On this week’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review, we take a look at how college graduates do not wanna hear about AI. Plus, what we all learned from the Musk v. Open AI case. But first, AI was unsurprisingly front and center at Google’s annual I/O developer conference. Among a suite of new AI products, Google said it updated its iconic search bar. Now, when searching in AI mode, the bar will expand as you ask a question. It will also provide suggestions about what you might wanna ask. Googl...
May 22, 2026•10 min
Anthropic’s newest AI model, Mythos, is so good, the company says, at uncovering security vulnerabilities that it's too dangerous to release to the public. Anthropic shared a preview version with a select group to help patch the holes that Mythos finds. But the prospect of a super-hacker AI system is still sending some business leaders into a panic. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino reports.
May 21, 2026•5 min
Earlier this month, a group called ShinyHunters took responsibility for a hack on the education platform Canvas, which is used for coursework at colleges. In a letter posted online , the group threatened to leak data it took from the platform, including billions of private messages between students and teachers. Canvas was also temporarily unavailable, disrupting students’ ability to do their work. Then, last week, Instructure , which makes Canvas, said it had reached a deal with the hackers , t...
May 20, 2026•6 min
As of mid-2025, about a third of newly published websites were generated by artificial intelligence. That’s a massive increase from just three years before when the number hovered around zero. The AI written text provides fewer diverse viewpoints and is generally presented in a cheerful manner. That's all according to an early study out last month. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with one of the study’s authors, Stanford University researcher Maty Bohacek, about how AI is changing the natur...
May 19, 2026•8 min
Hydropower is one of the oldest forms of energy creation, and uses the flow of rushing water to create electricity. The province of Québec, Canada, has historically had an abundance of it and, later this spring, will start supplying hydropower to New York City. This is the second big hydropower line to link Québec and the Northeast U.S. this year, after a line to Massachusetts came on board this winter. Right now, the power is going one way, from Canada to the U.S., but some are thinking that th...
May 18, 2026•7 min
This week, WhatsApp is offering private chats with its AI. Plus, Princeton will now hold supervised exams after a rise in AI-fueled cheating. But first, Google’s self-driving car division Waymo opted to do a voluntary recall of 3,800 of its robotaxis. This comes after a Waymo drove into a flooded road in San Antonio, Texas. The car was empty and no one was hurt, but Waymo is now updating its software to address how its cars deal with flooded roads. Will Oremus at The Atlantic joins Marketplace’s...
May 15, 2026•11 min
Voice cloning is the use of artificial intelligence to generate a clone of a real person’s voice, imitating the sound, when they pause and what words they typically emphasize. And it can be hard for people to identify voices as being AI-generated. Research last year from UC Berkeley professor Hany Farid, an expert in digital forensics, found that people correctly identify a voice as AI-generated only 60% of the time. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Farid about the rapid sophistication ...
May 14, 2026•12 min
In order to write her new book “I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI To Do ‘Almost’ Everything," journalist Joanna Stern decided to invite artificial intelligence into every aspect of her life — including her family life. She has a wife and two sons. On their spring break, she took them to Phoenix, where it's easy to hail a driverless car. They rode in a bunch of them, including one that totally freaked out. She brought home an AI-powered toy (which her four-year-old quickly tired of), and says sh...
May 13, 2026•7 min
Imagine if you invited robots - smart ones or “smart-ish,” at least - into every aspect of your life. Your emails and texts are all composed by an AI, the bots look at a photo of what’s in your fridge and figure out what you can make for dinner. They even become emotional support, providing advice and sometimes companionship. Journalist and founder of media company New Things, Joanna Stern, decided to try this and she wrote about it in her new book “I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI To Do Almos...
May 12, 2026•7 min
There's a new flex in Silicon Valley: how big is your AI agent swarm? They can work on your behalf, autonomously, 24/7, on whatever goal you give them. You might think having an army of AI minions could free up some time, maybe make work more chill. But, you’d be wrong, as Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino reports.
May 11, 2026•5 min
On this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” we’ll discuss why Apple is paying a $250 million settlement over its Apple Intelligence tool and its capabilities. Plus, GameStop makes a surprising buyout offer for eBay. But first up: Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, announced a new computing deal this week with SpaceX and its AI division, xAI. Anthropic will get access to SpaceX’s Colossus One data center, which will let the company increase how much its customers can use Claude....
May 08, 2026•10 min
Back in 2015, Elon Musk and Sam Altman got the idea to start a nonprofit AI lab to develop artificial general intelligence that benefits all humanity. The lab would also make its technology open source, calling it OpenAI. All that is according to a complaint filed by Elon Musk, who has since parted ways with the organization. And now he is suing OpenAI, its CEO Sam Altman and its president Greg Brockman, saying they have abandoned the founding principles of the organization in pursuit of profits...
May 07, 2026•10 min
Technology has been transformative for how police officers do their jobs. Body cameras, speed detection technology and surveillance drones are some prominent examples. And now, law enforcement departments are trying to figure out if and how they want to add artificial intelligence to the mix. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Greg Barber, a science and technology journalist who recently wrote about this for Proof News. He explained how AI is being used in police work now and whether or n...
May 06, 2026•8 min
The startup Winnie is a marketplace for childcare. It works like this: Parents type in the age of their kid and their zip code, then different childcare providers in the area will pop up. You can also filter by languages spoken, and whether you want a childcare center or home-based daycare or another option. It's free for parents to use. But the company was founded back in 2016, when AI search wasn’t really a thing. And Winnie’s CEO and co-founder Sara Mauskopf says parents now want to be able t...
May 05, 2026•9 min
The GUARD Act is a bipartisan bill that would prohibit companies from letting kids under 18 interact with what the legislation calls "AI companions,” which are chatbots designed to encourage the simulation of an interpersonal relationship. This comes after some harrowing stories of teenagers who developed relationships with chatbots and then harmed themselves or others. The bill just passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes talks about this with Ashley Gold, a...
May 04, 2026•7 min
This week, Taylor Swift trademarked her voice and image in what appears to be a bid to protect against AI misuse. Plus, a Japanese airline is experimenting with humanoid robots to help with baggage. But first, Google landed a deal with the Pentagon to let its AI models be used for classified work. A Google spokesperson told us in a statement that the company is proud to be providing its services for national security and that it believes AI should not be used for “domestic mass surveillance or a...
May 01, 2026•12 min
The war with Iran has upended supply chains including for materials that are critical to building the electronics we use everyday, such as a certain kind of thermoplastic, copper, and helium. We are now dealing with shortages of all of them. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Jeff Janukowicz, an analyst with the research firm IDC, to learn more.
Apr 30, 2026•8 min
There's been renewed interest in nuclear power in recent years, thanks in part to demand from tech companies in search of reliable energy to power their AI data centers. The startup Kairos Power has jumped on this opportunity. Its nuclear reactors are cooled by molten salt. They also use golf-ball sized nuclear fuel, instead of uranium rods cooled by water used by traditional reactors. Mike Laufer, co-founder and CEO of Kairos, says their reactors a bit like an upside down gumball machine. The c...
Apr 29, 2026•9 min
The International Math Olympiad is a yearly competition for students, most of them high school age, who compete to solve six difficult math problems. They're chosen from a pool of math problems submitted by different countries that participate in the competition. The problems that don't make the cut previously have mostly just been lost; there was no one place you could go to find them. But now a team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab has gathered over 30,000 of those pro...
Apr 28, 2026•8 min
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, allows government agencies to collect information about foreign nationals located abroad. That surveillance can happen without a warrant and the government can order email providers to turn over any messages of a particular foreigner, including those with a U.S. citizen. Section 702 is set to expire this week. President Donald Trump has called for its extension, but there are Congressional lawmakers in both parties who oppose the...
Apr 27, 2026•5 min
This week, Meta is reportedly laying off 10% of its workers. But in the meantime, it's also capturing their mouse clicks to train its AI models. Plus, Roblox settles with states over child safety concerns. But first, Apple's CEO is stepping down. The company announced this week that CEO Tim Cook is moving on from that role after about 15 years. His successor is John Ternus, a senior vice president of hardware engineering at the company. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Anita Ramaswamy, ...
Apr 24, 2026•14 min
Lawmakers around the U.S. are moving to restrict data center development. Maine, for example, recently passed what's being called the country's first statewide ban on data centers. The measure would prohibit building any new data centers until late 2027. As of this taping, Maine's governor, Janet Mills, was reportedly still undecided on whether she'd sign the bill. And 13 other states are also considering bans on data center development, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures...
Apr 23, 2026•7 min
The social media company Snap recently announced it’s laying off about 1,000 workers — 16% of its employees. The company said these changes will reduce costs by more than half a billion dollars and help establish a path to net income profitability. This move comes after one of Snap's investors, Irenic Capital Management, wrote a public letter to the company outlining what it needs to do to “save” the company and cut costs. Snap has been a public company for nine years. It's had just a few non-co...
Apr 22, 2026•10 min
The Wayback Machine is a project of the Internet Archive. It sends out web crawlers to take snapshots of the internet, creating a digital library of web pages. But now, some news publications are blocking its crawlers over concerns that AI companies will access the Wayback Machine’s publicly available archive and then train their AI models with the content. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes talked about this with Andrew Deck at Harvard's Nieman Lab.
Apr 21, 2026•7 min
California became the first state to regulate embodied carbon in its building code. That’s changing the construction industry even beyond the state border. More than a third of planet-warming emissions come from buildings and construction. Marketplace’s The rest of it is what’s called embodied carbon . That’s the emissions that it took to make the steel, concrete, glass and insulation, and put them all together. Caleigh Wells looked into what California’s new regulations could mean for builders ...
Apr 20, 2026•4 min
This week, Spotify is letting its users buy physical books. Plus, Amazon acquires the satellite service provide Globalstar. But first, state lawmakers in Illinois are considering a bill that says developers of large AI models can’t be held liable for critical harms caused by those models, as long as the developer doesn't intentionally or recklessly cause the harm and has published a safety protocol on its website. A representative from OpenAI testified in favor of the bill; meanwhile, Wired repo...
Apr 17, 2026•13 min
The share of older workers is on the decline — about 37% of people age 55 and above are now active in the labor force. About a decade ago, it was around 40%. The pandemic chased some older workers out, and others can simply afford to retire. Another factor that's causing some to exit? The emergence of artificial intelligence. Learning how to interact with it as a tool, maybe even as a colleague, seems like a headache to some. So, they’re choosing retirement instead. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughe...
Apr 16, 2026•7 min
Routers, computers, web cameras — they all connect to the internet. And they can be infected with malicious software that lets someone else take over. The device becomes a bot, essentially. A group of these devices networked together then becomes a botnet. And these botnets can then be used for nefarious purposes, like distributed denial of service attacks, without the device owners even knowing about it. Cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs recently wrote about several large botnets including o...
Apr 15, 2026•7 min
State governments invest their money a lot like a person might. Some treasuries, some mutual funds, a dash of corporate bonds, all intended to grow over time. Now, some states are looking to cryptocurrency as an investment. In 2025, at least nineteen states considered laws allowing some state funds to be invested in digital assets. Three states — Texas, New Hampshire, and Arizona — actually passed laws around this, according to a review by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughe...
Apr 14, 2026•5 min
Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes was shopping recently with her seven-year-old who was drawn to a “Relaxolotl,” a tea infuser shaped like an axolotl. And it had a label: “designed in Rhode Island, by people.” Genuine Fred makes the relaxolotl. President Jason Amendolara told “Marketplace Tech” the company adopted the saying over a decade ago, before artificial intelligence was really in the conversation. It was meant to signal there were real humans behind the ideas. But now, the phrase has taken ...
Apr 13, 2026•9 min
