There are many paths AI evolution could take. On one end of the spectrum, AI is dismissed as a marginal fad, another bubble fueled by notoriety and misallocated capital. On the other end, it’s cast as a dystopian force, destined to eliminate jobs on a large scale and destabilize economies. Markets oscillate between skepticism and…

21 January 2026

Governments plan to pour $1.3 trillion into AI infrastructure by 2030 to invest in “sovereign AI,” with the premise being that countries should be in control of their own AI capabilities. The funds include financing for domestic data centers, locally trained models, independent supply chains, and national talent pipelines. This is a response to real…

21 January 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. All anyone wants to talk about at Davos is AI and Donald Trump —Mat Honan, MIT Technology Review’s editor in chief  At Davos this year Trump is dominating all the side conversations. There…

21 January 2026

This story first appeared in The Debrief, our subscriber-only newsletter about the biggest news in tech by Mat Honan, Editor in Chief. Subscribe to read the next edition as soon as it lands. Hello from the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. I’ve been here for two days now, attending meetings, speaking on panels,…

21 January 2026

The story of enterprise resource planning (ERP) is really a story of businesses learning to organize themselves around the latest, greatest technology of the times. In the 1960s through the ’80s, mainframes, material requirements planning (MRP), and manufacturing resource planning (MRP II) brought core business data from file cabinets to centralized systems. Client-server architectures defined…

20 January 2026

AI agents are moving beyond coding assistants and customer service chatbots into the operational core of the enterprise. The ROI is promising, but autonomy without alignment is a recipe for chaos. Business leaders need to lay the essential foundations now. The agent explosion is coming Agents are independently handling end-to-end processes across lead generation, supply…

20 January 2026

A number of startups and university teams that are building “AI scientists” to design and run experiments in the lab, including robot biologists and chemists, have just won extra funding from the UK government agency that supports moonshot R&D. The competition, set up by ARIA (the Advanced Research and Invention Agency), gives a clear sense…

20 January 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 man who made India digital isn’t done yet Nandan Nilekani can’t stop trying to push India into the future. He started nearly 30 years ago, masterminding an ongoing experiment in technological state…

20 January 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. What it’s like to be banned from the US for fighting online hate   Just before Christmas the Trump administration dramatically escalated its war on digital rights by banning five people from entering the…

19 January 2026

Today marks an inflection point for enterprise AI adoption. Despite billions invested in generative AI, only 5% of integrated pilots deliver measurable business value and nearly one in two companies abandons AI initiatives before reaching production. The bottleneck is not the models themselves. What’s holding enterprises back is the surrounding infrastructure: Limited data accessibility, rigid…

19 January 2026