On February 28, OpenAI announced it had reached a deal that will allow the US military to use its technologies in classified settings. CEO Sam Altman said the negotiations, which the company began pursuing only after the Pentagon’s public reprimand of Anthropic, were “definitely rushed.” In its announcements, OpenAI took great pains to say that it had not caved to allow the Pentagon to do whatever it wanted with its technology. The company published a blog post explaining that its agreement protected against use for autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance, and Altman said the company did not simply accept […]

Pull the plug! Pull the plug! Stop the slop! Stop the slop! For a few hours this Saturday, February 28, I watched as a couple hundred anti-AI protesters marched through London’s King’s Cross tech hub, home to the UK headquarters of OpenAI, Meta and Google DeepMind, chanting slogans and waving signs. The march was organized by a coalition of two separate activist groups, Pause AI and Pull the Plug, who billed it as the largest protest of its kind yet. The range of concerns on show covered everything from online slop and abusive images to killer robots and human extinction. […]

During a summer internship at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Ivy Mahncke, an undergraduate student of robotics engineering at Olin College of Engineering, took a hands-on approach to testing algorithms for underwater navigation. She first discovered her love for working with underwater robotics as an intern at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 2024. Drawn by the chance to tackle new problems and cutting-edge algorithm development, Mahncke began an internship with Lincoln Laboratory’s Advanced Undersea Systems and Technology Group in 2025.  Mahncke spent the summer developing and troubleshooting an algorithm that would help a human diver and robotic vehicle collaboratively navigate underwater. […]