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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. Smart glasses are already causing havoc in India When Shubnam saw an Instagram video of a Delhi protest they had attended, they realized a content creator wearing Meta smart glasses had recorded them surreptitiously. The mocking reel drew millions of views, along with transphobic abuse and AI-generated memes. Experts warn that many others will experience similar ordeals as smart glasses go mainstream. The risks are particularly acute in India, where covert recording and the circulation of images without consent are already pervasive. The bigger issue is that the smart glasses aren’t just being used to turn ordinary people into targets of viral “pranks.” They’re also becoming a tool of police surveillance.
Here’s why smart glasses are creating new privacy risks in India. —Anuj Behal
MIT Technology Review Narrated: what’s at stake in AI’s trillion-dollar gamble When Jessica Wachter, a University of Pennsylvania finance professor, wanted to assess AI’s impact on the economy over the next few years, she started with a simple fact: a handful of so-called hyperscalers are investing huge amounts of money to build AI data centers. Instead of trying to predict how widely deployed AI models will be, Wachter asked how fast the hyperscalers’ earnings will need to grow to justify their spending through 2027, when expenditures are expected to reach nearly $1.1 trillion. The results are eye-opening. AI companies will need to achieve an extraordinary increase in productivity just to break even by 2030. This is our latest story to become an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish 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 Hackers claim they’ve stolen data on almost all FBI employeesThe ShinyHunters group says it seized more than 2 TB of data. (Axios)+ Including agents’ names, addresses, and phone numbers. (404 Media)+ ShinyHunters says the attack was retaliation for an FBI alert. (Reuters $)+ Now is a good time for doing crime. (MIT Technology Review) 2 Anthropic and OpenAI have both released lower-cost modelsThey face growing competition from cheaper Chinese models. (CNBC)+ Startups have been reducing their reliance on the two labs. (Bloomberg $)+ The new models are the first since their calls for an AI slowdown. (FT $)+ Their CEOs are set to brief the UN Security Council today. (Quartz)+ Could AI really kill us all? (MIT Technology Review)

3 Trump’s Treasury chief could soon become his new AI czarScott Bessent has played a central role in US-China AI talks. (Semafor)+ Other contenders include Michael Kratsios and Scott Kupor. (Gizmodo)+ Will Trump’s AI rebrand to “superintelligence” catch on? (BBC) 4 Scientists are turning renewable electricity directly into foodThe goal is to make more food with less land. (New Scientist $)+ Companies are creating food out of thin air. (MIT Technology Review) 5 A “fire amoeba” has broken the heat survival record for complex lifeThe newly discovered organism can grow and reproduce at 63°C. (NPR)+ It could inform the search for life elsewhere. (New Scientist $) 6 Meta quietly tested a “human concierge” for its Muse AI agentContractors secretly handled some calls placed by Muse. (Reuters $)+ Staff raised concerns about privacy and misleading users. (404 Media) 7 Data centres are replacing copper with light to cut energy usePhotonics can move data with less heat than electrical wiring. (BBC)+ Virtual power plants could also help. (MIT Technology Review) 8 AI models built from rat brains just got closer to realityAWS is tapping rat neurons to make video AI faster. (Wired $) 9 Uber is betting on human drivers to give its robotaxis an edgeThey can cover demand spikes while autonomous cars recharge. (Axios) 10 A humanoid robot took on an amateur fighter in a cageThe brief bout was billed as the first human-robot MMA fight. (Futurism)
Quote of the day “The use of the word artificial makes it sound fake. It’s not fake; it’s actually amazing.” —President Donald Trump tells the UN General Assembly why he wants to rename AI “superintelligence.” 
One more thing COURTESY OF PAINCHEK AI is changing how we quantify pain At Orchard Care Homes, nurses used to rely on an observational scale to assess pain in residents who couldn’t communicate verbally. But agitated residents were sometimes assumed to have behavioral issues, while their pain went untreated. Then, in 2021, the care-home chain began trialing PainChek, a smartphone app that scans a resident’s face for microscopic muscle movements and uses AI to output a pain score. Within weeks, the pilot unit saw fewer prescriptions and calmer corridors. Now researchers are racing to turn pain into something a camera or sensor can score as reliably as blood pressure. But when algorithms measure our suffering, does that change how we understand and treat it? Discover how AI is changing the way we assess pain. —Deena Mousa
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.) + Scientists have discovered the first new penguin species in more than 100 years.+ Discover the filmmaking skills that made Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop a directing masterclass.+ What happens when fast food meets local tastes? These unusual international menu items offer some tasty answers.+ Dance to every track the crowd has identified at Berghain since 2024 with this media player, which replays each night in sequence. 

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Shubnam was packing boxes for a move into a new home when their friend sent them an Instagram video. The footage had only been up for a few hours, but it was days old, recorded at a Delhi protest this spring against a bill that would have narrowed the legal recognition for transgender people in India.  There, a content creator known for rage-bait videos had approached Shubnam, a 38-year-old transfeminine graphic designer and educator. Shubnam, who uses a single chosen name, was dressed in a green sari with a shaved head, and the creator asked why they were wearing “female clothing.” Shubnam told him to back off. Only when the video arrived did they realize he had recorded the exchange on Meta smart glasses, styled to look like ordinary Wayfarers.  Edited into a mocking reel, the footage drew millions of views, along with transphobic abuse, reaction videos, and AI-generated memes. It spread from Instagram to X and YouTube. Copies remain online today.  For Shubnam, the video has caused huge harm. “All it took was one unconsented video to rewind two decades of progress that I made all on my own,” they told MIT Technology Review. “For a moment, it felt like this entire adult life I had lived was just a long lucid dream, and I was going to wake up as that clueless queer child again.” They haven’t worn a sari outside their neighborhood since.
Experts warn that many others will experience similar ordeals as smart glasses go mainstream. And they say privacy problems are becoming especially acute in India, where covert recording and the circulation of images without consent are already pervasive. Cases of cyberstalking, sextortion, deepfakes, and other forms of online abuse are growing in the country. And the chances of a crackdown on technologies such as smart glasses are slim, given that Indian law enforcement authorities are themselves increasingly adopting AI-powered surveillance tools, including facial recognition systems and their own AI-enabled smart glasses.
An unequal burden Smart glasses are among the fastest-growing devices in India’s wearables market, according to the International Data Corporation, a research firm. And Reliance Jio, one of the country’s largest telecommunications companies, says that later this year it’s set to launch a sub-$105 rival to Meta’s glasses, the latest model of which have a $420 price tag in India.  The core privacy issue is that these cameras don’t look like cameras, so targets may not notice they’re being recorded. Yet Meta rejects the idea that it’s responsible for protecting people from intrusions, says Janusz Świerczyński, an Oxford Saïd Business School researcher who studies privacy and emerging technology. “More and more, the expectation is being placed on bystanders to look out for themselves,” he says. That means it’s up to them to spot a small LED in the glasses frames that activates when recording is in progress. Meta also relies on wearers to behave responsibly, says Świerczyński. Reliance Jio did not respond to our request for comment on privacy issues related to its upcoming glasses.  Creators have already demonstrated ways to circumvent the recording light on Meta’s glasses. Tutorials show users how to cover or otherwise obscure the LED while continuing to record. Back in March, Wired documented a market for “stealth mode” modifications that physically disable the light or remove it entirely.  All that makes covert recording easier, and the risks are not borne equally. Świerczyński says women and other marginalized groups face greater harm when inconspicuous devices capture and circulate footage without consent—as happened to Shubnam. The bigger problem, however, is that in India smart glasses aren’t just being used to turn ordinary people into targets of viral “pranks.” They’re also being adopted as a tool of police surveillance.  In June, when thousands of young demonstrators gathered to protest problems with the country’s education system, Delhi police used Meta smart glasses to record them. In fact, a petition filed by former Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union president Aishe Ghosh before the Delhi High Court alleged that police had filmed protesters continuously for weeks, including while they were eating and resting. It also alleged that the police had threatened to send footage of student demonstrators to their parents and colleges.

In July, India’s solicitor general dismissed the case in court as “luxury litigation.” Instead of investigating the students’ complaints, police turned on the students themselves, opening 10 criminal investigations for offenses including rioting, assault on public servants, and damage to public property. Some of the protesters, who spoke to MIT Technology Review on condition of anonymity, say they never saw the LED on the Meta AI glasses police wore during the demonstrations.  Filming without consent Meta maintains that its safeguard works. The company told MIT Technology Review, “Every pair has a capture LED that blinks when you take a photo or video that you can save or share; it can’t be turned off, and if someone covers or damages the LED, the camera is disabled.” The company also says users are responsible for complying with the law and respecting people’s privacy. That approach is risky, especially in India, where norms around filming and consent are still highly disputed and digital literacy is still uneven, says Sameer Parmar, a counselor at Meri Trustline, a safety partner working with Meta and YouTube to support people harmed by online content.  “The hardware is improving, but the country’s weak understanding of consent gives an invisible camera far more room to cause harm,” he says. Simply being in a public place is often treated as implicit consent to be photographed or filmed. He says the help line has been seeing an uptick in cases involving covert recording and nonconsensual footage. “Violations of this access have increased significantly and are expected to rise further in India,” he says. People are recorded in medical settings, during private encounters, and in public spaces. Those with less power to object are particularly vulnerable, he adds. “It’s either trolling or it’s playing pranks on them and then recording them” he says. Abusers “do target people who are a little more unaware or susceptible to how this technology-facilitated harm works.” The law in India has not caught up with this new kind of harm, says Apar Gupta, a lawyer and founder-director of the Internet Freedom Foundation. “India’s laws against voyeurism and the sharing of intimate images were designed largely around more recognizable forms of abuse,” he says, citing offenses such as secretly filming someone undressing, using a toilet, or engaged in a sexual act. “[The laws] offer limited protection when someone is secretly filmed in an ordinary public setting and the footage is then used to humiliate them,” he says.
Social media platforms’ rules do offer another route to removing harmful content filmed with smart glasses, but it’s not an immediate remedy. “Under India’s current rules, platforms can have up to 36 hours to act on certain complaints—a window that can be long enough for a video to be downloaded, copied, and circulated elsewhere,” he says. The problem of filming without consent seems set to grow. According to the Financial Times, some internal prototypes of new Meta glasses include AI features that continuously photograph and listen to the wearer’s surroundings, enabling the glasses to later recall what they saw or heard. These functions wouldn’t activate the external recording indicator, making it impossible for bystanders to know when information about them is being collected.
Meta told us it intends to keep the LED for active capture, such as taking photos or recording video, but not for AI features that interpret the wearer’s surroundings. Its argument is that a constantly blinking light could eventually become so commonplace that people stop noticing it. But that logic risks putting society in a perpetual game of catch-up, says Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law at Boston University. “Tech companies have an incredible ability to push these tools out faster than society can meaningfully acclimate to the threat,” he says. “By the time society catches up, there’s already a degree of normalization.” For Shubnam, the danger is not just that people may become accustomed to being recorded. It is that they will become accustomed to seeing versions of themselves that they never chose to put out into the world.  “Being comprehended along the lines of a narrative that I didn’t compose or consent to—that imposed recognition makes you feel like you’re powerless in how people know you,” they say. 

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The US has spent billions building a “virtual wall” of surveillance towers along its southern border over the past 25 years, promising they will help detect and apprehend border crossers and save lives. But a groundbreaking investigation by MIT Technology Review has documented over a thousand people who moved through areas watched by these towers without being reached or apprehended, and who ultimately died there. Some were even under the watch of newly installed AI-powered towers designed to spot people automatically. Our findings reveal a humanitarian crisis more visible than previously known, and repeated failures of the virtual wall’s basic security promise. Join MIT Technology Review editors and reporters for a conversation examining the failures of border surveillance technology and uncovering the stories of the people who die in the borderlands. Speakers: Mat Honan, editor in chief, James O’Donnell, senior AI reporter, and Eileen Guo, features and investigations reporter Related Stories

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. Don’t be fooled by this summer of AI hype  —Timnit Gebru, executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), and Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington It’s been a busy few months for AI hype, with companies making breathless claims about hacking, mathematical breakthroughs, and the prospect of self-improving superintelligence. In all these cases, massive fanfare from the companies, presented as mea culpas in the hacking incidents, has been accompanied by intense press coverage. But once experts have had time to examine what happened, very different stories emerge.
There’s a strong commercial incentive to overstate AI capabilities. The authors argue that the illusion of speed and urgency promulgated by the tech companies is also a ploy to misdirect policymakers and the public. Here’s why they say we must remain skeptical about AI hype.
The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 22 nations have called for a new global body to oversee AIThey want pre-deployment testing and common safety standards. (Politico)+ But neither the US nor China are part of the new declaration. (NBC News)+ Meanwhile, OpenAI has proposed its own global AI safety standards. (Axios)+ The company wants the US to lead the international effort. (Reuters $)+ Could AI really kill us all? (MIT Technology Review) 2 Texas and California have moved to rein in data centersTexas has halted new permits pending a grid audit. (NBC News)+ California has passed new laws covering power and water use. (LA Times $)+ Data centers are amazing. Everyone hates them. (MIT Technology Review) 3 Chipmaker AMD has become the twelfth $1 trillion companyAI chip sales have helped its shares rise more than 180% this year. (CNBC)+ Hyperscalers are making a trillion-dollar bet on AI. (MIT Technology Review) 4 Meta’s AI agent Muse has overtaken ChatGPT to top the US App StoreIt’s helped set Meta shares for their best month in 13 years. (Quartz)+ But Muse has a major zero-day vulnerability. (Ars Technica)+ And Amazon has blocked the agent from shopping on its site. (GeekWire) 5 A new edible battery could power medical devices inside the bodyIt could run sensors, cameras, and drug-delivery capsules. (Economist $)+ It’s been tested in pigs with an RFID tracker and stomach stimulator. (Nature) 6 Trump’s budget chief could gain veto power over NIH grantsThe NIH is the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. (Ars Technica)+ Trump’s firings dealt another blow to science. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Epigenetic editing has reached human trials for hepatitis BThe treatment uses chemical tags to shut down viral DNA. (Nature) 8 Tree vaccines and gene-edited butterflies have won UK biotech fundingThe projects aim to boost nature’s adaptation to climate change.(Guardian)+ Why this summer was so hot—and 2027 could be worse. (MIT Technology Review) 9 A rocket shortage is making it harder to get satellites into spaceSpaceX is winding down Falcon 9 as rivals struggle to catch up. (WSJ $) 10 Something has gone badly wrong with Dyson’s $500 toothbrushA mysterious “component issue” has emerged. (Wired $) Quote of the day “If AI succeeds, then it may kill all of our jobs. If it fails, then the whole economy falls apart, and your 401(k) blows up, and maybe you still lose your job.” —Ben Casselman, the New York Times’s chief economics correspondent, explains why people feel trapped in a lose-lose dynamic with the AI boom. One more thing How wind tech could help decarbonize cargo shipping Cargo shipping is responsible for about 3% of the world’s annual greenhouse-gas emissions, and the industry is under pressure to find alternatives to fossil fuels. Wind power is one option.
In the Marshall Islands, where people have relied on wind-powered vessels for millennia, a new cargo sailboat inspired by traditional vessels made its maiden voyage last year. It could cut emissions by up to 80% compared with a fuel-powered cargo ship. See how engineers are bringing wind power back to cargo shipping.
—Sofia Quaglia We can still have nice things

It’s been a busy few months for AI hype. At the end of April, Anthropic claimed that its model Claude Mythos is better at finding software vulnerabilities than most security experts. Then we had the OpenAI–Hugging Face hacking incident, after which Anthropic (proudly) and Meta (reluctantly) disclosed similar incidents involving their models. This was followed by Anthropic’s claim that one of its models had made a mathematical breakthrough; soon OpenAI claimed a mathematical breakthrough of its own. Most recently, Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon went viral announcing his departure from the company, claiming that it and OpenAI are “racing straight towards self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Each of these events was mostly covered breathlessly by the press, often repeating the companies’ anthropomorphizing framings—which are designed to portray their software is not only powerful but incipient “artificial general intelligence.” So what is really going on? Are we witnessing a massive, civilization-changing set of technological breakthroughs, or is this marketing? In all these incidents, massive fanfare from the companies (presented as mea culpas in illicit hacking cases) is accompanied by intense press coverage. Once there is time for experts in the relevant fields to examine what happened, a very different story emerges, but one that gets less media attention.
Regarding the “hacking” incidents, cybersecurity experts say the story is more about OpenAI’s negligence and failure to adopt basic, established security practices than about “models gone rogue” or “AI agents creating civilizations.”  As for the mathematical results, mathematicians who were initially “stunned” by OpenAI’s press release saying that its latest chatbot, Astra, solved problems that “have been open and seen no progress on the main result for at least a decade”—but they later realized that the results weren’t as “novel as first appeared.” Since then, mathematicians have accused the company of research misconduct and plagiarism, and they’ve reiterated that Astra didn’t make a “profound intellectual leap.” Just weeks later, OpenAI claimed its own mathematical breakthrough. Two days before, Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at New York University’s Courant Institute, published a bombshell statement suggesting that OpenAI had stolen other people’s work and improperly attributed it. 
Claims of incipient, dangerous superintelligence are not based in good scientific or engineering practice. Rather, they are narratives based in ideologies of transhumanism, eugenics, and wishful thinking about imagined future digital humans. It’s worth thinking about why there is so much attention on computer programming and math as fields in which to apply large language models and related technology. Not only are they often elevated as the pinnacle of human intellectual achievement, but they involve problems where answers, once suggested, can be verified. The former property helps AI hype mongers sell the idea that they are building everything machines. The latter makes math and coding problems easier to tune systems for, since system output (sequences of likely words or pieces of computer code) can be evaluated without having to pay data workers to look at and annotate each one. Mathematicians in particular have warned against corporations using their field in this way. A statement signed by hundreds of them says there is “currently a strong commercial incentive on the part of the technology industry to overstate the capabilities of their products” and asks policymakers to “consult with experts, including mathematicians, in forming policy decisions rather than relying on press releases or popular reporting of mathematical results.” We echo this call and note that the illusion of speed and urgency promulgated by the tech companies is also a ploy to misdirect both policymakers and the public. Unfortunately, it sometimes works, such as with Senator Bernie Sanders’s well-meaning but ultimately misguided proposed legislation to prevent the development of “artificial superintelligence.” Describing them as “superintelligence” or “rogue models” ascribes agency to products rather than to the companies building them. This framing markets these companies’ products as “superhuman” and, at the same time, helps the companies evade accountability for their actions.  Instead of OpenAI being prosecuted for creating malware that hacked another company, press releases, news outlets, media personalities, and lawmakers refer to “rogue models” as if they acted on their own. Instead of researchers being questioned about their companies’ habit of plagiarizing academics’ work or using customer data to train models without consent, the public’s imagination is redirected to fears about what the future might hold upon the arrival of fictional superintelligent machines.   The AI industry has even suggested that popular, bipartisan anti-data-center activism is a “distraction” from attempts to regulate the impending, scary, “superhuman” machines these companies are building. According to the AI industry, we should be more worried about a fictional machine god than about the climate catastrophe that these data centers exacerbate, the asthma suffered by those living near them, the rising electricity bills of the public subsidizing them, or the water that is redirected to cooling them.  We know better than to make decisions based on marketing and better than to capitulate to corporate pressure to make those decisions quickly. Wise decision-making, by policymakers and communities, demands time to hear from independent experts and contextualize corporate claims. The best possible outcome from this summer of hype is that policymakers and the public at large learn to take a breath, hold onto our skepticism, and recognize this kind of hype for what it is the next time it comes around. Timnit Gebru is executive director of DAIR and author of the forthcoming book Deep Unlearning: The Radicalization of a Tech Idealist, which is available for preorders now and set to publish on February 16. Emily M. Bender is professor of linguistics at the University of Washington and coauthor of The AI Con.