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The Download: CRISPR in court, and the police’s ban-skirting AI

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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.

A US court just put ownership of CRISPR back in play

The CRISPR patents are back in play.

Yesterday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier will get another chance to show they ought to own the key patents on what many consider the defining biotechnology invention of the 21st century.

The pair shared a 2020 Nobel Prize for developing the gene-editing system, which is already being used to treat various disorders.

But when US patent rights were granted in 2014 to Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the decision set off a bitter dispute in which hundreds of millions of dollars—as well as scientific bragging rights—are at stake. Read the full story.

—Antonio Regalado

To read more about CRISPR, why not take a look at:

+ Charpentier and Doudna announced they wanted to cancel their own CRISPR patents in Europe last year. Read the full story.

+ How CRISPR will help the world cope with climate change. Read the full story.

+ The US has approved CRISPR pigs for food. Pigs whose DNA makes them resistant to a virus could be the first big consumer product using gene editing. Read the full story.

+ CRISPR will get easier and easier to administer. What does that mean for the future of our species?

Police tech can sidestep facial recognition bans now

—James O’Donnell

Six months ago I attended the largest gathering of chiefs of police in the US to see how they’re using AI. I found some big developments, like officers getting AI to write their reports. Now, I’ve published a new story that shows just how far AI for police has developed since then.

It’s about a new method police are using to track people: an AI tool that uses attributes like body size, gender, hair color and style, clothing, and accessories instead of faces. It offers a way around laws curbing the use of facial recognition, which are on the rise.

Here’s what this tells us about the development of police tech and what rules, if any, these departments are subject to in the age of AI. Read the full story.

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Two Trump officials were denied access to the US Copyright Office 
Their visit came days after the administration fired the office’s head. (Wired $)
+ Shira Perlmutter oversaw a report raising concerns about training AI with copyrighted materials. (WP $)

2 Google knew it couldn’t monitor how Israel might use its cloud technology
But it went ahead with Project Nimbus anyway. (The Intercept)

3 Spain still doesn’t know what caused its massive power blackout
Investigators are examining generators’ cyber defences for weaknesses. (FT $)
+ Could solar power be to blame? (MIT Technology Review)

4 Apple is considering hiking the price of iPhones
The company doesn’t want to blame tariffs, though. (WSJ $)
+ Apple boss Tim Cook had a call with Trump following the tariff rollback news. (CNBC)
+ It’s reportedly developing an AI tool to extend phones’ battery life. (Bloomberg $)

5 Venture capitalists aren’t 100% sure what an AI agent is
That isn’t stopping companies from sinking millions into them. (TechCrunch)
+ Google is working on its own agent ahead of its I/O conference. (The Information $)
+ What AI assistants can—and can’t—do. (Vox)
+ Check out our AI agent explainer. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Scammers are stealing the identities of death row inmates
And prisoners are unlikely to see correspondence alerting them to the fraud. (NBC News)

7 Weight-loss drugs aren’t always enough
You need long-term changes in health, not just weight. (The Atlantic $)
+ How is Trump planning to lower drug costs, exactly? (NY Mag $)
+ Drugs like Ozempic now make up 5% of prescriptions in the US. (MIT Technology Review)

8 China’s e-commerce giants are racing to deliver goods within an hour
As competition has intensified, companies are fighting to be the quickest. (Reuters)

9 This spacecraft will police satellites’ orbits 🛰
And hunt them down where necessary. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ The world’s biggest space-based radar will measure Earth’s forests from orbit. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Is your beard trimmer broken? Simply 3D-print a new part.
Philips is experimenting with letting its customers create their own replacements. (The Verge)

Quote of the day

“We usually set it up so that our team doesn’t get to creep in.”

—Angie Saltman, founder and president of tech company Saltmedia, explains how her company helps store Indigenous data securely away from the Trump administration, the Verge reports.

One more thing

Meet the radio-obsessed civilian shaping Ukraine’s drone defense

Drones have come to define the brutal conflict in Ukraine that has now dragged on for more than three years. And most rely on radio communications—a technology that Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov has obsessed over since childhood.

While Flash is now a civilian, the former officer has still taken it upon himself to inform his country’s defense in all matters related to radio. Once a month, he studies the skies for Russian radio transmissions and tries to learn about the problems facing troops in the fields and in the trenches.

In this race for survival—as each side constantly tries to best the other, only to start all over again when the other inevitably catches up—Ukrainian soldiers need to develop creative solutions, and fast. As Ukraine’s wartime radio guru, Flash may just be one of their best hopes for doing that. Read the full story.

—Charlie Metcalfe

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.)

+ Tune in at any time to the Coral City Camera, an underwater camera streaming live from an urban coral reef in Miami 🐠
+ Inhuman Resources, which mixes gaming, reading, and listening, sounds nuts.
+ This compilation of 331 film clips to recreate Eminem’s Lose Yourself is spectacular.
+ Questions I never thought I’d ask: what if Bigfoot were British?

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Police tech can sidestep facial recognition bans now

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Six months ago I attended the largest gathering of chiefs of police in the US to see how they’re using AI. I found some big developments, like officers getting AI to write their police reports. Today, I published a new story that shows just how far AI for police has developed since then. 

It’s about a new method police departments and federal agencies have found to track people: an AI tool that uses attributes like body size, gender, hair color and style, clothing, and accessories instead of faces. It offers a way around laws curbing the use of facial recognition, which are on the rise. 

Advocates from the ACLU, after learning of the tool through MIT Technology Review, said it was the first instance they’d seen of such a tracking system used at scale in the US, and they say it has a high potential for abuse by federal agencies. They say the prospect that AI will enable more powerful surveillance is especially alarming at a time when the Trump administration is pushing for more monitoring of protesters, immigrants, and students. 

I hope you read the full story for the details, and to watch a demo video of how the system works. But first, let’s talk for a moment about what this tells us about the development of police tech and what rules, if any, these departments are subject to in the age of AI.

As I pointed out in my story six months ago, police departments in the US have extraordinary independence. There are more than 18,000 departments in the country, and they generally have lots of discretion over what technology they spend their budgets on. In recent years, that technology has increasingly become AI-centric. 

Companies like Flock and Axon sell suites of sensors—cameras, license plate readers, gunshot detectors, drones—and then offer AI tools to make sense of that ocean of data (at last year’s conference I saw schmoozing between countless AI-for-police startups and the chiefs they sell to on the expo floor). Departments say these technologies save time, ease officer shortages, and help cut down on response times. 

Those sound like fine goals, but this pace of adoption raises an obvious question: Who makes the rules here? When does the use of AI cross over from efficiency into surveillance, and what type of transparency is owed to the public?

In some cases, AI-powered police tech is already driving a wedge between departments and the communities they serve. When the police in Chula Vista, California, were the first in the country to get special waivers from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly their drones farther than normal, they said the drones would be deployed to solve crimes and get people help sooner in emergencies. They’ve had some successes. 

But the department has also been sued by a local media outlet alleging it has reneged on its promise to make drone footage public, and residents have said the drones buzzing overhead feel like an invasion of privacy. An investigation found that these drones were deployed more often in poor neighborhoods, and for minor issues like loud music. 

Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU, says there’s no overarching federal law that governs how local police departments adopt technologies like the tracking software I wrote about. Departments usually have the leeway to try it first, and see how their communities react after the fact. (Veritone, which makes the tool I wrote about, said they couldn’t name or connect me with departments using it so the details of how it’s being deployed by police are not yet clear). 

Sometimes communities take a firm stand; local laws against police use of facial recognition have been passed around the country. But departments—or the police tech companies they buy from—can find workarounds. Stanley says the new tracking software I wrote about poses lots of the same issues as facial recognition while escaping scrutiny because it doesn’t technically use biometric data.

“The community should be very skeptical of this kind of tech and, at a minimum, ask a lot of questions,” he says. He laid out a road map of what police departments should do before they adopt AI technologies: have hearings with the public, get community permission, and make promises about how the systems will and will not be used. He added that the companies making this tech should also allow it to be tested by independent parties. 

“This is all coming down the pike,” he says—and so quickly that policymakers and the public have little time to keep up. He adds, “Are these powers we want the police—the authorities that serve us—to have, and if so, under what conditions?”

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.

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A US court just put ownership of CRISPR back in play

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The CRISPR patents are back in play.

On Monday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier will get another chance to show they ought to own the key patents on what many consider the defining biotechnology invention of the 21st century.

The pair shared a 2020 Nobel Prize for developing the versatile gene-editing system, which is already being used to treat various genetic disorders, including sickle cell disease. 

But when key US patent rights were granted in 2014 to researcher Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the decision set off a bitter dispute in which hundreds of millions of dollars—as well as scientific bragging rights—are at stake.

The new decision is a boost for the Nobelists, who had previously faced a string of demoralizing reversals over the patent rights in both the US and Europe.

“This goes to who was the first to invent, who has priority, and who is entitled to the broadest patents,” says Jacob Sherkow, a law professor at the University of Illinois. 

He says there is now at least a chance that Doudna and Charpentier “could walk away as the clear winner.”

The CRISPR patent battle is among the most byzantine ever, putting the technology alongside the steam engine, the telephone, the lightbulb, and the laser among the most hotly contested inventions in history.

In 2012, Doudna and Charpentier were first to publish a description of a CRISPR gene editor that could be programmed to precisely cut DNA in a test tube. There’s no dispute about that.

However, the patent fight relates to the use of CRISPR to edit inside animal cells—like those of human beings. That’s considered a distinct invention, and one both sides say they were first to come up with that very same year. 

In patent law, this moment is known as conception—the instant a lightbulb appears over an inventor’s head, revealing a definite and workable plan for how an invention is going to function.

In 2022, a specialized body called the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, or PTAB, decided that Doudna and Charpentier hadn’t fully conceived the invention because they initially encountered trouble getting their editor to work in fish and other species. Indeed, they had so much trouble that Zhang scooped them with a 2013 publication demonstrating he could use CRISPR to edit human cells.

The Nobelists appealed the finding, and yesterday the appeals court vacated it, saying the patent board applied the wrong standard and needs to reconsider the case. 

According to the court, Doudna and Charpentier didn’t have to “know their invention would work” to get credit for conceiving it. What could matter more, the court said, is that it actually did work in the end. 

In a statement, the University of California, Berkeley, applauded the call for a do-over.  

“Today’s decision creates an opportunity for the PTAB to reevaluate the evidence under the correct legal standard and confirm what the rest of the world has recognized: that the Doudna and Charpentier team were the first to develop this groundbreaking technology for the world to share,” Jeff Lamken, one of Berkeley’s attorneys, said in the statement.

The Broad Institute posted a statement saying it is “confident” the appeals board “will again confirm Broad’s patents, because the underlying facts have not changed.”

The decision is likely to reopen the investigation into what was written in 13-year-old lab notebooks and whether Zhang based his research, in part, on what he learned from Doudna and Charpentier’s publications. 

The case will now return to the patent board for a further look, although Sherkow says the court finding can also be appealed directly to the US Supreme Court. 

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ZKsync X hacker posts false SEC probe in apparent effort to crash token

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ZKsync X hacker posts false SEC probe in apparent effort to crash token

The X account of the Ethereum layer 2 network ZKsync and its developer Matter Labs were compromised early on May 13, with hackers falsely claiming the network was being probed by US authorities, among other scam messages.

A ZKsync-related X account posted on May 13, confirming the accounts for ZKsync and Matter Labs were compromised, warning users not to interact after the accounts shared links to a fake airdrop in an apparent phishing scam.

ZKsync X hacker posts false SEC probe in apparent effort to crash token
Other X users had warned the ZKsync X account was compromised. Source: pseudo

The hacked ZKsync and Matter Labs then both posted a fake statement claiming ZKsync was under investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and that the Treasury Department could impose sanctions on the platform.

Matter Labs communications head Lynnette Nolan confirmed to Cointelegraph that the now-deleted X post “is not legit” and both accounts are now “fully back in the control of the team.”

“Shoutout to the zksync hackers. Instead of dropping a token and stealing a few bucks they decided to scare the living shit out of onchain degens,” crypto startup g8keep co-founder Harrison Leggio, who goes by “Pop Punk,” posted to X.

ZKsync X hacker posts false SEC probe in apparent effort to crash token
Source: Harrison Leggio

The fake statement was seemingly aimed at crashing the price of the platform’s self-titled token, ZKsync (ZK), which has fallen around 2% in the last hour amid the X account breach, according to CoinGecko.

The SEC has investigated crypto companies in the past, and many of these firms have chosen to publicly disclose when they’ve been investigated by the regulator.

The SEC has stopped many of its probes under the Trump administration, with Crypto.com, Immutable, OpenSea and RobinHood Crypto, among others, confirming the agency had ended investigations.

ZK is down 6.4% over the last day to trade at around 7 cents, cooling from a nearly 38.5% rally it’s enjoyed over the past week.

Related: US prosecutors want 2 years for SEC X account hacker

Matter Labs’ Nolan said the firm was looking into how the X accounts were breached, and believed it was via “compromised delegated accounts,” which allow users limited access to an X account, allowing them to post on its behalf.

Two hacks in as many months

It’s the second compromise of ZKsync-controlled platforms since April.

On April 15, an attacker breached the admin account of ZKsync’s airdrop distribution contract and used a function to mint 111 million unclaimed ZK tokens, worth approximately $5 million at the time.

The hack happened amid the platform handing out 17.5% of ZK’s supply to ecosystem participants.

The attacker later returned 90% of the stolen tokens, agreeing to keep 10% as a bounty.

Magazine: ZK-proofs are bringing smart contracts to Bitcoin — BitcoinOS and Starknet

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Anchorage Digital buys Mountain Protocol, USDM stablecoin winds down

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Anchorage Digital buys Mountain Protocol, USDM stablecoin winds down

Crypto bank Anchorage Digital has expanded its stablecoin offerings with the acquisition of Mountain Protocol, a stablecoin issuer that says it will begin winding down its main stablecoin, Mountain USD (USDM).

The acquisition, which is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approval, will integrate the Mountain Protocol team, tech stack and licensing framework into Anchorage’s existing offerings, Anchorage said in a May 12 statement.

While terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, it reflects an accelerating number of acquisitions between crypto and TradFi firms in recent months.

Explaining the acquisition, Anchorage CEO Nathan McCauley said stablecoins are becoming the backbone of the crypto economy, while anticipating that “every business” will eventually use stablecoins as part of their operations.

Anchorage Digital buys Mountain Protocol, USDM stablecoin winds down
Source: Anchorage Digital

Mountain Protocol CEO Martin Carrica said its stablecoin experience and Anchorage’s crypto infrastructure positions the merging companies to meet the growing global demand for stablecoin services.

Anchorage is the only federally chartered digital asset bank in the US, while Mountain Protocol’s stablecoin services are regulated by the Bermuda Monetary Authority.

It comes around nine months after Anchorage introduced a stablecoin rewards program for institutions holding the PayPal USD (PYUSD) stablecoin.

Mountain Protocol’s USDM to wind down

As part of the acquisition, Mountain Protocol said it would begin an “orderly wind-down process” for USDM, which operates as a yield-bearing stablecoin.

Mountain Protocol said it ceased minting the stablecoin on May 12 but noted that USDM rewards will remain active for another 30 days. After that, the reward rate will be set to 0% APY.

The stablecoin issuer’s customers can redeem their USDM through the firm’s platform, while other USDM holders are encouraged to swap the stablecoin for other tokens on exchanges.

Related: ‘Dark stablecoins’ could emerge as regulations tighten

Mountain Protocol’s Ethereum-based USDM is not to be confused with Mehen Finance’s USDM stablecoin, which runs on the Cardano network. 

Mountain Protocol’s USDM saw considerable success shortly after launching in late 2023, rising to a $155 million market cap by March 2024, according to RWA.xyz. However, its market cap has since fallen below $50 million.

RWA.xyz estimates there are around 10,820 USDM holders.

Magazine: Crypto wanted to overthrow banks, now it’s becoming them in stablecoin fight

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