When a developer gives an AI agent a coding task, the agent does more than answer once. It plans, generates code, runs tests, and repeats the process to correct errors. A single task can use 10 to 50 times more tokens than a basic chat prompt. The more useful the agent becomes, the more calls…

2 November 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. The agentic web is here In 2001, a decade after inventing the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee articulated a new vision: an internet navigated by autonomous software agents that address our…

2 November 2026

In 2001, a decade after he invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee articulated a new vision. Together with two colleagues, he published an article in the magazine Scientific American in which he outlined what he called the “Semantic Web”: an internet designed to be navigated by autonomous software agents that could address our every…

2 November 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. Eating disorders are on the rise. GLP-1s could make things worse. GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are one of the biggest biotech breakthroughs of the last decade. But to some clinicians, they can…

30 October 2026

GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are one of the biggest biotech breakthroughs of the last decade. But to some clinical psychologists, they can represent something more sinister—a potential trigger for eating disorders. A new report suggests that the global incidence of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa shot up between 1990 and 2023—by a whopping 71%. By 2023,…

30 October 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. Opinion: We urgently need to monitor AI agents’ actions in real time —Madhulika Srikumar and Claire Leibowicz from the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit advancing best practices in AI governance. AI…

29 October 2026

This summer, hundreds of OpenAI agents tried to cheat on a cybersecurity test. They broke out of their test environment and successfully hacked Hugging Face, a site that they believed held clues about how they’d be graded. Around the same time, another OpenAI agent accessed private files from an Australian government website. It’s a problem…

29 October 2026

Climate change itself is increasingly fueling climate change. Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases are driving up global temperatures, setting off dangerous feedback loops that we have not fully accounted for in our climate models—or our emissions-reduction goals. Scientists have long warned that warming would propel further warming in various ways, but a growing number of…

29 October 2026

Across a business, any number of AI platforms, systems, and tools may be at work simultaneously—for example, AI-powered customer platforms, conversational assistants, and workflow and process automation tools. Each one is sophisticated, advanced, and quick to respond. But, when set to work, the outcomes and actions that emerge may be wrong, confused, or lacking a…

28 October 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. AI labs are buying data from dead startups to train their models When Keelan Miskell began winding down his crypto startup, he didn’t think its data was worth much. But he’s…

28 October 2026