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As AI pushes semiconductors and data centers toward new physical limits, advanced materials are becoming critical to performance, efficiency, and sustainability, says Mike Finelli, chief technology and innovation officer and chief North America officer at Syensqo. The AI boom is becoming a materials challenge. As AI pushes computing into new territory, the materials behind that infrastructure are becoming just as crucial as the algorithms running on it. Semiconductors and data centers are approaching physical limits around performance, thermal management, electrical efficiency, and reliability, creating new demands for materials that can do more at once. At the same time, AI is giving materials scientists new ways to search the enormous universe of possible molecules and accelerate the development of solutions. For Mike Finelli, chief technology and innovation officer and chief North America officer at Syensqo, that convergence is transforming what advanced materials can enable. "AI is now, from a material standpoint, really pushing semiconductors and the data centers to their physical limits," he says. As requirements accumulate, including high temperature, purity, electrical performance, chemical resistance, plasma resistance, and long-term stability, materials move toward what Finelli calls the "top of the pyramid."

Allowing AI firms to collude to'pace the frontier' is a dangerous proposition Anthropic's Dario Amodei is not the first corporate CEO to suggest that excessive competition is driving the world to some socially undesirable outcome. The safety breach disclosed by OpenAI after a swarm of its agents coordinated to breach their supposedly secure sandbox, get on the Internet and hack AI platform Hugging Face, warrants urgent action. It demonstrated the ease with which the technology can evade human control and gave concrete form to the existential fears about what it could do to humanity if not securely leashed. The end of the world may well be nigh, as some in the AI industry have warned. These are truly scary times.

In early August, The Information published an article that claimed U.S.-based founders, investors and startups, are travelling to an electronics market in Shenzhen to buy servomotors, sensors, controllers and gimbals. The report also claimed that Unitree and Zhiyuan robots are being bought intact, then stripped down into parts and carried back to the USA in suitcases. By late August, in a separate development, reports emerged that a US Department of Energy lab is investigating whether Chinese LiDAR sensors pose a security risk, if widely used on vehicles in the United States. According to TechCrunch, the research is being funded by one or more companies in the electric and autonomous vehicle industries. Don't cancel any Shenzhen travel plans just yet, but engineers at Princeton have unveiled a motorless, origami-inspired robot that can roll, crawl, and change shape through a combination of magnetic control and multistable geometry.

Plus: Anthropic says it has blocked potential plots to build biological weapons. Every year, puts together our 35 Innovators Under 35, a list of some of the brightest and best young minds working across science and technology. This year's honorees include nine people transforming biotech, whose work spans everything from lifesaving innovations to groundbreaking longevity tech. Their innovations include a "reprogramming" therapy that reverses vision loss, tiny brain electrodes inspired by Japanese art, and a personalized gene-editing treatment for a baby with a rare genetic disorder. There are even efforts to design new viruses with generative AI, which (hopefully) will produce new drugs or soak up pollution. Get to know the biotech innovators behind these breakthroughs .

Robots are a crowd-pleasing example of American innovation and global technological leadership. The latest press release of Boston Dynamics' executing the'Ghost Rabona' soccer kick highlights the increasingly natural movements of humanoids ( 1). At the other end of the spectrum, academic researchers are redefining the limits of miniaturization and building robots at the micrometer scale ( 2). Private and government funding propel foundational research forward, leading to breakthroughs in both hardware and software across U.S. labs and corporations ( 3, 4). Such progress reaffirms the U.S. as an intellectual and innovative powerhouse, a reputation that carries large geopolitical weight.

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The European Union and the United States continue to pull in opposite directions on artificial intelligence, with Washington urging other governments to loosen constraints at a recent Group of 20 ministerial meeting. On Tuesday, the US hosted a G20 "innovation" meeting in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where it put forward arguments against AI-specific regulations. "Policymakers do not need to approach each innovation in isolation and should not treat every emerging technology as a first-of-its-kind policy problem," Kratsios said. Such appeals are part of Trump's overall approach to making the US "the world leader in artificial intelligence". He has led a campaign to slash regulations, including in AI development.

John Ternus has officially taken over as the chief executive officer of Apple, succeeding Tim Cook, who ended a 15-year tenure leading the tech giant. Ternus, who took the helm on Tuesday, had been serving as the senior vice president for hardware engineering at the Cupertino, California-based company since 2021. Ternus is an old hand at the company. He joined Apple's product design team in 2001 and climbed the ranks. He was appointed vice president of hardware engineering in 2013 and was promoted in 2021 to the senior vice president role that he has now moved up from.

AI-assisted modernization can reduce the time and complexity of transforming legacy systems while creating a foundation for faster innovation, says Asifa Sherazi, CIO of health insurance at Bupa and Sanjeev Tripathi, senior VP, region head of BFSI, healthcare, and public sector at Infosys. For years, legacy technology has been a problem companies knew they needed to solve, but one they often struggled to tackle. The cost, complexity, and risk of replacing business-critical systems could make modernization feel like a disruption to manage instead of an opportunity to pursue. But with the rise in customer expectations and the changes AI brought to the economics of software development, that calculation is changing. Bupa's modernization of its My Bupa mobile application offers a case study in what becomes possible when a legacy migration is treated as a business transformation rather than a technology rewrite. Bupa CIO of health insurance Asifa Sherazi describes the risks of waiting for legacy systems to become an emergency: "The end-of-life technology is a risk that compounds quietly, and then arrives all at once." For Bupa, moving its application from Xamarin to native Swift and Kotlin improved the app rating from 3.7 to 4.7, while the user-perceived crash rate fell by nearly 24 percentage points on Android and eight points on iOS. "What they'll notice is that when they need us, often at a stressful moment, it just simply works," Sherazi says. Sanjeev Tripathi, senior vice president and region head of BFSI, healthcare, and public sector for Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia at Infosys, contends that AI is helping change the equation. "The emergence of AI is fundamentally shifting the economics of modernization," he says, reducing the effort, risk, and time traditionally associated with these programs. At Bupa, combining AI-assisted reverse engineering with forward engineering helped deliver the transformation in approximately 60% less time than would have been possible in the pre-AI era.