Data centers are going to space faster than the rules that govern them. Over the past month, six American companies and a Chinese firm have expressed interest in building orbital data centers, citing environmental benefits. While experts see potential upsides, they warn the projects could open governance loopholes — especially for countries with little say […]

This piece was republished with permission from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. It was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network. Six weeks before the US launched its brazen mission to capture Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, a spy plane was detected flying figure-of-eight loops above the Atlantic near the country’s border with […]

The U.S. government is planning to send “Tech Corps” volunteers abroad to promote the adoption of American artificial intelligence, as Washington competes with China for global AI dominance.   The program was announced on Friday, as part of the Peace Corps, a decades-old program that sends volunteers to help developing countries with education, health and economic […]

Fourteen-year-old Carolina has been on Roblox since she was 10, chatting and playing with other gamers on the platform. When the site rolled out mandatory age checks at the start of the year, Carolina was afraid she would lose access to some of her friends and group chats. She needn’t have worried — the software […]

When the lights dimmed at Jaideep Sharma’s wedding reception in the north Indian city of Ajmer, guests expected to see a cheesy montage of the young couple in various attractive locations. Instead, they saw Sharma’s father — dead for more than a year — on the screen, smiling and blessing the newlyweds. The video was […]

As the world descends on New Delhi for India’s AI Impact Summit this week, the questions on the table could not be more consequential. Artificial intelligence has become a core digital infrastructure. It is in our search results, our inboxes, our workflows. According to analytics and advisory company Gallup, 45% of employees now use AI […]

Facebook’s new content monetization program is booming, and Indonesian creators are leading the charge, giving the platform a much-needed boost to compete with YouTube and TikTok. The program has grown from under 3 million to 12 million participants in just over a year. Accounts in Bahasa Indonesia made up nearly 15% of the platform’s total monetized […]

Debates over the governance of artificial intelligence tend to assume that it will be important and transformative across many areas of human endeavor. Yet, the question of how those benefits and risks will be distributed — who will win and who will lose — is less commonly articulated. Techno-utopians enthuse that everyone will win: The […]

Global electric-vehicle makers are finding that breaking free from Chinese rare earths is easier said than done. EV makers outside China are accelerating investments in motor technologies that reduce or eliminate rare-earth elements, hoping to shield themselves from Beijing’s tightening grip. Over the past six months, Stellantis, General Motors, and Honda have each announced new […]

Nine months into its big push for cryptocurrency payments, Bhutan isn’t finding many takers for its plans. Last May, Bhutan became the first country to launch a nationwide crypto payment network for tourists. Visitors to the Himalayan kingdom could pay for their visas, flights, hotels, and meals in more than 100 cryptocurrencies via Binance. Within […]