THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

In the waning heat of last summer, freshly back in my office at a major research university, I found myself considering the higher-education hellscape that had lately descended upon the nation. I’d spent months reporting on the Trump administration’s attacks on universities for The Atlantic, speaking with dozens of administrators, faculty, and students about the billions of dollars in cuts to public funding for research and the resulting collapse of “college life.”At the same time, I’d been chronicling the spread of AI-powered chatbots that have already changed undergraduates forever.Initially, I surveyed the situation from the safe distance of a journalist who happens to also be a career professor and university administrator. I saw myself as an envoy between America’s college campuses and its citizens, telling the stories of the people whose lives had been shattered by these transformations. By the summer, though, that safe distance had collapsed back on me.… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Over the past several days, TikTok users have found themselves at a loss. Literally, I mean: They lost their audiences, and their view counts showed “0.” Some people who attempted to upload content about anti-ICE protests or the killing of Alex Pretti alleged that the platform was intentionally blocking them from doing so. Others were able to get their videos uploaded, but alleged that TikTok was not distributing them. Still others noticed that they were unable to send the word Epstein in a direct message, a quirk so bizarre that it incited California Governor Gavin Newsom to repost a screenshot shared by an anonymous X account using the handle @intelligentpawg.For many of these people, the explanation was obvious: “MAGA censorship.” Newsom said in his post that he would be launching a review “into whether TikTok is violating state law by censoring Trump-critical content,” and the concern isn’t totally random. TikTok’s… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

These are not the words you want to hear when it comes to human extinction, but I was hearing them: “Things are moving uncomfortably fast.” I was sitting in a conference room with Sam Bowman, a safety researcher at Anthropic. Worth $183 billion at the latest estimate, the AI firm has every incentive to speed things up, ship more products, and develop more advanced chatbots to stay competitive with the likes of OpenAI, Google, and the industry’s other giants. But Anthropic is at odds with itself—thinking deeply, even anxiously, about seemingly every decision. Anthropic has positioned itself as the AI industry’s superego: the firm that speaks with the most authority about the big questions surrounding the technology, while rival companies develop advertisements and affiliate shopping links (a difference that Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, was eager to call out during an interview in Davos last week). On Monday, Amodei published a lengthy… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Hours after Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy showed up for a movie night at the White House. Along with other business executives and several prominent Donald Trump supporters, they attended a private screening of Melania, a new documentary about the president’s wife. The moviegoers were treated to buckets of popcorn and sugar cookies frosted with the first lady’s name.Silicon Valley’s top executives have seemingly taken every opportunity to cozy up to Trump. During his inauguration a year ago, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, and Cook sat smiling behind the president in the Capitol Rotunda. The obsequiousness has not stopped since: In August, Cook presented Trump with a custom plaque atop a 24-karat-gold base in the Oval Office. At a White House dinner the next month, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin praised Trump’s… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Chances are, you’ve seen Richard Tsong-Taatarii’s photo. Taken Wednesday in Minneapolis, it shows an unidentifiable protester face down on the ground; two Border Patrol agents are on top of him, holding him there, while a third unloads pepper spray into his face from just inches away. Tomorrow’s front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune: Jan. 23, 2026 [image or embed] — Minnesota Star Tribune (@startribune.com) January 22, 2026 at 6:19 PMThe photo ran on the front page of The Minnesota Star Tribune on Friday and already feels like a defining image of the long ICE incursion in Minneapolis—a powerful illustration of how the agency has acted, in broad daylight, with excessive force and impunity.This is just one example of federal agents terrorizing people in the city. There’s also the photo of a 5-year-old boy being detained outside his home. There’s the video of an agent chasing a teenager through… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.