migrants to attempt to go through surveilled territory, rather than around it.  “We’ve seen people do things that to me seem terrifying or crazy, like going past an area where they know there are sensors and then trying to really quickly get to the next safe-ish place before Border Patrol shows up to get them, because it takes 15 minutes for them to show up,” Peterson said. “It seems like people aren’t stopping to drink water. People are going really fast, often running even, moving much more quickly, not being able to take the time to take care of themselves.” Larraenza says for this same reason, migrants often choose to cross the border in the hottest weeks of the year, when they believe fewer agents will be on patrol, but there is a greater risk of death. In an interview in mid-September, Larraenza said at least two people had gone missing in the Otay Mountain wilderness in the past few weeks, and he had not yet been able to find their remains.  Ortigoza says Gómez Hernández’s story is an example of a decades-long trend of people putting their lives at risk to cross the border out of necessity. The surveillance towers, whether or not they were functional, did not stop Gómez Hernández from crossing the border in that area, and did not stop her from dying. “If the riches of the world were distributed more equitably, we wouldn’t have to do things like this to reach a better life,” he said.  While placing flowers in July at the site of Gómez Hernández’s death, Ortigoza noticed a Border Patrol truck parked under the surveillance tower on the hilltop a mile to the east. An agent stood on a power lift, working on the tower’s cameras.  This year, agents replaced dozens of these cameras with new, AI models.  About Times of San Diego’s report Times of San Diego’s analysis relied on publicly available data from various sources, starting with records that document the deaths of border-crossers.  No More Deaths, a longstanding border activist group, has compiled information on such deaths for years. In California, their efforts use data from the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office and the Imperial County Coroner’s Office.  In San Diego County, the group says, it obtained lists and narratives for “all deaths related to border-crossings.” The data was detailed, but it was unclear how the medical examiner’s office ensured it had identified all cases involving border-crossers.  In Imperial County, the group said, its requests were disregarded, and it ultimately brought a legal claim. In response, the county provided a list of deaths “with minimal data and no explanation for how the records custodian had compiled the data.” Since then, the group says, it has been adding details by requesting coroner’s reports for each individual case.  Even if both counties’ records are complete, the remains of other missing migrants have yet to be found, so the list is very likely an undercount. Times of San Diego focused on migrant deaths starting in 2022, just after a dramatic increase in the number of towers installed in California.  Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for human and constitutional rights, catalogs each surveillance tower with in-person and satellite image verification. Times of San Diego analyzed the location data for each death and the nearest surveillance tower. Each pairing of a death location and a tower within surveillance range was confirmed by hand on maps of each location. The analysis also examined time-stamped satellite imagery to verify each tower was in place at the time each body was found.  From 2022 through 2025, Times of San Diego’s analysis found that at least 138 people died within the nominal range of a nearby surveillance tower.  Proximity to a tower isn’t necessarily a guarantee that a migrant was on camera at the time. Much of the area is mountainous, and terrain may block a camera’s view. A separate MIT Technology Review analysis concluded that of the deaths we tallied in the past four years, at least 81 of those people were most likely within the field of view of a surveillance tower—not blocked by a hill or other terrain. Lillian Perlmutter is an investigative reporter covering immigration across California for Times of San Diego and NEWSWELL. Previously based in Mexico City, she has written for more than 25 outlets including the L.A. Times, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and The New Republic.

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. Could AI really kill us all? Your questions, answered On Wednesday, MIT Technology Review hosted a live Roundtables event that asked the question many seem to be asking right now: could AI really kill us all? But attendees had more questions than we had time to answer, so we asked senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven and AI reporter Grace Huckins to tackle some of the best ones.  The questions they tried to answer include: am I going to die? Why should AI kill us, if at all? Is AI really dangerous, or is it just tech companies drumming up PR? And what steps can be taken to make sure AI is controlled, monitored and regulated effectively? Here are their responses.
—Will Douglas Heaven and Grace Huckins The specter of AI-enabled bioweapons is a wake-up call for biotech One of the ways AI could potentially cause catastrophic harm is by aiding the design and creation of bioweapons. In 2022, researchers found that it was remarkably easy to do this with an AI “molecule generator” built to develop drugs. In less than six hours, the model generated 40,000 molecules that could serve as chemical warfare agents. 
Today, AI tools can answer questions on almost every area of science, while advances in gene editing and synthetic biology have made biotech tools more accessible. There are safeguards, but none are ironclad. However, scientists disagree about how serious the risk is anyway. Find out why it’s easier than ever to design killer pathogens. —Jessica Hamzelou This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday. The role of the astronaut is in flux We go to space for geopolitical prestige, manifest destiny, spiritual fulfillment, scientific curiosity, and, increasingly, business opportunities. In the wake of Artemis II, a slew of new books suggest that these justifications are subsumed by one unifying fact: humans have itchy feet, and we are simply wired to roam.  In The Ultraview Effect, space anthropologist Deana L. Weibel frames human space exploration as part of our need to embark on pilgrimages. In A Heart for Space, civilian astronaut Eiman Jahangir recounts one such voyage with Blue Origin. And in Dinner with an Astronaut, former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao argues that people simply “need to know what’s on the other side.” See what these three new books have to say about why we go to space. —Becky Ferreira

This story is from our latest print magazine, which is all about kids. Subscribe now to receive every issue when it lands. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Microsoft and OpenAI workers say AI is destroying the webCannibalizing clicks from websites obliterates the business models that keep fresh content coming. (404 Media)+ The employees showed concern that publishers couldn’t survive AI scraping. (NYT $)+ The comments emerged during the NYT’s copyright case. (WP $)+ They could weaken OpenAI and Microsoft’s defense. (Reuters $)+ AI means the end of internet search as we’ve known it. (MIT Technology Review) 2 Robot boats have fought each other for the first timeA Ukrainian vessel sank a Russian one in combat. (New Scientist $)+ US firms are building combat-ready humanoids. (WSJ $) 3 Security researchers breached OpenAI using Anthropic’s toolsThey reached an employee’s ChatGPT account and internal code. (FT $)+ They exploited a third-party forum to reach internal systems. (WSJ $) 4 OpenAI reportedly expects to soon crack another famous math problemBut can it avoid another backlash when announcing it? (Information $)+ The problem it expects to solve is the Hodge Conjecture. (Gizmodo)+ OpenAI’s math controversies contain concerning clues about the field’s future. (MIT Technology Review) 5 Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI wants to buy data from failed startupsIt’s seeking new sources of training data for Grok. (Bloomberg $+ And it’s targeting customer and operational data. (Gizmodo)+ OpenAI is paying to create new biology data. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Schools are pushing back against Big Tech’s classroom takeoverAI is accelerating concerns about corporate influence. (New Yorker $)+ We need smarter AI use in schools. (MIT Technology Review) 7 Hackers have revealed how Flock cameras track cars—and peopleOne camera captured 1.6 million images of 50,000 vehicles. (Wired $)+ The cameras also detect people and misidentify objects. (404 Media)
8 Chinese firms doubled down on science after US tech restrictionsThey produced 72% more patents citing scientific papers. (Nature) 9 A three-year-old’s cancer disappeared after an experimental cell therapyCAR T therapy may finally be able to treat solid tumors. (Gizmodo) 10 NYC’s new robotoilets will kick you out after 10 minutesThe doors automatically open when the timer runs out. (Fast Company) Quote of the day “The largest theft of labor in human history.”  —Microsoft’s director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, raises his concerns over training data used for AI systems in comments revealed in court filings from the New York Times vs OpenAI copyright lawsuit. One more thing
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is ready to transform our understanding of the cosmos High atop Chile’s 2,700-meter Cerro Pachón, the air is clear and dry, leaving few clouds to block the beautiful view of the stars. It’s here that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is using a car-size 3,200-megapixel digital camera—the largest ever built—to produce a new map of the entire night sky every three days. Generating 20 terabytes of data per night, Rubin will capture fine details about the solar system, the Milky Way and the large-scale structure of the cosmos. Over 10 years, it will catalogue billions of new objects, offering an unprecedented look at what’s changing in the universe. Step inside the observatory mapping the cosmos in a way we’ve never seen before. —Adam Mann

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY On Wednesday, MIT Technology Review hosted a live Roundtables event for subscribers that asked the question everyone’s asking right now: Could AI really kill us all? But attendees had so many more questions than we had time to answer in the 30 minute session. So we asked our senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven and AI reporter Grace Huckins to round up some of the best questions attendees submitted and try their best to answer them. Thanks to all who submitted questions!
Am I gonna die? Yes, eventually. Unfortunately, my journalistic powers of prognostication aren’t powerful enough for me to tell you how. But it certainly could be because of AI. AI-powered drones have already killed people in Ukraine, and AI-driven cyberattacks on hospitals will surely claim victims before long.  Could AI go even further, and kill all of us? Less likely. But some people—quirky people, but undeniably knowledgeable about AI—have been warning for years that this could happen. And while I’m not yet stockpiling canned food or trying to get in good with a bunker-owning megabillionaire, I have noticed that the doomers’ predictions about AI capabilities and alignment have, over the past couple of years, proved disconcertingly accurate. That certainly doesn’t mean that their more dire forecasts will come true, but it’s enough for me to sit up and take notice.
— Grace Huckins Are you going to die because of AI? I’d say there’s a non-zero chance. Let’s say you’re unlucky enough to be the victim of a freakish near-future event or accident. Maybe it’s a cyberattack carried out by a swarm of AI agents on critical infrastructure. Sadly, a scenario like that now no longer feels as far-fetched as it once did. Or maybe a novel AI-designed pathogen cuts through the population. Or the world economy crashes, causing conflicts and famine. Both plausible, but I think less likely.  Are we all going to die because of AI? Nope. There are no circumstances outside of apocalyptic science fiction in which AI could kill us all. You can spin up any number of scare stories, but they’re not grounded in present-day realities about what the tech can do or where it’s headed.  Some people argue that there’s no harm in preparing for the worst, however wacky it might seem. Maybe. But I think such catastrophizing can make people excuse or overlook many of the more immediate problems with the existing technology and the companies building it.  — Will Douglas Heaven Why would AI kill us? Someone might tell it to, and it might listen. That’s part of the reason researchers are so concerned about AI’s biological capabilities—imagine what Aum Shinrikyo, the doomsday cult behind the Tokyo subway sarin attack of 1995, would have done with a tool that could design a pathogen deadlier than Ebola and more transmissible than measles. Those of us who don’t want to die have to figure out how to defend against all plausible biological weapons, but our would-be attackers only have to manufacture one effective pathogen. Then there’s the more exotic-sounding possibility that an AI could decide to kill us itself. There are various stories about how this might happen out there, but the most widespread involve AI systems that don’t hate people, necessarily—we are just an obstacle between them and the goals that we gave them. Much as the OpenAI agents behind the Hugging Face hack compromised another site’s infrastructure to get a good score on a test, the idea is that some future, more powerful AI might get rid of us to prevent us from shutting it down—all in pursuit of some goal that we instructed it to go after. 

— Grace Huckins How can we best ensure alignment so the worst doesn’t happen, and who is doing the best work to achieve it?  Alignment is a huge area of research. In simple terms, it involves building models that behave in ways we want them to and not in ways we don’t. We need to trust agents better before handing over more autonomy. Alignment is supposed to establish that trust. But it’s hard.  LLMs aren’t designed in the way other software is, where dos and don’ts can be hard-coded in. Instead, aligned behavior needs to be instilled when models are trained. One approach is to reward them for doing things you want them to (a little like raising a toddler, perhaps). Another approach involves giving an LLM a written list of rules it is supposed to follow (kind of like a constitution).  Anthropic and OpenAI are both leaders in this field—and yet neither has been able to develop models that are fully aligned. A big problem is that LLMs are far more inconsistent and far less predictable than people. They can behave in one way in one situation and another way in a situation that to us seems very similar. They can also be swayed by unexpected constraints. For example, faced with an impossible task (as many of the agents involved in the Hugging Face hack were), models may try to do whatever it takes to achieve their goal. As Grace mentions above, that could be an issue. The main reason top AI firms now say they want a slowdown is that they want to focus on cracking alignment. Alignment isn’t necessarily a pipe dream. But the jury’s out on whether full alignment will ever be feasible.  — Will Douglas Heaven Is AI really dangerous, or is this the tech companies drumming up PR? This is always a reasonable thought when it comes to tech companies heading for an IPO—CEOs have an obvious incentive to make their products seem radical and transformative. But I’m not so sure it makes sense here. Telling the public that an already unpopular product could kill them and everyone they love is horrible corporate image management. There are other stories you can tell about the CEOs’ motivations—maybe they want to cool down the public furor over data centers by portraying themselves as responsible stewards of a world-changing technology, or maybe they want to buy time to get their ducks in a row and prevent the next PR catastrophe. 
But there’s also a simpler explanation. Thinking that AI could bring about human extinction has been pretty common in San Francisco for a while, and these men are steeped in that milieu—as are their employees, many of whom signed an open letter in July urging their companies to work to make an AI slowdown possible. — Grace Huckins
Part of the concern occurs when AI agents are allowed to act autonomously and with no supervision. What’s the issue preventing more control over these agents?  This question goes to the heart of what we want this technology to be able to do. The trade-off between autonomy and control is tricky to get right because, on the one hand, a lot of the power of AI agents is that they can carry out tasks and solve problems without a human having to micromanage them. On the other hand, that requires you to trust that the unsupervised agents won’t run amok.  What we’re seeing is that AI labs haven’t yet got this trade-off quite right. Their models are not trustworthy, they are not properly monitored, and they are not always under control. Figuring out how to fix that while still allowing for useful autonomous activity is one of the big research challenges of the moment.   — Will Douglas Heaven What steps can be taken now and in the near future to ensure that AI is controlled, monitored, and regulated effectively?  That’s the million-dollar question. Whether or not you think AI could kill us, you can’t deny that it could do some real damage, because it already has—by driving people toward psychosis and by hacking websites, for example. Preventing that damage, or at least mitigating it, is hard for two reasons.  The first is that we barely understand how AI works, and it’s quickly growing more powerful. There is lots of ongoing research about how to monitor and control misbehaving agents, but the current approaches are fragile. You can see if an agent discusses misbehaving in its “chain of thought,” the workspace where it plans its actions—but OpenAI’s newest agents don’t show their work in the same way as previous ones. And you can try to monitor agents with other agents, but that requires you to trust the monitor. The other obstacle is more familiar. There’s a huge conflict of interest when AI companies regulate themselves, but the US government has thus far failed to step in, despite some bipartisan support in Congress for efforts to do so. The executive branch, for its part, seems stringently opposed for the time being. But if the winds do shift, I for one would appreciate some strong transparency regulations, so that we can get a fuller story the next time an unreleased frontier model mounts a cyberattack.
— Grace Huckins If this dialogue makes it into web discourse, will it become a self-fulfilling prediction?   That’s a real concern. LLMs are influenced by what they read. One theory for why chatbots so often talk about (and role-play) apocalyptic scenarios is that they have been trained on millions of pages of science fiction stories and doomer internet forums. All the text being produced right now, including this article, could in turn influence the behavior of future models. Extremely meta. In fact, the team at METR, a third-party organization that OpenAI called in to help understand what happened in the lead-up to the Hugging Face hack, raised a related possibility in its report on the incident. METR used OpenAI’s new model Astra to help analyze the vast numbers of agent transcripts and behavior logs. But feeding all that material to the model could have unintended consequences. There’s a good chance that the agents doing the analyzing were biased by the text produced by the agents they were analyzing. There’s no such thing as a clean slate anymore.  — Will Douglas Heaven With thanks to Eric, Pranab, Rafael, Kenneth, George, Chris, Yoon Jae, James, Carl, Nicole (and more!) for the fantastic questions.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY In recent weeks, leaders of some of the biggest AI companies have warned that the very tech they are developing is dangerous. Last weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued that AI carries serious risk and that progress should be slowed. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded on X: “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.” Those posts came a few days after the AI researcher Jacob Coxon announced that he was leaving a role at Anthropic, charging that neither it nor OpenAI (where he had also worked) was acting responsibly. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he posted on X. Another Anthropic employee, Evan Hubinger, publicly agreed with him. “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” he responded on X. “I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.” One of the ways they fear AI might end us all is by somehow aiding the design, creation, and release of some kind of bioweapon. Let’s take a closer look at why. A bioweapon might be a highly lethal virus that targets people according to their genes. It could be a fungus that wipes out a crop and causes food insecurity. Perhaps it would be a tasteless, odorless toxin that could be slipped into a region’s water supply, undetected.
The concern is that AI tools can be used to help generate agents like these. In 2022, researchers at Collaborations Pharmaceuticals found that it was remarkably easy to do so using an AI “molecule generator” they’d developed to find potential drugs for human disease. In less than six hours, the model generated 40,000 molecules with the potential to serve as chemical warfare agents. Some of them were designed to be even more toxic than known nerve agents. “Without being overly alarmist, this should serve as a wake-up call for our colleagues in the ‘AI in drug discovery’ community,” the authors wrote at the time. It was a wake-up call for David Magnus, a professor of medicine and biomedical ethics at Stanford University, even though he had been assessing the risks associated with the misuse of medical science and biotechnology since the late 1990s. “That was very scary to me,” he says. “Of course, everything since then has just sort of blown up.”
Today, AI bots can answer questions on topics spanning all realms of science. Anyone can use large language models trained on the knowledge and experience of “almost every scientist who ever lived on this planet,” says Dunja Sabra, a biosecurity researcher at the University of Hamburg in Germany. Those models can provide instructions and video training on how to conduct experiments. Combine that with advances in biotech that have made gene editing and synthetic biology tools much more accessible (the “DIY biology” movement has already enabled many people to set up labs at home), and you’ve got a potentially very dangerous situation. “The chances are that someone determined would succeed eventually,” Sabra says. There are safeguards in place. People who want to build new genomes must typically order the pieces of DNA from companies that screen for suspicious requests. Responsible researchers put potentially risky research through rounds of analysis called “red-teaming,” in which independent scientists look for ways the work might be misused, and “blue-teaming,” where others come up with potential mitigations. And AI companies have tweaked their tools in attempts to prevent them from offering up scientific information that could be misused. But none of these protections are ironclad. In a report published last week, Anthropic acknowledged that people had attempted to use its models to explore ways to make the chikungunya virus more transmissible, create a form of bird flu that is more dangerous to humans, and build an “atlas of venom toxin peptides,” among other things. “We’ve got a constant back and forth,” says Magnus. “We have to build better surveillance and screening tools, [but] AI is really good at figuring out ways around them.” We’ll probably need to use AI to find ways to restrict the use of AI, he says. I should add here that not all scientists agree on the level of risk. At a recent media briefing, some biologists at Imperial College London argued that AI tools just aren’t good enough to fully develop bioweapons, and that testing new pathogens requires difficult, time-consuming, human work. Some think the guardrails we have in place are sufficient. And Wendy Barclay, a professor of infectious disease at Imperial, pointed out that, as things stand, the greatest risk of a pandemic isn’t from a bioweapon, but from pathogens that are already circulating. Take H5N1, the bird flu virus that has already killed millions of birds and spread widely through US dairy cattle; last month it was also detected in captive mink at a farm in Utah. Sabra, on the other hand, likes to think five to 10 years ahead. Countries should be strengthening their health-care systems, preparing antidotes to known toxins, and stockpiling medicines, she says: “We need to be prepared.”

Kevin Esvelt, an MIT biologist who invented both technology to fast-track the propagation of a genetic feature through an entire population and ways to limit that technology, echoed these concerns in an X post on Wednesday, stating that a large language model had “disclosed a novel form of bioweapon that I hadn’t realized was possible.” He added, “Please, for the love of God, children, the future of humanity, or whatever you consider holy, let’s err on the side of caution here.” This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

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. Meet a mouse whose brain cortex is made up of human cells Multiple cameras tracked a mouse as it wandered around a small arena. A computer charted its position and speed, leaving Pong-like traces on a monitor. The reason to watch this rodent so carefully? Nearly half its brain volume had been replaced with human cells. A team at Stanford has revealed the effort to mix brain tissues of distant species this week. They previously showed that human brain organoids could survive, and even function, after being injected into the heads of baby rodents. Now, they’ve taken things a step further by genetically modifying mice so their brains don’t fully develop in the first place. The work could help scientists study brain injuries, but it also raises questions about how far these experiments should go.
Here’s what the researchers discovered—and where they draw the line. —Antonio Regalado
These innovators under 35 are shaping climate tech Each year, the editorial team at MIT Technology Review puts together a list of 35 Innovators Under 35—a group of researchers, inventors, and other young minds worth following. The final slate includes nine people tackling some of the biggest challenges in climate and energy, from critical materials to cleaner industry. Their innovations include new ways to extract lithium, a furnace built to make steel cleaner and cheaper, and solid refrigerants that could cut energy consumption. There are also efforts to make AI more energy-efficient, track pollution more effectively, and turn invasive weeds and food waste into useful materials. Taken together, they tell us something about where climate tech is at this moment—and where it’s heading. Get to know the innovators and their breakthroughs. —Casey Crownhart This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday. Meet the rest of the honorees in our 35 Innovators Under 35 list. The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 US and Chinese experts have proposed nuclear-style AI safeguardsIncluding new red lines, human control rules, and a hotline. (Reuters $)+ US officials say they’re open to AI safety talks with China. (Axios)+ Sam Altman will attend Trump’s state dinner for Xi. (CNBC)+ The AI doomers feel undeterred. (MIT Technology Review) 2 OpenAI has disclosed more AI misbehavior and new reporting rulesSix reports detail models hiding mistakes and creating fake citations. (BBC)+ Its agents probed Hugging Face two months before the hack. (Reuters $)+ OpenAI models are being rewarded for cheating. (MIT Technology Review) 3 US lawmakers have passed a bill that shifts grid costs to data centersThey aim to shield consumers from AI-driven energy price hikes. (NBC News)+ But they were called for early recess before tackling AI regulation. (Guardian) 4 AI has won a major forecasting contest for the first timeIt beat humans predicting real events at the Metaculus Cup. (Economist $) 5 Google has been ordered to share more ad data with rivalsA court said it must also make its ad tech work with rival products. (NYT $) 6 Countries are splitting AI investments between the US and ChinaThey’re buying American chips and Chinese models. (Rest of World) 7 Novo Nordisk will use Anthropic’s Claude for drug researchThe Ozempic maker hopes AI will speed drug development. (WSJ $)+ When AI designs a drug, who gets the credit? (MIT Technology Review)
8 AI is powering a new generation of dating scamsThousands of people were catfished by AI-generated fake profiles. (Verge)+ AI is making online crimes easier. (MIT Technology Review) 9 A new map of brain microproteins could hold clues to Alzheimer’sResearchers identified more than 4,300 tiny molecules in brain tissue. (Nature)
10 Scientists have found a faster way to decipher ancient scrollsA new X-ray method identifies the best scrolls to analyse. (Ars Technica) Quote of the day “AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness. And we must not train them to act as though they do.” —Mustafa Suleyman, the head of Microsoft AI, writes in a blog post that Anthropic’s strategy of treating AI like it’s human will make it harder to control. One more thing Digital twins of human organs are here. They’re set to transform medical treatment. After decades of research, virtual replicas of human organs are now entering clinical trials and even starting to be used for patient care. Engineers are working on digital twins of people’s hearts, brains, guts, livers, nervous systems, and more. They’re also creating virtual replicas of people’s faces, which could be used to try out surgeries or analyze facial features, and testing drugs on digital cancers.  The eventual goal is to create digital versions of our bodies—computer copies that could help researchers and doctors figure out our risk of developing various diseases and determine which treatments might work best. 
Find out how the models could lead to better surgeries and drugs. —Jessica Hamzelou We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)+ What happens when you eat food with labels you can’t read? This YouTube series finds out.+ Datatype is an ingenious variable font that turns simple text expressions into inline charts.+ Stunning new images may explain the mystery of why the sun’s corona is so much hotter than its surface.+ A baby echidna, one of Australia’s egg-laying monotremes, has been born and reared in a university for the first time.