Malaysia and Indonesia are the first to block Grok over explicit deepfakes that the chatbot has been generating. The UK's media regulator has opened a formal investigation into X under the Online Safety Act. There have been deeply concerning reports of the Grok AI chatbot account on X being used to create and share undressed images of people -- which may amount to intimate image abuse or pornography -- and sexualized images of children that may amount to child sexual abuse material (CSAM), Ofcom said. The investigation will focus on whether X has has complied with its duties to protect people in the UK from content that is illegal in the UK. That includes whether X is taking appropriate measures to prevent UK users from seeing priority illegal content, such as CSAM and non-consensual intimate images; if the platform is removing illegal content quickly after becoming aware of it; and whether X carried out an updated risk assessment before making any significant changes to the platform.

The UK's media regulator has opened a formal investigation into X. Malaysia and Indonesia are the first countries to block Grok, claiming that X's chatbot does not have sufficient safeguards in place to prevent explicit AI-generated deepfakes of women and children from being created and disseminated on X. Indonesia temporarily blocked access to Grok on Saturday, as did Malaysia on Sunday, the reports. Meanwhile, UK media regulator Ofcom has opened a formal investigation into X under the Online Safety Act. The government sees non-consensual sexual deepfakes as a serious violation of human rights, dignity and the safety of citizens in the digital space, Indonesia's Communication and Digital Affairs Minister Meutya Hafid said in a statement. Officials in the country said initial findings showed that Grok lacks effective controls to prevent users from creating and sharing sexually explicit deepfakes based on photos of Indonesian residents.

The astronaut training tourists to fly in the world's first commercial space station Former NASA astronaut Drew Feustel now leads the astronaut training program for the private space company Vast, which aims to put its Haven-1 station into orbit in May. For decades, space stations have been largely staffed by professional astronauts and operated by a handful of nations. But that's about to change in the coming years, as companies including Axiom Space and Sierra Space launch commercial space stations that will host tourists and provide research facilities for nations and other firms. The first of those stations could be Haven-1, which the California-based company Vast aims to launch in May 2026. If all goes to plan, its earliest paying visitors will arrive about a month later. Drew Feustel, a former NASA astronaut, will help train them and get them up to speed ahead of their historic trip.

I asked my MIT class to consider why some of the advances that MIT Technology Review's journalists thought would change our world never really did--and what we can learn from the flops. Every year, publishes a list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. In fact, the 2026 version is out today. This marks the 25th year the newsroom has compiled this annual list, which means its journalists and editors have now identified 250 technologies as breakthroughs. A few years ago, editor at large David Rotman revisited the publication's original list, finding that while all the technologies were still relevant, each had evolved and progressed in often unpredictable ways. I lead students through a similar exercise in a graduate class I teach with James Scott for MIT's School of Architecture and Planning.

Our reporters and editors constantly debate which emerging technologies will define the future. Once a year, we take stock and share some educated guesses with our readers. Here are the advances that we think will drive progress or incite the most change--for better or worse--in the years ahead. Rubrik is the exclusive sponsor of the 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2026 and had no editorial influence on this list. Rubrik is a security and AI operations company that aims to secure and accelerate the world's AI transformation.

When Hollow Knight: Silksong came out last summer I was in so much pain that I didn't know if I'd be able to play it. Could a video game teach me anything new about suffering? L ast year I became uncomfortably well acquainted with suffering. In March I started experiencing excruciating pain in my right arm and shoulder - burning, zapping, energy-sapping pain that left me unable to think straight, emanating from a nexus of torment behind my shoulder blade and sometimes stretching all the way up to the base of my skull and all the way down into my fingers. Typing was agony, but was painful; even at rest it was horrible.

By studying large language models as if they were living things instead of computer programs, scientists are discovering some of their secrets for the first time. How large is a large language model? Think about it this way. In the center of San Francisco there's a hill called Twin Peaks from which you can view nearly the entire city. Picture all of it--every block and intersection, every neighborhood and park, as far as you can see--covered in sheets of paper. Now picture that paper filled with numbers. LLMs contain a LOT of parameters. That's one way to visualize a large language model, or at least a medium-size one: Printed out in 14-point type, a 200-billion-parameter model, such as GPT4o (released by OpenAI in 2024), could fill 46 square miles of paper--roughly enough to cover San Francisco.

Technology can be a powerful force for good. It can also be an enormous factory for harmful ideas. We tried to keep both of those things in mind when creating the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2026. The billionaire investor Peter Thiel (or maybe his ghostwriter) once said, " We were promised flying cars, instead we got 140 characters ." That quip originally appeared in a manifesto for Thiel's venture fund in 2011. All good investment firms have a manifesto, right?

Silicon Valley envisions artificial intelligence ushering in an era of economic plenty. But what if the benefits are largely confined to corporations and investors that own the technology itself? In early 2024, Anish Acharya, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a big venture-capital firm based in Menlo Park, posted an article online titled "How AI Will Usher in an Era of Abundance." Since then, and even before, various Silicon Valley types have been tossing the term around loosely. Last summer, Elon Musk even adopted the term "sustainable abundance" for a new Tesla mission statement.

The Sudanese armed forces (SAF) are renewing efforts for an operation to retake the Kordofan and Darfur regions from the control of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), as the civil war rages deep into its third year. The army has been assessing the RSF's capabilities and resources in readiness for launching the military operation with a large number of military formations fully prepared to launch an attack, it said. Reporting from Khartoum, Al Jazeera's Hiba Moran said the Sudanese army had reorganised and redeployed troops in various part of Kordofan. "We have also seen the Sudanese army retake control of territories in the Kordofan region as well as launch air strikes and drone strikes on several RSF positions in Darfur and Kordofan," she said. "And it looks like these are the preparations or the first steps of that offensive that the army has been speaking about in efforts to regain control of territories in Kordofan and Darfur," she added.