Jun 13 2026
Why “reprogramming” is the buzziest approach to reversing aging right now

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  • Reprogramming is the new frontier in anti-aging research: Scientists are exploring ways to return cells to a younger state, building on a Nobel Prize–winning discovery that certain genetic factors can transform adult cells into stem cells capable of becoming virtually any cell type.
  • Big money is flooding in: Billions of dollars from billionaires like Yuri Milner and Sam Altman are backing companies like Altos Labs and Retro Biosciences, signaling serious investor confidence in reprogramming’s potential to extend healthy human lifespans.
  • Past anti-aging trends have stumbled: Earlier excitement around telomere lengthening and “zombie cell” removal faded after disappointing human trials—a cautionary reminder that promising mouse studies don’t always translate, and reprogramming faces the same unproven leap.

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Earlier this week, Life Biosciences, a biotech company focused on reversing age-related diseases, announced that it had dosed its first volunteer. A person with glaucoma has had an experimental treatment injected straight into their eyeball.

The idea is to try to treat the disease—which can cause vision loss—by regenerating healthy nerves in the eye. But David Sinclair, the chairman and cofounder of the company behind the trial, hopes to go further. If the treatment can reverse glaucoma, perhaps similar treatments can reverse other diseases of aging. Maybe, just maybe, they can reverse aging altogether.

The approach is designed to work by “reprogramming” cells to a younger state. It’s one of many strategies being explored by biotech companies looking to slow and reverse the process of aging. But of all of them, it seems to be the one that is truly taking off.

Aging is complicated. As we get older, we experience so many changes across pretty much all our biological systems. Scientists have tried to categorize these effects. In 2013, one team published a seminal paper describing nine “hallmarks of aging.” That list features many of the processes scientists have attempted to target. But some of those targets have fallen in and out of fashion over the years.

Take telomere attrition, for example. Telomeres are DNA sequences at the ends of our chromosomes, often likened to the plastic caps that stop the ends of our shoelaces from fraying. When cells divide, telomeres shorten until, eventually, the DNA is vulnerable to damage.

When I started reporting on aging, telomere shortening was all the rage. Shrinking telomeres had been linked to age-related diseases of the heart and brain. Shortened telomeres were considered a sign of premature aging. In 2015 Liz Parrish, CEO of the biotech company BioViva, injected herself with an experimental gene therapy that she hoped might lengthen her telomeres.

Then it suddenly seemed to go out of style. Research continued, but all the excitement within the aging and longevity community seemed to move on to another hallmark. (Parrish also continued with self-experimentation; she calls herself “the most genetically modified person on Earth.”)

That hallmark was cellular senescence. This happens when cells stop dividing but don’t die, instead entering a “zombie” state in which they churn out chemicals that can cause harmful inflammation.

Senescent cells gradually accumulate in pretty much every organ studied, where they are thought to contribute to age-related damage. Why not just periodically clear them out? When a team of scientists took that approach in mice in 2011, they found they could delay the onset of age-related conditions like cataracts and hunchback. The treated mice even looked younger.

But when scientists at Unity Biotechnology trialed a similar approach in people with osteoarthritis and an age-related eye condition in the late 2010s and early 2020s, the results were disappointing. The company laid off every employee in May last year and has since shuttered entirely.

Again, that doesn’t mean senolytic drugs that target “zombie cells” won’t work. But it feels as if many in the field have moved on. These days, the buzz is all about ✨reprogramming✨.

The idea here is to essentially return cells to a young state. It’s based on the Nobel Prize–winning discovery that four genetic factors can turn an adult cell into a stem cell, which can be encouraged to develop into pretty much any other cell type.

Some promising studies in mice suggest that this approach might help wind back the clock. It seems to improve tissue healing, restore vision, and even improve learning and memory.

Running parallel to all this research are repeated injections of hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. In 2021, my colleague Antonio Regalado reported on the founding of the biotech company Altos Labs to pursue reprogramming for rejuvenation.

Altos was funded by the billionaire Yuri Milner—reportedly along with Jeff Bezos, among others—to the tune of $3 billion, a previously unheard-of figure for a biotech startup. Other well-funded companies have since sprung up in this space.

There’s Retro Biosciences, for instance, which is pursuing reprogramming (among other approaches) in an effort to add 10 years of healthy life to human lifespans. Retro’s launch was supported by $180 million from OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Last month, the company announced a valuation of $1.8 billion.

NewLimit, another billionaire-backed biotech exploring reprogramming, says it has promising results from research in mice. It plans to trial a drug designed to rejuvenate the liver in people next year. Last week, the company announced it had raised $435 million toward reaching that goal, among others.

Life Biosciences, which was founded by the Harvard biologist David Sinclair, most recently secured $80 million to support its research. The eye trial is now officially underway, but Sinclair also has plans for whole-body rejuvenation. Earlier this week, he told my colleague Antonio that he plans to test a “highly, highly confidential” oral reprogramming drug as part of a $101 million competition organized by the XPrize Foundation. 

Reprogramming has certainly caught the attention of scientists, biotech companies, and investors. Studies in mice are hugely promising. Human trials are launching. And research in the field has billions of dollars’ worth of support.A lot of people in the field are really excited about reprogramming. But it comes with risks. And we still don’t know if it will work. The question now is: Do we finally have a rejuvenation drug within reach? And if not, what will the next research trend look like?

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.

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Liz Parrish claimed to have undergone her first experimental gene therapy in 2015, not 2017.

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Jun 12 2026
Why China is betting on big nuclear reactors

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  • China is catching the West on nuclear: China has nearly doubled its nuclear fleet since 2016 and is on track to surpass both the US and EU in nuclear capacity by 2030.

  • The secret is standardization: China builds reactors in batches of six or more using a uniform design and licensing system—essentially applying the factory-efficiency logic that small reactor advocates champion, but at massive scale.

  • Small reactors are exciting, but still unproven: A California startup just hit a key milestone in a US government pilot program, but its test reactor can’t yet produce electricity.

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It’s a tale of two nuclear industries.

In China, large reactors are coming together at a stunning pace. The country has nearly doubled its nuclear fleet since 2016, reaching nearly 60 gigawatts of total power capacity. The new facilities are nearly all gigawatt-scale pressurized-water reactors.

Meanwhile, the US has built just two reactors in that time—Unit 3 and Unit 4 at Plant Vogtle in Georgia. Smaller reactors are attracting a lot of excitement and investment, though. A microreactor developer just saw its reactor reach criticality in a new Department of Energy pilot program.

The world is racing to meet rising electricity demand, and many countries are interested in energy sources, like nuclear power, that don’t come with greenhouse-gas emissions. The key question: Which of these strategies will really pay off in terms of getting electrons on the grid quickly?  

Today, the US and France are known as leaders in the nuclear industry. The US has the world’s largest fleet, with France coming in second. France is heavily dependent on nuclear for its grid—about two-thirds of the country’s power comes from nuclear reactors.

But they have hardly added any new reactors to their fleets in recent years. The US can point only to Vogtle, and France connected its latest reactor to the grid in December 2024—the first in over 20 years. 

It’s incredibly difficult to build the massive projects that dominate the nuclear industry today. Up-front investment can run well into the billions, so investors need to wait decades to break even. Designs are complex and can often change during the regulatory process, tacking on cost and time. 

Many are hoping that the key to turning things around in these countries could be smaller reactors.

The idea is that shrinking the footprint of a reactor cuts down the initial investment needed to prove out the new technology. The reactors could even be put together in a factory rather than being built on-site, allowing for a lower price over time.

These smaller reactors are the target of tons of interest and investment in the US, including a new Department of Energy pilot program. The department set a goal last year of having three test reactors reach criticality by July 4, 2026, the nation’s 250th anniversary. (Criticality is the point at which a reactor achieves a self-sustaining chain reaction that can release energy.)

Last week, California-based Antares hit the milestone with its Mark-0 reactor. 

The company plans to eventually build microreactors, designed to produce between 100 kilowatts and 1 megawatt of electricity (large reactors on the grid today are at least 1,000 times that size). The core design is a sodium-cooled reactor, and it uses TRISO fuel, self-contained graphite-coated spheres of a more concentrated fuel than what most reactors use today. 

But there is still a long way to go before it can actually produce power—the Mark-0 doesn’t have any power conversion or heat removal systems. The company plans to produce electricity in late 2027 and deploy in the field by 2028, CEO Jordan Bramble told the Associated Press.

The private sector is interested—and invested—too. Big Tech companies are throwing money at new reactors they hope can help power data centers. 

But look to the other side of the globe, and others are sticking with the established blueprint: China is absolutely churning out large nuclear reactors. Construction started on six new reactors there in 2025, and two more got underway in the first five months of 2026. The country is on course to overtake both the US and the European Union in installed nuclear capacity by 2030.

The speed here is staggering. As of 2024, the average time to build a new reactor in China came in at between five and seven years. The global average is about nine years, and the two most recent reactors in the US took about 15 years.

One key to this speed is standardization: China has set up a uniform project management system to design, license, and build new reactors. They’re built in batches of six or more to take advantage of economies of scale.

It’s one of the ideas meant to give the edge to smaller reactors, but China is working to realize the same benefits for larger projects. A huge amount of government investment is certainly helping.

Larger reactors generally provide more electricity to the grid for a lower price, a key consideration in view of China’s steeply increasing electricity demand. While smaller reactors require less up-front investment than larger ones because of their size, they’ll actually be more expensive per unit of electricity produced. 

That’s not to say China is exclusively focused on big reactors: the country is also expected to see its first operational small modular reactor, the Linglong-1, start sending power to the grid this year.

But looking ahead, it’ll be interesting to see if smaller reactors can help the West keep building new nuclear power. At the moment, with China’s quick progress, it’s looking as if bigger might just be better. 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

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Jun 12 2026
Google DeepMind is worried about what happens when millions of agents start to interact

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  • A new class of risk is emerging: As millions of AI agents begin working together online without human oversight, Google DeepMind warns we could hit a tipping point where today’s hypothetical dangers become tomorrow’s real ones.
  • $10 million to build a field from scratch: Google DeepMind has joined forces with Schmidt Sciences, the UK government, and others to fund research into multi-agent safety—a field that, right now, barely exists.
  • Think scams and cyberattacks, but supercharged: The risks aren’t science fiction—they’re turbocharged versions of what already happens online, from prompt injections that turn agents into self-guided malware to coordinated attacks on the digital infrastructure society depends on.
  • The future is arriving faster than expected: Risks that seemed hypothetical just a few years ago are already materializing, and researchers caution that no single lab should be writing the safety rulebook everyone else has to live by.

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Google DeepMind is funding research into the potential dangers of situations where millions of different AI agents interact with each other online.

According to Rohin Shah, who directs the company’s AGI safety and alignment research, the mass-market arrival of agents that can carry out tasks without human oversight and follow instructions given to them by other agents creates a whole new class of risk.

In an effort to address this, Google DeepMind—which made agent-based tools a centerpiece of Google I/O last month—has teamed up with several other organizations to announce a $10 million funding pot for researchers to study the behavior of multi-agent systems and come up with ways to prevent unsafe scenarios. Joining Google DeepMind are Schmidt Sciences, a philanthropic foundation set up by Eric and Wendy Schmidt; ARIA, the UK government’s moonshot agency; the Cooperative AI foundation, a UK-based nonprofit research outfit; and Google’s charitable arm, Google.org.

I asked Shah and James Fox, who leads the Science of Trustworthy AI program at Schmidt Sciences, what they hope to achieve with that $10 million. It’s no small sum, but it’s dwarfed by the budgets commanded by Google DeepMind’s own research teams.

The aim is to kick-start research outside tech companies, says Shah: “The strength of academia is that it can look really quite far into the future and do the kind of work that isn’t top of mind at industry labs.”

“The main issue is that there just isn’t really a field of research for multi-agent safety yet,” he adds. “And we would like there to be.”

The concern is that as more and more AI agents get deployed and begin working together, we could hit a tipping point where imagined scenarios become real. “We see this with humanity, too,” says Shah. “Our institutions can accomplish things that no individual human can.”

Shah thinks we have a few more months to go before agents are deployed throughout the economy in numbers that make potential risks a real concern. He wants to get ahead of that moment.

Risky business

What risks are we talking about, exactly? The possibilities that Shah and Fox have in mind mostly boil down to supercharged versions of bad things that happen on the internet already: scams, prompt injections (where an AI agent is fed malicious instructions, turning it into a self-guiding piece of malware), other forms of cyberattack. We look at what humans do now and ask what the agent version of that would be, says Shah.  

“We’ve got this digital commons that is integral to how society works, and you really want to ensure that this doesn’t descend into just absolute anarchy,” says Fox.

(I asked Shah if they were considering any worst-case scenarios more on the doomer end of the spectrum, such as widespread economic collapse. “Certainly not if we’re talking by the end of the year,” he said. That’s only six months away! He laughed. “Okay, a while after that.”)

Shah and Fox both think that the only way to understand what might happen when large numbers of multi-agent systems interact with each other is to run realistic simulations. They want researchers to drop AI agents into sandboxes and study what they do.

You can’t predict what’s going to happen by studying single agents, or even small groups of agents, in isolation. You can’t assume that AI agents underpinned by LLMs will always act rationally, says Fox. And the complexity comes from having huge numbers of interactions at once.

Some researchers, including a team at Google DeepMind, have argued that artificial general intelligence (if possible at all) could come not from a single super-smart model but from a kind of agent hive mind, where the capabilities of the whole add up to more than the sum of its parts.  

Lack of trust

Google DeepMind is not the only top AI firm warning about the risks of the technology it is building. A couple of weeks ago, Anthropic published guidelines for deploying AI agents based on an approach to cybersecurity known as zero trust, which starts with the assumption that a computer system is vulnerable, an agent is an attacker, and a breach will happen.

Refael Angel, cofounder and CTO of Akeyless, a cybersecurity firm based in Tel Aviv, agrees that understanding the new risks introduced by agent-based systems is crucial.  

Every approach to security in the past has assumed that the machine in question was software written by a human, doing fixed things on fixed paths, says Angel: “An agent breaks all of those assumptions. It reasons, it improvises, and it can be hijacked by a single sentence buried in a document it was asked to read.”

Angel welcomes this new funding. “No single lab should author the safety standards everyone else has to trust,” he says. But he cautions that safety researchers can overlook boring problems that are already here in favor of more exotic hypothetical ones.

And yet, Fox notes, risks that were hypothetical a few years ago are now very real: “The future’s come more quickly than perhaps expected.”

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Jun 10 2026
David Sinclair plans to test whole-body rejuvenation drugs in the XPrize competition

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  • A bold new bet on whole-body rejuvenation: Harvard biologist David Sinclair plans to test an oral “reprogramming” drug on human volunteers as part of a $101 million XPrize competition.

  • Chemicals instead of gene therapy: Sinclair’s new drug candidate — code-named SL-100 — uses drugs to mimic the effects of reprogramming genes, and will attempt to reset aging across the body.

  • Experts urge caution: Other scientists warn that chemical reprogramming efforts have so far proven either ineffective at low doses or outright toxic at high ones — and Sinclair’s unpublished animal data has yet to face outside scrutiny.

  • The field’s bigger problem: Scientists still can’t agree on how to reliably measure aging or age reversal, making the XPrize competition as much about establishing scientific standards as it is about crowning a winner.

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The outspoken longevity scientist David Sinclair has been predicting that one day, you’ll go to the doctor and get a prescription that will make you 10 years younger.

Now MIT Technology Review has learned that he has plans to launch human tests of an oral “reprogramming” drug as part of a $101 million competition organized by the XPrize Foundation. 

The foundation is offering cash awards to teams able to “restore” a person to an earlier apparent age, as measured by improvements in immune, cognitive, and muscle function. 

The grand prize goes to any team able to show a 10-year (or greater) relative improvement after one year of treatment. 

Reached by phone, Sinclair, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, confirmed that he plans to give an oral drug mixture to volunteers in a bid to seek “evidence for age restoration in humans.”

The trial, if it goes forward, will be a significant new development in the race to harness so-called epigenetic reprogramming. That technology is based on the discovery, 20 years ago, of powerful genes able to turn an adult cell into a stem cell similar to those found in embryos.

The age-reversal effect is believed to occur via a resetting of molecular controls on DNA known as epigenetic marks, which help determine a cell’s overall metabolism and identity.

Companies are now racing to use that phenomenon for a new form of rejuvenation medicine. Only this January, one of Sinclair’s companies, Life Biosciences, made news by winning approval to launch an initial human trial using a set of powerful reprogramming genes. The company announced today it had treated its first patient. 

But that test involves a complex gene therapy and is limited to patients’ eyes, where it could treat conditions like glaucoma. 

Sinclair’s new plan is bolder: a reprogramming drug you’d swallow in order to promote such effects across the body. 

“What we’re aiming to do is to epigenetically restore the animal and eventually the person,” he says. “It is true that we’ve been doing extensive animal studies with the oral agent and are looking to compete in the XPrize.”

This alternative method, chemical reprogramming, uses drugs to mimic the effects of the embryonic genes. That is significant because drug compounds can travel through the bloodstream, reaching most or all cells in a person’s body. 

Some experts expressed caution, saying the chemical process, at least as used in labs, is extremely harsh and not even particularly effective. “Who doesn’t dream of whole-body rejuvenation? I think it’s a great goal,” says Sergiy Velychko, founder of Soxogen, a stealth reprogramming company in Boston. “But these chemicals are used in very, very high concentrations for cell reprogramming.”

Sinclair declined to describe the exact makeup of the drug candidate, code-named SL-100, calling its contents “highly, highly confidential.”

However, he has previously published lab studies of what he called “epigenetic age-reversal cocktails,” which mixed powerful chemicals with known supplements and commercially available medicines. 

It’s those latter components that would be easiest to test on people, since doctors are free to prescribe them, even for unusual objectives like age reversal. James Clement, head of Betterhumans, an organization that specializes in life-extension studies using existing drugs, said in a message that he is “running clinical trials” of an oral reprogramming cocktail for Sinclair’s XPrize team.

Sinclair’s team is competing in the XPrize Healthspan Competition, launched in 2023. It follows several previous competitions that focused on commercial spaceflight, lunar landings, and other goals. The XPrize Foundation is led by executive chairman Peter Diamandis, also an active promoter of longevity research.

“If two teams are equivalent, they would split the award,” says Jamie Justice, a doctor and executive director for the contest, which was bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s Hevolution Foundation, “But it will be incredibly hard to even get to one winner.”

Justice says a judging panel is now in the process of picking 10 finalists from 65 teams that have been exploring health foods, lifestyle interventions, digital trackers, and drug compounds. 

Sinclair’s team, Justice says, was a late entrant to the contest, but like all teams, it would be required to move into wider human tests starting this year. “You have to be ready and in trials,” she says.

The race to harness the reprogramming phenomenon and apply it to living people is heating up, even outside the XPrize competition. On June 2, a startup called NewLimit, founded by the crypto billionaire Brian Armstrong, said it had raised a further $435 million, from investors including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, to support what it calls “age reprogramming.” 

The company says it is working toward delivering genetic reprogramming instructions to the liver, to treat diseases of that organ.

But Sinclair has been saying that whole-body rejuvenation is a possibility too. And for that, chemicals, rather than gene therapy, could be the most practical strategy. 

Sinclair says his lab has been searching for such compounds and is starting to use AI “to improve the oral agents that we’re testing.”

Chemical reprogramming cocktails, as used in labs, typically involve a mix of vitamins, approved drugs, and experimental molecules. For instance, one recipe Sinclair filed a patent on includes the supplement forskolin,  the antidepressant tranylcypromine, and an experimental chemical, laduviglusib, which has been tested against Alzheimer’s, among other ingredients.

“In those days it was a six-factor cocktail,” Sinclair says of his earlier research. “But we’ve come a long way. I can’t disclose what’s in it, but it’s an improvement and an advance on that, and we’ve done a number of animal studies. They are not published, but we’ve been doing them for a long time, and we want to make sure that we’ve done a full investigation of safety and efficacy before we release any of the data.”

While Sinclair’s results aren’t published, other teams say attempts to reverse the age of entire animals using chemical drugs haven’t worked yet. Last year, the lab of Vadim Gladyshev, another Harvard biologist and a member of a different XPrize team, reported on its attempt to rejuvenate mice by installing pumps in their bodies that released controlled doses of seven compounds.

Gladyshev says the procedure proved to be toxic. “The idea was to see if we could rejuvenate whole animals. Unfortunately, we have not found [the right] conditions,” he says. “At low concentrations there was no effect, and high concentrations were toxic.”

Gladyshev says he doesn’t know what is in Sinclair’s cocktail, but says that “trying to improve the combinations makes sense.”

Sinclair, who is the author of several books on aging and has a large social media following, has frequently been criticized by other scientists for making unproven rejuvenation claims. 

In 2024, he resigned as president of the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research after claiming that a supplement developed by a company his brother runs had “reversed” the age of dogs, a claim for which there was so little evidence that one scientist called it a “lie.”

Part of the problem is that scientists still disagree on how to measure aging. And they don’t have a reliable way to measure age reversal, either, should it ever be achieved.

Justice, the XPRIZE director, says a primary purpose of the competition is to solve that problem by encouraging the development of standardized measures of aging. That is so that anti-aging drugs can be assessed reliably, and, one-day, approved by regulators if they work.

 “We as a scientific field have been forced to ask, ‘If a medicine improves how we age, how would we know?” Justice said during a public meeting with FDA officials in May. “If something worked, what would convince us as scientists, what’s meaningful to the general public?”

Finalists in the Healthspan competition will be announced in August.

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Jun 6 2026
Are AI chatbots making us lose control of our brains?

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  • Attention spans are in freefall. Psychologist Gloria Mark found that average attention spans dropped from two and a half minutes in 2003 to just 47 seconds by 2020—and the constant switching is directly linked to rising stress levels.
  • AI may be making our brains lazy. When we outsource writing, summarizing, and evaluating to tools like ChatGPT, we skip the “depth of processing” that helps us actually learn and think critically—and those cognitive muscles can atrophy from disuse.
  • Even our emotional intelligence is at risk. AI companions require none of the effort that real relationships demand, and Mark warns that if current trends continue, loneliness, purposelessness, and emotional decline will only deepen.
  • The fix is effort, not abstinence. Mark isn’t calling for a tech ban—she’s calling for intentionality: read the book, skip the GPS, meet friends in person. The harder the task, she says, the greater the reward.

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This week I’ve been at SXSW London. There’s been music, film, and a lot—and I mean a lot—of talk about AI. I also had the opportunity to sit down with Gloria Mark, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who has spent the last 30 years studying how people interact with digital technologies.

Early in her career, the biggest concerns were the potential impacts of internet and email use on our brains. We may laugh those concerns off today, but it’s true that as the technologies became more ubiquitous and ingrained in our daily lives, our attention spans began to shrink.

Mark is worried that things are only getting worse. The title of our session was “Have we lost control of our brains?” Unfortunately, Mark told me, the answer is yes.

Around two decades ago, Mark started wondering about how our use of devices might affect our attention spans. She set up what she calls “living laboratories,” using sensors and trackers to monitor adult volunteers’ attention, mood, and behavior when they were using devices.

In 2003, she found that the average user had an attention span of around two and a half minutes. That’s how long people could spend focused on one thing before moving on to something else. “That surprised me at the time,” she told me during our session on Wednesday. “I thought: Wow, this is really short.”

But when she repeated the experiment in 2012, she found that attention spans had shrunk—all the way down to around 75 seconds on average, she said. In research she conducted between 2014 and 2020, attention spans shrank further still—to a mere 47 seconds, on average. Yikes.

And it’s not good for us. Mark told me that she’s found switching our attention so frequently is stressful. “We would have people wear heart rate monitors, and … we would see direct correlation between switching attention fast and stress going up,” she told me.

All this distraction makes it harder for us to get stuff done, too. “It just takes longer to do any single task if you’re switching your attention,” she told me. “It’s not great for performance. It’s not great for our emotional well-being.”

And that’s for adults. What about the effects of digital technologies on children? A few months ago, Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) and Google’s YouTube were ordered to pay millions of dollars in damages to a 20-year-old woman who had accused the companies of creating products that led her to develop a childhood addiction.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Meta settled another lawsuit, this one brought by a rural school district in Kentucky. The district had also accused the company of designing addictive products that were harmful to students and had sought more than $60 million to cover the costs of their mental-health needs. Around 1,200 other school districts are taking similar legal action against social media companies.

But social media isn’t all bad, all the time. It can provide opportunities for some people, including those from marginalized groups, to form connections that might otherwise be difficult. A 2024 survey of LGBTQ+ teenagers found that while some described social media as a place of rejection and fear, others described it as a place where they felt a sense of belonging, where they could develop friendships and cultivate their identity.

In truth, we can’t definitively say what effects using social media is having on children across the board, says Mark. “There have been lots and lots of studies, and the evidence is to date inconclusive,” she told me. (Despite what you might read in best-selling books on the subject.)

Mark is hopeful that large, long-term studies might finally start shedding a bit more light on this question. An effort of this nature is underway in Australia, which enacted a social media ban for under-16s at the end of last year.

Given this uncertainty over a 20-year-old technology, I wondered if Mark had any thoughts on the potential impacts of AI—an obviously much newer offering that within the space of a couple of years appears to have become deeply integrated into our digital lives.

She told me she’s worried.

When we put in effort to do something—such as evaluating or summarizing content—we’re doing what’s known as “depth of processing,” she told me. “When you’re actively engaged with information, you’re processing it on a very deep level,” she said. “Then you’re more likely to learn it, to understand it, [and] to retain it.”

That’s not happening when most people use AI bots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. When we ask these tools to write, summarize, or evaluate for us, we’re no longer doing that depth of processing. “You’re deferring your cognitive work to AI,” she said. “And it’s not good for us.”

The risk is that our cognitive abilities will weaken over time. “If you’re not constantly exercising your muscles, they can atrophy,” Mark said. “And that’s exactly what can happen with our minds.” People with weaker critical thinking skills are more likely to fall prey to misinformation, she added.

Interactions with AI-powered “synthetic companions” can be just as harmful. Relationships between human beings take work—time, effort, and understanding. None of that is needed if you’re forming a relationship with a sycophantic bot. The “muscle” we risk atrophying here is emotional intelligence, which surveys suggest is already on the decline, said Mark.

She’s not painting a particularly rosy picture.

“If we continue on this trajectory, attention spans are diminished, loneliness is rising, boredom is rising, emotional intelligence decreasing, and actually our sense of purpose, according to studies, is also decreasing,” she said.

Luckily, she thinks we can course-correct by changing our relationship with these technologies. The key factor is effort.

The more effort we put into something, the deeper the satisfaction we stand to gain, Mark told me. That means making an effort to read a book rather than skimming its summary, and to meet with friends in person when you can. Try not to use GPS in places where you can probably manage without it.

“I love technology; we can’t give it up,” she told me. “[But] we have to learn how to create new life routines.”

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.

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Jun 6 2026
The Meta hack shows there’s more to AI security than Mythos

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  • A shockingly simple hack: Attackers exploited Meta’s AI customer support agent by simply asking it to reassign Instagram accounts to attacker-controlled emails. No sophisticated trickery was needed—just a VPN and a direct request.

  • AI as target, not weapon: Unlike fears about AI-powered cyberattacks, this breach targeted an AI system itself. Experts say this kind of attack will grow more common as companies automate sensitive workflows like account recovery.

  • Eager to please, easy to fool: AI agents are built to complete tasks flexibly—but that same quality makes them manipulable in ways humans wouldn’t be. One researcher compared them to an overeager student who just wants to please the teacher.

  • Speed versus safety: Guardrails and red-teaming can reduce risk, but companies racing to deploy capable agents often skip careful scrutiny. Experts warn that pressure to move fast is making a dangerous problem worse.

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On June 5, 404 Media reported that attackers had been using Meta’s AI customer support agent to steal Instagram accounts. Their approach was simple: They asked the agent to link the accounts to email addresses that they controlled, and the agent complied. One attacker broke into the dormant Obama White House account and made pro-Iran posts; others took over accounts with valuable, single-word handles, possibly in order to sell them.

AI cybersecurity concerns are nothing new. Since Anthropic announced in April that its Mythos model was too good at hacking to be released to the general public, commentators, researchers, and federal officials alike have fixated on the idea that superpowered AI systems could lay waste to our computer infrastructure. That’s not quite what this Instagram hack was: There, AI was the target rather than the attacker, and the method was far simpler than anything Mythos would cook up. But as companies offload more work to AI, these comparatively unsophisticated attacks could wreak their own havoc.

“As AI becomes more and more widely used—especially when AI is more and more widely used to automate our work flows, like account recovery—I think attackers are going to be more and more motivated to attack AI itself,” says Neil Gong, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University.

Gong and other scholars have been issuing warnings about the security vulnerabilities of AI agents for a while. They publish papers and blog posts detailing exploits such as indirect prompt injection, which involves hijacking agents using commands hidden in websites, emails, or other seemingly anodyne data sources. Compared with these techniques, the Meta hack was practically mindless. The only complication that hackers had to overcome was using a VPN that matched the true account owner’s location; then they directly asked the support agent to change the account’s email address, and it complied.

Meta has not commented publicly on how this vulnerability slipped through the cracks. But given the simplicity of the exploit, Gong says, it should have been uncovered easily, before the agent was deployed. “It’s really surprising,” he says. “I don’t understand why they didn’t find this simple problem.”

Jessica Ji, a senior research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, agrees. “It raises questions like: Were there even guardrails in place?” she says. “Did anyone think to test for this kind of scenario?” She notes that the oversight is particularly striking coming from a company like Meta, which has extensive expertise in both AI and cybersecurity. Meta did not respond to a request for comment for this article, but on Monday a Meta spokesperson said on X that the vulnerability had been resolved.

As embarrassing a moment as this might be for Meta in particular, it also highlights some core vulnerabilities shared by all AI agents. Unlike traditional software, agents can respond in flexible—and unexpected—ways to new circumstances, which is why they might be able to substitute for human customer support agents. But AI agents can also be tricked in ways that humans wouldn’t be, and because they can take real-world actions, those mistakes have consequences. “A human would say, ‘Okay, why do you want to change the email address?’ and maybe respond with a security question,” says Somesh Jha, a professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “What is going on with these agents is they’re very eager to finish the task. It’s almost like some elementary school student who just wants to please the teacher.”

There are ways to mitigate the risks. Companies can use traditional software to build guardrails that make sure agents follow strict rules, such as always asking for answers to security questions before sending sensitive account information to a new email address. And the experts consulted for this article all agree that agents should undergo rigorous red-teaming, a process in which developers try their best to attack a system in order to discover its vulnerabilities before it is deployed.

But there are also countervailing forces. Companies want to deploy capable agents, and the more power an agent has—and the fewer guardrails it is subject to—the more work it can potentially take on. “Security and utility always have a trade-off,” says Bo Li, a professor of computer science at the  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. And adequate red-teaming can be expensive. Defenders have to expend more resources than attackers do, because attackers only need to discover a single exploit, while defenders try to discover and patch as many as they can. When attackers are working toward something as valuable as a single-word Instagram handle, they’ll pour resources into finding exploits, so defenders have to spend even more money to protect that prize. 

As AI models continue to improve, hardening their defenses might actually get easier. Though the probabilistic nature of large language models means that LLM agents will always be vulnerable to some forms of attack, a more sophisticated model might have identified an attempt to change the email associated with the Obama White House account as suspicious. And AI systems can be used for agent red-teaming, much as participants in Anthropic’s Project Glasswing use Mythos to identify vulnerabilities in their software. 

Still, experts expect that the problem of securing AI agents will only become more pressing in the future. As agents grow more capable, companies that adopt them may want to give them more power, both to provide more services with fewer humans and to avoid being left behind by their competitors. In the fast-moving world of AI, the time needed to carefully secure risky agentic systems might seem like an unconscionable delay.

“Everybody wants to be the first to do something and just push things out without careful scrutiny and red-teaming,” Jha says. “I think it’s a very dangerous thing.”

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Jun 5 2026
How courts are coping with a flood of AI-generated lawsuits

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  • AI is driving an increase in lawsuits: A new study found that self-represented court filings more than doubled after 2023. Judges largely attribute the surge to chatbots.

  • Clearer filings, same odds: AI is helping people without lawyers write more coherent arguments, but it isn’t helping them win. Mounting a lawsuit involves far more than drafting text, experts say.

  • Chatbot-client privilege is unsettled law: Courts are split on whether conversations with AI tools like ChatGPT deserve the same legal protections as attorney-client communications, with conflicting rulings emerging from Michigan, New York, and Colorado.

  • Who pays when the chatbot is wrong?: Nippon Life Insurance sued OpenAI in March, alleging ChatGPT practiced law without a license. States are now weighing legislation to hold AI companies liable for bad legal advice.

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Most days in her chambers, Judge Maritza Braswell, a federal magistrate judge in Colorado, sifts through stacks of documents written by people without a lawyer. Many of them can’t afford to hire a lawyer, and others have cases too weak or too small to interest one. She reads each one carefully, mindful of how daunting it is to walk into the courtroom alone. 

Lately, like many judges across the US, she has seen a noticeable uptick in such filings. According to a new study that examined 4.5 million federal civil cases from 2005 to 2026, the share of lawsuits brought by self-represented people increased from 11% in 2022 to 16.8% in 2025. Within those cases, the number of filings made more than doubled from pre-2023 levels. 

Judge Braswell puts that jump down to AI. 

“I do correlate that to AI in part because I see AI use,” she says. As a tech-savvy judge who uses AI to vet court documents, she’s learned to recognize how large language models write. She can tell from the prose and at times, hallucinated cases and fabricated quotes. 

“I’m also actually seeing better-drafted pleadings,” she says. 

But while AI appears to be expanding access to justice, it doesn’t seem to be improving people’s chances of winning. Judges are also starting to question what kinds of rights and responsibilities large language models should bear as they step into lawyers’ shoes. For example, they ask whether a chatbot has a duty to provide good advice, as a human lawyer does. And a growing number of lawmakers across the US are starting to grapple with who should pay the price when chatbots dish out bad legal advice. 

AI supercharges lawsuits

To test whether AI was driving the increase in lawsuits filed by people without a lawyer, the authors of the study, Anand Shah at MIT and Joshua Levy at the University of Southern California, ran 1,600 randomly sampled court documents through Pangram, a commercial AI-text detector. The share flagged as containing AI-generated writing rose from 1% in 2023 to 18% in 2026. 

To Judge Braswell, that’s not necessarily a cause for concern. While the surge of AI-assisted filings might be adding to their workloads, she and many other judges find the cases easier to rule on because AI is helping people without legal training better articulate their arguments. 

Court documents written by people without lawyers are notoriously hard to decipher. Some arrive as handwritten scrawls bordering on gibberish that judges take a while to decode. However cryptic, judges are required to read them charitably.

These days, Judge Braswell has been churning through motions drafted by AI faster than the ones written by the litigants. “I have to be really careful because some of them contain hallucinations and errors, but I can generally understand what they’re arguing better with AI assistance from them than without it,” she says.

The clearer filings let Judge Braswell hear them better. “If I understand an argument a little bit better, I’m probably going to be able to help a little bit more,” she says.

Online communities are springing up to trade self-help guides on using AI to sue. In December 2024, a viral Reddit post walked immigration applicants through suing the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services over delayed review of their applications: draft a writ of mandamus with Microsoft Copilot, pay a lawyer $150 to polish it, and file in the expedient District of Vermont. Cases filed by people without lawyers in Vermont rose from about 45 a year before 2022 to more than 1,100 in 2024. 

Even so, people without lawyers are far more likely to lose their case than people with lawyers, and that’s not changing even with the addition of AI, the study found. 

“It turns out that mounting a lawsuit is a complex, multifaceted task. Not all of it is just drafting text,” says Levy. 

Chatbot-client privilege

Judge William Garfinkel, a federal magistrate judge in Connecticut, has served on the bench for three decades, pondering all sorts of questions about lawyers’ relationship with their clients. Lately, he has been wondering whether people’s conversations with chatbots dispensing legal advice should be privileged, the way their conversations with lawyers are. 

“You can make a good argument that … conversations with large language models like Claude or ChatGPT or Grok should deserve some protection,” he says.

Courts are starting to grapple with this question. In February, a federal court in Michigan ruled that a self-represented person’s conversations with ChatGPT to prepare her case were work product—legal work that is shielded from the opposing side.

The decision came on the same day a federal court in New York held that documents a criminal defendant had generated using Claude were not privileged attorney-client conversations or work product. The court argued that Claude is not an attorney and that a user has no “reasonable expectation of confidentiality in his communication” with it because AI companies can disclose user data to third parties. 

In March, Judge Braswell ruled that a self-represented person’s use of a chatbot should stay off limits. “It is true that AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others … collect user data for training and other purposes. But … that does not eliminate all expectations of privacy,” she wrote. Courts have since remained split on the issue.

Malpractice without a pulse

Some judges are also wondering whether a chatbot, like a lawyer, has a duty to provide good legal advice. Judge Allison Goddard, a federal magistrate judge in California, has noticed that people without lawyers often get the wrong advice from ChatGPT when trying to assess the value of their case during settlement negotiations. In one case, a plaintiff who slipped and fell in a store asked for $700,000 from the store, which was wildly more than the case was worth.

“Where are you getting the idea that you’re getting $700,000? Did you go to ChatGPT?” Judge Goddard asked. “Well …” the plaintiff mumbled. She then walked the person through the law to explain why ChatGPT was wrong and suggested a lower amount. “It’s like Dr. Google went to law school,” she says.

Then there’s the question of who’s liable when a chatbot makes such mistakes. In March, Nippon Life Insurance Company sued OpenAI alleging that ChatGPT practiced law without a license and helped a woman reopen a lawsuit that was already settled, flooding the court with frivolous filings. “ChatGPT is not an attorney,” the lawsuit said. 

In May, OpenAI asked the court to dismiss the case, arguing that ChatGPT does not practice law. “ChatGPT is not a person and neither has nor uses any degree of legal ​knowledge or skill,” OpenAI said in its filing. The case is still pending before the court.

States have started to weigh legislation that would hold AI companies liable when their chatbots offer bad legal advice. New York introduced a bill in March that would bar chatbots from impersonating lawyers, even if they notify ​users that they are interacting with chatbots. In Congress, a series of bills have been proposed to ban chatbots from posing as lawyers, doctors, and other licensed professionals. The bills have yet to gain traction.

For now, people will continue turning to AI to be their lawyer. For many of them, the rewards outweigh the risks. Not long ago, when Judge Braswell asked self-represented litigants why they wanted a particular piece of evidence, they mumbled timidly. Now, they answer her questions confidently, having rehearsed with a chatbot. 

“This is a really tough system to navigate. With AI, though, it gets a little less complex,” she says.

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Jun 4 2026
How virtual power plants could provide energy for data centers

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  • Google’s novel grid deal: Google is financing a 100 megawatt virtual power plant through Voltus that will pay homes and businesses to dial back electricity use, freeing up capacity for its data centers on the US East Coast’s PJM grid.

  • The flexibility problem: Data centers could theoretically come online without new power plants if they agreed to reduce demand during peak hours roughly 40 times a year—but there are questions about whether tech companies will actually do that, as downtime could mean giving up revenue.

  • People may not play along: A recent California study found that even at $40 a month, fewer than 5% of EV owners agreed to let utilities manage their charging—a cautionary sign for demand response programs that depend on widespread public participation.

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Would you take a payment to ramp down your electricity use? Would it change anything if you were doing so to help power a local data center?

Google just signed a new deal to help pay for a virtual power plant (VPP) in the largest power grid in the US. The agreement is with Voltus, a leading VPP and distributed energy resources platform.

Voltus will set up the virtual power plant, grouping together devices like electric vehicles and smart thermostats. It’ll pay customers to participate, and the company will dial back power or use the stored energy during times when the grid is stressed. Google will foot the bill for setting it up, and the extra capacity generated by the project will help run its data centers in the region.

This is one of the most concrete examples so far of a tech giant using a VPP to help meet energy demand for data centers. But there are still some lingering questions about just how far this sort of program can go, and what the limits are.

Last year, it felt as if everyone was talking about data center flexibility. A high-profile study from Duke University found that if data centers agreed to decrease their energy demand for roughly 40 hours per year, a whole bunch of them (about 100 gigawatts’ worth) could come online without making new power plants or transmission equipment necessary.

The underlying reason is that our power grid is designed not for our average energy use, but for the absolute maximum: the brutally hot July evening when everyone is blasting their air conditioners, watching Love Island, and microwaving popcorn. If a data center is willing to refrain from pulling so much power during those high-stress times, the grid can happily support it the rest of the year.

One lingering question here is about incentives: How would you get data centers to agree to this? After all, they might not have a very flexible load, especially now that AI use is more widespread—training a model can easily be delayed or shifted, but customer demand is more immediate. Giving up computing capacity could mean losing revenue.

Regulation is one approach that could work here. One proposal in the US would allow new data centers to come online years sooner if they agree to lower demand when the grid is nearing its max.  And a new Texas law requires large users to switch to backup power or curtail their demand in emergency situations.

Another approach is for data center operators to pay for other people to be flexible.

Voltus announced a new program in September that allows data centers to finance flexibility on their local grid. The company calls it “Bring your own capacity.” Google is now the first named customer taking advantage of this program.

In the new agreement, Voltus will pay people who agree to participate in the virtual power plant. The plant will be part of PJM, the grid that covers much of the US East Coast. The company says it will be able to aggregate up to 100 megawatts of distributed energy resources each year. The plant should be operational in 2027, according to Voltus.

This isn’t Google’s first foray into flexibility; the company has agreements with utilities across the US to limit or shift its own energy demand, which can help free up grid capacity. As the company pointed out in a blog post earlier this year, though, there are limits on how flexible a data center can be, and not every facility will be able to ramp down its power demand.

“There is no one solution for expanding grid capacity and we’re continuing to explore all options, including the many avenues for load flexibility,” said Michael Terrell, Google’s global head of advanced energy, in an emailed statement in response to written questions.

Once again, I’m wondering about incentives here. These companies are asking homes and businesses to be flexible. Will they agree?

A recent study in California looked at local people’s willingness to participate in managed electric-vehicle charging. Essentially, the program pays people to give up control of when they charge their EVs. This is another way to help smooth out electricity demand and ease the burden on the grid.

The problem? Not many people signed up. With no economic incentive, only 1% of EV owners enrolled in managed charging. At $40 per month (about 15% of their power bill), only 4.6% did.

This is a different situation and a different region from the one in which Google is working with Voltus. (It’s worth noting that the companies aren’t sharing how much they plan to pay the participants, which will obviously be a big determinant in participation for this kind of project.) 

But this study shows that even with money on the table, people may not always jump at the chance to cede control of their electricity demand. And it certainly feels relevant that about 70% of Americans oppose AI data centers in their area, according to recent Gallup polling. 

Being flexible sounds like a great idea in theory, and these financed VPPs could provide an immediate route to meeting energy demand. But as we move from idea to implementation, it’ll be interesting to see whether trial runs work as intended.  

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

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Jun 2 2026
China has approved the world’s first invasive brain-computer chip—here’s what’s next

<div data-chronoton-summary="

  • The world’s first approved invasive BCI: A coin-size device called NEO, developed by Shanghai startup Neuracle Technology, beat Neuralink and others to become the first invasive BCI approved for use beyond clinical trials, now available to paralysis patients in China.

  • China is betting big on brain tech: Beijing has fast-tracked NEO into its national health insurance system and named its brain-computer interface industry as one of six sectors critical to China’s future. It signals an acceleration that experts say has no comparable national-level ambition anywhere else in the world.

  • This isn’t a race—it’s two different games: While the US chases breakthroughs, China is focused on scale and accessibility. Also, despite geopolitical tensions, US-China collaboration in neurotechnology quietly continues, with American firm Axoft already running trials in Shanghai.

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One day last October, sitting in the courtyard of his house in China’s Henan province, Dong Hui decided to see if he could hold a pen to write. 

Dong, 39, had sustained spinal cord injuries in a car accident six years earlier that left him paralyzed from the neck down. Slowly but determinedly, he wrote his name, “Thank you,” and then the date. This was the result of an 11-month-long rehabilitation enabled by an implant in his brain. Before that process, Dong could move his arms slightly but wasn’t able to use his fingers.

“I couldn’t believe I was able to write again. I was so excited I even missed a stroke in my name,” he told MIT Technology Review on a video call. 

In November 2024, Dong became one of the first people in China to be given an invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) through brain surgery. He had signed up for a clinical trial with the device’s developer one month after seeing on TV how a BCI had apparently enabled another paralyzed Chinese man to hold his granddaughter. 

This March, the implant Dong uses became the first invasive BCI product in the world to be approved for use beyond clinical trials. It’s now available to some patients with paralysis in their limbs due to spinal cord injuries. We spoke to a range of experts to understand why the device was able to reach this global milestone, what makes this moment so significant, and what to expect next. 

A world first

Dong’s brain implant is a coin-size device called NEO. It was developed by Neuracle Technology, a Shanghai-based startup, together with researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing. 

During a procedure that took just over an hour and a half, the device’s sensors, which collect Dong’s brain signals, were placed on his dura mater, the tough outer layer of tissue that covers and protects the brain. The signals are transmitted to a computer by an implant placed on Dong’s skull. The computer then translates the signals into commands for a soft robotic glove Dong wears during the 2.5-hour training sessions he completes each day to help him learn to grab. 

Dong started his rehabilitation around a week after surgery. “On the ninth day of my training, my right hand successfully grabbed a ball without the glove,” he says. “That was a miraculous moment.” 

Now he continues with his training at home. He wants to be able to control his hands better in order to put on clothes, eat, and do other daily tasks without troubling his aging parents. 

A growing number of people with traumatic injuries in China are now poised to tread a similar path thanks to NEO’s recent approval. According to China’s National Medical Products Administration, the bureau responsible for drug supervision, the product is suitable for patients between 18 and 60 who have paralysis in all limbs due to spinal cord injuries but still have some residual function in their arms. 

NEO beat several other BCIs to approval, including one from Neuralink, a California-based company founded by Elon Musk. Since October 2023, Neuracle has conducted 36 clinical trials using NEO, including the one on Dong. Thirty-two of them took place in the space of a few months in 2025, with the details about one of the four first in-person trials published in a preprint paper last July. Neuracle did not reply to a request for comment from MIT Technology Review.

One reason for NEO’s fast approval could be that it has a “relatively less invasive” design than counterparts such as Neuralink’s N1 brain chip, says Avinash Singh, a BCI researcher at the University of Technology Sydney. NEO’s eight sensors sit on top of the brain’s protective membrane while Neuralink’s N1 chip directly penetrates the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain itself. Neuracle’s device faces fewer regulatory constraints because it presents a lower risk of hemorrhage, glial scarring, and long-term signal degradation, Singh says.

China’s strong support for its BCI industry also means that NEO was put on an expedited regulatory pathway; in comparison, the approval process of the US Food and Drug Administration can take several years, Singh adds.

A big boost for BCIs

NEO’s approval is hugely important for the global BCI industry, says Wang Shouyan, a neuroscientist at Fudan University in Shanghai who was not involved in research or trialing for NEO. Even though research and development on BCIs has taken place for several decades, most of it happened in the lab. The news means that BCIs are now ready for large-scale manufacturing and clinical use in China, Wang says. 

For Dong, however, it means something much more personal. “Now, it will be able to help not only me, but also thousands and thousands of other patients suffering from spinal cord injuries in China who are tortured by despair each day,” he says of NEO. “It will bring them hope and change their lives.” 

Days after NEO was approved, China started incorporating it into the country’s health insurance system by assigning it a unique code. This is one of the first steps toward a future where eligible Chinese patients pay a certain percentage of the BCI’s price if they need it during their treatment.

The growth of China’s BCI industry is expected to accelerate thanks to the government’s policy support and financial backing. The country’s latest five-year plan, published on the same day Neuracle received its approval, lists BCI as one of six key industries important to China’s future tech competitiveness, alongside quantum technology, humanoid robots, and others. Several Chinese startups, including NeuroXess and StairMed, have already worked in the field for many years. 

“China’s decision to double down on becoming a global leader in the field owes in part to what these companies have already accomplished,” says Meicen Sun, an information scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who studies information and technology policy. 

But, Sun says, the biggest advantage China may have is that Chinese people, particularly patients like Dong, tend to welcome this technology and are genuinely enthusiastic about it. In comparison, in the US and Western Europe, testing technologies on human bodies elicits an “ick factor,” triggering concerns and even resistance, she says.

Cooperation in a cold climate 

NEO has become the world’s first invasive BCI to go commercial, but scientists interviewed by MIT Technology Review caution against comparing Chinese and US efforts through the lens of a race. 

A race implies an endpoint, but it is hard to say where that is for the development of BCIs, says Nick Ramsey, a neuroscientist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Also, the US and China have fundamentally different visions, Sun says. The US is primarily concerned with being the first to do something and achieving state-of-the-art performance, while winning to China means capturing more consumers and using technology to deliver solutions on a societal scale. 

“Being exceptional and being accessible are two diametrically opposed definitions of winning,” Sun says. 

In fact, neurotechnology has emerged as a rare tech sector where US-China collaboration is still happening despite geopolitical tensions. The US company Axoft,  based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says it has teamed up with a Chinese company and a hospital in Shanghai to test its BCI on four patients in China and has plans to expand its trials in the country. 

Looking forward, China’s BCI industry is expected to speed up its growth over the next five years thanks to strong government support. “There is no comparable national-level ambition or coordinated map elsewhere in the world at the moment,” says Singh.

More BCIs are also in the pipeline for domestic approval in the country, including Beinao-1, developed by the Chinese Institute for Brain Research in Beijing and its affiliated startup, NeuCyber NeuroTech. The device, which sits on the dura mater, is designed to help those who have movement and speech difficulties due to spinal cord injuries or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. These candidates could get the green light as early as 2028, Singh says. 

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May 30 2026
The deadly Ebola outbreak is proving difficult to control

<div data-chronoton-summary="

  • No vaccine, no treatment: Unlike recent Ebola outbreaks, this one is caused by the Bundibugyo virus, for which no approved vaccine exists. Clinical trials for new ones are still months away.

  • Violence is making containment nearly impossible: Armed attacks have burned down two treatment centers and driven 18 infected patients back into the community. Conflict, damaged roads, and food insecurity have left health workers struggling to isolate cases or trace contacts.

  • US funding cuts have left the region exposed: Years of underinvestment, compounded by steep reductions in US global health funding under the Trump administration, have stripped away the surveillance systems and protective equipment needed to respond quickly

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The alert was raised on May 5. Four health-care workers in the Ituri Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo had died from an unknown illness within four days.

Rapid response teams were sent to investigate, and tests at a research center in Kinshasa revealed the culprit: the Bundibugyo virus, one of the viruses that cause Ebola. Suspected cases of the disease have snowballed in the last few weeks. By May 24, the WHO had estimated that 223 people had died from the disease. There were over 900 suspected cases. Today’s figures are likely to be higher.

A couple of weeks ago, I covered the hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship. Three people sadly died, but the outbreak itself was kept under control. There have been no further deaths, and passengers have been safely repatriated. The picture for Ebola is far bleaker. And there are several reasons why.

The most obvious is the disease itself. Ebola is a severe disease with an average 50% fatality rate. Previous outbreaks have resulted in thousands of deaths. (Hantavirus also has a high fatality rate, but it doesn’t usually spread as easily between humans.) 

Between 2014 and 2016, an Ebola outbreak in West Africa caused more than 11,000 deaths. A more recent outbreak, which took place between 2018 and 2020, caused 2,299 deaths before being brought under control with a vaccination campaign.

But those outbreaks were caused by the Zaire virus, which has a different genetic sequence. There is no vaccine for the Bundibugyo virus. We don’t know if the two vaccines approved for Zaire might also work for Bundibugyo. There’s a concern they might even make things worse by interfering with a person’s immune response to the virus.  

Scientists are working on potential Bundibugyo vaccines. But the most advanced efforts are still months away from clinical trials. There are no specific antiviral treatments for the virus, either.

So to control the outbreak, health-care workers are trying to stop the spread of the disease. Ebolaviruses can be transmitted to humans by animals including fruit bats, chimpanzees, and gorillas. They can then spread between people via contact with bodily fluids such as blood or vomit.

That’s why the virus is often spread among family members, to health-care workers, and during some burial services. The WHO advises isolating people who have the virus in treatment centers. It also recommends safe burial measures that limit physical contact with the deceased, for example. Communities need to be informed about the virus and how it spreads, and health professionals should be on hand to diagnose cases and track them.

That’s all easier said than done in an era of misinformation. Some members of the community even doubt whether the disease is real. There have been three attacks on health-care facilities in the region in recent weeks.

Last week, two treatment centers were burned down. The first incident occurred after relatives of a deceased man were prohibited from retrieving his (infectious) body. As a result of the second incident, 18 suspected cases reentered the community.

A couple of days later, a group of men unleashed gunfire at Mongbwalu General Hospital, which was also treating people with Ebola. They were demanding the bodies of their deceased relatives.

There are more causes for concern when it comes to the spread of the virus. The Ebola outbreak is thought to have originated in Mongbwalu, a high-traffic mining hub. People who caught the virus in Mongbwalu are thought to have sought care in neighboring districts. And the wider province borders both South Sudan and Uganda. So far, Uganda has reported seven confirmed cases and one death. South Sudan’s health ministry has said it will strengthen surveillance, but no cases have been reported in the country so far. 

Violence in the region is making it much harder to contain the spread of the virus, too. Conflict involving multiple armed groups, including deadly attacks on civilians, has hampered humanitarian and health-care efforts. Poor infrastructure and damaged roads make matters even worse. Food insecurity is ravaging the region as well—this year, nearly 10 million people in the region face acute hunger.

Together, these factors are making it “nearly impossible” to isolate people with Ebola and trace others who have been in contact with them, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement earlier this week.

The dismantling of US aid programs hasn’t helped either. US government funding for international health projects has steeply declined since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. These cuts have harmed disease surveillance systems, according to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian nonprofit.

“Funding cuts have left the region dangerously exposed,” Heather Reoch Kerr, the organization’s country director for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, said in a statement. “Years of underinvestment and recent funding cuts have left many health facilities without adequate protective equipment, surveillance capacity, or frontline support needed to respond quickly and safely.”

The US has mobilized emergency funding for the outbreak, and a spokesperson for the State Department has argued that none of the administration’s actions have hampered the Ebola response. But health experts counter that the damage has already been done.

On May 17, the WHO declared the Ebola outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. In a statement on Wednesday, Tedros described the situation as “a catastrophic collision of disease and conflict with the Ebola outbreak in Ituri province outpacing the response.”In an online appeal to residents on Wednesday, ahead of an in-person visit, Tedros pleaded for a ceasefire and commended the spirit of community members. He also acknowledged the steep challenges they face. “You are already carrying so much: malaria, hunger, insecurity, and the daily struggle to keep your families safe,” he wrote in French. “And now Ebola. It’s not fair, and I won’t pretend otherwise.”

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.

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