MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.
Every time OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic drops a new frontier large language model, the AI community holds its breath. It doesn’t exhale until METR, an AI research nonprofit whose name stands for “Model Evaluation & Threat Research,” updates a now-iconic graph that has played a major role in the AI discourse since it was first released in March of last year. The graph suggests that certain AI capabilities are developing at an exponential rate, and more recent model releases have outperformed that already impressive trend.
That was certainly the case for Claude Opus 4.5, the latest version of Anthropic’s most powerful model, which was released in late November. In December, METR announced that Opus 4.5 appeared to be capable of independently completing a task that would have taken a human about five hours—a vast improvement over what even the exponential trend would have predicted. One Anthropic safety researcher tweeted that he would change the direction of his research in light of those results; another employee at the company simply wrote, “mom come pick me up i’m scared.”
But the truth is more complicated than those dramatic responses would suggest. For one thing, METR’s estimates of the abilities of specific models come with substantial error bars. As METR explicitly stated on X, Opus 4.5 might be able to regularly complete only tasks that take humans about two hours, or it might succeed on tasks that take humans as long as 20 hours. Given the uncertainties intrinsic to the method, it was impossible to know for sure.
“There are a bunch of ways that people are reading too much into the graph,” says Sydney Von Arx, a member of METR’s technical staff.
More fundamentally, the METR plot does not measure AI abilities writ large, nor does it claim to. In order to build the graph, METR tests the models primarily on coding tasks, evaluating the difficulty of each by measuring or estimating how long it takes humans to complete it—a metric that not everyone accepts. Claude Opus 4.5 might be able to complete certain tasks that take humans five hours, but that doesn’t mean it’s anywhere close to replacing a human worker.
METR was founded to assess the risks posed by frontier AI systems. Though it is best known for the exponential trend plot, it has also worked with AI companies to evaluate their systems in greater detail and published several other independent research projects, including a widely covered July 2025 study suggesting that AI coding assistants might actually be slowing software engineers down.
But the exponential plot has made METR’s reputation, and the organization appears to have a complicated relationship with that graph’s often breathless reception. In January, Thomas Kwa, one of the lead authors on the paper that introduced it, wrote a blog post responding to some criticisms and making clear its limitations, and METR is currently working on a more extensive FAQ document. But Kwa isn’t optimistic that these efforts will meaningfully shift the discourse. “I think the hype machine will basically, whatever we do, just strip out all the caveats,” he says.
Nevertheless, the METR team does think that the plot has something meaningful to say about the trajectory of AI progress. “You should absolutely not tie your life to this graph,” says Von Arx. “But also,” she adds, “I bet that this trend is gonna hold.”
Part of the trouble with the METR plot is that it’s quite a bit more complicated than it looks. The x-axis is simple enough: It tracks the date when each model was released. But the y-axis is where things get tricky. It records each model’s “time horizon,” an unusual metric that METR created—and that, according to Kwa and Von Arx, is frequently misunderstood.
To understand exactly what model time horizons are, it helps to know all the work that METR put into calculating them. First, the METR team assembled a collection of tasks ranging from quick multiple-choice questions to detailed coding challenges—all of which were somehow relevant to software engineering. Then they had human coders attempt most of those tasks and evaluated how long it took them to finish. In this way, they assigned the tasks a human baseline time. Some tasks took the experts mere seconds, whereas others required several hours.
When METR tested large language models on the task suite, they found that advanced models could complete the fast tasks with ease—but as the models attempted tasks that had taken humans more and more time to finish, their accuracy started to fall off. From a model’s performance, the researchers calculated the point on the time scale of human tasks at which the model would complete about 50% of the tasks successfully. That point is the model’s time horizon.
All that detail is in the blog post and the academic paper that METR released along with the original time horizon plot. But the METR plot is frequently passed around on social media without this context, and so the true meaning of the time horizon metric can get lost in the shuffle. One common misapprehension is that the numbers on the plot’s y-axis—around five hours for Claude Opus 4.5, for example—represent the length of time that the models can operate independently. They do not. They represent how long it takes humans to complete tasks that a model can successfully perform. Kwa has seen this error so frequently that he made a point of correcting it at the very top of his recent blog post, and when asked what information he would add to the versions of the plot circulating online, he said he would include the word “human” whenever the task completion time was mentioned.
As complex and widely misinterpreted as the time horizon concept might be, it does make some basic sense: A model with a one-hour time horizon could automate some modest portions of a software engineer’s job, whereas a model with a 40-hour horizon could potentially complete days of work on its own. But some experts question whether the amount of time that humans take on tasks is an effective metric for quantifying AI capabilities. “I don’t think it’s necessarily a given fact that because something takes longer, it’s going to be a harder task,” says Inioluwa Deborah Raji, a PhD student at UC Berkeley who studies model evaluation.
Von Arx says that she, too, was originally skeptical that time horizon was the right measure to use. What convinced her was seeing the results of her and her colleagues’ analysis. When they calculated the 50% time horizon for all the major models available in early 2025 and then plotted each of them on the graph, they saw that the time horizons for the top-tier models were increasing over time—and, moreover, that the rate of advancement was speeding up. Every seven-ish months, the time horizon doubled, which means that the most advanced models could complete tasks that took humans nine seconds in mid 2020, 4 minutes in early 2023, and 40 minutes in late 2024. “I can do all the theorizing I want about whether or not it makes sense, but the trend is there,” Von Arx says.
It’s this dramatic pattern that made the METR plot such a blockbuster. Many people learned about it when they read AI 2027, a viral sci-fi story cum quantitative forecast positing that superintelligent AI could wipe out humanity by 2030. The writers of AI 2027 based some of their predictions on the METR plot and cited it extensively. In Von Arx’s words, “It’s a little weird when the way lots of people are familiar with your work is this pretty opinionated interpretation.”
Of course, plenty of people invoke the METR plot without imagining large-scale death and destruction. For some AI boosters, the exponential trend indicates that AI will soon usher in an era of radical economic growth. The venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, for example, recently put out a post titled “2026: This is AGI,” which used the METR plot to argue that AI that can act as an employee or contractor will soon arrive. “The provocation really was like, ‘What will you do when your plans are measured in centuries?’” says Sonya Huang, a general partner at Sequoia and one of the post’s authors.
Just because a model achieves a one-hour time horizon on the METR plot, however, doesn’t mean that it can replace one hour of human work in the real world. For one thing, the tasks on which the models are evaluated don’t reflect the complexities and confusion of real-world work. In their original study, Kwa, Von Arx, and their colleagues quantify what they call the “messiness” of each task according to criteria such as whether the model knows exactly how it is being scored and whether it can easily start over if it makes a mistake (for messy tasks, the answer to both questions would be no). They found that models do noticeably worse on messy tasks, although the overall pattern of improvement holds for both messy and non-messy ones.
And even the messiest tasks that METR considered can’t provide much information about AI’s ability to take on most jobs, because the plot is based almost entirely on coding tasks. “A model can get better at coding, but it’s not going to magically get better at anything else,” says Daniel Kang, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In a follow-up study, Kwa and his colleagues did find that time horizons for tasks in other domains also appear to be on exponential trajectories, but that work was much less formal.
Despite these limitations, many people admire the group’s research. “The METR study is one of the most carefully designed studies in the literature for this kind of work,” Kang told me. Even Gary Marcus, a former NYU professor and professional LLM curmudgeon, described much of the work that went into the plot as “terrific” in a blog post.
Some people will almost certainly continue to read the METR plot as a prognostication of our AI-induced doom, but in reality it’s something far more banal: a carefully constructed scientific tool that puts concrete numbers to people’s intuitive sense of AI progress. As METR employees will readily agree, the plot is far from a perfect instrument. But in a new and fast-moving domain, even imperfect tools can have enormous value.
“This is a bunch of people trying their best to make a metric under a lot of constraints. It is deeply flawed in many ways,” Von Arx says. “I also think that it is one of the best things of its kind.”
These ran the gamut, and while we answered quite a few (and I’m keeping some in mind for future reporting), there were a bunch we couldn’t get to, at least not in the depth I would have liked.
So let’s answer a few of your questions about advanced nuclear power. I’ve combined similar ones and edited them for clarity.
How are the fuel needs for next-generation nuclear reactors different, and how are companies addressing the supply chain?
Many next-generation reactors don’t use the low-enriched uranium used in conventional reactors.
It’s worth looking at high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, specifically. This fuel is enriched to higher concentrations of fissile uranium than conventional nuclear fuel, with a proportion of the isotope U-235 that falls between 5% and 20%. (In conventional fuel, it’s below 5%.)
HALEU can be produced with the same technology as low-enriched uranium, but the geopolitics are complicated. Today, Russia basically has a monopoly on HALEU production. In 2024, the US banned the import of Russian nuclear fuel through 2040 in an effort to reduce dependence on the country. Europe hasn’t taken the same measures, but it is working to move away from Russian energy as well.
That leaves companies in the US and Europe with the major challenge of securing the fuel they need when their regular Russian supply has been cut off or restricted.
The US Department of Energy has a stockpile of HALEU, which the government is doling out to companies to help power demonstration reactions. In the longer term, though, there’s still a major need to set up independent HALEU supply chains to support next-generation reactors.
How is safety being addressed, and what’s happening with nuclear safety regulation in the US?
There are some ways that next-generation nuclear power plants could be safer than conventional reactors. Some use alternative coolants that would prevent the need to run at the high pressure required in conventional water-cooled reactors. Many incorporate passive safety shutoffs, so if there are power supply issues, the reactors shut down harmlessly, avoiding risk of meltdown. (These can be incorporated in newer conventional reactors, too.)
But some experts have raised concerns that in the US, the current administration isn’t taking nuclear safety seriously enough.
A recent NPR investigation found that the Trump administration had secretly rewritten nuclear rules, stripping environmental protections and loosening safety and security measures. The government shared the new rules with companies that are part of a program building experimental nuclear reactors, but not with the public.
I’m reminded of a talk during our EmTech MIT event in November, where Koroush Shirvan, an MIT professor of nuclear engineering, spoke on this issue. “I’ve seen some disturbing trends in recent times, where words like ‘rubber-stamping nuclear projects’ are being said,” Shirvan said during that event.
During the talk, Shirvan shared statistics showing that nuclear power has a very low rate of injury and death. But that’s not inherent to the technology, and there’s a reason injuries and deaths have been low for nuclear power, he added: “It’s because of stringent regulatory oversight.”
Are next-generation reactors going to be financially competitive?
Building a nuclear power plant is not cheap. Let’s consider the up-front investment needed to build a power plant.
Plant Vogtle in Georgia hosts the most recent additions to the US nuclear fleet—Units 3 and 4 came online in 2023 and 2024. Together, they had a capital cost of $15,000 per kilowatt, adjusted for inflation, according to a recent report from the US Department of Energy. (This wonky unit I’m using divides the total cost to build the reactors by their expected power output, so we can compare reactors of different sizes.)
That number’s quite high, partly because those were the first of their kind built in the US, and because there were some inefficiencies in the planning. It’s worth noting that China builds reactors for much less, somewhere between $2,000/kW and $3,000/kW, depending on the estimate.
The up-front capital cost for first-of-a-kind advanced nuclear plants will likely run between $6,000 and $10,000 per kilowatt, according to that DOE report. That could come down by up to 40% after the technologies are scaled up and mass-produced.
So new reactors will (hopefully) be cheaper than the ultra-over-budget and behind-schedule Vogtle project, but they aren’t necessarily significantly cheaper than efficiently built conventional plants, if you normalize by their size.
It’ll certainly be cheaper to build new natural-gas plants (setting aside the likely equipment shortages we’re likely going to see for years.) Today’s most efficient natural-gas plants cost just $1,600/kW on the high end, according to data from Lazard.
An important caveat: Capital cost isn’t everything—running a nuclear plant is relatively inexpensive, which is why there’s so much interest in extending the lifetime of existing plants or reopening shuttered ones.
Ultimately, by many metrics, nuclear plants of any type are going to be more expensive than other sources, like wind and solar power. But they provide something many other power sources don’t: a reliable, stable source of electricity that can run for 60 years or more.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
In a pine forest on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the only active nickel mine in the US is nearing the end of its life. At a time when carmakers want the metal for electric-vehicle batteries, nickel concentration at Eagle Mine is falling and could soon drop too low to warrant digging.
But earlier this year, the mine’s owner started testing a new process that could eke out a bit more nickel. In a pair of shipping containers recently installed at the mine’s mill, a fermentation-derived broth developed by the startup Allonnia is mixed with concentrated ore to capture and remove impurities. The process allows nickel production from lower-quality ore.
Kent Sorenson, Allonnia’s chief technology officer, says this approach could help companies continue operating sites that, like Eagle Mine, have burned through their best ore. “The low-hanging fruit is to keep mining the mines that we have,” he says.
Demand for nickel, copper, and rare earth elements is rapidly increasing amid the explosive growth of metal-intensive data centers, electric cars, and renewable energy projects. But producing these metals is becoming harder and more expensive because miners have already exploited the best resources. Like the age-old technique of rolling up the end of a toothpaste tube, Allonnia’s broth is one of a number of ways that biotechnology could help miners squeeze more metal out of aging mines, mediocre ore, or piles of waste.
The mining industry has intentionally seeded copper ore with microbes for decades. At current copper bioleaching sites, miners pile crushed copper ore into heaps and add sulfuric acid. Acid-loving bacteria like Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans colonize the mound. A chemical the organisms produce breaks the bond between sulfur and copper molecules to liberate the metal.
Until now, beyond maintaining the acidity and blowing air into the heap, there wasn’t much more miners could do to encourage microbial growth. But Elizabeth Dennett, CEO of the startup Endolith, says the decreasing cost of genetic tools is making it possible to manage the communities of microbes in a heap more actively. “The technology we’re using now didn’t exist a few years ago,” she says.
Endolith analyzes bits of DNA and RNA in the copper-rich liquid that flows out of an ore heap to characterize the microbes living inside. Combined with a suite of chemical analyses, the information helps the company determine which microbes to sprinkle on a heap to optimize extraction.
Endolith scientists use columns filled with copper ore to test the firm’s method of actively managing microbes in the ore to increase metal extraction.
ENDOLITH
In lab tests on ore from the mining firm BHP, Endolith’s active techniques outperformed passive bioleaching approaches. In November, the company raised $16.5 million to move from its Denver lab to heaps in active mines.
Despite these promising early results, Corale Brierley, an engineer who has worked on metal bioleaching systems since the 1970s, questions whether companies like Endolith that add additional microbes to ore will successfully translate their processes to commercial scales. “What guarantees are you going to give the company that those organisms will actually grow?” Brierley asks.
Big mining firms that have already optimized every hose, nut, and bolt in their process won’t be easy to convince either, says Diana Rasner, an analyst covering mining technology for the research firm Cleantech Group.
“They are acutely aware of what it takes to scale these technologies because they know the industry,” she says. “They’ll be your biggest supporters, but they’re going to be your biggest critics.”
In addition to technical challenges, Rasner points out that venture-capital-backed biotechnology startups will struggle to deliver the quick returns their investors seek. Mining companies want lots of data before adopting a new process, which could take years of testing to compile. “This is not software,” Rasner says.
Nuton, a subsidiary of the mining giant Rio Tinto, is a good example. The company has been working for decades on a copper bioleaching process that uses a blend of archaea and bacteria strains, plus some chemical additives. But it started demonstrating the technology only late last year, at a mine in Arizona.
Nuton is testing an improved bioleaching process at Gunnison Copper’s Johnson Camp mine in Arizona.
NUTON
While Endolith and Nuton use naturally occurring microbes, the startup 1849 is hoping to achieve a bigger performance boost by genetically engineering microbes.
“You can do what mining companies have traditionally done,” says CEO Jai Padmakumar. “Or you can try to take the moonshot bet and engineer them. If you get that, you have a huge win.”
Genetic engineering would allow 1849 to tailor its microbes to the specific challenges facing a customer. But engineering organisms can also make them harder to grow, warns Buz Barstow, a Cornell University microbiologist who studies applications for biotechnology in mining.
Other companies are trying to avoid that trade-off by applying the products of microbial fermentation, rather than live organisms. Alta Resource Technologies, which closed a $28 million investment round in December, is engineering microbes that make proteins capable of extracting and separating rare earth elements. Similarly, the startup REEgen, based in Ithaca, New York, relies on the organic acids produced by an engineered strain of Gluconobacter oxydans to extract rare earth elements from ore and from waste materials like metal recycling slag, coal ash, or old electronics. “The microbes are the manufacturing,” says CEO Alexa Schmitz, an alumna of Barstow’s lab.
To make a dent in the growing demand for metal, this new wave of biotechnologies will have to go beyond copper and gold, says Barstow. In 2024, he started a project to map out genes that could be useful for extracting and separating a wider range of metals. Even with the challenges ahead, he says, biotechnology has the potential to transform mining the way fracking changed natural gas. “Biomining is one of these areas where the need … is big enough,” he says.
The challenge will be moving fast enough to keep up with growing demand.
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.
Demand for electric vehicles and the batteries that power them has never been hotter.
In 2025, EVs made up over a quarter of new vehicle sales globally, up from less than 5% in 2020. Some regions are seeing even higher uptake: In China, more than 50% of new vehicle sales last year were battery electric or plug-in hybrids. In Europe, more purely electric vehicles hit the roads in December than gas-powered ones. (The US is the notable exception here, dragging down the global average with a small sales decline from 2024.)
As EVs become increasingly common on the roads, the battery world is growing too. Looking ahead, we could soon see wider adoption of new chemistries, including some that deliver lower costs or higher performance. Meanwhile, the geopolitics of batteries are shifting, and so is the policy landscape. Here’s what’s coming next for EV batteries in 2026 and beyond.
A big opportunity for sodium-ion batteries
Lithium-ion batteries are the default chemistry used in EVs, personal devices, and even stationary storage systems on the grid today. But in a tough environment in some markets like the US, there’s a growing interest in cheaper alternatives. Automakers right now largely care just about batteries’ cost, regardless of performance improvements, says Kara Rodby, a technical principal at Volta Energy Technologies, a venture capital firm that focuses on energy storage technology.
Sodium-ion cells have long been held up as a potentially less expensive alternative to lithium. The batteries are limited in their energy density, so they deliver a shorter range than lithium-ion. But sodium is also more abundant, so they could be cheaper.
Sodium’s growth has been cursed, however, by the very success of lithium-based batteries, says Shirley Meng, a professor of molecular engineering at the University of Chicago. A lithium-ion battery cell cost $568 per kilowatt-hour in 2013, but that cost had fallen to just $74 per kilowatt-hour by 2025—quite the moving target for cheaper alternatives to chase.
Sodium-ion batteries currently cost about $59 per kilowatt-hour on average. That’s less expensive than the average lithium-ion battery. But if you consider only lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cells, a lower-end type of lithium-ion battery that averages $52 per kilowatt-hour, sodium is still more expensive today.
We could soon see an opening for sodium-batteries, though. Lithium prices have been ticking up in recent months, a shift that could soon slow or reverse the steady downward march of prices for lithium-based batteries.
Sodium-ion batteries are already being used commercially, largely for stationary storage on the grid. But we’re starting to see sodium-ion cells incorporated into vehicles, too. The Chinese companies Yadea, JMEV, and HiNa Battery have all started producing sodium-ion batteries in limited numbers for EVs, including small, short-range cars and electric scooters that don’t require a battery with high energy density. CATL, a Chinese battery company that’s the world’s largest, says it recently began producing sodium-ion cells. The company plans to launch its first EV using the chemistry by the middle of this year.
Today, both production and demand for sodium-ion batteries are heavily centered in China. That’s likely to continue, especially after a cutback in tax credits and other financial support for the battery and EV industries in the US. One of the biggest sodium-battery companies in the US, Natron, ceased operations last year after running into funding issues.
We could also see progress in sodium-ion research: Companies and researchers are developing new materials for components including the electrolyte and electrodes, so the cells could get more comparable to lower-end lithium-ion cells in terms of energy density, Meng says.
Major tests for solid-state batteries
As we enter the second half of this decade, many eyes in the battery world are on big promises and claims about solid-state batteries.
These batteries could pack more energy into a smaller package by removing the liquid electrolyte, the material that ions move through when a battery is charging and discharging. With a higher energy density, they could unlock longer-range EVs.
Companies have been promising solid-state batteries for years. Toyota, for example, once planned to have them in vehicles by 2020. That timeline has been delayed several times, though the company says it’s now on track to launch the new cells in cars in 2027 or 2028.
Historically, battery makers have struggled to produce solid-state batteries at the scale needed to deliver a commercially relevant supply for EVs. There’s been progress in manufacturing techniques, though, and companies could soon actually make good on their promises, Meng says.
Factorial Energy, a US-based company making solid-state batteries, provided cells for a Mercedes test vehicle that drove over 745 miles on a single charge in a real-world test in September. The company says it plans to bring its tech to market as soon as 2027. Quantumscape, another major solid-state player in the US, is testing its cells with automotive partners and plans to have its batteries in commercial production later this decade.
Before we see true solid-state batteries, we could see hybrid technologies, often referred to as semi-solid-state batteries. These commonly use materials like gel electrolytes, reducing the liquid inside cells without removing it entirely. Many Chinese companies are looking to build semi-solid-state batteries before transitioning to entirely solid-state ones, says Evelina Stoikou, head of battery technologies and supply chains at BloombergNEF, an energy consultancy.
A global patchwork
The picture for the near future of the EV industry looks drastically different depending on where you’re standing.
Last year, China overtook Japan as the country with the most global auto sales. And more than one in three EVs made in 2025 had a CATL battery in it. Simply put, China is dominating the global battery industry, and that doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon.
China’s influence outside its domestic market is growing especially quickly. CATL is expected to begin production this year at its second European site; the factory, located in Hungary, is an $8.2 billion project that will supply automakers including BMW and the Mercedes-Benz group. Canada recently signed a deal that will lower the import tax on Chinese EVs from 100% to roughly 6%, effectively opening the Canadian market for Chinese EVs.
Some countries that haven’t historically been major EV markets could become bigger players in the second half of the decade. Annual EV sales in Thailand and Vietnam, where the market was virtually nonexistent just a few years ago, broke 100,000 in 2025. Brazil, in particular, could see its new EV sales more than double in 2026 as major automakers including Volkswagen and BYD set up or ramp up production in the country.
On the flip side, EVs are facing a real test in 2026 in the US, as this will be the first calendar year after the sunset of federal tax credits that were designed to push more drivers to purchase the vehicles. With those credits gone, growth in sales is expected to continue lagging.
One bright spot for batteries in the US is outside the EV market altogether. Battery manufacturers are starting to produce low-cost LFP batteries in the US, largely for energy storage applications. LG opened a massive factory to make LFP batteries in mid-2025 in Michigan, and the Korean battery company SK On plans to start making LFP batteries at its facility in Georgia later this year. Those plants could help battery companies cash in on investments as the US EV market faces major headwinds.
Even as the US lags behind, the world is electrifying transportation. By 2030, 40% of new vehicles sold around the world are projected to be electric. As we approach that milestone, expect to see more global players, a wider selection of EVs, and an even wider menu of batteries to power them.
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
What would it take to convince you that the era of truth decay we were long warned about—where AI content dupes us, shapes our beliefs even when we catch the lie, and erodes societal trust in the process—is now here? A story I published last week pushed me over the edge. It also made me realize that the tools we were sold as a cure for this crisis are failing miserably.
On Thursday, I reported the first confirmation that the US Department of Homeland Security, which houses immigration agencies, is using AI video generators from Google and Adobe to make content that it shares with the public. The news comes as immigration agencies have flooded social media with content to support President Trump’s mass deportation agenda—some of which appears to be made with AI (like a video about “Christmas after mass deportations”).
But I received two types of reactions from readers that may explain just as much about the epistemic crisis we’re in.
One was from people who weren’t surprised, because on January 22 the White House had posted a digitally altered photo of a woman arrested at an ICE protest, one that made her appear hysterical and in tears. Kaelan Dorr, the White House’s deputy communications director, did not respond to questions about whether the White House altered the photo but wrote, “The memes will continue.”
The second was from readers who saw no point in reporting that DHS was using AI to edit content shared with the public, because news outlets were apparently doing the same. They pointed to the fact that the news network MS Now (formerly MSNBC) shared an image of Alex Pretti that was AI-edited and appeared to make him look more handsome, a fact that led to many viral clips this week, including one from Joe Rogan’s podcast. Fight fire with fire, in other words? A spokesperson for MS Now told Snopes that the news outlet aired the image without knowing it was edited.
There is no reason to collapse these two cases of altered content into the same category, or to read them as evidence that truth no longer matters. One involved the US government sharing a clearly altered photo with the public and declining to answer whether it was intentionally manipulated; the other involved a news outlet airing a photo it should have known was altered but taking some steps to disclose the mistake.
What these reactions reveal instead is a flaw in how we were collectively preparing for this moment. Warnings about the AI truth crisis revolved around a core thesis: that not being able to tell what is real will destroy us, so we need tools to independently verify the truth. My two grim takeaways are that these tools are failing, and that while vetting the truth remains essential, it is no longer capable on its own of producing the societal trust we were promised.
For example, there was plenty of hype in 2024 about the Content Authenticity Initiative, cofounded by Adobe and adopted by major tech companies, which would attach labels to content disclosing when it was made, by whom, and whether AI was involved. But Adobe applies automatic labels only when the content is wholly AI-generated. Otherwise the labels are opt-in on the part of the creator.
And platforms like X, where the altered arrest photo was posted, can strip content of such labels anyway (a note that the photo was altered was added by users). Platforms can also simply not choose to show the label; indeed, when Adobe launched the initiative, it noted that the Pentagon’s website for sharing official images, DVIDS, would display the labels to prove authenticity, but a review of the website today shows no such labels.
Noticing how much traction the White House’s photo got even after it was shown to be AI-altered, I was struck by the findings of a very relevant new paper published in the journal Communications Psychology. In the study, participants watched a deepfake “confession” to a crime, and the researchers found that even when they were told explicitly that the evidence was fake, participants relied on it when judging an individual’s guilt.In other words, even when people learn that the content they’re looking at is entirely fake, they remain emotionally swayed by it.
“Transparency helps, but it isn’t enough on its own,” the disinformation expert Christopher Nehring wrote recently about the study’s findings. “We have to develop a new masterplan of what to do about deepfakes.”
AI tools to generate and edit content are getting more advanced, easier to operate, and cheaper to run—all reasons why the US government is increasingly paying to use them. We were well warned of this, but we responded by preparing for a world in which the main danger was confusion. What we’re entering instead is a world in which influence survives exposure, doubt is easily weaponized, and establishing the truth does not serve as a reset button. And the defenders of truth are already trailing way behind.
Update: This story was updated on February 2 with details about how Adobe applies its content authenticity labels.
For the last couple of years, I’ve been following the progress of a group of individuals who believe death is humanity’s “core problem.” Put simply, they say death is wrong—for everyone. They’ve even said it’s morally wrong.
Vitalism is more than a philosophy, though—it’s a movement for hardcore longevity enthusiasts who want to make real progress in finding treatments that slow or reverse aging. Not just through scientific advances, but by persuading influential people to support their movement, and by changing laws and policies to open up access to experimental drugs.
And they’re starting to make progress.
Vitalism was founded by Adam Gries and Nathan Cheng—two men who united over their shared desire to find ways to extend human lifespan. I first saw Cheng speak back in 2023, at Zuzalu, a pop-up city in Montenegro for people who were interested in life extension and some other technologies. (It was an interesting experience—you can read more about it here.)
Zuzalu was where Gries and Cheng officially launched Vitalism. But I’ve been closely following the longevity scene since 2022. That journey took me to Switzerland, Honduras, and a compound in Berkeley, California, where like-minded longevity enthusiasts shared their dreams of life extension.
It also took me to Washington, DC, where, last year, supporters of lifespan extension presented politicians including Mehmet Oz, who currently leads the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, with their case for changes to laws and policies.
The journey has been fascinating, and at times weird and even surreal. I’ve heard biohacking stories that ended with smoking legs. I’ve been told about a multi-partner relationship that might be made possible through the cryopreservation—and subsequent reanimation—of a man and the multiple wives he’s had throughout his life. I’ve had people tell me to my face that they consider themselves eugenicists, and that they believe that parents should select IVF embryos for their propensity for a long life.
I’ve been shouted at and threatened with legal action. I’ve received barefoot hugs. One interviewee told me I needed Botox. It’s been a ride.
My reporting has also made me realize that the current interest in longevity reaches beyond social media influencers and wellness centers. Longevity clinics are growing in number, and there’s been a glut of documentaries about living longer or even forever.
At the same time, powerful people who influence state laws, giant federal funding budgets, and even national health policy are prioritizing the search for treatments that slow or reverse aging. The longevity community was thrilled when longtime supporter Jim O’Neill was made deputy secretary of health and human services last year. Other members of Trump’s administration, including Oz, have spoken about longevity too. “It seems that now there is the most pro-longevity administration in American history,” Gries told me.
I recently spoke to Alicia Jackson, the new director of ARPA-H. The agency, established in 2022 under Joe Biden’s presidency, funds “breakthrough” biomedical research. And it appears to have a new focus on longevity. Jackson previously founded and led Evernow, a company focused on “health and longevity for every woman.”
“There’s a lot of interesting technologies, but they all kind of come back to the same thing: Could we extend life years?” she told me over a Zoom call a few weeks ago. She added that her agency had “incredible support” from “the very top of HHS.” I asked if she was referring to Jim O’Neill. “Yeah,” she said. She wouldn’t go into the specifics.
Gries is right: There is a lot of support for advances in longevity treatments, and some of it is coming from influential people in positions of power. Perhaps the field really is poised for a breakthrough.
And that’s what makes this field so fascinating to cover. Despite the occasional weirdness.
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
Civitai—an online marketplace for buying and selling AI-generated content, backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz—is letting users buy custom instruction files for generating celebrity deepfakes. Some of these files were specifically designed to make pornographic images banned by the site, a new analysis has found.
The study, from researchers at Stanford and Indiana University, looked at people’s requests for content on the site, called “bounties.” The researchers found that between mid-2023 and the end of 2024, most bounties asked for animated content—but a significant portion were for deepfakes of real people, and 90% of these deepfake requests targeted women. (Their findings have not yet been peer reviewed.)
The debate around deepfakes, as illustrated by the recent backlash to explicit images on the X-owned chatbot Grok, has revolved around what platforms should do to block such content. Civitai’s situation is a little more complicated. Its marketplace includes actual images, videos, and models, but it also lets individuals buy and sell instruction files called LoRAs that can coach mainstream AI models like Stable Diffusion into generating content they were not trained to produce. Users can then combine these files with other tools to make deepfakes that are graphic or sexual. The researchers found that 86% of deepfake requests on Civitai were for LoRAs.
In these bounties, users requested “high quality” models to generate images of public figures like the influencer Charli D’Amelio or the singer Gracie Abrams, often linking to their social media profiles so their images could be grabbed from the web. Some requests specified a desire for models that generated the individual’s entire body, accurately captured their tattoos, or allowed hair color to be changed. Some requests targeted several women in specific niches, like artists who record ASMR videos. One request was for a deepfake of a woman said to be the user’s wife. Anyone on the site could offer up AI models they worked on for the task, and the best submissions received payment—anywhere from $0.50 to $5. And nearly 92% of the deepfake bounties were awarded.
Neither Civitai nor Andreessen Horowitz responded to requests for comment.
It’s possible that people buy these LoRAs to make deepfakes that aren’t sexually explicit (though they’d still violate Civitai’s terms of use, and they’d still be ethically fraught). But Civitai also offers educational resources on how to use external tools to further customize the outputs of image generators—for example, by changing someone’s pose. The site also hosts user-written articles with details on how to instruct models to generate pornography. The researchers found that the amount of porn on the platform has gone up, and that the majority of requests each week are now for NSFW content.
“Not only does Civitai provide the infrastructure that facilitates these issues; they also explicitly teach their users how to utilize them,” says Matthew DeVerna, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and one of the study’s leaders.
The company used to ban only sexually explicit deepfakes of real people, but in May 2025 it announced it would ban all deepfake content. Nonetheless, countless requests for deepfakes submitted before this ban now remain live on the site, and many of the winning submissions fulfilling those requests remain available for purchase, MIT Technology Review confirmed.
“I believe the approach that they’re trying to take is to sort of do as little as possible, such that they can foster as much—I guess they would call it—creativity on the platform,” DeVerna says.
Users buy LoRAs with the site’s online currency, called Buzz, which is purchased with real money. In May 2025, Civita’s credit card processor cut off the company because of its ongoing problem with nonconsensual content. To pay for explicit content, users must now use gift cards or cryptocurrency to buy Buzz; the company offers a different scrip for non-explicit content.
Civitai automatically tags bounties requesting deepfakes and lists a way for the person featured in the content to manually request its takedown. This system means that Civitai has a reasonably successful way of knowing which bounties are for deepfakes, but it’s still leaving moderation to the general public rather than carrying it out proactively.
A company’s legal liability for what its users do isn’t totally clear. Generally, tech companies have broad legal protections against such liability for their content under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, but those protections aren’t limitless. For example, “you cannot knowingly facilitate illegal transactions on your website,” says Ryan Calo, a professor specializing in technology and AI at the University of Washington’s law school. (Calo wasn’t involved in this new study.)
Civitai joined OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies in 2024 in adopting design principles to guard against the creation and spread of AI-generated child sexual abuse material . This move followed a 2023 report from the Stanford Internet Observatory, which found that the vast majority of AI models named in child sexual abuse communities were Stable Diffusion–based models “predominantly obtained via Civitai.”
But adult deepfakes have not gotten the same level of attention from content platforms or the venture capital firms that fund them. “They are not afraid enough of it. They are overly tolerant of it,” Calo says. “Neither law enforcement nor civil courts adequately protect against it. It is night and day.”
Civitai received a $5 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) in November 2023. In a video shared by a16z, Civitai cofounder and CEO Justin Maier described his goal of building the main place where people find and share AI models for their own individual purposes. “We’ve aimed to make this space that’s been very, I guess, niche and engineering-heavy more and more approachable to more and more people,” he said.
Civitai is not the only company with a deepfake problem in a16z’s investment portfolio; in February, MIT Technology Reviewfirst reported that another company, Botify AI, was hosting AI companions resembling real actors that stated their age as under 18, engaged in sexually charged conversations, offered “hot photos,” and in some instances described age-of-consent laws as “arbitrary” and “meant to be broken.”
“Who here believes involuntary death is a good thing?”
Nathan Cheng has been delivering similar versions of this speech over the last couple of years, so I knew what was coming. He was about to try to convince the 80 or so people in the audience that death is bad. And that defeating it should be humanity’s number one priority—quite literally, that it should come above all else in the social and political hierarchy.
“If you believe that life is good and there’s inherent moral value to life,” he told them, “it stands to reason that the ultimate logical conclusion here is that we should try to extend lifespan indefinitely.”
Solving aging, he added, is “a problem that has an incredible moral duty for all of us to get involved in.”
It was the end of April, and the crowd—with its whoops and yeahs—certainly seemed convinced. They’d gathered at a compound in Berkeley, California, for a three-day event called the Vitalist Bay Summit. It was part of a longer, two-month residency (simply called Vitalist Bay) that hosted various events to explore tools—from drug regulation to cryonics—that might be deployed in the fight against death. One of the main goals, though, was to spread the word of Vitalism, a somewhat radical movement established by Cheng and his colleague Adam Gries a few years ago.
No relation to the lowercase vitalism of old, this Vitalism has a foundational philosophy that’s deceptively simple: to acknowledge that death is bad and life is good. The strategy for executing it, though, is far more obviously complicated: to launch a longevity revolution.
Interest in longevity has certainly taken off in recent years, but as the Vitalists see it, it has a branding problem. The term “longevity” has been used to sell supplements with no evidence behind them, “anti-aging” has been used by clinics to sell treatments, and “transhumanism” relates to ideas that go well beyond the scope of defeating death. Not everyone in the broader longevity space shares Vitalists’ commitment to actually making death obsolete. As Gries, a longtime longevity devotee who has largely become the enthusiastic public face of Vitalism, said in an online presentation about the movement in 2024, “We needed some new word.”
“Vitalism” became a clean slate: They would start a movement to defeat death, and make that goal the driving force behind the actions of individuals, societies, and nations. Longevity could no longer be a sideshow. For Vitalism to succeed, budgets would need to change. Policy would need to change. Culture would need to change. Consider it longevity for the most hardcore adherents—a sweeping mission to which nothing short of total devotion will do.
“The idea is to change the systems and the priorities of society at the highest levels,” Gries said in the presentation.
To be clear, the effective anti-aging treatments the Vitalists are after don’t yet exist. But that’s sort of the point: They believe they could exist if Vitalists are able to spread their gospel, influence science, gain followers, get cash, and ultimately reshape government policies and priorities.
For the past few years, Gries and Cheng have been working to recruit lobbyists, academics, biotech CEOs, high-net-worth individuals, and even politicians into the movement, and they’ve formally established a nonprofit foundation “to accelerate Vitalism.” Today, there’s a growing number of Vitalists (some paying foundation members, others more informal followers, and still others who support the cause but won’t publicly admit as much), and the foundation has started “certifying” qualifying biotech companies as Vitalist organizations. Perhaps most consequentially, Gries, Cheng, and their peers are also getting involved in shaping US state laws that make unproven, experimental treatments more accessible. They hope to be able to do the same at the national level.
VITALISMFOUNDATION.ORG
VITALISMFOUNDATION.ORG
Vitalism cofounders Nathan Cheng and Adam Gries want to launch a longevity revolution.
All this is helping Vitalists grow in prominence, if not also power. In the past, people who have spoken of living forever or making death “optional” have been dismissed by their academic colleagues. I’ve been covering the broader field of aging science for a decade, and I’ve seen scientists roll their eyes, shrug their shoulders, and turn their backs on people who have talked this way. That’s not the case for the Vitalists.
Even the scientists who think that Vitalist ideas of defeating death are wacky, unattainable ones, with the potential to discredit their field, have shown up on stage with Vitalism’s founders, and these serious researchers provide a platform for them at more traditionally academic events.
I saw this collegiality firsthand at Vitalist Bay. Faculty members from Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California, Berkeley, all spoke at events. Eric Verdin, the prominent researcher who directs the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California, had also planned to speak, although a scheduling clash meant he couldn’t make it in the end. “I have very different ideas in terms of what’s doable,” he told me. “But that’s part of the [longevity] movement—there’s freedom for people to say whatever they want.”
Many other well-respected scientists attended, including representatives of ARPA-H, the US federal agency for health research and breakthrough technologies. And as I left for a different event on longevity in Washington, DC, just after the Vitalist Bay Summit, a sizable group of Vitalist Bay attendees headed that way too, to make the case for longevity to US lawmakers.
The Vitalists feel that momentum is building, not just for the science of aging and the development of lifespan-extending therapies, but for the acceptance of their philosophy that defeating death should be humanity’s top concern.
This, of course, sparks some pretty profound questions. What would a society without death look like—and would we even want it? After all, death has become an important part of human culture the world over. And even if Vitalists aren’t destined to realize their lofty goal, their growing influence could still have implications for us all. As they run more labs and companies, and insert themselves into the making of laws and policy, perhaps they will discover treatments that really do slow or even reverse aging. In the meantime, though, some ethicists are concerned that experimental and unproven medicines—including potentially dangerous ones—are becoming more accessible, in some cases with little to no oversight.
Gries, ultimately, has a different view of the ethics here. He thinks that being “okay with death” is what disqualifies a person from being considered ethical. “Death is just wrong,” he says. “It’s not just wrong for some people. It’s wrong for all people.”
The birth of a revolution
When I arrived at the Vitalist Bay Summit on April 25, I noticed that the venue was equipped with everything a longevity enthusiast might need: napping rooms, a DEXA body-composition scanner, a sauna in a bus, and, for those so inclined, 24-hour karaoke.
I was told that around 300 people had signed up for that day’s events, which was more than had attended the previous week. That might have been because arguably the world’s most famous longevity enthusiast, Bryan Johnson, was about to make an appearance. (If you’re curious to know more about what Johnson was doing there, you can read about our conversation here.)
The key to Vitalism has always been that“death is humanity’s core problem, and aging its primary agent,” cofounder Adam Gries told me. “So it was, and so it has continued, as it was foretold.”
But Gries, another man in his 40s who doesn’t want to die, was the first to address the audience that day. Athletic and energetic, he bounded across a stage wearing bright yellow shorts and a long-sleeved shirt imploring people to “Choose Life: VITALISM.”
Gries is a tech entrepreneur who describes himself as a self-taught software engineer who’s “good at virality.” He’s been building companies since he was in college in the 2000s, and grew his personal wealth by selling them.
As with many other devotees to the cause, his deep interest in life extension was sparked by Aubrey de Grey, a controversial researcher with an iconic long beard and matching ponytail. He’s known widely both for his optimistic views about “defeating aging” and for having reportedly made sexual comments to two longevity entrepreneurs. (In an email, de Grey said he’s “never disputed” one of these remarks but denied having made the other. “My continued standing within the longevity community speaks for itself,” he added.)
In an influential 2005 TED Talk (which has over 4.8 million views), de Grey predicted that people would live to 1,000 and spoke of the possibility of new technologies that would continue to stave off death, allowing some to avoid it indefinitely. (In a podcast recorded last year, Cheng described a recording of this talk as “the OG longevity-pilling YouTube video.”)
Many Vitalists have been influenced by controversial longevity researcher Aubrey de Grey. Cheng called his 2005 TED Talk “the OG longevity-pilling YouTube video.”
PETER SEARLE/CAMERA PRESS/REDUX
“It was kind of evident to me that life is great,” says Gries. “So I’m kind of like, why would I not want to live?”
A second turning point for Gries came during the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic, when he essentially bet against companies that he thought would collapse. “I made this 50 [fold] return,” he says. “It was kind of like living through The Big Short.”
Gries and his wife fled from San Francisco to Israel, where he grew up, and later traveled to Taiwan, where he’d obtained a “golden visa” and which was, at the time, one of only two countries that had not reported a single case of covid. His growing wealth afforded him the opportunity to take time from work and think about the purpose of life. “My answer was: Life is the purpose of life,” he says. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to experience the “journey of decrepitude” that aging often involves.
So he decided to dedicate himself to the longevity cause. He went about looking up others who seemed as invested as he was. In 2021 his search led him to Cheng, a Chinese-Canadian entrepreneur based in Toronto. He had dropped out of a physics PhD a few years earlier after experiencing what he describes on his website as “a massive existential crisis” and shifted his focus to “radical longevity.” (Cheng did not respond to email requests for an interview.)
The pair “hit it off immediately,” says Gries, and they spent the following two years trying to figure out what they could do. The solution they finally settled on: revolution.
After all, Gries reasons, that’s how significant religious and social movements have happened in the past. He says they sought inspiration from the French and American Revolutions, among others. The idea was to start with some kind of “enlightenment,” and with a “hardcore group,” to pursue significant social change with global ramifications.
“We were convinced that without a revolution,” Gries says, “we were as good as dead.”
A home for believers
Early on, they wrote a Vitalist declaration, a white paper that lists five core statements for believers:
Life and health are good. Death is humanity’s core problem, and aging its primary agent.
Aging causes immense suffering, and obviating aging is scientifically plausible.
Humanity should apply the necessary resources to reach freedom from aging as soon as possible.
I will work on or support others to work on reaching unlimited healthy human lifespan.
I will carry the message against aging and death.
While it’s not an explicit part of the manifesto, it was important to them to think about it as a moral philosophy as well as a movement. As Cheng said at the time, morality “guides most of the actions of our lives.” The same should be true of Vitalism, he suggested.
Gries has echoed this idea. The belief that “death is morally bad” is necessary to encourage behavior change, he told me in 2024. It is a moral drive, or moral purpose, that pushes people to do difficult things, he added.
Revolution, after all, is difficult. And to succeed—to “get unlimited great health to the top of the priority list,” as Gries says—the movement would need to infiltrate the government and shape policy decisions and national budgets. The Apollo program got people to the moon with less than 1% of US GDP; imagine, Gries asks, what we could do to human longevity with a mere 1% of GDP?
It makes sense, then, that Gries and Cheng launched Vitalism in 2023 at Zuzalu, a “pop-up city” in Montenegro that provided a two-month home for like-minded longevity enthusiasts. The gathering was in some ways a loose prototype for what they wanted to accomplish. Cheng spoke there of how they wanted to persuade 10,000 or so Vitalists to move to Rhode Island. Not only was it close to the biotech hub of Boston, but they believed it had a small enough population for an influx of new voters sharing their philosophy to influence local and state elections. “Five to ten thousand people—that’s all we need,” he said. Or if not Rhode Island, another small-ish US state, where they could still change state policy from the inside.
The ultimate goal was to recruit Vitalists to help them establish a “longevity state”—a recognized jurisdiction that “prioritizes doing something about aging,” Cheng said, perhaps by loosening regulations on clinical trials or supporting biohacking.
Bryan Johnson, who is perhaps the world’s most famous longevity enthusiast, spoke at Vitalist Bay and is trying to start a Don’t Die religion.
AGATON STROM/REDUX PICTURES
This idea is popular among many vocal members of the Vitalism community. It borrows from the concept of the “network state” developed by former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, defined as a new city or country that runs on cryptocurrency; focuses on a goal, in this case extending human lifespan; and “eventually gains diplomatic recognition from preexisting states.”
Some people not interested in dying have made progress toward realizing such a domain. Following the success of Zuzalu, one of the event’s organizers, Laurence Ion, a young cryptocurrency investor and self-proclaimed Vitalist, joined a fellow longevity enthusiast named Niklas Anzinger to organize a sequel in Próspera, the private “special economic zone” on the Honduran island of Roatán. They called their “pop-up city” Vitalia.
I visited shortly after it launched in January 2024. The goal was to create a low-regulation biotech hub to fast-track the development of anti-aging drugs, though the “city” was more like a gated resort that hosted talks from a mix of respected academics, biohackers, biotech CEOs, and straight-up eugenicists. There was a strong sense of community—many attendees were living with or near each other, after all. A huge canvas where attendees could leave notes included missives like “Don’t die,” “I love you,” and “Meet technoradicals building the future!”
But Vitalia was short-lived, with events ending by the start of March 2024. And while many of the vibes were similar to what I’d later see at Vitalist Bay, the temporary nature of Vitalia didn’t quite match the ambition of Gries and Cheng.
Patri Friedman, a 49-year-old libertarian and grandson of the economist Milton Friedman who says he attended Zuzalu, Vitalia, and Vitalist Bay, envisions something potentially even bolder. He’s the founder of the Seasteading Institute, which has the goal of “building startup communities that float on the ocean with any measure of political autonomy” and has received funding and support from the billionaire Peter Thiel. Friedman also founded Pronomos Capital, a venture capital fund that invests in projects focused on “building the cities of tomorrow.”
His company is exploring various types of potential network states, but he says he’s found that medical tourism—and, specifically, a hunger for life extension—dominates the field. “People do not want this ‘10 years and a billion dollars to pass a drug’ thing with the FDA,” says Friedman. (While he doesn’t call himself a Vitalist, partly because he’s “almost never going to agree with” any kind of decree, Friedman holds what you might consider similarly staunch sentiments about death, which he referred to as “murder by omission.” When I asked him if he has a target age he’d like to reach, he told me he found the question “mind-bogglingly strange” and “insane.” “How could you possibly be like: Yes, please murder me at this time?” he replied. “I can always fucking shoot myself in the head—I don’t need anybody’s help.”)
But even as Vitalists and those aligned with their beliefs embrace longevity states, Gries and Cheng are reassessing their former ambitions. The network-state approach has limits, Gries tells me. And encouraging thousands of people to move to Rhode Island wasn’t as straightforward as they’d hoped it might be.
Not because he can’t find tens of thousands of Vitalists, Gries stresses—but most of them are unwilling to move their lives for the sake of influencing the policy of another state. He compares Vitalism to a startup, with a longevity state as its product. For the time being, at least, there isn’t enough consumer appetite for that product, he says.
The past year shows that it may in fact be easier to lobby legislators in states that are already friendly to deregulation. Anzinger and a lobbying group called the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (A4LI) were integral to making Montana the first US hub for experimental medical treatments, with a new law to allow clinics to sell experimental therapies once they have been through preliminary safety tests (which don’t reveal whether a drug actually works). But Gries and his Vitalist colleagues also played a role—“providing feedback, talking to lawmakers … brainstorming [and] suggesting ideas,” Gries says.
The Vitalist crew has been in conversation with lawmakers in New Hampshire, too. In an email in December, Gries and Cheng claimed they’d “helped to get right-to-try laws passed” in the state—an apparent reference to the recent expansion of a law to make more unapproved treatments accessible to people with terminal illnesses. Meanwhile, three other bills that expand access even further are under consideration.
Ultimately, Gries stresses, Vitalism is “agnostic to the fixing strategies” that will help them meet their goals. There is, though, at least one strategy he’s steadfast about: building influence.
Only the hardcore
To trigger a revolution, the Vitalists may need to recruit only around 3% or 4% of “society” to their movement, Gries believes. (Granted, that does still mean hundreds of millions of people.) “If you want people to take action, you need to focus on a small number of very high-leverage people,” he tells me.
That, perhaps unsurprisingly, includes wealthy individuals with “a net worth of $10 million or above,” he says. He wants to understand why (with some high-profile exceptions, including Thiel, who has been investing in longevity-related companies and foundations for decades) most uber-wealthy people don’t invest in the field—and how he might persuade them to do so. He won’t reveal the names of anyone he’s having conversations with.
These “high-leverage” people might also include, Gries says, well-respected academics, leaders of influential think tanks, politicians and policymakers, and others who work in government agencies.
A revolution needs to find its foot soldiers. And at the most basic level, that will mean boosting the visibility of the Vitalism brand—partly through events like Vitalist Bay, but also by encouraging others, particularly in the biotech space, to sign on. Cheng talks of putting out a “bat signal” for like-minded people, and he and Gries say that Vitalism has brought together people who have gone on to collaborate or form companies.
There’s also their nonprofit Vitalism International Foundation, whose supporters can opt to become “mobilized Vitalists” with monthly payments of $29 or more, depending on their level of commitment. In addition, the foundation works with longevity biotech companies to recognize those that are “aligned” with its goals as officially certified Vitalist organizations. “Designation may be revoked if an organization adopts apologetic narratives that accept aging or death,” according to the website. At the time of writing, that site lists 16 certified Vitalist organizations, including cryopreservation companies, a longevity clinic, and several research companies.
One of them is Shift Bioscience, a company using CRISPR and aging clocks—which attempt to measure biological age—to identify genes that might play a significant role in the aging process and potentially reverse it. It says it has found a single gene that can rejuvenate multiple types of cells.
Shift cofounder Daniel Ives, who holds degrees in mitochondrial and computational biology, tells me he was also won over to the longevity cause by de Grey’s 2005 TED Talk. He now has a countdown on his computer: “It’s my days till death,” he says—around 22,000 days left. “I’m using that to keep myself focused.”
Ives calls himself the “Vitalist CEO” of Shift Bioscience. He thinks the label is important first as a way for like-minded people to find and support each other, grow their movement, and make the quest for longevity mainstream. Second, he says, it provides a way to appeal to “hardcore” lifespan extensionists, given that others in the wellness and cosmetics industry have adopted the term “longevity” without truly applying themselves to finding rejuvenation therapies. He refers to unnamed companies and individuals who claim that drinking juices, for example, can reverse aging by five years or so.
“You don’t have to convince the mainstream,” says ARPA-H science and engineering advisor Mark Hamalainen. Though “kind of a terrible example,”he notes, Stalinism started small. “Sometimes you just have to convince the right people.”
“Somebody will make these claims and basically throw legitimate science under the bus,” he says. He doesn’t want spurious claims made on social media to get lumped in with the company’s serious molecular biology. Shift’s head of machine learning, Lucas Paulo de Lima Camillo, was recently awarded a $10,000 prize by the well-respected Biomarkers of Aging Consortium for an aging clock he developed.
Another out-and-proud Vitalist CEO is Anar Isman, the cofounder of AgelessRx, a telehealth provider that offers prescriptions for purported longevity drugs—and a certified Vitalist organization. (Isman, who is in his early 40s, used to work at a hedge fund but was inspired to join the longevity field by—you guessed it—de Grey.)
During a panel session at Vitalist Bay, he stressed that he too saw longevity as a movement—and a revolution—rather than an industry. But he also claimed his company wasn’t doing too badly commercially. “We’ve had a lot of demand,” he said. “We’ve got $60 million plus in annual revenue.”
Many of his customers come to the site looking for treatments for specific ailments, he tells me. He views each as an opportunity to “evangelize” his views on “radical life extension.” “I don’t see a difference between … dying tomorrow or dying in 30 years,” he says. He wants to live “at least 100 more” years.
CHRIS LABROOY
Vitalism, though, isn’t just appealing to commercial researchers. Mark Hamalainen, a 41-year-old science and engineering advisor at ARPA-H, describes himself as a Vitalist. He says he “kind of got roped into” Vitalism because he also works with Cheng—they founded the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, which supports new entrants to the field through mentoring programs. “I kind of view it as a more appealing rebranding of some of the less radical aspects of transhumanism,” he says. Transhumanism—the position that we can use technologies to enhance humans beyond the current limits of biology—covers a broad terrain, but “Vitalism is like: Can we just solve this death thing first? It’s a philosophy that’s easy to get behind.”
In government, he works with individuals like Jean Hébert, a former professor of genetics and neuroscience who has investigated the possibility of rejuvenating the brain by gradually replacing parts of it; Hébert has said that “[his] mission is to beat aging.” He spoke at Zuzalu and Vitalist Bay.
Andrew Brack, who serves as the program manager for proactive health at ARPA-H, was at Vitalist Bay, too. Both Brack and Hébert oversee healthy federal budgets—Hébert’s brain replacement project was granted $110 million in 2024, for example.
Neither Hébert nor Brack has publicly described himself as a Vitalist, and Hébert wouldn’t agree to speak to me without the approval of ARPA-H’s press office, which didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview with him or Brack. Brack did not respond to direct requests for an interview.
Gries says he thinks that “many people at [the US Department of Health and Human Services], including all agencies, have a longevity-positive view and probably agree with a lot of the ideas Vitalism stands for.” And he is hoping to help secure federal positions for others who are similarly aligned with his philosophy. On both Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve last year, Gries and Cheng sent fundraising emails describing an “outreach effort” to find applicants for six open government positions that, together, would control billions of dollars in federal funding. “Qualified, mission-aligned candidates we’d love to support do exist, but they need to be found and encouraged to apply,” the pair wrote in the second email. “We’re starting a systematic search to reach, screen, and support the best candidates.”
Hamalainen supports Gries’s plan to target high-leverage individuals. “You don’t have to convince the mainstream,” he says. Though “kind of a terrible example,” Hamalainen notes, Stalinism started small. “Sometimes you just have to convince the right people.”
One of the “right” people may be the man who inspired Gries, Hamalainen, Ives, Isman, and so many others to pursue longevity in the first place: de Grey. He’s now a paid-up Vitalist and even spoke at Vitalist Bay. Having been in the field for over 20 years, de Grey tells me, he’s seen various terms fall in and out of favor. Those terms now have “baggage that gets in the way,” he says. “Sometimes it’s useful to have a new term.”
The sometimes quiet (sometimes powerful, sometimes influential) Vitalists
Though one of the five principles of Vitalism is a promise to “carry the message,” some people who agree with its ideas are reluctant to go public, including some signed-up Vitalists. I’ve asked Gries multiple times over several years, but he won’t reveal how many Vitalists there are, let alone who makes up the membership.
Even some of the founders of Vitalism don’t want to be public about it. Around 30 people were involved in developing the movement, Gries says—but only 22 are named as contributors to the Vitalism white paper (with Gries as its author), including Cheng, Vitalia’s Ion, and ARPA-H’s Hamalainen. Gries won’t reveal the names of the others. He acknowledges that some people just don’t like to publicly affiliate with any organization. That’s certainly what I’ve found when I’ve asked members of the longevity community if they’re Vitalists. Many said they agreed with the Vitalist declaration, and that they liked and supported what Gries was doing. But they didn’t want the label.
Some people worry that associating with a belief system that sounds a bit religious—even cult-like, some say—won’t do the cause any favors. Others have a problem with the specific wording of the declaration.
For instance, Anzinger—the other Vitalia founder—won’t call himself a Vitalist. He says he respects the mission, but that the declaration is “a bit poetic” for his liking.
And Dylan Livingston, CEO of A4LI and arguably one of the most influential longevity enthusiasts out there, won’t describe himself as a Vitalist either.
Many other longevity biotech CEOs also shy away from the label—including Emil Kendziorra, who runs the human cryopreservation company Tomorrow Bio, even though that’s a certified Vitalist organization. Kendziorra says he agrees with most of the Vitalist declaration but thinks it is too “absolutist.” He also doesn’t want to imply that the pursuit of longevity should be positioned above war, hunger, and other humanitarian issues. (Gries has heard this argument before, and counters that both the vast spending on health care for people in the last years of their life and the use of lockdown strategies during the covid pandemic suggest that, deep down, lifespan extension is “society’s revealed preference.”)
Still, because Kendziorra agrees with almost everything in the declaration, he believes that “pushing it forward” and bringing more attention to the field by labeling his company a Vitalist organization is a good thing. “It’s to support other people who want to move the world in that direction,” he says. (He also offered Vitalist Bay attendees a discount on his cryopreservation services.)
“There’s a lot of closeted scientists working in our field, and they get really excited about lifespans increasing,” explains Ives of Shift Bioscience. “But you’ll get people who’ll accuse you of being a lunatic that wants to be immortal.” He claims that people who represent biotech companies tell him “all the time” that they are secretly longevity companies but avoid using the term because they don’t want funders or collaborators to be “put off.”
Ultimately, it may not really matter how much people adopt the Vitalist label as long as the ideas break through. “It’s pretty simple. [The Vitalist declaration] has five points—if you agree with the five points, you are a Vitalist,” says Hamalainen. “You don’t have to be public about it.” He says he’s spoken to others about “coming out of the closet” and that it’s been going pretty well.
Gries puts it more bluntly: “If you agree with the Vitalist declaration, you are a Vitalist.”
And he hints that there are now many people in powerful positions—including in the Trump administration—who share his views, even if they don’t openly identify as Vitalists.
Jim O’Neill, the deputy secretary of health and human services, is one of the highest-profile longevity enthusiasts serving in government. Gries says, “It seems that now there is the most pro-longevity administration in American history.”
AMY ROSSETTI/DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES VIA AP
O’Neill has long been interested in both longevity and the idea of creating new jurisdictions. Until March 2024, he served on the board of directors of Friedman’s Seasteading Institute. He also served as CEO of the SENS Research Foundation, a longevity organization founded by de Grey, between 2019 and 2021, and he represented Thiel as a board member there for many years. Many people in the longevity community say they know him personally, or have at least met him. (Tristan Roberts, a biohacker who used to work with a biotech company operating in Próspera, tells me he served O’Neill gin when he visited his Burning Man camp, which he describes as a “technology gay camp from San Francisco and New York.” Hamalainen also recalls meeting O’Neill at Burning Man, at a “techy, futurist” camp.) (Neither O’Neill nor representatives from the Department of Health and Human Services responded to a request to comment about this.)
O’Neill’s views are arguably becoming less fringe in DC these days. The day after the Vitalist Bay Summit, A4LI was hosting its own summit in the capital with the goal of “bringing together leaders, advocates, and innovators from around the globe to advance legislative initiatives that promote a healthier human lifespan.” I recognized lots of Vitalist Bay attendees there, albeit in more formal attire.
The DC event took place over three days in late April. The first two involved talks by longevity enthusiasts across the spectrum, including scientists, lawyers, and biotech CEOs. Vitalia’s Anzinger spoke about the success he’d had in Próspera, and ARPA-H’s Brack talked about work his agency was doing. (Hamalainen was also there, although he said he was not representing ARPA-H.)
But the third day was different and made me think Gries may be right about Vitalism’s growing reach. It began with a congressional briefing on Capitol Hill, during which Representative Gus Bilirakis, a Republican from Florida, asked, “Who doesn’t want to live longer, right?” As he explained, “Longevity science … directly aligns with the goals of the Make America Healthy Again movement.”
“There’s a lot of closeted scientists working in our field, and they get really excited about lifespans increasing,” says Daniel Ives of Shift Bioscience. “But you’ll get people who’ll accuse you of being a lunatic that wants to be immortal.”
Bilirakis and Representative Paul Tonko, a New York Democrat, were followed by Mehmet Oz, the former TV doctor who now leads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; he opened with typical MAHA talking points about chronic disease and said US citizens have a “patriotic duty” to stay healthy to keep medical costs down. The audience was enthralled as Oz talked about senescent cells, the zombie-like aged cells that are thought to be responsible for some age-related damage to organs and tissues. (The offices of Bilirakis and Tonko did not respond to a request for comment; neither did the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.)
And while none of the speakers went anywhere near the concept of radical life extension, the Vitalists in the audience were suitably encouraged.
Gries is too: “It seems that now there is the most pro-longevity administration in American history.”
The fate of “immortality quests”
Whether or not Vitalism starts a revolution, it will almost always be controversial in some quarters. While believers see an auspicious future, others are far less certain of the benefits of a world designed to defeat death.
Gries and Cheng often make the case for deregulation in their presentations. But ethicists—and even some members of the longevity community—point out that this comes with risks. Some question whether it is ever ethical to sell a “treatment” without some idea of how likely it is to benefit the person buying and taking it. Enthusiasts counter with arguments about bodily autonomy. And they hope Montana is just the start.
Then there’s the bigger picture. Is it really that great not to die … ever? Some ethicists argue that for many cultures, death is what gives meaning to life.
Sergio Imparato, a moral philosopher and medical ethicist at Harvard University, believes that death itself has important moral meaning. We know our lives will end, and our actions have value precisely because our time is limited, he says. Imparato is concerned that Vitalists are ultimately seeking to change what it means to be human—a decision that should involve all members of society.
Alberto Giubilini, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, agrees. “Death is a defining feature of humanity,” he says. “Our psychology, our cultures, our rituals, our societies, are built around the idea of coping with death … it’s part of human nature.”
CHRIS LABROOY
Imparato’s family is from Naples, Italy, where poor residents were once laid to rest in shared burial sites, with no headstones to identify them. He tells me how the locals came to visit, clean, and even “adopt” the skulls as family members. It became a weekly ritual for members of the community, including his grandmother, who was a young girl at the time. “It speaks to what I consider the cultural relevance of death,” he says. “It’s the perfect counterpoint to … the Vitalist conception of life.”
Gries seems aware of the stigma around such “immortality quests,” as Imparato calls them. In his presentations, Gries shares lists of words that Vitalists should try to avoid—like “eternity,” “radical,” and “forever,” as well as any religious terms.
He also appears to be dropping, at least publicly, the idea that Vitalism is a “moral” movement. Morality was “never part of the Vitalist declaration,” Gries told me in September. When I asked him why he had changed his position on this, he dismissed the question. “Our point … was always that death is humanity’s core problem, and aging its primary agent,” he told me. “So it was, and so it has continued, as it was foretold.”
But despite these attempts to tweak and control the narrative, Vitalism appears to be opening the door to an incredibly wide range of sentiments in longevity science. A decade ago, I don’t think there would have been any way that the views espoused by Gries, Anzinger, and others who support Vitalist sentiments would have been accepted by the scientific establishment. After all, these are people who publicly state they hope to live indefinitely and who have no training in the science of aging, and who are open about their aims to find ways to evade the restrictions set forth by regulatory agencies like the FDA—all factors that might have rendered them outcasts not that long ago.
But Gries and peers had success in Montana. Influential scientists and policymakers attend Vitalism events, and Vitalists are featured regularly at more mainstream longevity events. Last year’s Aging Research and Drug Discovery (ARDD) conference in Copenhagen—widely recognized as the most important meeting in aging science—was sponsored in part by Anzinger’s new Próspera venture, Infinita City, as well as by several organizations that are either certified Vitalist or led by Vitalists.
“I was thinking that maybe what I was doing was very fringe or out there,” Anzinger, the non-Vitalist supporter of Vitalism, admits. “But no—I feel … loads of support.”
There was certainly an air of optimism at the Vitalist Bay Summit in Berkeley. Gries’s positivity is infectious. “All the people who want a fun and awesome surprise gift, come on over!” he called out early on the first day. “Raise your voice if you’re excited!” The audience whooped in response. He then proceeded to tell everyone, Oprah Winfrey–style, that they were all getting a free continuous glucose monitor. “You get a CGM! You get a CGM!” Plenty of attendees actually attached them to their arms on the spot.
Every revolution has to start somewhere, right?
This piece has been updated to clarify a quote from Mark Hamalainen.
The eastern half of the US saw a monster snowstorm over the weekend. The good news is the grid has largely been able to keep up with the freezing temperatures and increased demand. But there were some signs of strain, particularly for fossil-fuel plants.
One analysis found that PJM, the nation’s largest grid operator, saw significant unplanned outages in plants that run on natural gas and coal. Historically, these facilities can struggle in extreme winter weather.
Much of the country continues to face record-low temperatures, and the possibility is looming for even more snow this weekend. What lessons can we take from this storm, and how might we shore up the grid to cope with extreme weather?
Living in New Jersey, I have the honor of being one of the roughly 67 million Americans covered by the PJM Interconnection.
So I was in the thick of things this weekend, when PJM saw unplanned outages of over 20 gigawatts on Sunday during the height of the storm. (That’s about 16% of the grid’s demand that afternoon.) Other plants were able to make up the difference, and thankfully, the power didn’t go out in my area. But that’s a lot of capacity offline.
Typically, the grid operator doesn’t announce details about why an outage occurs until later. But analysts at Energy Innovation, a policy and research firm specializing in energy and climate, went digging. By examining publicly available grid mix data (a breakdown of what types of power plants are supplying the grid), the team came to a big conclusion: Fossil fuels failed during the storm.
The analysts found that gas-fired power plants were producing about 10 gigawatts less power on Sunday than the peak demand on Saturday, even while electricity prices were high. Coal- and oil-burning plants were down too. Because these plants weren’t operating, even when high prices would make it quite lucrative, they were likely a significant part of the problem, says Michelle Solomon, a manager in the electricity program at Energy Innovation.
PJM plans to share more details about the outages at an upcoming committee meeting once the cold snap passes, Dan Lockwood, a PJM spokesperson, told me via email.
Fossil-fuel plants can see reliability challenges during winter: When temperatures drop, pressures in natural-gas lines fall too, which can lead to issues for fuel supply. Freezing temperatures can throw compression stations and other mechanical equipment offline and even freeze piles of coal.
One of the starkest examples came in 2021, when Texas faced freezing temperatures that took many power plants offline and threw the grid into chaos. Many homes lost power for days, and at least 246 people died during that storm.
Texas fared much better this time around. After 2021, the state shored up its grid, adding winter weatherization for power plants and transmission systems. Texas has also seen a huge flood of batteries come online, which has greatly helped the grid during winter demand peaks, especially in the early mornings. Texas was also simply lucky that this storm was less severe there, as one expert told Inside Climate News this week.
Here on the East Coast, we’re not out of the woods yet. The snow has stopped falling, but grids are still facing high electricity demand because of freezing temperatures. (I’ve certainly been living under my heated blanket these last few days.)
PJM could see a peak power demand of 130 gigawatts for seven straight days, a winter streak that the local grid has never experienced, according to an update to the utility’s site on Tuesday morning.
The US Department of Energy issued emergency orders to several grid operators, including PJM, that allow power plants to run while basically ignoring emissions regulations. The department also issued orders allowing several grids to tell data centers and other facilities to begin using backup generators. (This is good news for reliability but bad news for clean air and the climate, since these power sources are often incredibly emissions-intensive.)
We here on the East Coast could learn a thing or two from Texas so we don’t need to resort to these polluting emergency measures to keep the lights on. More energy storage could be a major help in future winter storms, lending flexibility to the grid to help ride out the worst times, Solomon says. Getting offshore wind online could also help, since those facilities typically produce reliable power in the winter.
No one energy source will solve the massive challenge of building and maintaining a resilient grid. But as we face the continued threat of extreme storms, renewables might actually help us weather them.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
The US Department of Homeland Security is using AI video generators from Google and Adobe to make and edit content shared with the public, a new document reveals. It comes as immigration agencies have flooded social media with content to support President Trump’s mass deportation agenda—some of which appears to be made with AI—and as workers in tech have put pressure on their employers to denounce the agencies’ activities.
The document, released on Wednesday, provides an inventory of which commercial AI tools DHS uses for tasks ranging from generating drafts of documents to managing cybersecurity.
In a section about “editing images, videos or other public affairs materials using AI,” it reveals for the first time that DHS is using Google’s Veo 3 video generator and Adobe Firefly, estimating that the agency has between 100 and 1,000 licenses for the tools. It also discloses that DHS uses Microsoft Copilot Chat for generating first drafts of documents and summarizing long reports and Poolside software for coding tasks, in addition to tools from other companies.
Google, Adobe, and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The news provides details about how agencies like Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, which is part of DHS, might be creating the large amounts of content they’ve shared on X and other channels as immigration operations have expanded across US cities. They’ve posted content celebrating “Christmas after mass deportations,” referenced Bible verses and Christ’s birth, showed faces of those the agency has arrested, and shared ads aimed at recruiting agents. The agencies have also repeatedly used music without permissions from artists in their videos.
Some of the content, particularly videos, has the appearance of being AI-generated, but it hasn’t been clear until now what AI models the agencies might be using. This marks the first concrete evidence such generators are being used by DHS to create content shared with the public.
It still remains impossible to verify which company helped create a specific piece of content, or indeed if it was AI-generated at all. Adobe offers options to “watermark” a video made with its tools to disclose that it is AI-generated, for example, but this disclosure does not always stay intact when the content is uploaded and shared across different sites.
The document reveals that DHS has specifically been using Flow, a tool from Google that combines its Veo 3 video generator with a suite of filmmaking tools. Users can generate clips and assemble entire videos with AI, including videos that contain sound, dialogue, and background noise, making them hyperrealistic. Adobe launched its Firefly generator in 2023, promising that it does not use copyrighted content in its training or output. Like Google’s tools, Adobe’s can generate videos, images, soundtracks, and speech. The document does not reveal further details about how the agency is using these video generation tools.
Workers at large tech companies, including more than 140 current and former employees from Google and more than 30 from Adobe, have been putting pressure on their employers in recent weeks to take a stance against ICE and the shooting of Alex Pretti on January 24. Google’s leadership has not made statements in response. In October, Google and Apple removed apps on their app stores that were intended to track sightings of ICE, citing safety risks.
An additional document released on Wednesday revealed new details about how the agency is using more niche AI products, including a facial recognition app used by ICE, as first reported by 404Media in June.
