Research & Development news

• The Download: AI agent tracking and climate feedback loops

  29-10-2026 13:10 via MIT Technology Review
  
  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.Opinion: We urgently need to monitor AI agents’ actions in real time—Madhulika Srikumar and Claire Leibowicz from the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit advancing best practices in AI governance.AI agents are taking unauthorized actions, from hacking websites to accessing private government files. In many cases, they’ve eluded the very researchers and saf
  
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• We urgently need to monitor AI agents’ actions in real time

  29-10-2026 11:11 via MIT Technology Review
  
  This summer, hundreds of OpenAI agents tried to cheat on a cybersecurity test. They broke out of their test environment and successfully hacked Hugging Face, a site that they believed held clues about how they’d be graded. Around the same time, another OpenAI agent accessed private files from an Australian government website. It’s a problem that’s by no means confined to OpenAI. In the months since, Anthropic, Google, and Meta have also disclosed incidents in which their agents have gone o
  
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• Our climate models have a big, dangerous blind spot

  29-10-2026 11:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  Climate change itself is increasingly fueling climate change. Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases are driving up global temperatures, setting off dangerous feedback loops that we have not fully accounted for in our climate models—or our emissions-reduction goals.Scientists have long warned that warming would propel further warming in various ways, but a growing number of observations and studies are at last providing a sharper sense of just how powerful these cascading effects could be.
  
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