AI agents are a risky business. Even when stuck inside the chatbox window, LLMs will make mistakes and behave badly. Once they have tools that they can use to interact with the outside world, such as web browsers and email addresses, the consequences of those mistakes become far more serious. That might explain why the first breakthrough LLM personal assistant came not from one of the major AI labs, which have to worry about reputation and liability, but from an independent software engineer, Peter Steinberger. In November of 2025, Steinberger uploaded his tool, now called OpenClaw, to GitHub, and in late January the project went viral.

Plus: social media firms have agreed to be assessed on how effectively they protect teens' mental health A "QuitGPT" campaign is urging people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions In September, Alfred Stephen, a freelance software developer in Singapore, purchased a ChatGPT Plus subscription, which costs $20 a month and offers more access to advanced models, to speed up his work. But he grew frustrated with the chatbot's coding abilities and its gushing, meandering replies. Then he came across a post on Reddit about a campaign called QuitGPT. QuitGPT is one of the latest salvos in a growing movement by activists and disaffected users to cancel their subscriptions. In just the past few weeks, users have flooded Reddit with stories about quitting the chatbot. And while it's unclear how many users have joined the boycott, there's no denying QuitGPT is getting attention.

A "QuitGPT" campaign is urging people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions Backlash against ICE is fueling a broader movement against AI companies' ties to President Trump. In September, Alfred Stephen, a freelance software developer in Singapore, purchased a ChatGPT Plus subscription, which costs $20 a month and offers more access to advanced models, to speed up his work. But he grew frustrated with the chatbot's coding abilities and its gushing, meandering replies. Then he came across a post on Reddit about a campaign called QuitGPT . The campaign urged ChatGPT users to cancel their subscriptions, flagging a substantial contribution by OpenAI president Greg Brockman to President Donald Trump's super PAC MAGA Inc. It also pointed out that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, uses a résumé screening tool powered by ChatGPT-4.

Are you interested in learning more about the ways in which AI is being used? We've launched a new weekly newsletter series exploring just that: digging into how generative AI is being used and deployed across sectors and what professionals need to know to apply it in their everyday work. Each edition of Making AI Work begins with a case study, examining a specific use case of AI in a given industry. Then we'll take a deeper look at the AI tool being used, with more context about how other companies or sectors are employing that same tool or system. Finally, we'll end with action-oriented tips to help you apply the tool. The first edition takes a look at how AI is changing health care, digging into the future of medical note-taking by learning about the Microsoft Copilot tool used by doctors at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

The social network for AI bots resembled a spectator battle, with AI enthusiasts competing to make their agents look sentient. Lots of influential people in tech last week were describing Moltbook, an online hangout populated by AI agents interacting with one another, as a glimpse into the future. It appeared to show AI systems doing useful things for the humans that created them (one person used the platform to help him negotiate a deal on a new car). Sure, it was flooded with crypto scams, and many of the posts were actually written by people, but about it pointed to a future of helpful AI, right? The whole experiment reminded our senior editor for AI, Will Douglas Heaven, of something far less interesting: Pokémon. Back in 2014, someone set up a game of Pokémon in which the main character could be controlled by anyone on the internet via the streaming platform Twitch.

For a few days recently, the hottest new hangout on the internet was a vibe-coded Reddit clone called Moltbook, which billed itself as a social network for bots. As the website's tagline puts it: "Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Launched on January 28, Moltbook went viral in a matter of hours. It's been designed as a place where instances of a free open-source LLM-powered agent known as OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot, then Moltbot), could come together and do whatever they wanted. But is Moltbook really a glimpse of the future, as many have claimed? More than a billion people worldwide suffer from a mental-health condition, according to the World Health Organization. The prevalence of anxiety and depression is growing in many demographics, particularly young people, and suicide is claiming hundreds of thousands of lives globally each year. Given the clear demand for accessible and affordable mental-health services, it's no wonder that people have looked to artificial intelligence for possible relief. Millions are already actively seeking therapy from popular chatbots, or from specialized psychology apps like Wysa and Woebot. Four timely new books are a reminder that while the present feels like a blur of breakthroughs, scandals, and confusion, this disorienting time is rooted in deeper histories of care, technology, and trust. Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review's new AI newsletter, is here For years, our newsroom has explored AI's limitations and potential dangers, as well as its growing energy needs . And our reporters have looked closely at how generative tools are being used for tasks such as coding and running scientific experiments . But how is AI being used in fields like health care, climate tech, education, and finance? How are small businesses using it? And what should you keep in mind if you use AI tools at work? These questions guided the creation of Making AI Work, a new AI mini-course newsletter. Read more about it, and sign up here to receive the seven editions straight to your inbox. The number of civil lawsuits it's pursuing has sharply dropped in comparison to Trump's first term. It's the latest example of Brussels' attempts to rein in Big Tech. Local governments and banks are only too happy to oblige promising startups. Cryptocurrency is now fully part of the financial system, for better or worse. "Agentic engineering" is the next big thing, apparently. Runners had long suspected its suggestions were pushing them towards injury. Only around three dozen supporters turned up. Its menswear suggestions are more manosphere influencer than suave gentleman. "There is no Plan B, because that assumes you will fail.

Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review's new AI newsletter, is here Learn how to apply LLMs across industries in 7 weekly editions of our new free newsletter. For years, our newsroom has explored AI's limitations and potential dangers, as well as its growing energy needs . And our reporters have looked closely at how generative tools are being used for tasks such as coding and running scientific experiments . But how is AI being used in fields like health care, climate tech, education, and finance? How are small businesses using it? And what should you keep in mind if you use AI tools at work?

The viral social network for bots reveals as much about our own current mania for AI as it does about the future of agents. For a few days this week the hottest new hangout on the internet was a vibe-coded Reddit clone called Moltbook, which billed itself as a social network for bots. As the website's tagline puts it: "Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Launched on January 28 by Matt Schlicht, a US tech entrepreneur, Moltbook went viral in a matter of hours. Schlicht's idea was to make a place where instances of a free open-source LLM-powered agent known as OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot, then Moltbot), released in November by the Australian software engineer Peter Steinberger, could come together and do whatever they wanted. More than 1.7 million agents now have accounts. Between them they have published more than 250,000 posts and left more than 8.5 million comments (according to Moltbook). Those numbers are climbing by the minute. Moltbook soon filled up with ...

Years of layering new tools on old infrastructure has left enterprise IT brittle and fragmented. For decades, enterprises reacted to shifting business pressures with stopgap technology solutions. To rein in rising infrastructure costs, they adopted cloud services that could scale on demand. When customers shifted their lives onto smartphones, companies rolled out mobile apps to keep pace. And when businesses began needing real-time visibility into factories and stockrooms, they layered on IoT systems to supply those insights. Each new plug-in or platform promised better, more efficient operations.

Plus: Anthropic's new tools are freaking out the markets Every time OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic drops a new frontier large language model, the AI community holds its breath. It doesn't exhale until METR, an AI research nonprofit whose name stands for "Model Evaluation & Threat Research," updates a now-iconic graph that has played a major role in the AI discourse since it was first released in March of last year. The graph suggests that certain AI capabilities are developing at an exponential rate, and more recent model releases have outperformed that already impressive trend. That was certainly the case for Claude Opus 4.5, the latest version of Anthropic's most powerful model, which was released in late November. In December, METR announced that Opus 4.5 appeared to be capable of independently completing a task that would have taken a human about five hours--a vast improvement over what even the exponential trend would have predicted. But the truth is more complicated than those dramatic responses would suggest.