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Google reports a data center issue is causing a partial Search disruption, affecting some pages in certain locales.
Microsoft has rolled out a redesigned Bing Places for Business platform, moving business listing management to bing.com/forbusiness and introducing a new recommendation tool with streamlined import workflows.
The platform lets businesses create and manage listings across Bing Search and Bing Maps at no cost. Consolidating the experience under the Bing.com domain is meant to make the product easier to find and use.
Microsoft says the redesign follows months of research with business owners who reported difficulty discovering the product, navigating the interface, and importing locations at scale.
Microsoft wrote:
“Before we wrote a single line of code, we spent months listening to business owners about their challenges and goals.”
Here’s what Microsoft added after those discussions.
For multi-location brands and agencies, Microsoft has overhauled the Google import flow.
The update aims to preserve key attributes, such as names, hours, and contact details, while also introducing more efficient management features, including dashboards, bulk editing, and real-time status updates.
A new Recommendation Tool evaluates listing health and suggests specific additions, such as photos, website and social links, hours, and category-specific items. For restaurants, that can include menu links or online ordering.
The feature is designed to help owners who may be newer to local SEO prioritize high-impact fields.
Current Bing Places users and their listings are being migrated automatically. Logging in with existing credentials redirects to the new experience.
Microsoft says more updates will roll out in the coming months, including deeper integrations with Bing Maps and Copilot and expanded support for agencies and partners.
A Bing Places profile can appear in Bing search results and on Bing Maps. That includes the map results and the place page people see when they click through for directions, call, or website info.
Claiming and keeping your listing up to date helps Microsoft show accurate location, hours, and contact details across Bing’s local results and Maps. In short, you control what customers see when they find you on Bing.
The improved Google import process simplifies keeping your Bing listing in step with your Google Business Profile.
The new Bing Places for Business is live at bing.com/forbusiness.
Featured Image: PixieMe/Shutterstock
A report from Unbounce shows that unoptimized mobile landing pages are costly, finding 83% of visits come from mobile devices, yet desktop pages convert 8% better.
Based on over 57 million conversions and 41,000 pages, the study highlights the need for the industry to adapt as mobile traffic increases but underperforms.
Unbounce’s Conversion Benchmark Report has a clear message:
“If you’re still building your landing pages for desktop first, with the mobile version being just a quick box to check before publishing, chances are you’re missing out big time.”
While mobile accounted for the vast majority of landing page visits, desktop pages outperformed by a notable margin.
The report asserts:
“An 8% gap in conversion rates is significant, but it gets even worse when you look at the number of conversions lost. If all industries optimized their pages, we might have reported over 1.3 million more conversions.”
Unbounce’s research indicates that the median conversion rate across all industries is 6.6 percent, with specific verticals varying from 3.8 percent to 12.3 percent.
Marketers can use this benchmark as a reference point, the report notes:
“Higher than the median? Your page is converting better than most. Lower than the median? Your page is converting worse than most.”
It warns that benchmarks only measure how often conversions happen, not their value or quality. This is especially important for campaigns aimed at high-value leads or sales, where just the raw conversion rate might not provide the full picture.
The research highlights that simpler language on landing pages tends to perform better.
Pages written at a 5th to 7th grade level see an 11 percent conversion rate, which is 56 percent higher than pages at an 8th to 9th grade level, and more than twice as effective as professional-level writing.
Unbounce warns:
“There’s a high likelihood that your conversion rate will drop as you add more difficult words to the page.”
Complex words with three or more syllables have a negative impact, showing a 24.3 percent decrease in connection with conversion rates.
As Unbounce puts it:
“Simple copy converts.”
Analyzing conversion performance across paid and organic channels, the report reveals that email is the top performer with an average conversion rate of 19.3 percent.
Paid social platforms such as Instagram (17.9 percent) and Facebook (13 percent) also perform well, surpassing paid search channels like Google Ads.
As digital marketing evolves to prioritize mobile users and attention spans become shorter, maintaining fresh and optimized landing pages is key to ensuring your campaigns succeed.
These findings align with industry trends toward minimal UX, more A/B testing, and re-evaluating marketing channels.
Unbounce’s study serves as a reminder to examine landing pages more closely, particularly on mobile devices, and benchmark results against industry standards.
The full report provides practical advice, including optimizing for various devices, simplifying landing page messaging, and implementing A/B testing. Acting on these insights could help recover lost conversions.
Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock
Part of our work at OGS Media with Reddit is making it easier for brands to get on the platform the right way: transparent, authentic, and really connecting with your audience. Some of that happens through our partnership, working with various teams at Reddit, testing new features, and sharing insights from the brands we’re currently managing.
Another part of that is through hosting Ask Me Anything (AMAs) like the one I did last week on r/RedditForBusiness.
The questions that came in reminded me why this work matters. After nearly two decades on the platform and working with brands like TikTok, Purple, and Asurion, I see how brands are genuinely trying to figure out Reddit. The AMA drew questions from marketers across industries, from early-stage startups to enterprise brands, all working to understand how to show up authentically.
Let me walk you through the biggest themes that emerged and what actually works on Reddit.
Multiple people asked variations of the same question: “What’s the biggest mistake brands make when they first start marketing on Reddit?”
“Most brands find Reddit through their online marketing teams. They see that Reddit is showing up in Google search results or they see it in LLMs. But when looking at who should give Reddit a try, it still ends up landing in their online marketing teams. Online marketers have been held to ROI numbers for so long, it’s how they look at their engagement on Reddit.
There’s an interest in being on Reddit because it’s popular and important, but there’s not enough time spent understanding why Reddit is important and that’s what I think is the biggest mistake brands make.”
The root problem? Brands need to understand what makes Reddit so powerful in the online user’s journey, how subreddits operate as individual communities with their own rules, culture, and expectations. How the journey to learning and making decisions is as important as the outcome.
When one marketer asked how to avoid the anti-promotional backlash, I explained:
“As for the line between contribution and self-promotion, I think that’s often more of a feeling than a line. It takes understanding the community, what they expect and need, what they appreciate and what they despise. The best marketers know how to ‘read the room’ and know their audience, start with being helpful first, and wait for that moment when what they have to offer is what you’re asking for, so that they’re never selling you something, but rather helping you out with a solution they just happen to have.”
A marketer with years of experience asked why traditional social media approaches don’t translate to Reddit success. The answer gets to the heart of what makes Reddit different:
“It really comes down to a large segment of the world wanting to engage in conversation, versus just watching streams for updates and entertainment.
It was long after social media really came out that marketers started really looking at it for the exposure and traffic it could drive. This created two avenues: a megaphone to share information and customer service.
Neither of these helps people who are on a journey to learn something, engage in conversations or discussions around a topic of interest, or to find a solution to a problem they need solved.
Traditional social media doesn’t work here because it is not about conversation, it is about promotion and marketing.”
The fundamental shift brands need to make? Stop thinking about Reddit like Facebook or LinkedIn with stricter rules. Instead:
“Start thinking about Reddit like a networking event, a cocktail party, a social event. How would you approach and engage with an actual event, versus posting content on a social media platform.
It simply comes down to the intent.”
Reddit operates more like walking into a conference where each subreddit is a different breakout session with its own culture, expectations, and unwritten rules. You can’t just grab the microphone and start pitching; you need to listen, contribute, and earn your place in the conversation.
This understanding leads directly to what actually works on Reddit.
When asked for the top do’s and don’ts, I broke it down to the essentials:
“Really become a Redditor:
- Find communities that you are a good fit to belong to (from the Redditor point of view).
- Focus on engaging and helping Redditors through discussion.”
“Give this task to your marketing team (well, not only your marketing team).
- Treat subreddits like categories.
- Focus on KPIs outside Reddit.”
That first “don’t” surprises people, but it’s critical. Here’s the thing: Marketing teams are trained to chase quarterly numbers, to show immediate ROI, to justify every dollar spent. But Reddit operates on relationship timelines, not campaign cycles.
When you hand Reddit to someone who’s measured on conversion rates and cost-per-click, they’re going to treat it like another performance channel. They’ll miss what actually matters, the compound value of becoming part of the conversation, of genuinely helping solve problems, of building trust that turns your brand into the solution people recommend when someone asks for help six months from now.
The real ROI on Reddit isn’t in the traffic you drive this quarter; it’s in becoming the answer that shows up in Google searches and AI responses for years to come because you took the time to build authentic authority in your communities.
This came up multiple times, so here’s the realistic timeline:
“Some of our clients see Reddit become their primary funnel within three months. Some rank with their content prominently within 30 days. Some show up everywhere in LLMs inside six months. Some clients get information that changes their whole business within three months. One very large brand turned around its brand sentiment in about nine months. So it is just dependent on what impact means to you.”
But the general rule: Six to 12 months for meaningful impact, assuming you’re doing it right.
One of the most practical questions was how to succeed without actually selling products. I responded:
“Overall, the premise is you don’t sell products on Reddit. You solve problems. Help people with their actual problems, and they’ll ask what you recommend. That’s when you mention your solution. However, some communities do want product posts, like fashion or deal subreddits. It depends on what you’re selling. But the smart move is be helpful first, then run ads where people need your product. You get conversions from ads plus trust from being genuinely useful.”
This is where a lot of brands get tripped up. They think “no selling” means they can never mention their product. That’s not it at all. It’s about context and timing.
Interestingly, questions came from both ends of the spectrum, pre-launch startups and established enterprise companies. The answer was the same for both:
“I think that the pathway for every brand, early stage, prelaunch, or established, should be about understanding what their audience on Reddit really needs from them, what their customers journey through Reddit looks like, and what the opportunities are for the brand to connect with those customers at the right time, with the right conversations, and with the intent to help them move through their journey to completion.”
The process is the same regardless of company size. It takes time, it takes commitment, and it informs the brand what their customers actually need, what they think about the industry, the brand, and its competitors.
When someone asked about responding to criticism, here’s the reality check:
“What I will say, is that arguing and getting defensive almost NEVER works. Remember you and the people you are talking with are humans, so what would you do in real life? I never think it hurts to give a quick and honest apology (through DM if needed). Something human. People soften when they realize they are talking to another person.”
This ties back to the networking event concept. If someone called you out at a conference, you wouldn’t start arguing with them in front of everyone. You’d handle it like a human being.
Another practical question that came up was what brands should actually focus on during their first three months on Reddit. Based on our work with enterprise clients, there’s a specific methodology that works.
The biggest temptation for new brands is to jump in and start posting immediately. That’s exactly backwards.
The first month isn’t about your brand at all; it’s about becoming a genuine Redditor. We have our clients’ team members join communities related to their personal interests first. Love cooking? Join r/cooking. Into photography? Find your camera subreddit. This isn’t marketing; it’s learning how Reddit actually works.
Simultaneously, we’re conducting what we call “deep audience immersion.” Before posting a single thing, we spend weeks analyzing subreddit discussions to understand what your audience actually cares about. We map user journeys, identify pain points, and document the language and tone that resonates within each community.
During this phase, we also establish your brand subreddit as a “home base” and create one to two employee accounts for future engagement. But these accounts don’t engage with business topics yet. They’re building karma and credibility in personal interest areas.
Month 2 is when we start engaging authentically within your industry communities, but still not promoting anything. Team members begin participating in discussions where their expertise adds genuine value. The key is engaging as knowledgeable individuals who happen to work at your company, not as company representatives.
We’re also developing content during this phase, but it’s all based on real user conversations we’ve observed. Every post, comment, and engagement has a purpose rooted in solving actual problems we’ve seen discussed.
The third month is when content strategy kicks into high gear, but it’s informed by everything we’ve learned. We map high-traffic discussions and ensure your brand is present when it matters most, without being intrusive.
We call this “smart engagement timing,” appearing in conversations not because we’re pushing an agenda, but because we genuinely have something valuable to contribute.
This approach works. One client, Devicie, went from relative obscurity to authentic industry credibility within their first quarter. They saw a 2,000% increase in Reddit visibility, 528 total upvotes across community-driven posts, 271% growth in meaningful conversations, and enterprise leads sourced directly from Reddit engagement.
But more importantly, Reddit became an engine for their entire business strategy, informing everything from product development to sales conversations.
The 90-day approach isn’t about quick wins, but rather building the foundation for long-term success that compounds over time.
Multiple people asked whether Reddit should replace other marketing channels. Here’s the perspective:
“I don’t know that I would ever put all my eggs in one basket, but I would say that for me, and for a lot of people I know in the SEO space, Reddit is a very important investment to make. The largest impact you can have to search right now in my opinion, as well as for LLM search, is to have high quality problem solving discussions that include your brand on Reddit.”
And when someone joked about trends we’ll cringe at in 10 years, the response was simple:
“Questioning whether Reddit is a good investment to make for your brand.”
The questions from this AMA reinforce what I’ve been seeing for years: Brands know Reddit is important, but they’re approaching it with the wrong frameworks. They’re trying to apply Facebook advertising logic to a platform that operates more like a collection of professional associations or hobby clubs.
The brands that succeed on Reddit understand this fundamental difference. They show up as humans first, experts second, and companies third. They solve problems instead of pushing products. They invest time in understanding communities instead of treating them as advertising categories.
Most importantly, they recognize that Reddit success isn’t about gaming the system; it’s about genuinely participating in it. That takes longer than running ads, requires more nuance than posting content, and demands more authenticity than most marketing teams are used to providing.
But for the brands that get it right? Reddit becomes more than a marketing channel. It becomes a competitive advantage that’s incredibly difficult for competitors to replicate.
If you have questions about Reddit marketing, feel free to jump into the original AMA thread or connect with me on LinkedIn, where I post most of my Reddit thoughts.
More Resources:
Featured Image: Courtesy of r/RedditforBusiness
In late 2023, a long-trusted virtualization staple became the biggest open question on the enterprise IT roadmap.
Amid concerns of VMware licensing changes and steeper support costs, analysts noticed an exodus mentality. Forrester predicted that one in five large VMware customers would begin moving away from the platform in 2024. A subsequent Gartner community poll found that 74% of respondents were rethinking their VMware relationship in light of recent changes. CIOs contending with pricing hikes and product roadmap opacity face a daunting choice: double‑down on a familiar but costlier stack, or use the disruption to rethink how—and where—critical workloads should run.
“There’s still a lot of uncertainty in the marketplace around VMware,” explains Matt Crognale, senior director, migrations and modernization at cloud modernization firm Effectual, adding that the VMware portfolio has been streamlined and refocused over the past couple of years. “The portfolio has been trimmed down to a core offering focused on the technology versus disparate systems.”
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.
This content was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.
On Wednesday, federal EV tax credits in the US officially came to an end.
Those credits, expanded and extended in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, gave drivers up to $7,500 in credits toward the purchase of a new electric vehicle. They’ve been a major force in cutting the up-front costs of EVs, pushing more people toward purchasing them and giving automakers confidence that demand would be strong.
The tax credits’ demise comes at a time when battery-electric vehicles still make up a small percentage of new vehicle sales in the country. And transportation is a major contributor to US climate pollution, with cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes together making up roughly 30% of total greenhouse-gas emissions.
To anticipate what’s next for the US EV market, we can look to countries like Germany, which have ended similar subsidy programs. (Spoiler alert: It’s probably going to be a rough end to the year.)
When you factor in fuel savings, the lifetime cost of an EV can already be lower than that of a gas-powered vehicle today. But EVs can have a higher up-front cost, which is why some governments offer a tax credit or rebate that can help boost adoption for the technology.
In 2016, Germany kicked off a national incentive program to encourage EV sales. While the program was active, drivers could get grants of up to about €6,000 toward the purchase of a new battery-electric or plug-in hybrid vehicle.
Eventually, the government began pulling back the credits. Support for plug-in hybrids ended in 2022, and commercial buyers lost eligibility in September 2023. Then the entire program came to a screeching halt in December 2023, when the government announced it would be ending the incentives with about one week’s notice.
Monthly sales data shows the fingerprints of those changes. In each case where there’s a contraction of public support, there’s a peak in sales just before a cutback, then a crash after. These short-term effects can be dramatic: There were about half as many battery-electric vehicles sold in Germany in January 2024 than there were in December 2023.
We’re already seeing the first half of this sort of boom-bust cycle in the US: EV sales ticked up in August, making up about 10% of all new vehicle sales, and analysts say September will turn out to be a record-breaking month. People rushed to take advantage of the credits while they still could.
Next comes the crash—the next few months will probably be very slow for EVs. One analyst predicted to the Washington Post that the figure could plummet to the low single digits, “like 1 or 2%.”
Ultimately, it’s not terribly surprising that there are local effects around these policy changes. “The question is really how long this decline will last, and how slowly any recovery in the growth will be,” Robbie Andrew, a senior researcher at the CICERO Center for International Climate Research in Norway who collects EV sales data, said in an email.
When I spoke to experts (including Andrew) for a story last year, several told me that Germany’s subsidies were ending too soon, and that they were concerned about what cutting off support early would mean for the long-term prospects of the technology in the country. And Germany was much further along than the US, with EVs making up 20% of new vehicle sales—twice the American proportion.
EV growth did see a longer-term backslide in Germany after the end of the subsidies. Battery-electric vehicles made up 13.5% of new registrations in 2024, down from 18.5% the year before, and the UK also passed Germany to become Europe’s largest EV market.
Things have improved this year, with sales in the first half beating records set in 2023. But growth would need to pick up significantly for Germany to reach its goal of getting 15 million battery-electric vehicles registered in the country by 2030. As of January 2025, that number was just 1.65 million.
According to early projections, the end of tax credits in the US could significantly slow progress on EVs and, by extension, on cutting emissions. Sales of battery-electric vehicles could be about 40% lower in 2030 without the credits than what we’d see with them, according to one analysis by Princeton University’s Zero Lab.
Some US states still have their own incentive programs for people looking to buy electric vehicles. But without federal support, the US is likely to continue lagging behind global EV leaders like China.
As Andrew put it: “From a climate perspective, with road transport responsible for almost a quarter of US total emissions, leaving the low-hanging fruit on the tree is a significant setback.”
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, 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.
EV tax credits are dead in the US. Now what?
Federal EV tax credits in the US officially came to an end yesterday.
Those credits, expanded and extended in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, gave drivers up to $7,500 toward the purchase of a new electric vehicle. They’ve been a major force in cutting the up-front costs of EVs, pushing more people toward purchasing them and giving automakers confidence that demand would be strong.
The tax credits’ demise comes at a time when battery-electric vehicles still make up a small percentage of new vehicle sales in the country. So what’s next for the US EV market?
—Casey Crownhart
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
If you’re interested in reading more about EVs and clean energy, take a look at:
+ The US could really use an affordable electric truck. Ford recently announced plans for a $30,000 electric pickup, which could be the shot in the arm that the slowing US EV market needs. Read the full story.
+ What role should oil and gas companies play in climate tech, really?
+ China is an EV-building powerhouse. These three charts explain its energy dominance. Read the full story.
+ Supporting new technologies like EVs can be expensive, but deciding when to wean the public off incentives can be a difficult balancing act. Read the full story.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 OpenAI has become the world’s most valuable startup
Move aside, SpaceX. (Bloomberg $)
+ OpenAI is now valued at an eye-watering $500 billion. (FT $)
+ The valuation came after workers sold around $6.6 billion in shares. (Reuters)
2 Music labels are close to striking AI licensing deals
Universal and Warner are trying their best to avoid the mis-steps of the internet era. (FT $)
+ AI is coming for music, too. (MIT Technology Review)
3 Facebook’s political ads are full of spam and scams
And deepfake technology is making them more convincing than ever. (NYT $)
+ Meta will start using conversations with its chatbots to personalize ads. (WSJ $)
4 China is forging ahead with integrating AI tools into children’s lives
But educators worry they’ll harm youngsters’ learning and social skills. (Rest of World)
+ Chinese universities want students to use more AI, not less. (MIT Technology Review)
5 The batteries of the future could be created by AI
Researchers including Microsoft are experimenting with materials suggested by models. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ This startup wants to use the Earth as a massive battery. (MIT Technology Review)
6 A historian claims to have used AI to identify an anonymous Nazi
Digital tools helped Jürgen Matthäus to pinpoint the person photographed beside a mass grave. (The Guardian)
7 The Pentagon is interested in AI-powered machine guns that shoot drones
Steven Simoni’s Allen Control Systems is part of Silicon Valley’s new military pivot. (Reuters)
+ We saw a demo of the new AI system powering Anduril’s vision for war. (MIT Technology Review)
8 One of Saturn’s moons may have once hosted life 
Enceladus has all the necessary keystones to support life, and future missions could uncover it. (Scientific American $)
+ Meanwhile, Blue Origin has won a NASA rover contract. (Wired $)
+ The case against humans in space. (MIT Technology Review)
9 Chatbots exercise all sorts of tricks to keep you talking
They don’t want the conversation to end, a new study has found. (Wired $)
10 What it’s like to become a viral meme
Drew Scanlon, aka “Blinking Guy,” is leveraging his fame for a good cause. (SF Gate)
Quote of the day
“I cannot overstate how disgusting I find this kind of ‘AI’ dog shit in the first place, never mind under these circumstances.”
—Writer Luke O’Neil tells 404 Media his feelings about an AI-generated “biography” of journalist Kaleb Horton, who recently died.
One more thing
A day in the life of a Chinese robotaxi driver
When Liu Yang started his current job, he found it hard to go back to driving his own car: “I instinctively went for the passenger seat. Or when I was driving, I would expect the car to brake by itself,” says the 33-year-old Beijing native, who joined the Chinese tech giant Baidu in January 2021 as a robotaxi driver.
Liu is one of the hundreds of safety operators employed by Baidu, “driving” five days a week in Shougang Park. But despite having only worked for the company for 19 months, he already has to think about his next career move, as his job will likely be eliminated within a few years. Read the full story.
—Zeyi Yang
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ Congratulations are in order for 32 Chunk, winner of this year’s highly prestigious Fat Bear Week competition 
+ Here’s how 10 women artists got their days off to the best start possible.
+ This Instagram account documenting the worldly travels of a cassette player is fab.
+ Brb, I’m off to listen to Arctic Outpost Radio, spinning records from the very top of the world.
A team at Microsoft says it used artificial intelligence to discover a “zero day” vulnerability in the biosecurity systems used to prevent the misuse of DNA.
These screening systems are designed to stop people from purchasing genetic sequences that could be used to create deadly toxins or pathogens. But now researchers led by Microsoft’s chief scientist, Eric Horvitz, says they have figured out how to bypass the protections in a way previously unknown to defenders.
The team described its work today in the journal Science.
Horvitz and his team focused on generative AI algorithms that propose new protein shapes. These types of programs are already fueling the hunt for new drugs at well-funded startups like Generate Biomedicines and Isomorphic Labs, a spinout of Google.
The problem is that such systems are potentially “dual use.” They can use their training sets to generate both beneficial molecules and harmful ones.
Microsoft says it began a “red-teaming” test of AI’s dual-use potential in 2023 in order to determine whether “adversarial AI protein design” could help bioterrorists manufacture harmful proteins.
The safeguard that Microsoft attacked is what’s known as biosecurity screening software. To manufacture a protein, researchers typically need to order a corresponding DNA sequence from a commercial vendor, which they can then install in a cell. Those vendors use screening software to compare incoming orders with known toxins or pathogens. A close match will set off an alert.
To design its attack, Microsoft used several generative protein models (including its own, called EvoDiff) to redesign toxins—changing their structure in a way that let them slip past screening software but was predicted to keep their deadly function intact.
The researchers say the exercise was entirely digital and they never produced any toxic proteins. That was to avoid any perception that the company was developing bioweapons.
Before publishing the results, Microsoft says, it alerted the US government and software makers, who’ve already patched their systems, although some AI-designed molecules can still escape detection.
“The patch is incomplete, and the state of the art is changing. But this isn’t a one-and-done thing. It’s the start of even more testing,” says Adam Clore, director of technology R&D at Integrated DNA Technologies, a large manufacturer of DNA, who is a coauthor on the Microsoft report. “We’re in something of an arms race.”
To make sure nobody misuses the research, the researchers say, they’re not disclosing some of their code and didn’t reveal what toxic proteins they asked the AI to redesign. However, some dangerous proteins are well known, like ricin—a poison found in castor beans—and the infectious prions that are the cause of mad-cow disease.
“This finding, combined with rapid advances in AI-enabled biological modeling, demonstrates the clear and urgent need for enhanced nucleic acid synthesis screening procedures coupled with a reliable enforcement and verification mechanism,” says Dean Ball, a fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, a think tank in San Francisco.
Ball notes that the US government already considers screening of DNA orders a key line of security. Last May, in an executive order on biological research safety, President Trump called for an overall revamp of that system, although so far the White House hasn’t released new recommendations.
Others doubt that commercial DNA synthesis is the best point of defense against bad actors. Michael Cohen, an AI-safety researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, believes there will always be ways to disguise sequences and that Microsoft could have made its test harder.
“The challenge appears weak, and their patched tools fail a lot,” says Cohen. “There seems to be an unwillingness to admit that sometime soon, we’re going to have to retreat from this supposed choke point, so we should start looking around for ground that we can actually hold.”
Cohen says biosecurity should probably be built into the AI systems themselves—either directly or via controls over what information they give.
But Clore says monitoring gene synthesis is still a practical approach to detecting biothreats, since the manufacture of DNA in the US is dominated by a few companies that work closely with the government. By contrast, the technology used to build and train AI models is more widespread. “You can’t put that genie back in the bottle,” says Clore. “If you have the resources to try to trick us into making a DNA sequence, you can probably train a large language model.”
AI shopping agents, once a combination of novelty and hype, are becoming a viable ecommerce sales channel.
Last month, Google and Stripe announced new shopping and payment processing tools for AI-related purchases.
Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) offer a degree of transaction standards for agent-based commerce.
That standard addresses concerns about turning AI-driven discovery into sales while keeping payments safe and authorized.
For example, how does a merchant know if a human authorized an AI agent to make a purchase? Who is responsible if the buyer contests it?
Once a novelty, AI shopping agents are becoming a reality for consumers.
AP2 seeks to answer those questions. The protocol provides a framework for authenticating and validating AI-led transactions, enabling banks, merchants, and consumers to trust the outcome.
The solution uses what Google called “tamper-proof, cryptographically-signed digital” mandates with verifiable credentials.
A mandate is a digital contract between the shopper and her AI agent. It proves what she asked the agent to do and under what conditions. That mandate then becomes the evidence that merchants and payment providers can rely on if she disputes the transaction.
AP2 documents the mandate when, for instance, a shopper tells an AI interface to buy a pair of blue, size 10 men’s running shoes. Thus AP2 could be a foundation for agentic commerce that payment networks, regulators, and retailers can accept as legitimate.
While AP2 focuses on trust and authorization, Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol focuses on turning conversations into transactions. ACP provides merchants with a way to present products, pricing, and checkout information in a format usable by AI agents.
Behind the scenes, Stripe issues a Shared Payment Token that passes payment details from the AI agent to the merchant without exposing the shopper’s credentials. The order itself flows into the merchant’s backend via ACP to be accepted and fulfilled, like any other ecommerce order, which the buyer can return later.
Stripe launched ACP alongside its Instant Checkout in ChatGPT. U.S.-based Etsy sellers are the first participants, with Shopify merchants expected to follow. A shopper asks ChatGPT for recommendations, chooses a product, and completes payment through a Stripe-powered checkout without leaving the chat.
New technologies often create both opportunities and challenges. For merchants, agentic commerce is no exception.
A promising opportunity may lie in latent demand. Shoppers sometimes want to buy a product, but the item is out of stock, too expensive, or takes too long to ship. A simple search doesn’t result in a sale.
An AI shopping agent could scour dozens or even hundreds of merchant sites and feeds, identifying the proper product at the right price, which the consumer would have otherwise missed. This solves the latent demand.
Yet instantly comparing prices, shipping rates, and product availability across many merchants creates intense competition. That’s the challenge.
It could even lead to platform pressure, where merchants are present on multiple channels — Etsy, Shopify, Amazon, eBay, and others — to access the dozens of AI shopping portals.
Imagine a shopper prompting an AI agent to “look for noise-canceling headphones less than $200, and buy them if they go on sale during Black Friday.”
The agent monitors products, validates prices, and executes purchases automatically. The scenario — an AI agent shopping for a human — is futuristic, but is also familiar to those old enough.
In his 1999 book, “Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers,” Seth Godin argued that interruption marketing — television commercials, display ads, email promos — was losing its effectiveness. Businesses needed consumer consent to build ongoing relationships. Permission, not promotion, was the key.
Shoppers who allowed merchants to execute purchases on their behalf were Godin’s ultimate example of trust.
In all likelihood, agentic commerce will depend on the same foundation Godin described a generation ago: trust and consent.
The key will be how ecommerce businesses react when algorithms programmatically select and buy products.
Permission marketing, such as opt-in email, forced merchants to rethink customer relationships. Similarly, agentic commerce could require merchants to prove reliability, value, and transparency.
Success may hinge less on who has the flashiest storefront and more on which merchants provide the cleanest data, fairest pricing, and the most dependable fulfillment for AI agents to recognize.
Perplexity released its Comet browser to everyone today, shifting from a waitlist to free desktop downloads worldwide.
Comet bakes an AI assistant into every new tab so you can ask questions, summarize pages, and navigate without jumping between search results and multiple tools.
Perplexity first introduced Comet in July in a limited release. Since then, the company says “millions” have joined the waitlist, and early users asked 6–18 times more questions on day one.
The move poses a challenge to traditional search engines and browsers by adopting an AI-first approach to web navigation, which reduces the need for multiple searches and the management of numerous tabs.
At the core of Comet’s functionality is the Comet Assistant, an AI-powered helper that browses alongside users and handles tasks such as research, meeting support, coding assistance, and e-commerce activities.
The assistant appears in every new tab, ready to answer questions or complete actions without requiring users to navigate away from their current workflow.
Unlike traditional browsers where users must open a separate search engine, copy information between tabs, or use multiple tools, Comet integrates assistance directly into the browsing experience. You can ask questions in natural language, and the assistant provides answers drawn from web sources.
Perplexity also announced Background Assistants today. These assistants work simultaneously and asynchronously in the background, handling tasks without requiring active user supervision.
The Background Assistants join the recently announced Email Assistant, currently available to Max Subscribers. The Email Assistant can be cc’d on email threads to handle scheduling, draft replies, and manage inbox tasks without opening a separate application.
While Comet has been desktop-only since its July launch, Perplexity recently previewed mobile versions for iPhone and Android.
The mobile version will include voice technology, allowing users to interact with Comet assistants through speech rather than typing.
Comet is now available for free download at perplexity.ai/comet for desktop users.
For tips on using the browser, see Perplexity’s resource hub.
Featured Image: Sidney van den Boogaard/Shutterstock