The Pentagon’s bombshell deal with OpenAI, explained • Only Congress can put meaningful limits on government abuse of AI.

Sorry skeptics, AI really is changing the programming profession • But AI agents aren't making programmers obsolete.

The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic • Anthropic faces a Friday deadline to allow domestic surveillance and automated killer robots.

Waymo just revealed a crucial statistic for scaling its technology • At any moment, just 70 people oversee Waymo’s 3,000-vehicle fleet.

A volcano scorched hundreds of Roman scrolls — can AI recover their text? • Despite early breakthroughs, it could take years to decode all the surviving scrolls.

The many masks LLMs wear • Why frontier labs struggle to keep their chatbots in character.

The feds are probing Waymo's behavior around school children • It's not clear if Waymo was at fault for striking a child at 6 mph.

An unlikely ally for open-source protein-folding models: Big Pharma • Drug companies are funding open-source AI to avoid depending on Google.

How shifting risk to users makes Claude Code more powerful • People are discovering that Claude Code isn’t just for code.

17 predictions for AI in 2026 • AI will continue improving rapidly, but real-world economic impacts will be modest.

Waymo and Tesla’s self-driving systems are more similar than people think • Everyone is moving toward transformer-based, end-to-end architectures.

The best Chinese open-weight models — and the strongest US rivals • The Understanding AI guide to open-weight models.

Google and Anthropic approach LLMs differently • The very different cultures of OpenAI's two most important rivals.

Help some of the poorest people in Rwanda • If readers give $20,000 to GiveDirectly, my wife and I will give another $10,000.

Six reasons to think there’s an AI bubble — and six reasons not to • A complete playbook for every AI bubble debate.

Hyperproductivity: The Next Stage of AI? • A glimpse at an astonishing, exhilarating, exhausting new style of work

An AI “tsunami” is coming for Hollywood — here’s how artists are responding • I talked with nine creators about economic pressures and fan backlash.

Waymo’s next five cities are all in red states • Liberal cities risk falling behind on driverless technology.

Waymo is finally ready for freeway service • The self-driving leader is getting ready to conquer the Sun Belt.

AI ads are going mainstream • Why Google, Coca-Cola, and other companies have embraced AI-generated ads.

Context rot: the emerging challenge that could hold back LLM progress • What if attention isn't all you need?

AI skeptics and AI boosters are both wrong • "We’re in an intelligence explosion already and have been for decades," Andrej Karpathy said.

Sora, OpenAI’s chart-topping AI video app, explained • Sora is number one on the iOS App Store. Meta's AI app is 76th.

AI isn't replacing radiologists • Radiology combines digital images, clear benchmarks, and repeatable tasks. But demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high.

How AI is shaking up the study of earthquakes • “It's kind of like putting on glasses for the first time,” one scientist told me.

The case for AI doom isn't very convincing • I read Eliezer Yudkowsky's new book, "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies."

Welcome Kai! • Understanding AI has a new writer.

Tesla is (still) following in Waymo’s footsteps • Scaling a robotaxi service takes years, not months.

I chatted with the Argument's Kelsey Piper about AI and jobs • Is AI ruining jobs searches? Is it ruining the careers of young programmers? Kelsey and I discussed.

New evidence strongly suggests AI is killing jobs for young programmers • It's a brutal time to be a recent computer science graduate.

I want to hear from you! • Help me make Understanding AI better.

Is GPT-5 a "phenomenal" success or an "underwhelming" failure? • Maybe it's a bit of both.