Tech companies like the idea, as they largely eliminate community opposition, and could cut down on utility costs

While Elon Musk has often touted putting datacenters in space, reports suggest that another geographic area may soon become a widespread target: our lakes and oceans.

Two underwater datacenters are already in operation off the coast of China, and recent reports suggest that the Trump administration is considering plans for four proposed underwater, sealed-pod datacenters to be built off the shores of Maine and Alaska.

Men allegedly impersonated voices and images of executives to convince employees to send large payments

Three foreign nationals were arrested and charged with using AI to allegedly impersonate corporate CEOs and attorneys to steal over $100m, according to an indictment that was newly unsealed by the US Department of Justice.

According to a press release from the United States attorney’s office for the southern district of New York, three men – Jacob Soall, Sharon Hazan, and Guy Sheetrit – were arrested for using AI to alter and impersonate the voices and images of executives and attorneys at various companies in order to convince employees to send over large payments. Soall and Hazan were arrested in Spain over the summer, while Sheetrit was arrested in the United Kingdom in September. The alleged fraud took place between 2024 and 2026.

Tech industry fears delays to its multi-trillion dollar infrastructure buildout meant to power artificial intelligence

Several newly elected Democrats and Senator Bernie Sanders have renewed calls for datacenter moratoriums in the days after the US midterm elections. The sweeping Democratic victory, which was buoyed in part by backlash to the tech industry, has added momentum to efforts to slow down the multi-trillion-dollar buildout of the controversial facilities.

On the social media platform X, Sanders posted a call for an immediate national datacenter moratorium this week. “Americans don’t want Big Tech oligarchs wrecking the environment, gutting jobs and threatening humanity’s future,” Sanders said on Wednesday.

Global tech stocks have plunged after the Democrats’ victory in the US midterm elections, with fears of a slowdown in AI development. Major tech corporations including Apple, Tesla and Nvidia shed about $1tn in a single trading session. Is this stock market jitters, or a sign the AI bubble might be about to burst? Lucy Hough speaks to senior economics correspondent Richard Partington

After Thursday’s share price plunge on Wall Street, could the volatility be the start of a huge market meltdown?

Global financial markets have been thrown into a tailspin as investors bet on an AI slowdown after the US midterm elections.

This is not the first time stock markets have wobbled in recent months due to concerns over a tech bubble. But could this volatility be the start of a huge market meltdown?

Asian and European markets follow US tech rout with many analysts predicting more waves of selling to come

European and Asian stock markets fell sharply on Friday after the Democrats’ decisive victory in the midterms triggered a rout in US tech stocks a day earlier.

A sell-off on Wall Street on Thursday was followed by sharp falls in Asian stock markets on Friday. The investor sentiment then reached London, where the market was, at one stage, poised for its worst day since March.

The tech industry spent big on the midterms, but it turned out to be a poor investment. Elon Musk poured a staggering $446m dollars into Republican-aligned political action committees (Pacs) and groups since last year, but his efforts didn’t pay off. Democrats won every one of the five Senate races where Musk’s America Pac spent the most money backing Republican candidates. Carter Sherman and Kai Wright are joined by the Guardian’s US tech editor, Blake Montgomery, to ask what the ‘blue tsunami’ will mean for Musk and the wider tech industry. Will this spell the end of AI datacenters? And if so, what could this mean for the US economy?

The tech industry spent big on the midterms, but it turned out to be a poor investment. Elon Musk poured a staggering $446m dollars into Republican-aligned political action committees (Pacs) and groups since last year, but his efforts didn’t pay off. Democrats won every one of the five Senate races where Musk’s America Pac spent the most money backing Republican candidates. Carter Sherman and Kai Wright are joined by the Guardian’s US tech editor, Blake Montgomery, to ask what the ‘blue tsunami’ will mean for Musk and the wider tech industry. Will this spell the end of AI datacenters? And if so, what could this mean for the US economy?

Voters approved nearly every datacenter moratorium that was on the ballot, dozens in total in Tuesday’s elections

• Track live results from all 50 states

• Send us your questions about the US midterms results and Democrats’ ‘blue wave’

There were three big losers in Tuesday’s midterm elections in the US: Donald Trump, Elon Musk and datacenters.

Datacenters, the facilities full of semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence and a host of other online products, were on the ballot in elections in at least 40 jurisdictions across 10 states. Voters responded with a strong rebuke of the giant buildings, which have has become a symbol of the tech industry and AI.

Owners of pilates and yoga studios in the US got political and encouraged their followers to vote on social media

Your local pilates instructors only want you to do two things: breathe through your side-planks and vote.

In the days leading up to the US midterm elections, a wave of posts from fitness and wellness accounts blanketed Instagram, eschewing their typical messaging around the importance of strengthening your core in favor of the importance of exercising your civic duty. Owners of pilates and yoga studios and instructors across the US posted reels and pictures on platforms like Instagram encouraging their followers and clients to vote. Engagement varied depending on their following: posts reaped anywhere from 70 to more than 10,000 likes.

Big tech stocks falter as investors question whether billions being poured into AI can generate returns quickly enough

A sell-off of tech stocks that began earlier this month and gained steam with disappointing earnings from leading tech companies drove US markets down by hundreds of billions of dollars on Friday. In total, the decline has knocked nearly $1tn in value off the tech-heavy Nasdaq exchange in one week and erased about $2tn in a month.

The S&P 500, the index of the 500 most valuable companies in the US, fell by more than 1% Friday, losing hundreds of billions of dollars in market value. It was on track to erase its gain for October, even though it set its all-time high during the same month. The weakness for technology stocks dragged the Nasdaq composite down even further, more than 3%, also erasing hundreds of billions in value. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell less.

These resource-guzzling centres drive up utility bills and are hated across the political spectrum. Cue a clunky, but potentially influential, new name for them

Jesus may have turned water into wine, but Donald Trump has done one better: he turned Lake Ontario into Lake America and the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America. And then, for his next trick, he insisted we all stop talking about artificial intelligence (AI) and call it superintelligence (SI) instead.

Those, of course, are only a few of the name changes the president has ushered in. When he’s not golfing or commenting on senators’ buttocks, president Trump loves a rebranding project. Which makes sense: coming up with a new name is far easier than making meaningful improvements to people’s lives.

Ukraine no longer wants to depend on one company in space. It has discussed and is weighing cooperation with Turkiye on satellite technology, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an interview with CNN Türk, days after he met with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkiye.

Satellite links are now central to how Ukraine fights, carrying its drones, communications and reconnaissance, and most of that runs on Elon Musk’s Starlink. Last month, a slowdown of Starlink and its military version disrupted operations on the front line and cost civilian lives. It demonstrated how much of Ukraine’s war depends on a single firm it does not control, pushing Kyiv to build or share the technology itself.

A satellite partnership with Turkiye, still at the talking stage

Asked after his official meetings in Turkiye whether joint production or technology development with Ankara was on the table, including in satellites, Zelenskyy said the idea is being explored but is far from settled.

“We will work in this area too. This question was also discussed and considered. You will agree, this is not a simple matter,” Zelenskyy emphasized.

He had met Erdogan in Turkiye on 1 November, one of a run of talks between the two leaders as Ankara positions itself as a go-between in the war.

Why Ukraine wants its own technology in space

Zelenskyy tied the push to security, saying both countries need technology they own rather than borrow.

“For both states, security is of great importance. Without our own developments, without our own technologies, including in the space sphere, it is hard for us to move forward,” Zelenskyy said.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Military Intelligence published the names of 49 Russian and Belarusian companies and institutions building Rassvet, Russia’s low-orbit satellite internet system for military purposes. Russia launched its first 16 Rassvet satellites earlier this year. Stable communications would need 200–250 in orbit, Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, adviser to Zelenskyy, said in May.

We cannot let the billionaire class take unprecedented risks with our future

America is a divided country in crisis. Despite the sunny economic forecast coming from the Trump administration, millions of Americans are struggling to find and keep jobs, getting crushed under the rising cost of living, and losing health insurance when they need it the most.

Meanwhile, via corporate consolidation and political corruption, the billionaire class is getting richer faster than ever before: a 40% increase in wealth in just the last two years. Today, the combined wealth of nearly 3,000 global billionaires equals one-fifth of the entire world’s yearly output. Nearly 1,000 billionaires live and do business in the United States.

Bowen Wan was on anti-seizure medication, and chatbot provided her with a tapering schedule to reduce dosage

A woman’s death from an epileptic seizure after she received dangerous advice from a chatbot has prompted her parents to sue OpenAI earlier this week.

The legal action is the latest lawsuit that in which plaintiffs allege that a bot provided counsel to a user that ultimately led to their death.

Europe is raising its defense budgets, but a Ukrainian defense-tech executive warns against spending the money on expensive systems that prove too ineffective to stop cheap drones at a sustainable cost. That is the case Taras Bublyk, CEO of the Ukrainian electronic-warfare firm UNWAVE, made in an interview with Ukrinform.

He argued that economics decides these fights: firing a costly missile at a cheap drone every time is a defense no budget can sustain for long. Bublyk said Europe should learn from the lessons of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

Why a missile for every drone is a losing trade

Bublyk said the core problem is the price gap between a threat and the tools used to stop it. Spend an expensive missile each time to down a relatively cheap drone, and the defense cannot be sustained.

“The cost of countering must be proportionate to the cost of the threat. The countermeasures must be affordable, produced in sufficient quantity, and work as a single system,” Bublyk explained.

His answer is a layered defense that combines detection, electronic warfare, interceptor drones, physical barriers, and conventional air defense, so that where jamming or a cheaper interceptor will do, no one burns a costly missile.

Advanced weapons are not the same as being ready to use them

For Europe, that means investing not only in the technology but also in integrating it and scaling up production because owning advanced weapons does not, by itself, mean a country can use them well.

Rising European defense budgets are a good sign, he adds, but risk flowing to systems built without the lessons of the current war.

“There is a risk of investing in expensive systems that may prove insufficiently effective. European countries need to learn to integrate drones, electronic warfare and other technologies into specific combat tasks, taking Ukraine’s experience into account,” he said.

Ukraine has previously offered to teach what it has learned under constant drone attacks and jamming.

The rules that could cost Europe precious minutes

Much of Europe’s critical infrastructure is still underprepared for modern drone threats, Bublyk continued, and even sites with some protection often run systems designed without real combat experience, while Ukraine, which has that experience, is ready to help.

“European countries should use Ukraine’s experience of protecting critical infrastructure and move now from planning to building and deploying the relevant systems,” he said.

He also pointed to a regulatory gap: many European states restrict the use of electronic warfare, including in certain frequency bands, with no clear rules for switching such systems on in a real emergency.

Responsible agencies, he argued, need clear authority and fast-response mechanisms, so no one loses precious time seeking permissions once a threat has already been detected.

The tech mogul’s midterm donations backing Republicans have made him the largest single-cycle political donor in modern US history

Elon Musk has poured so much money into US politics this midterms election cycle that his donations could fund half a dozen SpaceX rocket launches or buy thousands of Tesla Cybertrucks. At the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles, Musk could order more than 31.9m cheeseburgers with the money he has spent on the midterms.

Musk, the world’s richest person, has funnelled at least $445.77m into Republican-aligned political action committees (Pacs) and groups since last year, according to US Federal Election Commission data as of 29 October. The contributions have made him the Republicans’ most prominent financial backer and the largest single-cycle political donor in modern US history.

Anthropic, the creator of Claude, filed to go public on the US stock market on 26 October. The company's filing statement contains a 92-page risk factor document in which it acknowledges the dangers that AI poses to society and human beings, and factors that could negatively affect Anthropic's business. Johana Bhuiyan, senior tech reporter for the Guardian, breaks down the document and explains why Anthropic's IPO could be a real test for the AI boom

• Anthropic files for potentially record-breaking stock market valuation in key test for AI industry

It was an ambitious notion – now Californians will vote on a one-time 5% billionaire tax, and state’s super rich have pulled out all the stops in opposition

One year ago, the idea of a billionaire tax in California was still in its infancy.

It wasn’t yet one of the most contentious ballot measure fights in state history – pitting Democrats against Democrats, drawing national attention from political heavyweights, and netting hundreds of millions of Silicon Valley dollars to fight it. Back then, it was a bold and desperate answer to Donald Trump’s healthcare cuts.

Binance exchange says it will cover customer losses as it scrambles to freeze affected assets, with about $3bn located so far

• Q&A: How big a deal is the $6.3bn crypto heist?

• Tell us: have you been affected by the Binance hack?

The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange has been hit by a record $6.3bn (£4.7bn) hack described as the biggest heist in history, with experts identifying North Korea as the likely culprit.

Binance said it would cover all customer losses as it froze $3bn of the affected assets.

Ukrainian company Robotic Complexes is developing CASEEVAK, an armored module that lets the Murakha unmanned ground vehicle carry wounded soldiers off the battlefield, the company told Militarnyi on 28 October. The casualty rides in a closed capsule with ventilation, heating, lighting, and a first-aid kit, and side and rear doors let medics load and reach the soldier from any side.

Drones that can fly long distances pose a threat to both wounded soldiers and the crews evacuating them, making transportation the main challenge, said Ukrainian military medic Daryna Boiko, The Independent reported. Developers are looking for new ways to counter this threat. The current Murakha model is being equipped with passive anti-drone protection elements, the developers say.

An armored capsule that keeps the wounded connected

After a wounded soldier is loaded onto an evacuation platform, it is important not only to transport them to a safe location but also to protect them and monitor their condition during transit.

The module is built around a closed armored capsule made of 3.5 mm-thick Armox 500T steel with an inner lining of HDPE 1000, the media outlet reports. Side and rear doors allow the wounded to be loaded from different directions and accessed during evacuation.

To enable the operator to monitor the person inside and maintain contact with them, the capsule is equipped with a camera with day and night channels and two-way audio communication. The system can be controlled via ELRS, LTE, Starlink, or fiber-optic communications. Militarnyi reports that even if the capsule is detached from the main platform, it retains two independent communication channels.

The developers are also working to integrate vital-signs monitoring systems intended to provide medical personnel with information about the wounded person’s condition during transport.

An electric platform and protection against FPV drones

The evacuation module requires a platform capable of carrying it as it moves through dangerous areas. The Murakha is equipped with two electric motors, delivering a combined torque of 1,600 N·m, and a 35 kWh battery. The system’s stated range is up to 80 km, according to the media outlet.

Another area of development is protection against drones. Measures intended to protect the system include net launchers and electronic warfare (EW) equipment. However, work on a protective cage against FPV drones is still ongoing, according to the report.

The company has already conducted ballistic tests of the armor steel at a distance of 50 meters, using ammunition of various calibers, Militarnyi reports.

The Murakha-Mini logistics platform

The same company previously developed the Murakha-Mini logistics platform. Ukrainian military personnel began using it on the front line to deliver equipment, provisions and other supplies, Militarnyi reported on 24 October 2025.

The UGV can carry up to 250 kg and travel up to 40 km on a single charge, the media outlet reported. During one combat mission, it transported 150 kg of cargo and towed a six-metre platform carrying another drone and provisions, covering 16 km in one direction, Militarnyi reported.

The Department of Homeland Security asked an Icelandic hosting company to take down data obtained through hack

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asked ⁠an Icelandic hosting company on Thursday to take down or limit access to data related to thousands ⁠of agency personnel, saying ⁠the content ​put them at risk, according to the request posted online by hosting company FlokiNET.

The database “places more than ⁠40,000 identifiable individuals at risk of harassment, stalking and physical harm”, the request said.

The Michigan Senate candidate is calling for public ownership and other reforms, offering a potential antidote to ideological gridlock

The Michigan senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat, occupies a strange but increasingly common place in modern American politics. He’s praised by progressives, begrudgingly tolerated by moderate Democrats and largely demonized by Republicans.

He’s also uniquely positioned to forge an all-too-elusive thread of political kinship between these perpetually-at-odds groups with his bold but contentious plan for reining in AI, called AI Under Democracy.

Regulator demands companies explain how and why they charge different prices for the same product or service

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is demanding some of the US’s biggest airlines, ride-share companies and retailers divulge how they are using algorithms and loyalty programs to target customers and drivers with different prices and wages.

Nine companies – Delta, United, JetBlue, Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, Target and Walmart – were named in the inquiry, which comes after investigations and lawsuits alleging consumers are charged different prices based on their buying histories and drivers paid different fares based on their personal histories.

Information released by Distributed Denial of Secrets is the third such government data disclosure in the last month

Data identifying more than 41,000 employees and contractors for the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was released on Wednesday in an unprecedented leak that reveals how the agency is organized. The records, which were made public by the transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, reference operation names, surveillance programs and information on undercover initiatives.

DHS did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Both of these threats have the same roots: private entities seeking to cash in. We have the power to stand against them

A summer of extreme heat, entire villages obliterated in Nepal, a super El Niño breaking records, Exxon publicly saying we may reach 3C by 2050 – could it possibly be any worse?

How about throwing AI extinction in the mix?

In Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, Marissa Mayer, former president and CEO of Yahoo, told her interviewer something so absurd it’s since gone viral. 

Struggling with the “impossible task” of naming three things that she loves about her own 10 year old daughter, the New York Times reports, Mayer asked the AI assistant she just launched to do that thinking for her. It delivered the perfect answer, Mayer said: “It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover.” Everyone is piling onto that absurd anecdote right now, rightfully so. What she has to say about gender in tech, however, is more out of touch than that.

Saying sensational things on the record — especially knowing that the reporter will not be able to resist using such a shocking story as the lede — is a savvy strategy. For someone as influential as Mayer, telling the list story is transparently a result of years of media training. Mayer is selling her new app, Dazzle, which accesses your camera roll and analyzes your life based on the photos you take. It’s disturbing to see her talk about relinquishing basic cognitive skills like “plan a birthday party” to AI. But the rest of the story gets into something Mayer has talked about for more than a decade: “the gender card,” as she’s called it. 

“I never play the gender card,” she told Steven Levy in a 2015 interview. “The moment you play into that, it’s an issue. [...] In technology we live at a rare, fast-moving pace. There are probably industries where gender is more of an issue, but our industry is not one where I think that’s relevant.” She repeats similar sentiments in Sunday’s NYT interview.

The height of Mayer’s career coincided with the girlbossification of everything, during the Lean In era, when Notorious RBG and “well behaved women rarely make history” mugs were everywhere. She’s been asked about gender in tech one million times, and has mostly dismissed it. But a decade after the tech girlboss reigned, her thoughts on this haven’t seemed to evolve much. 

Later in the NYT piece, she brushed off the notion that gender has any bearing on who gets to participate in the tech industry. She also brushes off a question about bias baked into AI models, something that’s been studied and proven extensively, and instead names female AI executives like Fei-Fei Li as the reason well-documented bias doesn’t exist. She asserts that passion overrides gender, as if just being “passionate” enough erases decades of women’s experiences in the tech workforce.

“To me, gender fades into the background. I talk about passion as a gender neutralizing force,” she told the NYT. “If you’re excited about something, gender doesn’t matter.”

Meanwhile, male figureheads of the AI industry are out here posting slop videos about sperm on main. Half of women in tech leave the industry by 35, earn 84 cents to their male counterparts’ dollar, and women founders receive half the amount of funding that male founders do.

Earlier this month, event organizers canceled one of the biggest gatherings of women and non-binary technologists, the Grace Hopper Celebration. “Unlike past events, this year, both individual registrations and sponsorship commitments came in significantly below our expectations and, ultimately, below the level needed to cover critical operating expenses,” the organizers wrote in a statement. Bloomberg reported that this comes after years of declining attendance, with around 15,000 people attending in 2025, making it the fewest since 2016. 

In 2023, GHC attendees reported standing in lines for hours to talk to recruiters, being shoved, harassed, and cut in front of by the hundreds of men who’d suddenly flooded the conference. “They trampled over attendees, shoved their way into the recruiter’s booth to wave their resumes in front of their faces, verbally assaulted attendees, and physically pushed and shoved attendees in line,” one attendee said. 

After the GHC 2026 cancellation was announced, Kayley Seow, a tech worker who was at the 2023 conference, contacted me to talk about what it meant to her. She said she felt “pretty shattered” when she heard the conference wouldn’t happen this year. “GHC is such a pillar of the community that you don't expect to fall, or in this case, not run. Despite its flaws, it continues to be an important space for people hoping to get into tech and those already in it. I'd been recommending it to every undergrad or woman technologist to attend.” There are other, similar conferences held around the country, but GHC is hard to recreate, Seow told me. “Other organizations exist but they operate virtually, there's events here and there in the Bay, but it's impossible to find something as concentrated as GHC.” 

The people she knows who are most affected are current undergrads who planned to go to GHC to connect with recruiters, find internships, and land graduate jobs, Seow said. “They're disappointed, and a little scared, since it's October and we're coming up on the end of internship recruiting season, especially for the international students who were hoping to talk to the bigger companies at GHC that have the resources to take on international students as interns.” It’s still unclear whether there will be a conference in 2027.

GHC’s cancellation this year follows a string of blows to organizations that support women technologists. Women Who Code, a nonprofit that awarded more than $3.5 million in scholarships and supported a community of 360,000 members, shut down in 2024 after 11 years, citing funding issues.  

Things are very different today than they were when Mayer was the first-ever pregnant CEO of a Fortune 500 company. In 2025, at the direction of President Donald Trump’s executive order “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” and other orders, civil servants across the federal government from NASA to the Social Security office and the CDC had to drop everything to scrub mentions of diversity, equity and inclusion from their systems. This wasn’t just symbolic or semantic. The National Institutes of Health terminated billions of dollars worth of nearly 2,300 federal research grants, cuts that disproportionately affected women and early career researchers. Led entirely by inexperienced men in their early 20s and spearheaded by Elon Musk, the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency canceled funding that would have advanced potentially lifesaving research projects focused on pregnancy and reproductive health, chronic illness, and vaccine safety for women. The damage done by DOGE cuts to the advancement of science and technology that would have been done by women and would have improved women’s lives around the world is immeasurable and widespread; it’s hard to imagine believing gender plays no role in STEM today in light of what we have seen under the Trump administration over the last year and a half, especially.

But in a way, Mayer is right: Drinking one’s own Kool-Aid is a non-gendered issue. Earlier this year, Sam Altman suggested AI generating podcasts to interact with your kids about their days and got similarly roasted for a week straight. He deserved it, and so does she.

Undercover reporters ordered 500 drone mesh modems from a Chinese firm, which billed them to Russia’s Alabuga drone plant, investigation by The Insider found. The outlet estimates the firm makes about half the high-power mesh modems that let Russia steer its drones deep into Ukraine. The firm’s director also named US company AMD as the source of a key chip, and AMD says it has not sold to the firm.

Geran drones and Banderol drone-missiles have become Russia’s main weapons against Ukraine’s energy grid. Russia began this winter’s strike campaign against that grid in late September, ISW assessed. Ukrainians’ survival this winter depends largely on how fast the West halts mesh modem sales to Russia, the outlet argued.

What a mesh modem does

A mesh modem links drones into one radio network. Each unit relays data for the others, so if one drone is shot down, traffic reroutes through the rest. Information keeps flowing even if nearly 80% of the drones are downed, Ukrainian defense adviser Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov said in November 2025.

Range is the other half of the threat. One XK F-359 holds a line-of-sight link over 100–300 km, The Insider says. In theory, a couple of relay drones could keep a whole attack on Kyiv connected. Operators can then send new commands in flight and steer around air defenses. Russia’s Gerbera drones, first built as cheap decoys, increasingly carry these modems.

Explore further

Russia’s jam-resistant drones run on a Chinese modem no one has sanctioned

A modem from an upgraded Gerbera

To trace the part, The Insider’s correspondent in Ukraine examined an unmarked mesh modem from an upgraded Gerbera with a vertical tail fin, a version that appeared this summer. The outlet identified it as Xingkai’s XK F-359, the part Ukrainian intelligence and earlier reporting, Euromaidan Press included, had logged as the XK-F358. The Insider calls that label a misidentification.

Next, The Insider and the Nordsint investigative project contacted Xingkai on WeChat, posing as a Russian military supplier based in Alabuga. A company employee who introduced himself as “Jack Jiang” confirmed the firm is the model’s sole maker. The Insider identified him as Jiang Qin, Xingkai’s director and owner.

500 modems, three banks

The reporters then ordered 500 units for delivery to Alabuga, home to the plant that makes most of Russia’s long-range drones. Jiang invoiced 19.5 million yuan, which The Insider put at about $2.87 million. He offered two ways to pay: dollars to Xingkai’s DBS Bank account in Hong Kong, or yuan to his personal Ping An Bank account.

Explore further

America has sided with Russia against Ukraine. Europe should stop pretending and build a coalition against Russia, China, and even the US

In the chat, the reporters said outright that the end user was a military production facility. Jiang raised no objection, The Insider reported.

Later, after the reporters asked to update the address, Xingkai sent a revised invoice with “Alabuga” spelled in Latin letters. This time, it routed payment to a China Merchants Bank account in the name of a former Xingkai manager. She left a management post at the company in 2025, according to Tesari corporate records cited by The Insider. None of the three banks answered The Insider’s requests for comment.

Jiang also claimed the modem’s programmable chip is made by AMD. Asked for an AMD license, he refused, saying Xingkai buys the chips through a middleman. AMD told The Insider that Xingkai “is not an AMD customer or authorized partner,” and said it had sold the company nothing. AMD added that it bars exports of its products to Russia that violate US export controls and sanctions.

Datacenter and chip costs fueled sharp decrease in AI sector although non-AI stocks still had a strong showing

The latest shudder for stocks in the AI industry pulled markets lower worldwide on Thursday, while oil prices hit their highest levels since May on worries about the war with Iran.

The S&P 500 fell 1.2% for its worst day since July, while the Nasdaq composite tumbled 2.6%. The weakness for tech stocks was so overwhelming that it masked strength for the rest of the US market, in which the majority of stocks actually rose. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 11 points, or less than 0.1%.

This story first appeared as the cover story in Issue 4 of The Atlas, a new global publication by Coda Story and The Continent. Sign up to the newspaper here.

In late July, at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Philadelphia, the mathematician Jacob Tsimerman was awarded one of four Fields Medals – the highest honour in mathematics.

A few hours later, Tsimerman announced that he was joining OpenAI.

Tsimerman’s departure from theoretical mathematics, while at the absolute peak of his powers, highlights the fault line in a debate that is upending the normally quiet world of higher mathematics. “What a dick move,” said one mathematics professor, speaking to The Atlas off the record.

Tsimerman, who has written extensively about his fear of “omnicidal futures involving artificial intelligence” – a fear that AI could wipe out humanity, closely associated with the AI “doomer” community – has said he will work on OpenAI’s safety team.

Tsimerman and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

In recent months, OpenAI has announced proofs of various longstanding mathematical problems, solved with one of the company’s latest large language models. Other companies have also made advancements: RedNote, a Chinese AI model, obtained a perfect score at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Shanghai in July.

Human mathematicians, at all levels of the profession, are reeling from the implications. Tim Gowers, a professor at the University of Cambridge who helped to verify one of OpenAI’s proofs, has written that even if AI models fail to progress further, “we have still probably entered an era where it will become very difficult for humans to compete with AI at solving mathematical problems”.

This is a startling assessment – and a marketing coup for the likes of OpenAI.

“Mathematicians actually have a special role in this,” said Joshua Grochow, an associate professor in Computer Science and (by courtesy)Mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder. “The AI companies’ PR pitch is essentially to say, ‘Look, we have solved math. the intellectually hardest thing ever, therefore we can solve everything.’ ”

LLMs have not solved math – far from it. Nonetheless, Grochow added, recently some capabilities have improved. “They are legitimately able to produce real math, new math that they had not produced before. So you can’t deny that utility. You can deny the extent of that utility, but you can’t say it’s all BS.”

Miek Messerschmidt, a senior lecturer in mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, recently used Anthropic’s Claude to take a crack at a problem that had stumped him. Claude solved it within 30 minutes. “How did I feel? You mean emotionally? I was relieved, because I didn’t have to go down this dead end any more. But I was also disconcerted by what this entity could do in such a short amount of time.”

NEW VARIABLES

Mathematics has been disrupted by technological leaps before. The abacus. The mechanical calculator. The blackboard, even, which played an instrumental role in standardising training and mathematical notation (“It’s hard to research, because most of what’s written on blackboards doesn’t stay there very long,” said mathematics historian Michael Barany).

But AI is a different kind of disruption. Where previous advances helped mathematicians expand the frontiers of their knowledge, large language models threaten the livelihoods, and purpose, of mathematicians themselves.

“Our place in society at developing new ideas has been quite unthreatened for quite some time,” said Tim Chartier, a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Davidson College. “For a long time, the frontier of mathematics could only be expired by the mathematicians themselves. There were no tools that could push into that boundary, except the research mathematician…At this current time, it’s not like we don’t need research mathematicians – but the landscape has changed so quickly, it’s hard to know what that will look like a year from now, two years from now.”

This matters for everyone: for thousands of years, mathematics has been considered to be the foundation of scientific knowledge. There is no physics without mathematics. No astronomy without mathematics. And there is no computer science – or AI – without mathematics. What happens if there are cracks in the foundation?

“I think that LLMs pose an existential threat to the mathematical community,” wrote Tasmin Chu, a PhD student at the California Institute of Technology, in an essay published on 2 August – the day after OpenAI released a set of ten new mathematical results, resolving or making progress on various problems.

“This is a polemic, not a press release,” Chu continued. “I know that others feel the same way; I have spent today crashing out and learning that top mathematicians I know are crashing out.”

Some of what mathematicians are worried about is the same as what everyone else is worried about: that AI will take their jobs; that AI companies have absorbed everyone’s work, and are reproducing it without attribution or compensation; that students aren’t learning properly any more; and that there won’t be jobs for them when they graduate.

But some worries are more specific to the field. Like the fear that, if mathematics becomes too reliant on particular AI models, then AI companies will have the power to restrict access to a select few – or make it prohibitively expensive. That promising young mathematicians, instead of turning to research, will use their talents instead to refine proprietary algorithms, which may or may not be used for the common good. That there will be no one left to understand, let alone vouch for, the mathematics produced by the machines. That objective truth, or anything close to it, is going to be much harder to prove – a fear shared with journalists, incidentally, who find it increasingly difficult to verify whether a photograph is real or fake.

MATHEMATICIAN IN THE LOOP

After speaking with more than a dozen leading mathematicians from around the world, The Atlas can confirm that Chu is not alone with her fears: it’s all anyone is talking about. The crisis is existential – and mathematicians are looking to one man in particular to guide them through it.

There are no working mathematicians who are truly famous. The closest anyone gets is Terence Tao, a professor at UCLA, who is often referred to as the world’s greatest living mathematician. A prodigy, Tao skipped five grades of school, receiving his masters degree at age 16. By 21, he had earned a PhD from Princeton, and was awarded the Fields Medal just ten years later, in 2006, for his pioneering work with Ben Green on prime number theory.

But what sets Tao apart, in a field infamously incomprehensible to outsiders, is his ability to communicate to both mathematicians and laypeople alike. This has made him a de facto spokesperson for the mathematics community – and extremely influential in setting its norms. “From all accounts he’s a lovely man,” said one researcher, speaking anonymously.

“But the social pressure to agree with Terry Tao is really strong.”

On July 24, the day after Jacob Tsimerman joined OpenAI, Tao gave a public lecture at the ICM titled “Mathematics in the Age of AI”. In it, he presents his “working hypothesis”: that AI tools for mathematics, which he already uses in his own research, will keep getting better. This will allow for collaboration on a vastly greater scale than has ever been possible before, Tao argues, and speed up the pace of research – revealing new, previously unimagined frontiers.

But it will also change, fundamentally, the role of human mathematicians. There will be little point in problem-solving – the computers will handle that. But the humans will still have to do the really hard work: understanding why AI-generated proofs are correct, and explaining this to others. The sooner they embrace this and plan accordingly, Tao concludes, the better.

The Atlas reached out to Terence Tao to request an interview. His human assistant, UCLA media relations officer Holly Ober, declined the request, making a referral instead to a “living document” which is maintained by Tao’s Claude AI assistant, on his website. This document synthesises Tao’s current thinking on AI, based on his public writings and talks, even “interviewing” Tao with follow-up questions.

As per his AI assistant, Tao believes that the topic of AI in mathematics is too important to be left to just a small number of spokespeople – and that his own “influence on this discussion should diminish as the rest of the community steps up.”

AN UNSOLVED EQUATION

Not everyone believes in the inevitability of AI defining the future of mathematics. According to several sources, both organisers and funders were disappointed with the turnout at the ICM in Philadelphia. Despite the gravity of the occasion, the congress was not at capacity.

Ila Varma and Tarik Aougab, associate professors at the University of Toronto and Haverford College respectively, may have had something to do with that. In March, they launched a petition to boycott the ICM due to the ongoing war in Iran, increasing authoritarianism in the United States and the risks faced by visiting academics – if they were even allowed in. “AI companies were invited, but most African mathematicians who tried to attend couldn’t get visas,” Varma said.

More than 2,600 people signed the petition. For Varma, this is evidence that mathematicians may yet use their status to resist the influence – and the cash – of the big AI companies.

“There’s an idea that the positionality of mathematics in society is to decide who’s smart, who’s worthy of the most lucrative career opportunities and the privileges that go along with it. And now we are being asked to take this technology that is likely to be extremely unhealthy for users, that’s bad for the environment, this thing built on unethical labour, and our discipline is being used against many of our wishes to tell society that this thing is intelligent, and that you should let it do your thinking for you.”

Michael Harris, a professor at the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu in Paris, was at the ICM in Philadelphia. “The talks I attended on AI, starting with Tao’s public lecture, took pains to insist on the need for human mathematicians to make sense of anything produced in the name of the discipline, by machines or by humans,” he said. “There is a growing resistance to any use of AI whatsoever in mathematics, especially among young people, and this will become evident over the next few months.”

One of the clearest voices of dissent belongs to Max Weinreich, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the City University of New York.

In an essay published earlier this month, Weinreich makes the case against what he describes as “artificial mathematics”: “Mathematicians do not need to use AI, nor should we use AI; soon, I argue, you will not want to have your name associated with AI. Instead, we should use our intellectual authority to oppose its development.”

His opposition is about more than mathematics, he told The Atlas. In his view, the environmental and financial implications of the AI boom pose major societal risks – and mathematicians, given their privileged position, are one of the few groups of people who can do anything about it.

As John Fletcher, a theoretical physicist and mathematician, observed: “There is a lot of power in being perceived as the smartest people in the world.”

Po-Shen Loh, a professor at Carnegie Mellon and former coach of the US International Mathematical Olympiad team, backs mathematicians to figure it out – by treating it like a maths problem. “AI is making mathematicians engage with the real world. They are smart enough to realise they have an existential crisis. They’re quickly racing down to discover all the dead ends, to see what works and what doesn’t.”

And when they figure it out, maybe they’ll let the rest of us know. 

A version of this story, edited for length, first appeared in The Atlas newspaper.  Additional reporting by: Shougat Dasgupta, Masho Lomashvilli, Irina Matchavariani.

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Astronomy, our window into the rest of the universe, happens in the dark. Planets, stars and galaxies – all the mysteries of the cosmos – only reveal themselves at night. But the night sky may be getting much brighter, thanks to an American company with a plan to conquer darkness itself by sending 50,000 giant mirrors into space.

What you are reading first appeared as a cover story for The Atlas, our new global publication with The Continent. Sign up here to get the next edition delivered to your inbox on August 27.

Astronomers are panicking.

It is an “existential threat” to optical astronomy, says the European Southern Observatory. A “disastrous” idea that will “permanently scar” the night sky, according to the Royal Astronomical Society. The American Astronomical Society told Nature it “would probably mean the end of ground-based astronomy, or optical astronomy, at least.”

Sthabile Kolwa agrees. “It will take away a very crucial part of our civilization,” she tells The Atlas. Kolwa, a senior lecturer in astronomy at the University of South Africa, studies the life cycles of galaxies, but today her concerns are more immediate. “It might come to this, that we just have to find them in the parking lot and say, ‘Hey, what are you guys doing? You’re going to ruin science for us.’ ”

Like Uber, but for the sun

The parking lot in question is in Hawthorne, California, outside the headquarters of Reflect Orbital. They call themselves The Sunlight Company. The start-up is celebrating: Earlier this month, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the launch of Eärendil-1, likely in a few months time.

This satellite, named for a character in JRR Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, will unfurl an 18m x 18m mirror in low Earth orbit. It’s designed to reflect sunlight onto the dark side of the earth, lighting a 5km2 patch of land with the strength of four full moons.

It is a proof of concept.

By 2035, Reflect Orbital wants 50,000 of its mirrors in space, delivering illumination “comparable to daylight” on demand to paying customers (“sunlight is the new oil,” says chief executive Ben Nowack). The company says this will allow solar panels to generate clean energy overnight; provide “safer, evenly-lit streets” to cities that pay for it; and keep construction sites and farms working 24/7.

There will be an app, of course, offering “sunlight as a service” – lighting up the night will be as easy as ordering an Uber.

Clean, renewable energy is at the heart of the company’s vision, a spokesperson told The Atlas in a statement. Reflect Orbital declined to respond to specific queries and said it is in constant dialogue with astronomers, scientists and environmental researchers to mitigate the impact of the light pollution: “We are able to dim the brightness of the service and turn it off at any stage. We control where the light shines when serving an authorised customer. Most people and most places will never see this light. It is precise, targeted and customers will require permits to receive the service.”

Circadian arrhythmia

A new research paper, published in May, challenges Reflect Orbital’s position. Its author, the European Southern Observatory’s Oliver Hainault, concluded that the company’s 50,000 satellites would increase the background brightness of the sky by 300% – even when their mirrors are pointed somewhere else. This, coupled with a proposal from Elon Musk’s SpaceX to build vast data centres in space, would go “beyond the limit” of what astronomy can withstand.

What that means, in practice, is that the images from ground-based telescopes will be dramatically less useful, marred by streaks of light from passing satellites. The most distant light sources won’t be visible at all.

This will obscure evidence of other galaxies, hinder research into black holes and other cosmic phenomena, and potentially prevent early warnings of asteroid approaches. Cutting-edge astronomy will only be possible from space-based telescopes like the James Webb and the Hubble – access to which is already massively oversubscribed, and subject to political interference.

The night sky will look different to the naked eye, too. “The next time you’re away from urban light pollution, spend some time outdoors after dark and enjoy the view of the Milky Way and the constellations that have inspired awe since humankind woke to consciousness. Chances are those views are not here to stay forever,” wrote journalist Tereza Pultarova for Space.com.

Running out of space

The night sky is already a lot brighter than it was 150 years ago, when light bulbs started to become commonplace. According to Dark Sky International, a US-based nonprofit that advocates against light pollution, 80% of Earth’s human population already lives under some form of sky glow, most of which is generated on land. This has forced astronomers to seek out “dark sky places,” like the Atacama Desert in Chile or the Upper Karoo in South Africa, for their telescopes.

Humans can adapt to less darkness. But it is much harder for animals and ecosystems that have evolved alongside predictable rhythms of day and night. Nocturnal predators lose the ability to hunt; sea turtle babies can’t find their way to the sea; migratory birds are thrown hopelessly off course; and moths expend all their energy helplessly chasing artificial light sources.

“It’s almost like we are on a mission to obliterate natural darkness from earth,” said Ruskin Hartley, Dark Sky’s chief executive. “And now rather than do it street by street and bulb by bulb, let’s do it from space.”

Space is, in theory, protected by the Outer Space Treaty, a 1967 agreement signed by 110 countries, including all the major space superpowers. It states that “space is the province of all mankind." But that’s not what’s actually happening, Hartley argues. “In the US, it’s the most wealthy, most powerful individuals who are gobbling up as much of that orbital space as they can before someone else can get that opportunity” – with China, Russia and Europe all scrambling too for a greater presence in low Earth orbit.

“Who gets to choose that we light up the night sky? Who gets to make that decision?” Ruskin asks. In the US, it is the FCC’s job to decide what satellites are allowed in space. But it has said that assessing the impact of light pollution or environmental damage is not within its remit. Instead, it wants to slash regulation so American companies can take advantage of the “space industrial revolution.”

And Reflect Orbital has rich and powerful backers. Earlier this year, it secured a $1.5-million contract from the US air force, hinting at possible military applications for its mirrors. Last year, it raised $20-million from three venture capital firms, including Sequoia Capital, one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley. Sequoia also owns a multibillion-dollar stake in SpaceX, which has its own plans for low earth orbit.

There are already more than 10,000 Starlink satellites up there, giving Elon Musk unprecedented influence over global communications. The company wants to launch one million more satellites over the next few years to build a network of space-based data centres. In addition to the light pollution, astronomers worry the potential for collisions will increase dramatically, as will risks to the ozone layer.

A brighter future

On her blog Higher Dimensions, the astronomy professor Janna Levin contemplates our brighter future. “It is quite possible that the hot glow of the swarm of data satellites will saturate the night, washing out the stars from our perspective on Earth. We’ll look up into the sky and instead of Zeus transformed into a swan outlined in a constellation of a few stars, the machine gods will literally loom above us, glowing with radiant heat, making declarations, predicting the weather, forecasting then determining our fate.”

Kolwa, the South African astronomy lecturer, offers a different metaphor: that of empires “colonizing low Earth orbit.” This was an ambition of one of the most infamous imperialists of them all, Cecil John Rhodes, who said that he looked up at the stars and thought: “I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”

But it hasn’t been colonized just yet.

“I’m still trying to figure out what we can do, what responsibility we have as scientists,” says Kolwa. “How could we engage our communities to stand up to these corporations and say no? We must keep our night skies dark, as dark as possible.”

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On April 24, Brazil’s competition authority, the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) announced it was opening an investigation to assess whether Google’s use of news content amounted to unfair competition practices against the Brazilian press. The announcement was welcomed by civil society organizations that have tried to push regulation to limit the reckless power of Big Tech for years. Ajor, Brazil’s Digital News Association, said that “a balanced relationship between digital platforms and journalism organizations is fundamental to the flourishing of journalism committed to the public interest. By ensuring a fair competitive environment, Cade directly advances that goal.”

In spirit and intent, CADE’s investigation into Google is similar to legislation in Australia that recognized that value is being extracted from news publishers without proportionate recompense. In Brazil, the case has been debated since 2019, but the adoption of AI Overviews helped alter the perspective of Brazilian judges. The overviews are artificially generated summaries that synthesize information from several sources and appear at the top of Google Search results. They “raise potentially more concerns,” ruled Judge Camila Cabral Pires Alves, “as they may more profoundly alter the economic function of the interface and expand the ability to retain attention within the platform's own environment.”

CADE will now investigate whether Google should be sanctioned for “alleged abusive exploitation of a dominant position, in light of the technological evolution of the conduct.” While there is perhaps a greater global appetite to regulate the impacts of AI – even the Trump administration has recently acknowledged that some oversight may be necessary – the CADE judges have been under considerable pressure from Big Tech executives to stop investigations into how their control of the market harms Brazilian businesses. 

For those of us who have reported on Big Tech, this aggressive lobbying is not surprising. Companies like Google, Meta, Twitter, TikTok, Amazon, and Microsoft have long attempted to interfere in any decision or legislation that can harm their interests in Latin America. According to a joint investigation by journalists across 13 countries, Big Tech lobbyists got away with convincing legislators in Colombia to weaken a rule meant to protect children’s mental health and prevent enforcement of privacy regulations in Ecuador. It took a team of over 40 journalists from 13 countries to uncover this while reporting on the ‘Big Tech Lobby’ in the continent and across the world.   

Threats by the U.S. government to retaliate against any country or international entity that sought to regulate Big Tech added another layer to an already complicated and uneven relationship with Silicon Valley. “Digital Taxes, Digital Services Legislation, and Digital Markets Regulations are all designed to harm, or discriminate against, American Technology,” wrote Donald Trump on social media. “Show respect to America and our amazing Tech Companies or consider the consequences!” During the past year, Trump’s envoys have forced dozens of governments around the world to dilute or even shelve regulation in exchange for lifting tariffs. 

In “Big Tech’s Invisible Hands,” which I coordinated alongside Maria Teresa Ronderos, from CLIP (Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodistica), journalists mapped a total of 75 executives that were part of “public policy” or “government relations” teams in Brazil. Tech companies utilized a “revolving door” in which public sector employees could go straight into highly paid jobs leveraging their contacts and influence. Doors opened more easily. Invitations to hangouts and events were more likely to be accepted. 

Lobbying in Brazil is dialed up to eleven. The country has 163 million internet users, with over 150 million on WhatsApp, and over 120 million on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. With AI, Brazil is a similarly large, influential market. Portuguese is the sixth most widely-spoken language in the world, with 70% of speakers based in Brazil. Which means that, if an LLM has been trained in this language, it probably used content created by millions of Brazilians going about their business of making friends, debating politics and football online. It’s not just about journalists; we are all unpaid labor for Big Tech. 

In the words of Arthur Lira, the Speaker in Brazil’s Congress who filed a criminal complaint against Big Tech executives in 2023, companies adopted a variety of tactics “to shut down democratic debate and intimidate lawmakers” and defeat any attempt at using legislation to force accountability. Google, he said, used its search homepage, used by over 85% of Brazilians, to spread fear that proposed laws would “make the internet worse” or “make it harder to know what is true or false on the internet.” A report by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro found that Google invested in ads on its own platform so extensively that it tweaked the search, prominently featuring the word “censorship” in connection to the Brazilian bill. Google also hired Michael Temer, a lawyer and former President of Brazil, to influence lawmakers and Supreme Court Justices. Of course, it was not Google alone. Meta executives, for instance, even argued that proposed legislation in Brazil could lead to the Bible being censored.

But Brazilian lawmakers, the Supreme Court, and civil society have persisted. On August 28, 2025, the “Felca Law” was approved, after a video by the influencer Felca denounced the exploitation and exposure of children on social media. The law establishes that digital platforms must take measures like verifying user age, implementing parental controls, and preventing children's exposure to adult content, gambling, and pornography. They must create reporting channels and may face fines of up to 10% of their annual revenue in Brazil.

Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Donald Trump have had a testy relationship, in part because of Lula’s criticism of Big Tech. In February, at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Lula called for global governance of AI, warning: “When few control the algorithms, it is not innovation, but domination. Regulating the so-called Big Tech companies is linked to the imperative of safeguarding human rights in the digital sphere, promoting information integrity, and protecting our countries’ creative industries.”

By sticking to his guns, Lula may now be seeing the tide turn. He was in the White House on May 7, and though neither he nor Trump took questions, both appeared encouraged by the meeting. “Very dynamic,” was how Trump described Lula, while Lula said he was “very, very satisfied” with how the talks went. With a general election in Brazil approaching in October, Lula will be sensitive to how the White House, as it has done in other elections, and Big Tech might offer vocal support for right wing candidates.

But his willingness to stand up to Big Tech is popular with voters. A recent poll found that 78% of Brazilians want to see tech companies being held responsible for the content they publish. Another poll found that 55% of Brazilians defend regulating Big Tech, with 43.9% against it. 

And as scams, fake news, and AI slop dominate ever larger swathes of all our digital space, in Brazil, as in much of the rest of the world, the entire experience of the internet is becoming more unappealing. Big Tech, with the assistance of the U.S. government, may be succeeding in slowing down the pace of regulation and watering down the content of that regulation, but in the long run its victories might be pyrrhic. People have had enough and their governments might be forced to listen.

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It starts with a simple search term in the Department of Justice’s Epstein Library. “Blue eyes.” Hundreds of results. Jeffrey Epstein’s international trafficking agents send him pictures and descriptions of blue-eyed young girls: potential victims to be dispatched to his various homes. “I spotted two skinny blond blue eyes 21 years old ladies in Monaco last weekend and asked them for CVs,” one agent, whose name has been redacted, wrote. “Trying her best to move from her small town to Moscow; English isn't great. Could be fun for Paris, blue eyes,” wrote another. “Can't understand if her breast is real. Otherwise very pretty and sweet…Very blue eyes as we like.” 

One of Epstein’s victims wrote of being chosen for her eye color in a journal entry later shared with federal prosecutors. "Superior gene pool?!? Why me?" she wrote, describing Epstein's worldview as "Nazi like." "It makes no sense. Why my hair color and eye color?" 

Epstein — himself blue-eyed — seemed to prefer both his victims, and the people he bankrolled, to have blue eyes. “All of my fundees have blue eyes,” he boasted in one email. In the entryway of his Manhattan townhouse, he displayed dozens of prosthetic eyeballs in a frame. Epstein made notes and sent article links to his contacts asking if having blue eyes meant you were more intelligent or a “genius”. He even had a list of scientists and tech leaders with blue eyes — including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Google’s Ray Kurzweil. “Total — 70 people Blue eyes — 41 Unclear (might be blue, but not 100% sure)” the list says. Appearing in the files — whether on this list or elsewhere in Epstein's records — does not connote legal wrongdoing.

Going deeper into the files, Epstein and his network of contacts discussed beliefs about how physical characteristics and race might denote intelligence. They exchanged emails about population control. They spoke of engineering women’s sex drives, building designer babies, and living in a world full of superintelligent humans that could merge with robots. They spoke of getting rid of the elderly, the infirm, and the poor.

The files offer a glimpse into a world where ideas about eugenics and race science have never gone away. On the contrary, they run through our elite universities, through the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley, and through the tech industry itself. Epstein’s was an exclusive club that counted among its members people who harbor dreams of re-engineering human minds and bodies, seizing control of our collective future, and building technology that, they hope, will one day merge with — or even replace — all of us.

In 2002, two decades before the launch of ChatGPT, Epstein hosted an Artificial Intelligence summit on his Caribbean island. In the years that followed, he cultivated close, regular contact with a network of  (predominantly male) scientists, researchers, academics and tech leaders working at the vanguard of AI, biotech, genetics and cognitive science, meeting them at universities like Harvard and at his various homes. 

In August 2018, a year before Epstein was found dead in his jail cell, he was in email correspondence with software consultant and bitcoin investor Bryan Bishop about funding a project to create “designer babies” — children with genes cherrypicked for their looks, health, strength, immune systems, sleep needs and even, in Bishop’s imaginings, abilities to live on a different planet. 

  “Attached is the doc you requested, it's the "use of funds" spreadsheet for the designer baby and human cloning company,” Bishop wrote to Epstein. “This gets us out of our self-funded ‘garage biology’ phase to the first live birth of a human designer baby, and possibly a human clone, within 5 years. Once we reach the first birth, everything changes and the world will never be the same again.”

Bishop went on to discuss how his ultimate ambition was to make “practically unlimited modifications to the cells before generating an embryo.”

In response to a request for comment, Bishop sent Coda a publicly available set of answers to frequently asked questions about designer babies.

“The reason people have an aversion to eugenics, and rightfully so, is because countries used genocide and sterilization to prevent reproduction by populations that they didn’t like. We have no intention of doing anything of the sort,” Bishop writes in the public FAQ. “‘Designer baby’ simply describes a child whose genome has been intentionally altered or chosen by their parents, rather than left entirely to the genetic lottery of natural conception.”

“It’s such a great subject,” Epstein responded after he read Bishop’s proposal. “We need to get a read on legal. Can’t do anything where US rules apply to US citizens regardless of where [they are].” 

Building a super-race of humans, and parachuting humanity into a different evolutionary era — or even obsoleting the human race as we know it — is a running theme in the Epstein files, and an increasingly prominent ambition for tech evangelists today.

“It’s eugenics all the way down,” said Jacob Metcalf, a founding partner at Ethical Resolve, a consulting firm working with tech companies to develop their ethics protocols. A common fantasy in tech circles, he said, is “to essentially control human destiny. And a lot of the times that human destiny is for humans to be replaced. That's the really bleak thing here. What could be more eugenic than getting rid of humans.”

In 2008, Epstein began conversations with the computer scientist Ben Goertzel. Over the years, Epstein would send Goertzel more than $360,000 to fund the researcher’s plans to build towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a term Goertzel himself popularized.

“I remain eager to move forward on working together to accelerate progress toward a human-obsoleting thinking machine,” Goertzel wrote to Epstein in May 2008. Eighteen years on, and the idea of obsoleting humans with artificial intelligence is widely discussed in the tech world.

When asked to comment on his exchange with Epstein, Goertzel told Coda: “I do think we will create forms of transhuman intelligence going beyond the scope of humanity as we know it, but I also very much hope and envision a strong role for humans even after this happens.”

Goertzel went on to describe a future where the world reaches the “Singularity” — a Silicon Valley buzzword signifying a tipping point where AI surpasses human intelligence. “I do think AI will eventually gain its own superhuman autonomy, but I think this can happen in a way that respects and nourishes human life rather than being harmful to it,” he said. “Epstein and I discussed this face to face a few times and indeed I was a bigger fan of the human species than he was, and more optimistic about its flourishing post-Singularity.” 

In an email to Epstein, Goertzel laid out a scenario where AI systems would start running their own economic activity. He envisioned this Artificial Intelligence economy acting as a “parasite to overcome the regular human economy” that would eventually “gain its own superhuman autonomy.” The ideas Epstein and Goertzel exchanged mirror a broader conversation unfolding in the tech world that imagines a future where ultimately, human labour could be rendered superfluous, and ultimately be replaced by artificial intelligence and robots.

Together, Goertzel and Epstein also discussed modifying human brains — a concept popular in Silicon Valley today, where numerous brain-computer projects are researching ways to cognitively enhance the human brain, and alter human personality, memory, and mental capabilities.

In 2008, when Epstein told Goertzel he was “off to jail” for a year, after he was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution, Goertzel suggested the solution to his problems might one day be solved if human brains could be re-programmed.

“According to my understanding, the girls you were involved with were old enough to know what they were doing, so society really has no ‘moral right’ to lock you up,” Goertzel wrote to Epstein. “This is a fucked-up society we live in. But past ones have really been no better -- the fault is really w/ the human brain architecture, which is precisely what I'm aiming to supercede in my AGI work.”

When asked to comment on these remarks — and in particular the implication that Epstein’s problems might be solved if his accusers' brains were one day re-engineered — Goertzel told Coda: “This was a general observation that the messed-up nature of our society generally is rooted in the way our brains have evolved... and that advanced tech will let us modify our brains to make ourselves and thus our society better.  There was no implication intended (nor stated) that women’s brains are any more or less messed up or in need of improvement than men’s.”

Goertzel reflected that his comments on Epstein’s victims being “old enough” were “regrettable and unfortunate in hindsight,” adding that his impression was that Epstein had been involved with adult women, not “disgustingly curating high school students for sexual purposes. I should have paid more attention.” 

In 2013, three and a half years after Epstein was released from jail, Goertzel approached Epstein for funding to build a “toddler robot”. Given Epstein’s criminal history of abusing minors, this has inevitably attracted attention online. “When we were discussing measuring the IQ of robot toddlers, the topic was never sexualized in any way,” Goertzel told Coda when asked about the project. “While I had nothing to do with Epstein's perverse sexual tastes or abuse of women, what I have read about his awful doings in the newspapers relates to his interest in teenage girls not toddlers.”

Epstein was particularly interested in funding projects that built — like Goertzel’s –- on transhumanist theories. Transhumanism is a worldview that captivates many of the most prominent tech leaders in Silicon Valley today. It believes in a future when the human body can be endlessly altered, genetically engineered, and ultimately fused with artificial intelligence. 

“Transhumanism is a much more radical concept than eugenics,” explained Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist and researcher who has written extensively about eugenicist ideas within artificial intelligence. “In eugenics, you're trying to create a more superior human by breeding humans through generations. In transhumanism, you're trying to get rid of humans altogether.”

For transhumanists, she added, “their idea is to get rid of any undesirable properties they see with humans."

Perhaps the most well-known proponent of transhumanism in the Epstein files is Peter Thiel.

“I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?” New York Times journalist Ross Douthat asked Thiel last year. “Uh—,” Thiel said. “This is a long hesitation!” Douthat said. “Should the human race survive?” “Yes, but I would like us to radically solve these problems,” Thiel said. “We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body.”

Thiel’s name appears in the files more than 2000 times, and Epstein reportedly invested some $40 million into Valar Ventures, a firm co-founded by Thiel. The two spoke of building secret societies and shared an interest in transhumanism and cryogenics — Epstein wanted to freeze his brain and penis when he died, so that one day he could be revived, while Thiel has also stated his body will be frozen after his death. 

They also appeared to share an interest in bringing an end to the democratic systems of today, imagining a different system altogether. Epstein, for his part, spent his life puppeteering the most powerful people in the world and undermining democratic systems. Thiel, meanwhile, first expressed his own anti-democratic views in 2009 when he wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” adding that since women were allowed to vote, the notion of a capitalist democracy became impossible. When the Brexit vote came through, Epstein wrote to Thiel: “Brexit, just the beginning.” Thiel asked — “of what”; Epstein said – “Return to tribalism, counter to globalization, amazing new alliances.” 

Globalization — and the idea of internationally powerful governing bodies — is a worldview that both Epstein and Thiel seemed to distrust. In March, in a palazzo in Rome, a stone’s throw from the Vatican, Thiel gave one of his infamous lectures in which he espoused his views about an “antichrist” that gets in the way of technological progress. This antichrist, he suggested, could be an internationally powerful body; the product of globalization. I stood outside the palace as attendees — priests, students, researchers — mutely hurried out, refusing to speak to the cluster of reporters waiting for Thiel’s black Mercedes. 

“He has a totally irrational side, which lives on fear, of what danger might happen,” one audience member told me of Thiel on condition of anonymity, recalling how, up close, Thiel looked haunted and ill. “His head is full of future scenarios, which is what’s killing him. I think he’s scared.”

Thiel did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Epstein didn’t confine himself to lofty conversations about a future collapse of the global order or re-engineering humanity. He also had ambitions for his own personal eugenics project. In 2019, it emerged that he wanted to seed the world with his DNA — and reportedly have 20 women impregnated at a time at Zorro ranch, his New Mexico property.

Epstein tried to recruit Virginia Giuffre for this very project. He “fantasized about improving the human race by fathering children who carried his superior genes,” she recounted in her memoir, published posthumously late last year.  “He’d talk about using his Zorro ranch as a literal breeding ground to propagate babies.” When Giuffre was 18 years old, she recalled, Epstein asked if she would carry his child and hand over all legal rights to it – “like a modern-day handmaid.”

In a haunting diary entry from another Epstein victim, written between the ages of 16 and 17 and shared with federal prosecutors, a girl describes being told she will be sent to Zorro ranch — possibly to participate in the very same project. “Go to New Mexico? What in the hell? This makes no sense. What about school?” she writes, describing how Epstein chose her for her hair color and eye color, and tried to convince her she would create “perfect offspring.”

The teenager chronicles her pregnancy, pasting a sonogram into the scrapbook, before giving a traumatic account of giving birth with Ghislaine Maxwell beside her. “Ghislaine said to push all the pain away. I don't understand. Blood and water all over the bed.” As the baby was born, she writes, Maxwell covered her eyes. “I saw between her fingers this tiny head and body in the doctors hands.”

The girl describes hearing the baby’s “tiny cries” before “they took her.”

“I’m nothing but your property and incubator,” the teenager writes of Epstein. The diary is a terrifying piece of evidence that appears to link to Epstein’s longstanding fixation with creating genetically bespoke humans. The diary author’s lawyers, Wigdor LLP, declined to comment.   

Epstein’s fever-dreams of creating an army of children carrying specific genes reflect a broader trend of “pronatalism” — a movement historically tied to eugenics — that’s thriving in Silicon Valley.

 Millions of dollars of funding are currently being poured into projects creating “superbabies,” while billionaire tech oligarchs including Elon Musk — whose name appears more than 1000 times in the files — reportedly want to use surrogates “to reach legion-level before the apocalypse.” Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

In the files, women appear either as victims, as objects, or as vessels for genetic engineering experiments. They are an inconvenient reality, people to be controlled and re-booted. Epstein wrote a 2013 email implying that women “are like shrimp. You throw away the head and keep the body.” 

“The obsession with "artificial" life appears tied to a masculine desire to try control the production of life – ultimately ridding themselves of their dependency on women," said Gabriella Razzano, Co-Founder of OpenUp, a social impact tech lab based in Cape Town, who is also a senior advisor at the African AI Observatory. “I think there is important work to be done on tying the narratives that are very revealing in the Epstein files to understand how, and why, technology is being developed as it is.” 

The trading of ideas about intelligence — both artificial and human — takes a particularly sinister turn in a 2016 exchange between Epstein and the cognitive scientist and AI researcher Joscha Bach, whose research Epstein funded to the tune of $300,000.

Bach writes to Epstein about a study claiming that “black children outperform white children in motor development, even in very poor and socially disadvantaged households, but they lag behind (and never catch up) in cognitive development even after controlling for family income.”

Epstein responds with racist ideas about his notion of how to “make blacks smarter”, adding — “maybe climate change is a good way of dealing with overpopulation. The Earth’s forest fire. Potentially a good thing for the species,” before contemplating a world with “too many people,” where “many mass executions of the elderly and infirm make sense.” 

Epstein then imagines creating a future “Übermensch” — a superior human with cherry-picked attributes. “What I like is the idea that ubermensch could be the melding of humans, put together in one brain,” Epstein writes. This bespoke human, he suggests, would include traits from marginalized groups, who he appears to believe have a stronger awareness of how to navigate power structures because of their historical exclusion. “An increased motor system, an increased awareness, an increased status calculator (Blacks, jews, women). Ubermensch could be the combination of the best of humans, not the best of a specific race or gender. Fun idea.” 

Bach told Coda in a statement: “I was summarizing a scientific study in a private email. Studies like this get often abused in ideological discourse to justify discrimination, which I strongly oppose and condemn.”

“I am firmly opposed to any form of racial discrimination, and I reject the use of group-level statistical claims to make judgments about individuals or to justify unequal treatment.” 

He continued: “It goes without saying that if global warming were to lead to a reduction in the human population, it would be accompanied by immeasurable suffering. Our civilization would break down, leading to a return to dark ages, in which the elderly and infirm were often killed, because people could not support them, and often did not care about supporting them. Every reasonable person understands that this is horrible and not desirable in any way.”

Epstein “was often callous about human suffering in a way that I found disturbing but worth understanding, as a window into the perspectives of the rich and powerful,” Bach added. 

Alongside Epstein’s conversations about mass executions for the old and and the sick, he was also interested in Silicon Valley’s dream concept of living forever — he had numerous email conversations with the longevity guru Peter Attia about prolonging his own lifespan, and funded a Harvard project geared towards “the end of aging.” In an email to Attia, Epstein mused: “I’m not sure why women live past reproductive age at all.” Attia, who published a statement about his relationship to Epstein, did not respond to requests for comment. 

This interest in “longevity” — living for as long as possible, even living forever, is popular among the elite precisely because they find themselves in an elite class, says David Robert Grimes, a scientist and disinformation expert who has written about longevity and race science in Silicon Valley. “They're both sides of the same coin — the Silicon Valley eugenics, and also the longevity stuff. They promote an idea that ‘we are exclusive and we are special',” he said. "It helps them to justify deep social inequality."

The tech elite did not inherit this ideology by accident. Stanford University, the intellectual heart of Silicon Valley, was once a major hub for the American eugenics movement, which later helped to inspire Nazi race laws. Stanford’s founding president, David Starr Jordan, was a prominent eugenicist, campaigning for forced sterilization of people with undesirable genetic traits. The university removed his name from its buildings in 2020 — but in Palo Alto, his beliefs did not disappear with the nameplate.

"Instead of eugenics we just call it longevity or biohacking," Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who has spent years investigating Silicon Valley's belief systems, said on a panel with me at a journalism conference last year. "It's the same."

The ideology Epstein bankrolled in private is being built in public. It’s a vision of the future in which a select few get to upgrade and extend their lives, while tightening their grip on the systems that determine which humans are worth investing in — and which are not.

It sounds like a dark sci-fi fantasy, except, as the files show, that fantasy is being funded and pushed into reality. Most of us will never be in the rooms where these ideas are discussed. All of us will live with the results.

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