Crypto exchanges have increasingly positioned themselves as bridges between digital asset markets and traditional finance.
The round of layoffs was part of Polygon transitioning operations to payments following a $250 million deal to acquire Coinme and Sequence in January.
In the wake of a massive hours-long gridlock event, San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie has told state regulators it’s time to put more requirements on robotaxi operators like Waymo.
Read more The company didn’t immediately say what went wrong. SpaceX’s stock plunged more than 4% in after-hours trading before paring losses.
Read more Coca Cola said dairy production at its Fairlife unit will “remain suspended” in the United States following a hack.
Read more Ryan Beiermeister, who demonstrated cool analysis in the Founders Fund YouTube series “Mafia,” has joined the firm as a partner.
Read more Google is adding personalized AI avatars to Vids that let users create videos starring a digital version of themselves, alongside Gemini Omni-powered tools for generating and editing videos from prompts and reference images.
Read more 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.
Meet GPT-Red: an LLM super-hacker OpenAI built to make its models safer
OpenAI has built an LLM super-hacker called GPT-Red that it uses as a sparring partner to help its other models boost their defenses against cyberattacks.
It automates a type of safety evaluation for software systems known as red-teaming, which is typically done by a team of human testers. The aim is to find as many different ways to break or hijack a system as possible.
OpenAI gave MIT Technology Review an exclusive peek into the system. Find out how it could keep the company ahead of human attackers.
—Will Douglas Heaven
Why heat pumps are still so hot in the US
—Casey Crownhart
It feels as if it should be illegal to even think about heating appliances during the height of summer, but we need to talk about heat pumps.
The appliances use electricity for heating, they’re incredibly efficient, and they’re on the rise. In the US, their sales have doubled over the past 15 years, according to a new report. They’re also winning the heating race against fossil fuels, outpacing natural-gas furnaces by 32% during the first quarter of 2026.
These stats are especially striking at this moment, because a key tax credit for heat pumps just ended. So why are heat pumps still so hot? Read the full story for the answer.
This article is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Elon Musk discreetly bought a $1 billion gas turbine firm to power Grok
He acquired fossil fuel company APR Energy in May. (Electrek)
+ The most likely application will be powering AI data centers. (Engadget)
+ The deal was revealed through an FTC filing. (Gizmodo)
+ What will power AI’s growth? (MIT Technology Review)
2 A hack shows the Suno AI music generator scraped YouTube, Deezer
It scraped decades’ worth of music to train its models. (404 Media)
+ The hacked is a unique look into the black boxes powering GenAI. (CNET)
+ AI is coming for music, too. (MIT Technology Review)
3 Thinking Machines has launched an open-weight AI model
Inkling offers a US alternative to China’s open-source models. (Reuters $)
+ It’s the first AI model built by Thinking Machines. (WSJ $)
+ The startup was founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. (Axios)
4 Europe is narrowing its ambitions for tech independence
Manufacturing and research show promise, but funding is a problem. (NYT $)
+ Earnings are strong, but an AI gap persists. (Reuters $)
+ India is also scrambling for AI independence. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Earth is absorbing energy at a rate that’s alarming climate scientists
The planet is taking in more heat than models predicted. (Economist $)
+ The legal case for climate justice is growing. (MIT Technology Review)
6 The AI backlash has tech executives fearing for their lives
Violent threats against AI firms are spilling into the real world. (WSJ $)
+ An anti-AI movement is growing globally. (MIT Technology Review)
7 A Moroccan intelligence insider exposed widespread Pegasus use
Including to target journalists, activists, and foreign politicians. (Guardian)
8 AI is powering citizen-led disaster relief from afar for Venezuela
It’s helping to locate missing people and coordinate relief. (Rest of World)
9 Thermodynamic computers could turn noise into useful calculations
They may offer a cooler, more efficient way to process information. (Quanta)
10 An engineer has explained every ’90s computer in Jurassic Park
Fans have debated the technology in the film for decades. (Ars Technica)
Quote of the day
“We hit pause because the communities powering AI should share in its success. Maybe that’s a novel concept in Washington.”
—New York Gov. Kathy Hochul responds on X to President Donald Trump’s criticism of her state’s new data center moratorium.
One More Thing
Will we ever trust robots?
Robotics firm Prosper is developing a humanoid called Alfie to perform tasks in homes, hospitals, and hotels. The company’s founder, Shariq Hashme, has identified trustworthiness as the top design priority—and first hurdle to clear before humanoids can live up to their hype.
Hashme believes one essential tactic to get people to put their trust in Alfie is to build a detailed character from the ground up—something humanlike but not too human. But the robot’s reliance on remote human operators raises broader questions about privacy, labour, and whether society will truly accept humanoids in our private spaces.
Read the full story on the humanoid trust dilemma.
—James O’Donnell
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.)
+ Meet the man behind the world’s most beautiful books.
+ 3D printing has revived Roman Britain’s most popular board game.
+ “Lucha Libro” is an imaginative idea to boost literacy: staging live wrestling matches in US libraries.
+ Over 100 years after the death of legendary explorer Ernest Shackleton, the wreck of his final ship has been photographed for the first time.
It feels as if it should be illegal to even think about heating appliances during the height of summer—seriously, these heat waves in New York have been brutal—but we need to talk about heat pumps.
The appliances use electricity for heating, they’re incredibly efficient, and they’re on the rise. (For what it’s worth, many heat pumps can also be run in reverse to cool buildings.) In the US, heat pump sales have doubled over the past 15 years, according to a new report. And they’re winning the heating race against fossil fuels, outpacing natural-gas furnaces by 32% during the first quarter of 2026.
These stats are especially striking at this moment, because a key tax credit for heat pumps just ended with the close of 2025. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at the data. Why are heat pumps still so hot?
In case you need a quick refresher, heat pumps use electricity to essentially move heat from one spot to another. A refrigerant moves around a loop in the device, expanding and compressing, gathering and releasing heat at different points in the cycle. (For a more in-depth look at the thermodynamics, this explainer I wrote in 2023 still holds up.)
The result is an appliance that can be incredibly efficient. Once you pay for and install a heat pump, it’s generally significantly cheaper to run than a gas or oil furnace or other types of electric heating systems. And because they’re more efficient and don’t involve burning fossil fuels, heat pumps can be a major help in decarbonizing buildings.
One of the major hurdles to wider use of heat pumps is the appliances’ cost: They tend to be more expensive to buy and install than gas furnaces. For this reason, many governments offer incentives to encourage their adoption. In the US, people who installed heat pumps between 2023 and 2025 were eligible for up to $2,000 in tax credits.
Last year, though, the Trump administration slashed those tax credits, along with many of the other incentives that were part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Effective January 1, 2026, no more financial help for heat pumps.
I think I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending. Tax credits of up to $7,500 for new EVs ended on September 30, 2025. In the quarter leading up to that deadline, sales spiked as people rushed to take advantage of the incentive. Then they fell off a cliff. Things are starting to normalize now, but clearly the tax credit’s sunset had a major effect.
But as it turns out, heat pumps are an entirely different story. In the first few months of 2026, sales have actually gone up, as Lucas Davis, an energy economist and UC Berkeley professor, points out in a new analysis.
Heat pump shipments were flat from December to January and have seen a gradual rise since then, according to data from the Air Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, a trade group that represents about 90% of the US market. This increase from winter into spring follows a seasonal trend seen in previous years—and it’s actually a bit stronger in 2026.
This data isn’t what you’d expect to see if losing the tax credit were hurting demand. As Davis lays out in his post, it seems the credit wasn’t really convincing people to install heat pumps, or at least the case for doing so was sufficient without the added incentive.
“It appears that the U.S. market for heat pumps is strong enough that it does not depend on tax credits,” Davis writes.
In 2024, MIT Technology Review put heat pumps on our annual list of breakthrough technologies. “We’ve entered the era of the heat pump,” I wrote at the time.
While heat pump sales have been up and down over the last few years, the era is going strong. The appliances have outsold gas furnaces in the US for the last four years. It’s not just the US, either. Countries including China and Germany have seen strong movement to heat pumps in recent years.
There’s rarely a straight path to adoption for new technology, especially something that requires so many individual households to make a significant change. But it’s encouraging that a major decarbonization tool is going strong, even when roadblocks pop up.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
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