There’s a fault line running through enterprise AI, and it’s not the one getting the most attention. The public conversation still tracks foundation models and benchmarks—GPT versus Gemini, reasoning scores, and marginal capability gains. But in practice, the more durable advantage is structural: who owns the operating layer where intelligence is applied, governed, and improved.…

16 April 2026

The AI boom has hit across industries, and public sector organizations are facing pressure to accelerate adoption. At the same time, government institutions face distinct constraints around security, governance, and operations that set them apart from their business counterparts. For this reason, purpose-built small language models (SLMs) offer a promising path to operationalize AI in…

16 April 2026

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Cyberscammers are bypassing banks’ security with illicit tools sold on Telegram  Inside a money-laundering center in Cambodia, an employee opens a banking app on his phone. It asks for a photo linked to the…

16 April 2026

The availability of artificial intelligence for use in warfare is at the center of a legal battle between Anthropic and the Pentagon. This debate has become urgent, with AI playing a bigger role than ever before in the current conflict with Iran. AI is no longer just helping humans analyze intelligence. It is now an…

16 April 2026

Last week, news outlets reported that Microsoft was pausing carbon removal purchases. It was something of a bombshell. The thing is, Microsoft is the carbon removal market. The company has single-handedly purchased something like 80% of all contracted carbon removal. If you’re looking for someone to pay you to suck carbon dioxide out of the…

16 April 2026

As a movement, environmentalism has been pretty misanthropic. Understandably so—we humans have done some destructive things to the ecosystems around us. In the 21st century, though, mainstream conservation is learning that humans can be a force for good. Foresters are turning to Indigenous burning practices to prevent wildfires. Biologists are realizing that flower-dotted meadows were…

16 April 2026

When the covid-19 pandemic started, Jennifer Phillips thought about the songs of the sparrows. They were easier to hear, because the world had suddenly become quieter. Car traffic plummeted as people sheltered at home and shifted to remote work. Air travel collapsed. Cities—normally filled with the honking, screeching, engine-gunning riot of transportation—became as silent as…

16 April 2026

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. NASA is building the first nuclear reactor-powered interplanetary spacecraft. How will it work?  Just before Artemis II began its historic slingshot around the moon, NASA revealed an even grander space travel…

15 April 2026

From inside a money-laundering center in Cambodia, an employee opens a popular Vietnamese banking app on his phone. The app asks him to upload a photo associated with the account, so he clicks on a picture of a 30-something Asian man. Next, the app requests to open the camera for a video “liveness” check. The…

15 April 2026

For four days in February 2019, some 30 synthetic biologists and ethicists hunkered down at a conference center in Northern Virginia to brainstorm high-risk, cutting-­edge, irresistibly exciting ideas that the National Science Foundation should fund. By the end of the meeting, they’d landed on a compelling contender: making “mirror” bacteria. Should they come to be,…

15 April 2026