MIT Technology Review

MIT Technology Review examines the question of when an achievement can genuinely be credited to artificial intelligence as a scientific discovery rather than to the humans who built and used the system. The piece weighs criteria for attribution as AI systems increasingly generate hypotheses, run experiments and produce results in fields like biology and materials science, prompting debate among researchers over authorship, credit and the definition of discovery itself.

MIT Technology Review argues that recent claims about AI breakthroughs and existential fears may be overblown. The piece suggests public anxiety and excitement around the latest advances in artificial intelligence owe more to marketing and media amplification than to genuine capability leaps, urging readers to look critically at what the technology actually delivers today.

The Pentagon is asking for $30 million to develop an AI-powered lie detection system, according to MIT Technology Review. The proposal would fund technology that uses artificial intelligence to assess deception, raising questions among readers about the scientific reliability of such tools and the privacy and civil liberties implications of deploying AI lie detectors in security or military screening.

MIT Technology Review has published an explainer examining legal responsibility when autonomous AI agents cause harm. The piece asks who should answer for an agent's mistakes — the developer, the deployer, or the user — as companies increasingly hand real-world tasks to software that acts on its own. It is part of the outlet's ongoing series untangling complex technology questions.

MIT Technology Review's latest Download newsletter leads with the question of liability when AI agents go rogue — who is responsible when autonomous systems act outside their intended behaviour — alongside its AI Hype Index, a recurring gauge of how inflated or grounded current AI claims really are. Together the pieces weigh who pays for agent failures while cutting through the noise surrounding the industry's boldest promises.