New snake oil? Etsy witches are hawking spells they claim can change the weather on your wedding day, help you with your love life, or fatten your crypto portfolio.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission has seemingly missed its decision deadline for the Canary Litecoin ETF, adding to uncertainty amid a government shutdown and new generic listing standards.
ETHZilla’s CEO says the Ethereum treasury company plans to work with layer-2 protocols to generate a higher yield than it could get from staking.
Investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration are underway.
Read more The Trump administration canceled over 300 awards related to clean energy on October 1. The states most affected by the cuts voted for Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Read more As part of the change, Anthropic is updating the structure of its core technical group, bringing the company’s product-engineering team into closer contact with the infrastructure and inference teams.
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Read more YouTubers are no longer just creators, and in some cases, their side businesses are growing faster than their channels.
Read more A team at Microsoft says it used artificial intelligence to discover a “zero day” vulnerability in the biosecurity systems used to prevent the misuse of DNA.
These screening systems are designed to stop people from purchasing genetic sequences that could be used to create deadly toxins or pathogens. But now researchers led by Microsoft’s chief scientist, Eric Horvitz, says they have figured out how to bypass the protections in a way previously unknown to defenders.
The team described its work today in the journal Science.
Horvitz and his team focused on generative AI algorithms that propose new protein shapes. These types of programs are already fueling the hunt for new drugs at well-funded startups like Generate Biomedicines and Isomorphic Labs, a spinout of Google.
The problem is that such systems are potentially “dual use.” They can use their training sets to generate both beneficial molecules and harmful ones.
Microsoft says it began a “red-teaming” test of AI’s dual-use potential in 2023 in order to determine whether “adversarial AI protein design” could help bioterrorists manufacture harmful proteins.
The safeguard that Microsoft attacked is what’s known as biosecurity screening software. To manufacture a protein, researchers typically need to order a corresponding DNA sequence from a commercial vendor, which they can then install in a cell. Those vendors use screening software to compare incoming orders with known toxins or pathogens. A close match will set off an alert.
To design its attack, Microsoft used several generative protein models (including its own, called EvoDiff) to redesign toxins—changing their structure in a way that let them slip past screening software but was predicted to keep their deadly function intact.
The researchers say the exercise was entirely digital and they never produced any toxic proteins. That was to avoid any perception that the company was developing bioweapons.
Before publishing the results, Microsoft says, it alerted the US government and software makers, who’ve already patched their systems, although some AI-designed molecules can still escape detection.
“The patch is incomplete, and the state of the art is changing. But this isn’t a one-and-done thing. It’s the start of even more testing,” says Adam Clore, director of technology R&D at Integrated DNA Technologies, a large manufacturer of DNA, who is a coauthor on the Microsoft report. “We’re in something of an arms race.”
To make sure nobody misuses the research, the researchers say, they’re not disclosing some of their code and didn’t reveal what toxic proteins they asked the AI to redesign. However, some dangerous proteins are well known, like ricin—a poison found in castor beans—and the infectious prions that are the cause of mad-cow disease.
“This finding, combined with rapid advances in AI-enabled biological modeling, demonstrates the clear and urgent need for enhanced nucleic acid synthesis screening procedures coupled with a reliable enforcement and verification mechanism,” says Dean Ball, a fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, a think tank in San Francisco.
Ball notes that the US government already considers screening of DNA orders a key line of security. Last May, in an executive order on biological research safety, President Trump called for an overall revamp of that system, although so far the White House hasn’t released new recommendations.
Others doubt that commercial DNA synthesis is the best point of defense against bad actors. Michael Cohen, an AI-safety researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, believes there will always be ways to disguise sequences and that Microsoft could have made its test harder.
“The challenge appears weak, and their patched tools fail a lot,” says Cohen. “There seems to be an unwillingness to admit that sometime soon, we’re going to have to retreat from this supposed choke point, so we should start looking around for ground that we can actually hold.”
Cohen says biosecurity should probably be built into the AI systems themselves—either directly or via controls over what information they give.
But Clore says monitoring gene synthesis is still a practical approach to detecting biothreats, since the manufacture of DNA in the US is dominated by a few companies that work closely with the government. By contrast, the technology used to build and train AI models is more widespread. “You can’t put that genie back in the bottle,” says Clore. “If you have the resources to try to trick us into making a DNA sequence, you can probably train a large language model.”
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
EV tax credits are dead in the US. Now what?
Federal EV tax credits in the US officially came to an end yesterday.
Those credits, expanded and extended in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, gave drivers up to $7,500 toward the purchase of a new electric vehicle. They’ve been a major force in cutting the up-front costs of EVs, pushing more people toward purchasing them and giving automakers confidence that demand would be strong.
The tax credits’ demise comes at a time when battery-electric vehicles still make up a small percentage of new vehicle sales in the country. So what’s next for the US EV market?
—Casey Crownhart
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
If you’re interested in reading more about EVs and clean energy, take a look at:
+ The US could really use an affordable electric truck. Ford recently announced plans for a $30,000 electric pickup, which could be the shot in the arm that the slowing US EV market needs. Read the full story.
+ What role should oil and gas companies play in climate tech, really?
+ China is an EV-building powerhouse. These three charts explain its energy dominance. Read the full story.
+ Supporting new technologies like EVs can be expensive, but deciding when to wean the public off incentives can be a difficult balancing act. Read the full story.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 OpenAI has become the world’s most valuable startup
Move aside, SpaceX. (Bloomberg $)
+ OpenAI is now valued at an eye-watering $500 billion. (FT $)
+ The valuation came after workers sold around $6.6 billion in shares. (Reuters)
2 Music labels are close to striking AI licensing deals
Universal and Warner are trying their best to avoid the mis-steps of the internet era. (FT $)
+ AI is coming for music, too. (MIT Technology Review)
3 Facebook’s political ads are full of spam and scams
And deepfake technology is making them more convincing than ever. (NYT $)
+ Meta will start using conversations with its chatbots to personalize ads. (WSJ $)
4 China is forging ahead with integrating AI tools into children’s lives
But educators worry they’ll harm youngsters’ learning and social skills. (Rest of World)
+ Chinese universities want students to use more AI, not less. (MIT Technology Review)
5 The batteries of the future could be created by AI
Researchers including Microsoft are experimenting with materials suggested by models. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ This startup wants to use the Earth as a massive battery. (MIT Technology Review)
6 A historian claims to have used AI to identify an anonymous Nazi
Digital tools helped Jürgen Matthäus to pinpoint the person photographed beside a mass grave. (The Guardian)
7 The Pentagon is interested in AI-powered machine guns that shoot drones
Steven Simoni’s Allen Control Systems is part of Silicon Valley’s new military pivot. (Reuters)
+ We saw a demo of the new AI system powering Anduril’s vision for war. (MIT Technology Review)
8 One of Saturn’s moons may have once hosted life 
Enceladus has all the necessary keystones to support life, and future missions could uncover it. (Scientific American $)
+ Meanwhile, Blue Origin has won a NASA rover contract. (Wired $)
+ The case against humans in space. (MIT Technology Review)
9 Chatbots exercise all sorts of tricks to keep you talking
They don’t want the conversation to end, a new study has found. (Wired $)
10 What it’s like to become a viral meme
Drew Scanlon, aka “Blinking Guy,” is leveraging his fame for a good cause. (SF Gate)
Quote of the day
“I cannot overstate how disgusting I find this kind of ‘AI’ dog shit in the first place, never mind under these circumstances.”
—Writer Luke O’Neil tells 404 Media his feelings about an AI-generated “biography” of journalist Kaleb Horton, who recently died.
One more thing
A day in the life of a Chinese robotaxi driver
When Liu Yang started his current job, he found it hard to go back to driving his own car: “I instinctively went for the passenger seat. Or when I was driving, I would expect the car to brake by itself,” says the 33-year-old Beijing native, who joined the Chinese tech giant Baidu in January 2021 as a robotaxi driver.
Liu is one of the hundreds of safety operators employed by Baidu, “driving” five days a week in Shougang Park. But despite having only worked for the company for 19 months, he already has to think about his next career move, as his job will likely be eliminated within a few years. Read the full story.
—Zeyi Yang
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ Congratulations are in order for 32 Chunk, winner of this year’s highly prestigious Fat Bear Week competition 
+ Here’s how 10 women artists got their days off to the best start possible.
+ This Instagram account documenting the worldly travels of a cassette player is fab.
+ Brb, I’m off to listen to Arctic Outpost Radio, spinning records from the very top of the world.