One icy morning in February, nearly 200 people gathered in a church in downtown Richmond, Va. Most had awakened before dawn and driven in from across the state. There were Republicans and Democrats from rural farms and D.C. exurbs. They shared one goal: to fight back against AI development in a region with the largest concentration of data centers in the world. "Aren't you tired of being ignored by both parties, and having your quality of life and your environment absolutely destroyed by corporate greed?" state senator Danica Roem said, to a standing ovation. The activists--wearing homemade shirts with slogans like Boondoggle: Data Center in Botetourt County--marched to the state capitol and spent the day testifying to lawmakers about their fears over data centers' impacts on electricity, water, noise pollution, and more. Some lawmakers pledged to help: "You're getting a sh-t deal," state delegate John McAuliff told activists. The phrase captured many people's feelings toward the AI industry as a whole. Not much unites Americans these days.

One chilly day in November 2025, community worker Mike Prado drove through Abilene, Tex., handing out blankets, socks, and jackets to unhoused individuals across the city. People sat on curbs, alleyway after alleyway, their meager belongings soaked by the previous night's hard rain. Prado has worked in this community for a decade, and was once homeless in Abilene himself. Prado has witnessed difficult years--but the current situation was the worst he'd ever seen, he told TIME. One man with a walker approached Prado outside of the Hope Haven offices--an Abilene nonprofit where Prado works, which operates a shelter and helps people with vouchers find housing--and accepted a jacket from him.

He Xiaopeng launches Xpeng's next-gen Iron humanoid robot during a press conference at the company's headquarters in Guangzhou on November 5, 2025. He Xiaopeng launches Xpeng's next-gen Iron humanoid robot during a press conference at the company's headquarters in Guangzhou on November 5, 2025. It was a controversy laced with pride for He Xiaopeng. In November, He, the founder and CEO of Chinese physical AI firm XPeng, had just debuted his new humanoid robot, IRON, whose balance, posture shifts, and coquettish swagger mirrored human motion with such eerie precision that a slew of netizens accused him of faking the demonstration by putting a human in a bodysuit. To silence the naysayers, He boldly cut open the robot's leg live on stage to reveal the intricate mechanical systems that allow it to adapt to uneven surfaces and maintain stability just like the human body. "At first, it made me sad," He tells TIME in his Guangzhou headquarters.

Children and parked cars are color-coded on a monitor inside a Mercedes-Benz S-Class during an autonomous driving and AI demonstration in Immendingen, Germany on July 17, 2018. Children and parked cars are color-coded on a monitor inside a Mercedes-Benz S-Class during an autonomous driving and AI demonstration in Immendingen, Germany on July 17, 2018. In 2025, misconceptions about AI flourished as people struggled to make sense of the rapid development and adoption of the technology. Here are three popular ones to leave behind in the New Year. When GPT-5 was released in May, people wondered (not for the first time) if AI was hitting a wall.

Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. What is the split between your individual and enterprise customers? It was [previously] lower on the enterprise side. At the beginning of 2024, it was 90/10.

Welcome back to In the Loop, new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? When you think about the top echelon of the world's tech elites, Larry Ellison probably doesn't spring to mind. But on Wednesday, the 81-year-old chairman of Oracle briefly became the richest person in the world with a net worth of almost $400 billion, overtaking Elon Musk. Ellison's $100-billion jump was the biggest single-day gain ever, and the result of a promising Oracle growth forecast in which they advertised hundreds of billions of dollars in inbound revenue from AI companies using Oracle's cloud computing capabilities.

Why Are Chatbots Parroting Russian Propaganda? Welcome back to, TIME's new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. Starting today, we'll be publishing these editions both as stories on Time.com and as emails. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? What to Know: Why are chatbots parroting Russian disinformation? Over the last year, as chatbots have gained the ability to search the internet before providing an answer, the likelihood that they will share false information about specific topics in the news has gone up, according to new research by NewsGuard Technologies.

The paper suggests that the usage of LLMs could actually harm learning, especially for younger users. The paper has not yet been peer reviewed, and its sample size is relatively small. But its paper's main author Nataliya Kosmyna felt it was important to release the findings to elevate concerns that as society increasingly relies upon LLMs for immediate convenience, long-term brain development may be sacrificed in the process. "What really motivated me to put it out now before waiting for a full peer review is that I am afraid in 6-8 months, there will be some policymaker who decides, 'let's do GPT kindergarten.' I think that would be absolutely bad and detrimental," she says.