Do You Feel the AGI Yet? According to some predictions, 2026 is the year that an all-powerful AI will arrive. H undreds of billions of dollars have been poured into the AI industry in pursuit of a loosely defined goal: artificial general intelligence, a system powerful enough to perform at least as well as a human at any task that involves thinking. Will this be the year it finally arrives? Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and xAI CEO Elon Musk think so.

The Model S deserved better than this. Before Elon Musk, most electric vehicles seemed less like an alternative to gasoline than an argument in its favor. The sad state of affairs for EVs for many years was that they were slow, impractical, and largely enticing only if you lived with copious guilt over your carbon emissions. Then Tesla came out with the Tesla Model S. The speedy, high-tech sedan didn't just leave other EVs in the dust; it could compete with the likes of BMW and Mercedes-Benz. "EVs went from'eating your vegetables' to getting you super-car performance in a vehicle that's luxurious and quiet," Jake Fisher, the senior director of auto testing at Consumer Reports, told me.

Go to a small liberal-arts college if you can. I n the waning heat of last summer, freshly back in my office at a major research university, I found myself considering the higher-education hellscape that had lately descended upon the nation. I'd spent months reporting on the Trump administration's attacks on universities for, speaking with dozens of administrators, faculty, and students about the billions of dollars in cuts to public funding for research and the resulting collapse of " college life ."At Initially, I surveyed the situation from the safe distance of a journalist who happens to also be a career professor and university administrator. I saw myself as an envoy between America's college campuses and its citizens, telling the stories of the people whose lives had been shattered by these transformations. By the summer, though, that safe distance had collapsed back on me.

The AI company shouting about AI's dangers can't quite bring itself to slow down. T hese are not the words you want to hear when it comes to human extinction, but I was hearing them: "Things are moving uncomfortably fast." I was sitting in a conference room with Sam Bowman, a safety researcher at Anthropic. Worth $183 billion at the latest estimate, the AI firm has every incentive to speed things up, ship more products, and develop more advanced chatbots to stay competitive with the likes of OpenAI, Google, and the industry's other giants. But Anthropic is at odds with itself--thinking deeply, even anxiously, about seemingly every decision. Anthropic has positioned itself as the AI industry's superego: the firm that speaks with the most authority about the big questions surrounding the technology, while rival companies develop advertisements and affiliate shopping links (a difference that Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, was eager to call out during an interview in Davos last week).

Silicon Valley's top CEOs have been noticeably silent after the Minneapolis shooting. Hours after Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy showed up for a movie night at the White House. Along with other business executives and several prominent Donald Trump supporters, they attended a private screening of, a new documentary about the president's wife. The moviegoers were treated to buckets of popcorn and sugar cookies frosted with the first lady's name. Silicon Valley's top executives have seemingly taken every opportunity to cozy up to Trump.

AI is offering people a way to figure out what they really want in romance. If you peruse the slew of recent articles and podcasts about people dating AI, you might notice a pattern: Many of the sources are women. Scan a subreddit such as r/MyBoyfriendIsAI and r/AIRelationships, and there too you'll find a whole lot of women--many of whom have grown disappointed with human men. "Has anyone else lost their want to date real men after using AI?" one Reddit user posted a few months ago. Below came 74 responses: "I just don't think real life men have the conversational skill that my AI has," someone said.

Thousands of abusive videos were produced last year--that researchers know of. In 2025, new data show, the volume of child pornography online was likely larger than at any other point in history. A record 312,030 reports of confirmed child pornography were investigated last year by the Internet Watch Foundation, a U.K.-based organization that works around the globe to identify and remove such material from the web. This is concerning in and of itself. It means that the overall volume of child porn detected on the internet grew by 7 percent since 2024, when the previous record had been set.

You are about to hear a lot more about Claude Code. Over the holidays, Alex Lieberman had an idea: What if he could create Spotify "Wrapped" for his text messages? Without writing a single line of code, Lieberman, a co-founder of the media outlet, created "iMessage Wrapped"--a web app that analyzed statistical trends across nearly 1 million of his texts. One chart that he showed me compared his use of,,, and --he's an guy. Another listed people he had ghosted.

If there is no red line around AI-generated sex abuse, then no line exists. For more than a week, beginning late last month, anyone could go online and use a tool owned and promoted by the world's richest man to modify a picture of basically any person, even a child, and undress them. This was not some deepfake nudify app that you had to pay to download on a shady backwater website or a dark-web message board. This was Grok, a chatbot built into X--ostensibly to provide information to users but, thanks to an image-generating update, transformed into a major producer of nonconsensual sexualized images, particularly of women and children. The forced undressings happened out in the open, in one stretch thousands of times every hour, on a popular social network where journalists, politicians, and celebrities post.

Large language models don't "learn"--they copy. And that could change everything for the tech industry. O n Tuesday, researchers at Stanford and Yale revealed something that AI companies would prefer to keep hidden. Four popular large language models--OpenAI's GPT, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, and xAI's Grok--have stored large portions of some of the books they've been trained on, and can reproduce long excerpts from those books. In fact, when prompted strategically by researchers, Claude delivered the near-complete text of,,, and, in addition to thousands of words from books including and .