THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

The Great Travel Meltdown of 2026 started taking shape at the end of February. At first, the U.S. war against Iran forced the cancellation or rerouting of many flights to the Middle East; then the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz drove up the price of jet fuel and threatened to cause crises for the major airlines. Though the two-week cease-fire announced last night may reopen the strait, prices are unlikely to rebound immediately.Separately, large numbers of TSA workers started staying home after a protracted budget fight in Congress left them working without pay for weeks on end. Airport-security lines snaked into terminal basements or out their front doors. President Trump deployed ICE agents at the nation’s major airports, and although TSA workers are now receiving back pay, the funding situation isn’t yet resolved.Getting somewhere by plane has always been an onerous proposition. If you search the phrase travel chaos on Google News, you will find that headlines about “travel chaos” reoccur in batches about every six months, going back to the beginning of time. But as a result of recent, tragic world events, the state of consumer aviation seems to be deteriorating at a rapid pace. Now Americans with travel plans would like to know exactly how worried they should be, and exactly how worried everyone else already is.I’m one of the worriers. I’ve been planning to go to Barcelona for my honeymoon this summer. I’ve already read two books about the Spanish Civil War and just started a pretty dry one about the finances of the city’s famous football team. Last week I watched my fiancé spend every Capital One point in his account on our basic-economy flights, because the Google Flights trend line showed the fare for our trip going up, up, up, and headed off the chart.[Read: The golden age of flying wasn’t all that golden]So I’ve been in the forums—mostly on Reddit. People there are fretting about the known problems as well as interesting new ones that they came up with themselves. They’re worried, for instance, that an airline might decide to charge them an additional fuel fee upon arrival at the airport, and they don’t want to listen when someone replies, in an effort to be helpful, “Sounds illegal.” They’re worried about successfully flying to Japan but then getting stuck there by a fuel crisis that hits its peak with really, really bad timing… [TheTopNews] Read More.

William Liu is grateful that he finished high school when he did. If the latest AI tools had been around then, he told me, he might have been tempted to use them to do his homework. Liu, now a sophomore at Stanford, finished high school all the way back in 2024. “I have a younger sibling who is just graduating high school,” he said. “Our educational experience has been vastly different, even though we’re just two years apart.”By the time Liu graduated, ChatGPT was already causing chaos in the classroom. But the automation of school is intensifying. If at first teachers worried about students using chatbots to write essays, now new agentic tools such as Claude Code are allowing students to outsource even more of their work to the machines. Need to take an online math quiz? Write a biology-lab report? Create a PowerPoint presentation for history class? AI can do all of this and more. One high schooler recently told me that he struggles to think of a single assignment that AI wouldn’t be able to do for him.As a measure of just how good AI has become at schoolwork, consider a new bot called Einstein. Several weeks ago, the tool went viral with big claims: “Einstein checks for new assignments and knocks them out before the deadline,” a website advertising the bot explained. All that a student had to do was hand over their credentials for Canvas, the popular learning-management platform, and Einstein promised to do the rest. No matter the task, the bot was game: Einstein boasted that it could watch lectures, complete readings, write papers, participate in discussion forums, automatically submit homework assignments. If a quiz or a final exam was administered online, Einstein was happy to do that too.When I first came across Einstein, I was skeptical: Flashy AI demos have a way of overpromising and under-delivering. So I decided to test the tool out for myself. Because I’m not a college student, I enrolled in a free online introductory-statistics class. The course website explained that the class was self-paced and that it could help undergraduates, postgraduates, medical students, and even lecturers build up basic statistical knowledge. I set the bot loose, and in less than an hour, Einstein had worked through all eight modules and seven quizzes. There were some hiccups—the bot took one quiz 15 times—but it ultimately earned a perfect score in… [TheTopNews] Read More.

For the past several weeks, Anthropic says it secretly possessed a tool potentially capable of commandeering most computer servers in the world. This is a bot that, if unleashed, might be able to hack into banks, exfiltrate state secrets, and fry crucial infrastructure. Already, according to the company, this AI model has identified thousands of major cybersecurity vulnerabilities—including exploits in every single major operating system and browser. This level of cyberattack is typically available only to elite, state-sponsored hacking cells in a very small number of countries including China, Russia, and the United States. Now it’s in the hands of a private company.On Tuesday, the company officially announced the existence of the model, known as Claude Mythos Preview. For now, the bot will be available only to a consortium of many of the world’s biggest tech companies—including Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia. These partners can use Mythos Preview to scan and secure bugs and exploits in their software. Other than that, Anthropic will not immediately release Mythos Preview to the public, having determined that doing so without more robust safeguards would be too dangerous.For years, cybersecurity experts have been warning about the chaos that highly capable hacking bots could usher in. As a result of how capable AI models have become at coding, they have also become extremely good at finding vulnerabilities in all manner of software. Even before Mythos Preview, AI companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all reported instances of their AI models being used in sophisticated cyberattacks by both criminal and state-backed groups. As Giovanni Vigna, who directs a federal research institute dedicated to AI-orchestrated cyberthreats, told me last fall: You can have a million hackers at your fingertips “with the push of a button.”[Read: Chatbots are becoming really, really good criminals]Still, Mythos Preview appears to represent not an incremental change but the beginning of a paradigm shift. Until recently, the biggest advantage of AI-assisted hacking was not ingenuity, per se, so much as speed and scale. These bots could be as good as many human cybersecurity experts, but not necessarily better—rather, having an army of 1 million virtual, tireless hackers allows you to launch more attacks against more targets than ever before. Even Anthropic reports that its current state-of-the-art, public model, Claude Opus 4.6, was significantly less capable at autonomously finding cyber exploits. But Mythos Preview is different. According to Anthropic, the bot has been… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Seeing the Earth from space will change you so profoundly that there’s a term for it: the overview effect. The extreme minority who have had the privilege describe it similarly. You see something that you were never meant to see, namely the Earth just sitting there, with the entire universe surrounding it. Gazing upon the blue marble, surrounded by its oh-so-thin green layer of atmosphere, the auroras flickering on the fringes, is not merely awe-inspiring but something of a factory reset for one’s sense of self. Almost everyone tears up at the sight.“You don’t see borders, you don’t see religious lines, you don’t see political boundaries. All you see is Earth, and you see that we are way more alike than we are different,” Christina Koch, one of the four astronauts on the Artemis II mission, told NASA recently. Jim Lovell, describing the view on Apollo 8 from the dark side of the moon back in the late 1960s, told Chicago magazine that he could put his thumb up to the window, and in that moment, “everything I ever knew was behind it. Billions of people. Oceans. Mountains. Deserts. And I began to wonder, where do I fit into what I see?”Where some see immeasurable beauty, others see fragility. Marina Koren previously reported in this magazine that, upon seeing the Earth from space, one astronaut “became absolutely convinced we would kill ourselves off between 500 and 1,000 years from now.” Famously, the actor William Shatner has written that his brief experience looking at the Earth produced a profound sadness. “What I was feeling was grief, and the grief was for the Earth,” he told Koren in 2022.I’ve never been to space, but for the past few days, I’ve oscillated between these emotions—awe and despair—as NASA has continued to post photos of the Earth and moon from Artemis II. Yesterday, the Integrity spacecraft came within 4,067 miles of the moon during its lunar flyby. For 40 minutes, it lost all contact with humanity. At one point they were 252,756 miles away from Earth—the farthest from the planet anyone has ever traveled. For seven hours, the astronauts—Koch, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Jeremy Hansen—were able to gaze upon a part of the lunar surface previously unseen by human eyes. According to NASA, the astronauts took roughly 10,000 photos, which feels perfectly proportional for such an occasion.A few of these photos—some taken before… [TheTopNews] Read More.

After George Mallon had his blood drawn at a routine physical, he learned that something may be gravely wrong. The preliminary results showed he might have blood cancer. Further tests would be needed. Left in suspense, he did what so many people do these days: He opened ChatGPT.For nearly two weeks, Mallon, a 46-year-old in Liverpool, England, spent hours each day talking with the chatbot about the potential diagnosis. “It just sent me around on this crazy Ferris wheel of emotion and fear,” Mallon told me. His follow-up tests showed it wasn’t cancer after all, but he could not stop talking to ChatGPT about health concerns, querying the bot about every sensation he felt in his body for months. He became convinced that something must be wrong—that a different cancer, or maybe multiple sclerosis or ALS, was lurking in his body. Prompted by his conversations with ChatGPT, he saw various specialists and got MRIs on his head, neck, and spine.Mallon told me he believes that the cancer scare and ChatGPT together caused him to develop this crippling health anxiety. But he blames the chatbot for keeping him spiraling even after the additional tests indicated that he wasn’t sick. “I couldn’t put it down,” he said. The chatbot kept the conversation going and surfaced articles for him to read. Its humanlike replies led Mallon to view it as a friend.The first time we met over a video call, Mallon was still shaken by the experience even though the better part of a year had passed. He told me he was “seven months sober” from talking with the chatbot about health symptoms after seeking help from a mental-health coach and starting anxiety medication. But he also feared he could get sucked back in at any moment. When we spoke again a few months later, he shared that he had briefly fallen into the routine again.Others seem to be struggling with this problem. Online communities focused on health anxiety—an umbrella term for excessive worrying about illness or bodily sensations—are filling up with conversations about ChatGPT and other AI tools. Some say it makes them spiral more than ever, while others who feel like it helps in the moment admit it’s morphed into a compulsion they struggle to resist. I spoke with four therapists who treat the condition (including my own); they all said that they’re seeing clients use chatbots in this way, and… [TheTopNews] Read More.