In April 2025, Ronald Deibert left all electronic devices at home in Toronto and boarded a plane. When he landed in Illinois, he bought a new laptop and iPhone. He wanted to reduce the risk of having his personal devices confiscated, because he knew his work made him a prime target for surveillance. "I'm traveling under the assumption that I am being watched, right down to exactly where I am at any moment," Deibert says. Deibert directs the Citizen Lab, a research center he founded in 2001 to serve as "counterintelligence for civil society." Housed at the University of Toronto, it's one of the few institutions that investigate cyberthreats exclusively in the public interest, and in doing so, it has exposed some of the most egregious digital abuses of the past two decades.

Why he thinks near-term targets can be a distraction, and what technologies he expects to power our future grid. Bill Gates doesn't shy away or pretend modesty when it comes to his stature in the climate world today. "Well, who's the biggest funder of climate innovation companies?" he asked a handful of journalists at a media roundtable event last week. "If there's someone else, I've never met them." The former Microsoft CEO has spent the last decade investing in climate technology through Breakthrough Energy, which he founded in 2015. Ahead of the UN climate meetings kicking off next week, Gates published a memo outlining what he thinks activists and negotiators should focus on and how he's thinking about the state of climate tech right now.

After writing about Quaise, a geothermal startup that's trying to commercialize new drilling technology, I've been thinking about the role oil and gas companies are playing in the energy transition. It's becoming increasingly common in climate tech to see a startup join up with a bigger fossil fuel company in its field, like Quaise has with Nabors Industries, one of the biggest drilling firms in the world. This industry has resources and energy expertise--but also a vested interest in fossil fuels. Can it really be part of addressing climate change? This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter.

US president Donald Trump's massive, sweeping tariffs sent global stock markets tumbling yesterday, setting the stage for a worldwide trade war and ratcheting up the dangers of a punishing recession. Experts fear that the US cleantech sector is especially vulnerable to a deep downturn, which would undermine progress on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Agents are the talk of the AI industry--they're capable of planning, reasoning, and executing complex tasks like scheduling meetings, ordering groceries, or even taking over your computer to change settings on your behalf. But the same sophisticated abilities that make agents helpful assistants could also make them powerful tools for conducting cyberattacks. They could readily be used to identify vulnerable targets, hijack their systems, and steal valuable data from unsuspecting victims.

Generative AI models can produce images in response to prompts within seconds, and they've recently been used for everything from highlighting their own inherent bias to preserving precious memories. Now, researchers from Stephen James's Robot Learning Lab in London are using image-generating AI models for a new purpose: creating training data for robots. They've developed a new system, called Genima, that fine-tunes the image-generating AI model Stable Diffusion to draw robots' movements, helping guide them both in simulations and in the real world. Genima could make it easier to train different types of robots to complete tasks--machines ranging from mechanical arms to humanoid robots and driverless cars--as well as making AI web agents more useful. We've just unveiled our 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch.

End-of-life decisions can be extremely upsetting for surrogates--the people who have to make those calls on behalf of another person. Friends or family members may disagree over what's best for their loved one, which can lead to distressing situations. David Wendler, a bioethicist at the US National Institutes of Health, and his colleagues have been working on an idea for something that could make things easier: an artificial intelligence-based tool that can help surrogates predict what the patients themselves would want in any given situation. Wendler hopes to start building their tool as soon as they secure funding for it, potentially in the coming months. But rolling it out won't be simple.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - August 3. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. Until recently, there was no visceral sense that the largest challenge we face is fixing the planet. Responding to environmental problems was for too long viewed by big companies as a marketing strategy to target consumers who were more environmentally conscious than others. Today, the tides are, literally, changing, and sustainability is now mission critical for businesses as new wisdom has emerged that illustrates how being'green' is a catalyst for innovation and market opportunity. Climate tech companies can now leverage advances in visual data collection, computer vision and AI to bolster their bottom line by focusing on enhancing sustainable practices.

Why, I wondered, was the enthusiasm so high at this week's Techonomy Climate conference in Mountain View? So I asked a smart friend why climate action suddenly commands so much passion. "The pandemic helped people realize a disaster can strike everyone on the planet all at once," they answered. "Almost none of us really thought it was possible before." It was as good an explanation as any.