AI presents an opportunity to build a more prosperous and secure world.The UK has already laid a strong foundation to seize this moment and is uniquely positioned to translate AI innovation into public benefit. That’s why we are excited to deepen our collaboration with the UK government to accelerate this work and offer a blueprint for other countries.Together we will focus on using AI to speed up progress in science and education, modernize public services and advance national security and resilience.Accelerating access to frontier AI in key sectors: Science & EducationOur partnership will center on providing access to frontier AI in two areas foundational to the UK’s long-term success: scientific discovery and education.The UK has a rich history of applying new technologies to drive scientific progress, from Hooke’s microscope to Faraday’s electrical experiments. We aim to build on this heritage, and empower the next generation of scientists with AI tools that can unlock breakthroughs, transform the economy, and solve some of the major challenges facing humanity. We will provide priority access to our “AI for Science” models to UK scientists, including:AlphaEvolve – a Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithmsAlphaGenome – an AI model to help scientists better understand our DNAAI co-scientist – a multi-agent AI system that acts as a virtual scientific collaboratorWeatherNext – a family of state-of-the-art weather forecasting modelsLike the microscope or telescope, these AI tools are designed to enhance scientific capacity, enabling researchers to tackle problems of unprecedented complexity and scale. For example, AlphaFold – our AI system for predicting protein structures – has already enabled almost 190,000 researchers in the UK alone to deepen their understanding of areas such as crop resilience, antimicrobial resistance and other critical biological challenges.Establishing Google DeepMind’s first automated science laboratory in the UKTo help turbocharge scientific discovery, we will establish Google DeepMind’s first automated laboratory in the UK in 2026, specifically focused on materials science research. A multidisciplinary team of researchers will oversee research in the lab, which will be built from the ground up to be fully integrated with Gemini. By directing world-class robotics to synthesize and characterize hundreds of materials per day, the team intends to significantly shorten the timeline for identifying transformative new materials.Discovering new materials is one of the most important pursuits in science, offering the potential to reduce costs and enable entirely new technologies. For example, superconductors that operate at ambient temperature and pressure could allow for low cost medical imaging and reduce power loss in electrical grids. Other novel materials could help us tackle critical energy challenges by unlocking advanced batteries, next-generation solar cells and more efficient computer chips.

Today, we’re announcing an expanded partnership with the UK AI Security Institute (AISI) through a new Memorandum of Understanding focused on foundational security and safety research, to help ensure artificial intelligence is developed safely and benefits everyone.The research partnership with AISI is an important part of our broader collaboration with the UK government on accelerating safe and beneficial AI progress.Building on a foundation of collaborationAI holds immense potential to benefit humanity by helping treat disease, accelerate scientific discovery, create economic prosperity and tackle climate change. For these benefits to be realised, we must put safety and responsibility at the heart of development. Evaluating our models against a broad spectrum of potential risks remains a critical part of our safety strategy, and external partnerships are an important element of this work.This is why we have partnered with the UK AISI since its inception in November 2023 to test our most capable models. We are deeply committed to the UK AISI’s goal to equip governments, industry and wider society with a scientific understanding of the potential risks posed by advanced AI as well as potential solutions and mitigations.We are actively working with AISI to build more robust evaluations for AI models, and our teams have collaborated on safety research to move the field forward, including recent work on Chain of Thought Monitorability: A New and Fragile Opportunity for AI Safety. Building on this success, today we are broadening our partnership from testing to include wider, more foundational, research in a variety of areas.What the partnership involvesUnder this new research partnership, we’re broadening our collaboration to include:Sharing access to our proprietary models, data and ideas to accelerate research progressJoint reports and publications sharing findings with the research communityMore collaborative security and safety research combining our teams’ expertiseTechnical discussions to tackle complex safety challengesKey research areasOur joint research with AISI focuses on critical areas where Google DeepMind’s expertise, interdisciplinary teams, and years of pioneering responsible research can help make AI systems more safe and secure:Monitoring AI reasoning processesWe will work on techniques to monitor an AI system’s “thinking”, also commonly referred to as its chain-of-thought (CoT). This work builds on previous Google DeepMind research as well, and our recent collaboration on this topic with AISI, OpenAI, Anthropic and other partners. CoT monitoring helps us understand how an AI system produces its answers, complementing interpretability research.Understanding social and emotional impactsWe will work together to investigate the ethical implications of socioaffective misalignment; that is, the potential for AI models to behave in ways which do not align with human wellbeing, even when they’re technically following instructions correctly. This research will build on existing Google DeepMind work that has helped define this critical area of AI safety.Evaluating economic systemsWe will explore the potential impact of AI on economic systems by simulating real-world tasks across different environments. Experts will score and validate these tasks, after which they will be categorised along dimensions like complexity or representativeness, to help predict factors like long-term labour market impact.Working together to realise the benefits of AIOur partnership with AISI is one element of how we aim to realise the benefits of AI for humanity while mitigating potential risks. Our wider strategy includes foresight research, extensive safety training that goes hand-in-hand with capability development, rigorous testing of our models, and the development of better tools and frameworks to understand and mitigate risk.Strong internal governance processes are also essential for safe and responsible AI development, as is collaborating with independent external experts who bring fresh perspectives and diverse expertise to our work. Google DeepMind’s Responsibility and Safety Council works across teams to monitor emerging risk, review ethics and safety assessments and implement relevant technical and policy mitigations. We also partner with other external experts like Apollo Research, Vaultis, Dreadnode and more, to conduct extensive testing and evaluation of our models, including Gemini 3, our most intelligent and secure model to date.Additionally, Google DeepMind is a proud founding member of the Frontier Model Forum, as well as the Partnership on AI, where we focus on ensuring safe and responsible development of frontier AI models and increasing collaboration on important safety issues.We hope our expanded partnership with AISI will allow us to build more robust approaches to AI safety for the benefit not just of our own organisations, but also the wider industry and everyone who interacts with AI systems.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly becoming a primary source for information delivery across diverse use cases, so it’s important that their responses are factually accurate.In order to continue improving their performance on this industry-wide challenge, we have to better understand the types of use cases where models struggle to provide an accurate response and better measure factuality performance in those areas.The FACTS Benchmark SuiteToday, we’re teaming up with Kaggle to introduce the FACTS Benchmark Suite. It extends our previous work developing the FACTS Grounding Benchmark, with three additional factuality benchmarks, including:A Parametric Benchmark that measures the model’s ability to access its internal knowledge accurately in factoid question use-cases.A Search Benchmark that tests a model’s ability to use Search as a tool to retrieve information and synthesize it correctly.A Multimodal Benchmark that tests a model’s ability to answer prompts related to input images in a factually correct manner.We are also updating the original FACTS grounding benchmark with Grounding Benchmark – v2, an extended benchmark to test a model’s ability to provide answers grounded in the context of a given prompt.Each benchmark was carefully curated to produce a total of 3,513 examples, which we are making publicly available today. Similar to our previous release, we are following standard industry practice and keeping an evaluation set held-out as a private set. The FACTS Benchmark Suite Score (or FACTS Score) is calculated as the average accuracy of both public and private sets across the four benchmarks. Kaggle will oversee the management of the FACTS Benchmark Suite. This includes owning the private held-out sets, testing the leading LLMs on the benchmarks, and hosting the results on a public leaderboard. More details about the FACTS evaluation methodology can be found in our tech report.Benchmark overviewParametric BenchmarkThe FACTS Parametric benchmark assesses the ability of models to accurately answer factual questions, without the aid of external tools like web search. All the questions in the benchmark are “trivia style” questions driven by user interest that can be answered via Wikipedia (a standard source for LLM pretraining). The resulting benchmark consists of a 1052-item public set and a 1052-item private set.

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This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How one controversial startup hopes to cool the planet Stardust Solutions believes that it can solve climate change—for a price.  The Israel-based geoengineering startup has said it expects nations will soon pay it more than a billion dollars a year to launch specially equipped aircraft into the stratosphere. Once they’ve reached the necessary altitude, those planes will disperse particles engineered to reflect away enough sunlight to cool down the planet, purportedly without causing environmental side effects. 
But numerous solar geoengineering researchers are skeptical that Stardust will line up the customers it needs to carry out a global deployment in the next decade. They’re also highly critical of the idea of a private company setting the global temperature for us. Read the full story. —James Temple
MIT Technology Review Narrated: Is this the electric grid of the future?   In Nebraska, a publicly owned utility company is tackling the challenges of delivering on reliability, affordability, and sustainability. It aims to reach net zero by 2040—here’s how it plans to get there. This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Australia’s social media ban for teens has just come into forceThe whole world will be watching to see what happens next. (The Guardian)+ Opinions about the law are sharply divided among Australians. (BBC)+ Plenty of teens hate it, naturally. (WP $)+ A third of US teens are on their phones “almost constantly.” (NYT $)2 This has been the second-hottest year since records beganMean temperatures approached 1.5°C above the preindustrial average. (New Scientist $)+ Meanwhile world leaders at this year’s UN climate talks couldn’t even agree to use the phrase ‘fossil fuels’ in the final draft. (MIT Technology Review)3 OpenAI is in troubleIt’s rapidly losing its technological edge to competitors like Google and Anthropic. (The Atlantic $)+ Silicon Valley is working harder than ever to sell AI to us. (Wired $)+ There’s a new industry-wide push to agree shared standards for AI agents. (TechCrunch)+ No one can explain how AI really works—not even the experts attending AI’s biggest research gathering. (NBC)4 MAGA influencers want Trump to kill the Netflix/Warner Bros dealThey argue Netflix is simply too woke (after all, it employs the Obamas.) (WP $)5 AI slop videos have taken over social mediaIt’s now almost impossible to tell if what you’re seeing is real or not. (NYT $)6 Trump’s system to weed out noncitizen voters is flagging US citizens Once alerted, people have 30 days to provide proof of citizenship before they lose their ability to vote. (NPR)+ The US is planning to ask visitors to disclose five years of social media history. (WP $)+ How open source voting machines could boost trust in US elections. (MIT Technology Review)7 Virtual power plants are having a momentHere’s why they’re poised to play a significant role in meeting energy demand over the next decade. (IEEE Spectrum)+ How virtual power plants are shaping tomorrow’s energy system. (MIT Technology Review)8 New devices are about to get (even) more expensiveYou can thank AI for pushing up the price of RAM for the rest of us. (The Verge)9 People hated the McDonald’s AI ad so much the company pulled it How are giant corporations still falling into this exact trap every holiday season? (Forbes)  

10 Why is ice slippery? There’s a new hypothesis 🧊You might think you know. But it’s still fiercely debated among ice researchers! (Quanta $) Quote of the day “We’re pleased to be the first, we’re proud to be the first, and we stand ready to help any other jurisdiction who seeks to do these things.” —Australia’s communications minister Anika Wells tells the BBC how she feels about her government’s decision to ban social media for under-16s.  One more thing MICHAEL BYERS The entrepreneur dreaming of a factory of unlimited organs
At any given time, the US transplant waiting list is about 100,000 people long. Thousands die waiting, and many more never make the list to begin with. Entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt wants to address this by growing organs compatible with human bodies in genetically modified pigs. In recent years, US doctors have attempted seven pig-to-human transplants, the most dramatic of which was a case where a 57-year-old man with heart failure lived two months with a pig heart supplied by Rothblatt’s company. 
The experiment demonstrated the first life-sustaining pig-to-human organ transplant—and paved the way towards an organized clinical trial to prove they save lives consistently. Read the full story. —Antonio Regalado

Stardust Solutions believes that it can solve climate change—for a price. The Israel-based geoengineering startup has said it expects  nations will soon pay it more than a billion dollars a year to launch specially equipped aircraft into the stratosphere. Once they’ve reached the necessary altitude, those planes will disperse particles engineered to reflect away enough sunlight to cool down the planet, purportedly without causing environmental side effects.  The proprietary (and still secret) particles could counteract all the greenhouse gases the world has emitted over the last 150 years, the company stated in a 2023 pitch deck it presented to venture capital firms. In fact, it’s the “only technologically feasible solution” to climate change, the company said. The company disclosed it raised $60 million in funding in October, marking by far the largest known funding round to date for a startup working on solar geoengineering.
Stardust is, in a sense, the embodiment of Silicon Valley’s simmering frustration with the pace of academic research on the technology. It’s a multimillion-dollar bet that a startup mindset can advance research and development that has crept along amid scientific caution and public queasiness. But numerous researchers focused on solar geoengineering are deeply skeptical that Stardust will line up the government customers it would need to carry out a global deployment as early as 2035, the plan described in its earlier investor materials—and aghast at the suggestion that it ever expected to move that fast. They’re also highly critical of the idea that a company would take on the high-stakes task of setting the global temperature, rather than leaving it to publicly funded research programs.
“They’ve ignored every recommendation from everyone and think they can turn a profit in this field,” says Douglas MacMartin, an associate professor at Cornell University who studies solar geoengineering. “I think it’s going to backfire. Their investors are going to be dumping their money down the drain, and it will set back the field.” The company has finally emerged from stealth mode after completing its funding round, and its CEO, Yanai Yedvab, agreed to conduct one of the company’s first extensive interviews with MIT Technology Review for this story.Yedvab walked back those ambitious projections a little, stressing that the actual timing of any stratospheric experiments, demonstrations, or deployments will be determined by when governments decide it’s appropriate to carry them out. Stardust has stated clearly that it will move ahead with solar geoengineering only if nations pay it to proceed, and only once there are established rules and bodies guiding the use of the technology. That decision, he says, will likely be dictated by how bad climate change becomes in the coming years. “It could be a situation where we are at the place we are now, which is definitely not great,” he says. “But it could be much worse. We’re saying we’d better be ready.” “It’s not for us to decide, and I’ll say humbly, it’s not for these researchers to decide,” he adds. “It’s the sense of urgency that will dictate how this will evolve.” The building blocks No one is questioning the scientific credentials of Stardust. The company was founded in 2023 by a trio of prominent researchers, including Yedvab, who served as deputy chief scientist at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission. The company’s lead scientist, Eli Waxman, is the head of the department of particle physics and astrophysics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Amyad Spector, the chief product officer, was previously a nuclear physicist at Israel’s secretive Negev Nuclear Research Center. Stardust CEO Yanai Yedvab (right) and Chief Product Officer Amyad Spector (left) at the company’s facility in Israel. ROBY YAHAV, STARDUST Stardust says it employs 25 scientists, engineers, and academics. The company is based in Ness Ziona, Israel, and plans to open a US headquarters soon.  Yedvab says the motivation for starting Stardust was simply to help develop an effective means of addressing climate change. 

“Maybe something in our experience, in the tool set that we bring, can help us in contributing to solving one of the greatest problems humanity faces,” he says. Lowercarbon Capital, the climate-tech-focused investment firm  cofounded by the prominent tech investor Chris Sacca, led the $60 million investment round. Future Positive, Future Ventures, and Never Lift Ventures, among others, participated as well.AWZ Ventures, a firm focused on security and intelligence technologies, co-led the company’s earlier seed round, which totaled $15 million. Yedvab says the company will use that money to advance research, development, and testing for the three components of its system, which are also described in the pitch deck: safe particles that could be affordably manufactured; aircraft dispersion systems; and a means of tracking particles and monitoring their effects. “Essentially, the idea is to develop all these building blocks and to upgrade them to a level that will allow us to give governments the tool set and all the required information to make decisions about whether and how to deploy this solution,” he says.  The company is, in many ways, the opposite of Make Sunsets, the first company that came along offering to send particles into the stratosphere—for a fee—by pumping sulfur dioxide into weather balloons and hand-releasing them into the sky. Many researchers viewed it as a provocative, unscientific, and irresponsible exercise in attention-gathering.  But Stardust is serious, and now it’s raised serious money from serious people—all of which raises the stakes for the solar geoengineering field and, some fear, increases the odds that the world will eventually put the technology to use. “That marks a turning point in that these types of actors are not only possible, but are real,” says Shuchi Talati, executive director of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, a nonprofit that strives to ensure that developing nations are included in the global debate over such climate interventions. “We’re in a more dangerous era now.” Ask AIWhy it matters to you?BETAHere’s why this story might matter to you, according to AI. This is a beta feature and AI hallucinates—it might get weirdTell me why it matters Many scientists studying solar geoengineering argue strongly that universities, governments, and transparent nonprofits should lead the work in the field, given the potential dangers and deep public concerns surrounding a tool with the power to alter the climate of the planet. 
It’s essential to carry out the research with appropriate oversight, explore the potential downsides of these approaches, and publicly publish the results “to ensure there’s no bias in the findings and no ulterior motives in pushing one way or another on deployment or not,” MacMartin says. “[It] shouldn’t be foisted upon people without proper and adequate information.” He criticized, for instance, the company’s claims to have developed a perfectly safe and inert “magic aerosol particle,” arguing that such a promise can’t be trusted without published findings. Other scientists have also disputed those scientific claims.Plenty of other academics say solar geoengineering shouldn’t be studied at all, fearing that merely investigating it starts the world down a slippery slope toward its use and diminishes the pressures to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. In 2022, hundreds of them signed an open letter calling for a global ban on the development and use of the technology, adding the concern that there is no conceivable way for the world’s nations to pull together to establish rules or make collective decisions ensuring that it would be used in “a fair, inclusive, and effective manner.”
“Solar geoengineering is not necessary,” the authors wrote. “Neither is it desirable, ethical, or politically governable in the current context.” The for-profit decision  Stardust says it’s important to pursue the possibility of solar geoengineering because the dangers of climate change are accelerating faster than the world’s ability to respond to it, requiring a new “class of solution … that buys us time and protects us from overheating.” Yedvab says he and his colleagues thought hard about the right structure for the organization, finally deciding that for-profits working in parallel with academic researchers have delivered “most of the groundbreaking technologies” in recent decades. He cited advances in genome sequencing, space exploration, and drug development, as well as the restoration of the ozone layer. He added that a for-profit structure was also required to raise funds and attract the necessary talent. “There is no way we could, unfortunately, raise even a small portion of this amount by philanthropic resources or grants these days,” he says. He adds that while academics have conducted lots of basic science in solar geoengineering, they’ve done very little in terms of building the technological capacities. Their geoengineering research is also primarily focused on the potential use of sulfur dioxide, because it is known to help reduce global temperatures after volcanic eruptions blast massive amounts of it into the stratospheric. But it has well-documented downsides as well, including harm to the protective ozone layer.
“It seems natural that we need better options, and this is why we started Stardust: to develop this safe, practical, and responsible solution,” the company said in a follow-up email. “Eventually, policymakers will need to evaluate and compare these options, and we’re confident that our option will be superior over sulfuric acid primarily in terms of safety and practicability.” Public trust can be won not by excluding private companies, but by setting up regulations and organizations to oversee this space, much as the US Food and Drug Administration does for pharmaceuticals, Yedvab says.“There is no way this field could move forward if you don’t have this governance framework, if you don’t have external validation, if you don’t have clear regulation,” he says. Meanwhile, the company says it intends to operate transparently, pledging to publish its findings whether they’re favorable or not. That will include finally revealing details about the particles it has developed, Yedvab says. 
Early next year, the company and its collaborators will begin publishing data or evidence “substantiating all the claims and disclosing all the information,” he says, “so that everyone in the scientific community can actually check whether we checked all these boxes.” In the follow-up email, the company acknowledged that solar geoengineering isn’t a “silver bullet” but said it is “the only tool that will enable us to cool the planet in the short term, as part of a larger arsenal of technologies.” “The only way governments could be in a position to consider [solar geoengineering] is if the work has been done to research, de-risk, and engineer safe and responsible solutions—which is what we see as our role,” the company added later. “We are hopeful that research will continue not just from us, but also from academic institutions, nonprofits, and other responsible companies that may emerge in the future.” Ambitious projections Stardust’s earlier pitch deck stated that the company expected to conduct its first “stratospheric aerial experiments” last year, though those did not move ahead (more on that in a moment). On another slide, the company said it expected to carry out a “large-scale demonstration” around 2030 and proceed to a “global full-scale deployment” by about 2035. It said it expected to bring in roughly $200 million and $1.5 billion in annual revenue by those periods, respectively. Every researcher interviewed for this story was adamant that such a deployment should not happen so quickly. Given the global but uneven and unpredictable impacts of solar geoengineering, any decision to use the technology should be reached through an inclusive, global agreement, not through the unilateral decisions of individual nations, Talati argues.  “We won’t have any sort of international agreement by that point given where we are right now,” she says. A global agreement, to be clear, is a big step beyond setting up rules and oversight bodies—and some believe that such an agreement on a technology so divisive could never be achieved. There’s also still a vast amount of research that must be done to better understand the negative side effects of solar geoengineering generally and any ecological impacts of Stardust’s materials specifically, adds Holly Buck, an associate professor at the University of Buffalo and author of After Geoengineering. “It is irresponsible to talk about deploying stratospheric aerosol injection without fundamental research about its impacts,” Buck wrote in an email. She says the timelines are also “unrealistic” because there are profound public concerns about the technology. Her polling work found that a significant fraction of the US public opposes even research (though polling varies widely).  Meanwhile, most academic efforts to move ahead with even small-scale outdoor experiments have sparked fierce backlash. That includes the years-long effort by researchers then at Harvard to carry out a basic equipment test for their so-called ScopeX experiment. The high-altitude balloon would have launched from a flight center in Sweden, but the test was ultimately scratched amid objections from environmentalists and Indigenous groups.  Given this baseline of public distrust, Stardust’s for-profit proposals only threaten to further inflame public fears, Buck says. “I find the whole proposal incredibly socially naive,” she says. “We actually could use serious research in this field, but proposals like this diminish the chances of that happening.” Those public fears, which cross the political divide, also mean politicians will see little to no political upside to paying Stardust to move ahead, MacMartin says. “If you don’t have the constituency for research, it seems implausible to me that you’d turn around and give money to an Israeli company to deploy it,” he says. An added risk is that if one nation or a small coalition forges ahead without broader agreement, it could provoke geopolitical conflicts.  “What if Russia wants it a couple of degrees warmer, and India a couple of degrees cooler?” asked Alan Robock, a professor at Rutgers University, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2008. “Should global climate be reset to preindustrial temperature or kept constant at today’s reading? Would it be possible to tailor the climate of each region of the planet independently without affecting the others? If we proceed with geoengineering, will we provoke future climate wars?” Revised plans Yedvab says the pitch deck reflected Stardust’s strategy at a “very early stage in our work,” adding that their thinking has “evolved,” partly in response to consultations with experts in the field. He says that the company will have the technological capacity to move ahead with demonstrations and deployments on the timelines it laid out but adds, “That’s a necessary but not sufficient condition.” “Governments will need to decide where they want to take it, if at all,” he says. “It could be a case that they will say ‘We want to move forward.’ It could be a case that they will say ‘We want to wait a few years.’”“It’s for them to make these decisions,” he says. Yedvab acknowledges that the company has conducted flights in the lower atmosphere to test its monitoring system, using white smoke as a simulant for its particles, as the Wall Street Journal reported last year. It’s also done indoor tests of the dispersion system and its particles in a wind tunnel set up within its facility. But in response to criticisms like the ones above, Yedvab says the company hasn’t conducted outdoor particle experiments and won’t move forward with them until it has approval from governments.  “Eventually, there will be a need to conduct outdoor testing,” he says. “There is no way you can validate any solution without outdoor testing.” But such testing of sunlight reflection technology, he says, “should be done only working together with government and under these supervisions.” Generating returns   Stardust may be willing to wait for governments to be ready to deploy its system, but there’s no guarantee that its investors will have the same patience. In accepting tens of millions in venture capital, Stardust may now face financial pressures that could “drive the timelines,” says Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia University.  And that raises a different set of concerns. Obliged to deliver returns, the company might feel it must strive to convince government leaders that they should pay for its services, Talati says.  “The whole point of having companies and investors is you want your thing to be used,” she says. “There’s a massive incentive to lobby countries to use it, and that’s the whole danger of having for-profit companies here.” She argues those financial incentives threaten to accelerate the use of solar geoengineering ahead of broader international agreements and elevate business interests above the broader public good. Stardust has “quietly begun lobbying on Capitol Hill” and has hired the law firm Holland & Knight, according to Politico. It has also worked with Red Duke Strategies, a consulting firm based in McLean, Virginia, to develop “strategic relationships and communications that promote understanding and enable scientific testing,” according to a case study on the company’s  website.  “The company needed to secure both buy-in and support from the United States government and other influential stakeholders to move forward,” Red Duke states. “This effort demanded a well-connected and authoritative partner who could introduce Stardust to a group of experts able to research, validate, deploy, and regulate its SRM technology.” Red Duke didn’t respond to an inquiry from MIT Technology Review. Stardust says its work with the consulting firm was not a government lobbying effort. Yedvab acknowledges that the company is meeting with government leaders in the US, Europe, its own region, and the Global South. But he stresses that it’s not asking any country to contribute funding or to sign off on deployments at this stage. Instead, it’s making the case for nations to begin crafting policies to regulate solar geoengineering. “When we speak to policymakers—and we speak to policymakers; we don’t hide it—essentially, what we tell them is ‘Listen, there is a solution,’” he says. “‘It’s not decades away—it’s a few years away. And it’s your role as policymakers to set the rules of this field.’” “Any solution needs checks and balances,” he says. “This is how we see the checks and balances.” He says the best-case scenario is still a rollout of clean energy technologies that accelerates rapidly enough to drive down emissions and curb climate change. “We are perfectly fine with building an option that will sit on the shelf,” he says. “We’ll go and do something else. We have a great team and are confident that we can find also other problems to work with.” He says the company’s investors are aware of and comfortable with that possibility, supportive of the principles that will guide Stardust’s work, and willing to wait for regulations and government contracts. Lowercarbon Capital didn’t respond to an inquiry from MIT Technology Review. ‘Sentiment of hope’ Others have certainly imagined the alternative scenario Yedvab raises: that nations will increasingly support the idea of geoengineering in the face of mounting climate catastrophes.  In Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel, The Ministry for the Future, India unilaterally forges ahead with solar geoengineering following a heat wave that kills millions of people.  Wagner sketched a variation on that scenario in his 2021 book, Geoengineering: The Gamble, speculating that a small coalition of nations might kick-start a rapid research and deployment program as an emergency response to escalating humanitarian crises. In his version, the Philippines offers to serve as the launch site after a series of super-cyclones batter the island nation, forcing millions from their homes.  It’s impossible to know today how the world will react if one nation or a few go it alone, or whether nations could come to agreement on where the global temperature should be set.  But the lure of solar geoengineering could become increasingly enticing as more and more nations endure mass suffering, starvation, displacement, and death. “We understand that probably it will not be perfect,” Yedvab says. “We understand all the obstacles, but there is this sentiment of hope, or cautious hope, that we have a way out of this dark corridor we are currently in.” “I think that this sentiment of hope is something that gives us a lot of energy to move on forward,” he adds.