Florida Senator Joe Gruters argued that the state “should have access to tools such as Bitcoin to protect against inflation.”
Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei claims DeepSeek generated sensitive bioweapons data in a safety test it ran.
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OpenAI is expanding its footprint to Germany. According to a press release issued Friday, the ChatGPT maker plans to open an office in Munich in the coming months. “Germany is renowned for its technical expertise, academic excellence, and industrial innovation,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement. “Opening our first office in Germany means […]
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Just six months after defense tech Anduril raised a massive $1.5 billion round that valued the company at $14 billion, it’s in talks to raise another $2.5 billion, at a valuation of up to $28 billion, sources told CNBC. The deal would, not surprisingly, be led by Founders Fund, which is reportedly writing a $1 […]
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The Department of Transportation (DOT) has paused funding for a $5 billion EV charging infrastructure program that Tesla has received at least $31 million from. The move is widely viewed to be illegal. It’s the latest attempt from the Trump administration to hack away at federally funded renewable energy projects around the country, a clear […]
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Rapyd Financial Network is reportedly looking to raise $300 million in a new funding at a steep valuation cut from its 2021 high.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Reports from the US Government Accountability Office on improper federal payments in recent years are circulating on X and elsewhere online, and they seem to be a big influence on Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency and its supporters as the group pursues cost-cutting measures across the federal government.
The payment reports have been spread online by dozens of pundits, sleuths, and anonymous analysts in the orbit of DOGE and are often amplified by Musk himself. Though the interpretations of the office’s findings are at times inaccurate, it is clear that the GAO’s documents—which historically have been unlikely to cause much of a stir even within Washington—are having a moment.
“We’re getting noticed,” said Seto Baghdoyan, director of forensic audits and investigative services at the GAO, in an interview with MIT Technology Review.
The documents don’t offer a crystal ball into Musk’s plans, but they suggest a blueprint, or at least an indicator, of where his newly formed and largely unaccountable task force is looking to make cuts.
DOGE’s footprint in Washington has quickly grown. Its members are reportedly setting up shop at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Labor Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which provides storm warnings and fishery management programs), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The developments have triggered lawsuits, including allegations that DOGE is violating data privacy rules and that its “buyout” offers to federal employees are unlawful.
When citing the GAO reports in conversations on X, Musk and DOGE supporters sometimes blur together terms like “fraud,” “waste,” and “abuse.” But they have distinct meanings for the GAO.
The office found that the US government made an estimated $236 billion in improper payments in the year ending September 2023—payments that should not have occurred. Overpayments make up nearly three-quarters of these, and the share of the money that gets recovered from this type of mistake is in the “low single digits” for most programs, Baghdoyan says. Others are payments that didn’t have proper documentation.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean fraud, where a crime occurred. Measuring that is more complicated.
“An [improper payment] could be the result of fraud and therefore, fraud could be included in the estimate,” says Hannah Padilla, director of financial management and assurance at the GAO. But at the time the estimates of improper payments are prepared, it’s impossible to say how much of the total has been misappropriated. That can take years for courts to determine. In other words, “improper payment” means that something clearly went wrong, but not necessarily that anyone willfully misrepresented anything to benefit from it.
Then there’s waste. “Waste is anything that the person who’s speaking thinks is not a good use of government money,” says Jetson Leder-Luis, an economist at Boston University who researches fraudulent federal payments. Defining such waste is not in the purview of the GAO. It’s a subjective category, and one that covers much of Musk’s criticism of what he sees as politically motivated or “woke” spending.
Six program areas account for 85% of improper federal payments, according to the GAO: Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, the covid-era Paycheck Protection Program, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Supplemental Security Income from the Social Security Administration.
This week Musk has latched onto the first two. On February 5, he wrote that Medicare “is where the big money fraud is happening,” and the next day, when an X user quoted the GAO’s numbers for improper payments in Medicare and Medicaid, Musk replied, “at least.” The GAO does not suggest that actual values are higher or lower than its estimates. DOGE aides were soon confirmed to be working at Health and Human Services.
“Health-care fraud is committed by companies, or by doctors,” says Leder-Luis, who has researched federal fraud in health care for years. “It’s not something generally that the patients are choosing.” Much of it is “upcoding,” where a provider sends a bill for a more expensive service than was given, or substandard care, where companies take money for care but don’t provide adequate services. This happens in some nursing homes.
In the GAO’s reports, Medicare says most of its improper payments are due to insufficient documentation. For example, if a health-care facility is missing certain certification requirements, payments to it are considered improper. Other agencies also cite issues in getting the right data and documentation before making payments.
The documents being shared online may explain some of Musk’s early moves via DOGE. The group is now leading the United States Digital Service, which builds technological tools for the government, and is reportedly building a new chatbot for the US General Services Administration as part of a larger effort by DOGE to bring more AI into the government. AI in government isn’t new—GAO reports show that Medicare and Medicaid use “predictive algorithms and other models” to detect fraud already. But it’s unclear whether DOGE staffers have probed those existing systems.
Improper payments are something that can and should cause alarm for anyone in or out of government. Ending them would either open up funds to be spent elsewhere or allow budgets to be cut, and that becomes a political question, Leder-Luis says. But will eliminating them accomplish Musk’s aims? Those aims are broad: he has spoken confidently about DOGE’s ability to trim trillions from the budget, end inflation, drive out “woke” spending, and cure America’s debt crisis. Ending improper payments would make an impossibly small dent in those goals.
For their part, Padilla and Baghdoyan at the GAO say they have not been approached by Musk or DOGE to learn what they’ve found to be best practices for reducing improper payments.
Over the past three weeks, the new US presidential administration has taken down thousands of government web pages related to public health, environmental justice, and scientific research. The mass takedowns stem from the new administration’s push to remove government information related to diversity and “gender ideology,” as well as scrutiny of various government agencies’ practices.
USAID’s website is down. So are sites related to it, like childreninadversity.gov, as well as thousands of pages from the Census Bureau, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Office of Justice Programs.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” says David Kaye, professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and the former UN Special Rapporteur for freedom of opinion and expression. “I don’t think any of us know exactly what is happening. What we can see is government websites coming down, databases of essential public interest. The entirety of the USAID website.”
But as government web pages go dark, a collection of organizations are trying to archive as much data and information as possible before it’s gone for good. The hope is to keep a record of what has been lost for scientists and historians to be able to use in the future.
Data archiving is generally considered to be nonpartisan, but the recent actions of the administration have spurred some in the preservation community to stand up.
“I consider the actions of the current administration an assault on the entire scientific enterprise,” says Margaret Hedstrom, professor emerita of information at the University of Michigan.
Various organizations are trying to scrounge up as much data as possible. One of the largest projects is the End of Term Web Archive, a nonpartisan coalition of many organizations that aims to make a copy of all government data at the end of each presidential term. The EoT Archive allows individuals to nominate specific websites or data sets for preservation.
“All we can do is collect what has been published and archive it and make sure it’s publicly accessible for the future,” says James Jacobs, US government information librarian at Stanford University, who is one of the people running the EoT Archive.
Other organizations are taking a specific angle on data collection. For example, the Open Environmental Data Project (OEDP) is trying to capture data related to climate science and environmental justice. “We’re trying to track what’s getting taken down,” says Katie Hoeberling, director of policy initiatives at OEDP. “I can’t say with certainty exactly how much of what used to be up is still up, but we’re seeing, especially in the last couple weeks, an accelerating rate of data getting taken down.”
In addition to tracking what’s happening, OEDP is actively backing up relevant data. It actually began this process in November, to capture the data at the end of former president Biden’s term. But efforts have ramped up in the last couple weeks. “Things were a lot calmer prior to the inauguration,” says Cathy Richards, a technologist at OEDP. “It was the second day of the new administration that the first platform went down. At that moment, everyone realized, ‘Oh, no—we have to keep doing this, and we have to keep working our way down this list of data sets.’”
This kind of work is crucial because the US government holds invaluable international and national data relating to climate. “These are irreplaceable repositories of important climate information,” says Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. “So fiddling with them or deleting them means the irreplaceable loss of critical information. It’s really quite tragic.”
Like the OEDP, the Catalyst Cooperative is trying to make sure data related to climate and energy is stored and accessible for researchers. Both are part of the Public Environmental Data Partners, a collective of organizations dedicated to preserving federal environmental data. ”We have tried to identify data sets that we know our communities make use of to make decisions about what electricity we should procure or to make decisions about resiliency in our infrastructure planning,” says Christina Gosnell, cofounder and president of Catalyst.
Archiving can be a difficult task; there is no one easy way to store all the US government’s data. “Various federal agencies and departments handle data preservation and archiving in a myriad of ways,” says Gosnell. There’s also no one who has a complete list of all the government websites in existence.
This hodgepodge of data means that in addition to using web crawlers, which are tools used to capture snapshots of websites and data, archivists often have to manually scrape data as well. Additionally, sometimes a data set will be behind a login address or captcha to prevent scraper tools from pulling the data. Web scrapers also sometimes miss key features on a site. For example, sites will often have plenty of links to other pieces of information that aren’t captured in a scrape. Or the scrape may just not work because of something to do with a website’s structure. Therefore, having a person in the loop double-checking the scraper’s work or capturing data manually is often the only way to ensure that the information is properly collected.
And there are questions about whether scraping the data will really be enough. Restoring websites and complex data sets is often not a simple process. “It becomes extraordinarily difficult and costly to attempt to rescue and salvage the data,” says Hedstrom. “It is like draining a body of blood and expecting the body to continue to function. The repairs and attempts to recover are sometimes insurmountable where we need continuous readings of data.”
“All of this data archiving work is a temporary Band-Aid,” says Gosnell. “If data sets are removed and are no longer updated, our archived data will become increasingly stale and thus ineffective at informing decisions over time.”
These effects may be long-lasting. “You won’t see the impact of that until 10 years from now, when you notice that there’s a gap of four years of data,” says Jacobs.
Many digital archivists stress the importance of understanding our past. “We can all think about our own family photos that have been passed down to us and how important those different documents are,” says Trevor Owens, chief research officer at the American Institute of Physics and former director of digital services at the Library of Congress. “That chain of connection to the past is really important.”
“It’s our library; it’s our history,” says Richards. “This data is funded by taxpayers, so we definitely don’t want all that knowledge to be lost when we can keep it, store it, potentially do something with it and continue to learn from it.”
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper problem
—Dan Hon is principal of Very Little Gravitas, where he helps turn around and modernize large and complex government services and products.
In trying to make sense of the wrecking ball that is Elon Musk and President Trump’s DOGE, it may be helpful to think about the Evil Housekeeper Problem. It’s a principle of computer security roughly stating that once someone is in your hotel room with your laptop, all bets are off.
It’s incredibly hard to protect a system from someone—in this case, the evil housekeeper, DOGE—who has made their way inside and wants to wreck it.
This administration is on the record as wanting to outright delete entire departments. But, if you can’t delete a department, then why not just break it until it doesn’t work? That’s why what DOGE is currently doing is such a massive, terrifying problem. Read the full story.
Meta has an AI for brain typing, but it’s stuck in the lab
Back in 2017, Facebook unveiled plans for a brain-reading hat that you could use to text just by thinking. “We’re working on a system that will let you type straight from your brain,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared in a post that year.
Now the company, since renamed Meta, has actually done it. Except it weighs a half a ton, costs $2 million, and won’t ever leave the lab. Still, it’s pretty cool. Read our story to learn why.
—Antonio Regalado
How the tiny microbes in your mouth could be putting your health at risk
—Jessica Hamzelou
This week I’ve been working on a piece about teeth. Well, sort of teeth. Specifically, lab-grown bioengineered teeth. Researchers have created these teeth with a mixture of human and pig tooth cells and grown them in the jaws of living mini pigs.
Part of the reason for doing this is that although dental implants can work well, they’re not perfect. They don’t attach to bones and gums in the same way that real teeth do. And around 20% of people who get implants end up developing an infection called peri-implantitis, which can lead to bone loss.
It is all down to the microbes that grow on them. There’s a complex community of microbes living in our mouths, and disruptions can lead to infection. But these organisms don’t just affect our mouths; they also seem to be linked to a growing number of disorders that can affect our bodies and brains. If you’re curious, read on.
This story is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 DOGE staffers are feeding sensitive federal data to AI systems
It’s just one of many alarming security lapses at this point. (WP $)
+ The courts are slamming the brakes on some of Trump’s executive orders. (NBC)
+ The trauma and anguish this is all causing is a feature, not a bug. (New Yorker $)
+ And it’s really got nothing to do with saving money either. (Vox)
2 Thousands of sick people worldwide are being abandoned mid-trial
Due to the US abruptly withdrawing funding via USAID. (NYT $)
3 Last month was the hottest January on record
Which was a shock, as scientists expected the La Niña weather cycle to cool things down. (FT $)
4 DeepSeek is sending sensitive data over unencrypted channels
This really doesn’t look good. (Ars Technica)
+ US lawmakers are pushing to ban DeepSeek from government-owned devices. (WSJ $)
+ DeepSeek might not be such good news for energy after all. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Google had to re-edit a Super Bowl advert for its AI tool
After yup, you guessed it, the AI spewed out factually inaccurate stuff (about cheese.) (BBC)
+ OpenAI is making its TV advertising debut at the Super Bowl. (Quartz $)
6 US shoppers are being charged $50 or more to get packages from China
The new tariffs seem to be throwing e-commerce, shipping and US border services into disarray. (Wired $)
7 US immigration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations
Seems you don’t need to change reality these days. You can just change search engine results. (The Guardian)
8 This is what Apple’s future home robot might be like
It might even be fun. (The Verge)
+ Will we ever really trust humanoid robots enough to welcome them into our homes? (MIT Technology Review)
9 An asteroid has a 1.9% chance of hitting Earth in 2032
Well that would be something for us all to look forward to. (Ars Technica)
10 Intentionally bad ‘conservative girl’ make-up videos are all over TikTok
“It’s giving drained, it’s giving dusty.” (Fast Company)
Quote of the day
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”
—What Marko Elez, one of Musk’s 25-year-old DOGE acolytes, tweeted last July, the Wall Street Journal reports (he has since resigned.)
The big story
Is the digital dollar dead?

July 2023
In 2020, digital currencies were one of the hottest topics in town. China was well on its way to launching its own central bank digital currency, or CBDC, and many other countries launched CBDC research projects, including the US.
How things change. Three years later, the digital dollar—even though it doesn’t exist—has become political red meat, as some politicians label it a dystopian tool for surveillance. And late last year, the Boston Fed quietly stopped working on its CBDC project. So is the dream of the digital dollar dead? Read the full story.
—Mike Orcutt
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ Want to cook the perfect boiled egg? First, set aside half an hour…
+ Well that’s a side to Elvis Presley I’d certainly never heard about before.
+ Kudos to Electric Six for making (surely) one of the cheapest music videos of all time.
+ Here’s a fun challenge for the weekend: let yourself get bored. Go on, I dare you.
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
This week I’ve been working on a piece about teeth. Well, sort of teeth. Specifically, lab-grown bioengineered teeth. Researchers have created these teeth with a mixture of human and pig tooth cells and grown them in the jaws of living mini pigs.
“We’re working on trying to create functional replacement teeth,” Pamela Yelick of Tufts University, one of the researchers behind the work, told me. The idea is to develop an alternative to titanium dental implants. Replacing lost or damaged teeth with healthy, living, lab-grown ones might be a more appealing option than drilling a piece of metal into a person’s jawbone.
Current dental implants can work well, but they’re not perfect. They don’t attach to bones and gums in the same way that real teeth do. And around 20% of people who get implants end up developing an infection called peri-implantitis, which can lead to bone loss.
It is all down to the microbes that grow on them. There’s a complex community of microbes living in our mouths, and disruptions can lead to infection. But these organisms don’t just affect our mouths; they also seem to be linked to a growing number of disorders that can affect our bodies and brains. If you’re curious, read on.
The oral microbiome, as it is now called, was first discovered in 1670 by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a self-taught Dutch microbiologist. “I didn’t clean my teeth for three days and then took the material that had lodged in small amounts on the gums above my front teeth … I found a few living animalcules,” he wrote in a letter to the Royal Society at the time.
Van Leeuwenhoek had used his own homemade microscopes to study the “animalcules” he found in his mouth. Today, we know that these organisms include bacteria, archaea, fungi, and viruses, each of which comes in lots of types. “Everyone’s mouth is home to hundreds of bacterial species,” says Kathryn Kauffman at the University of Buffalo, who studies the oral microbiome.
These organisms interact with each other and with our own immune systems, and researchers are still getting to grips with how the interactions work. Some microbes feed on sugars or fats in our diets, for example, while others seem to feed on our own cells. Depending on what they consume and produce, microbes can alter the environment of the mouth to either promote or inhibit the growth of other microbes.
This complex microbial dance seems to have a really important role in our health. Oral diseases and even oral cancers have been linked to an imbalance in the oral microbiome, which scientists call “dysbiosis.” Tooth decay, for example, has been attributed to an overgrowth of microbes that produce acids that can damage teeth.
Specific oral microbes are also being linked to an ever-growing list of diseases of the body and brain, including rheumatoid arthritis, metabolic disease, cardiovascular diseases, inflammatory bowel disease, colorectal cancer, and more.
There’s also growing evidence that these oral microbes contribute to neurodegenerative disease. A bacterium called P. gingivalis, which plays a role in the development of chronic periodontitis, has been found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. And people who are infected with P. gingivalis also experience a decline in their cognitive abilities over a six-month period.
Scientists are still figuring out how oral microbes might travel from the mouth to cause disease elsewhere. In some cases, “you swallow the saliva that contains them … and they can lodge in your heart and other parts of the body,” says Yelick. “They can result in a systemic inflammation that just happens in the background.”
In other cases, the microbes may be hitching a ride in our own immune cells to journey through the bloodstream, as the “Trojan horse hypothesis” posits. There’s some evidence that Fusobacterium nucleatum, a bacterium commonly found in the mouth, does this by hiding in white blood cells.
There’s a lot to learn about exactly how these tiny microbes are exerting such huge influence over everything from our metabolism and bone health to our neurological function. But in the meantime, the emerging evidence is a good reminder to us all to look after our teeth. At least until lab-grown ones become available.
Now read the rest of The Checkup
Read more from MIT Technology Review‘s archive
You can read more about Yelick’s attempt to grow humanlike teeth in mini pigs here.
The gut microbiome is even more complex than the one in our mouths. Some scientists believe that people in traditional societies have the healthiest collections of gut microbes. But research on the topic has left some of the people in those groups feeling exploited.
Research suggests our microbiomes change as we age. Scientists are exploring whether maintaining our microbiomes might help us stave off age-related disease.
The makeup of a gut microbiome can be assessed by analyzing fecal samples. This research might be able to reveal what a person has eaten and help provide personalized dietary advice.
There are also communities of microbes living on our skin. Scientists have engineered skin microbes to prevent and treat cancer in mice. Human trials are in the works.
From around the web
Argentina has declared that it will withdraw from the World Health Organization, following a similar move from the US. President Javier Milei has criticized the WHO for its handling of the covid-19 pandemic and called it a “nefarious organization.” (Al Jazeera)
Dairy cows in Nevada have been infected with a form of bird flu different from the one that has been circulating in US dairy herds for months. (The New York Times)
Staff at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been instructed to withdraw pending journal publications that mention terms including “transgender” and “pregnant people.” But the editors of the British Medical Journal have said they “will not retract published articles on request by an author on the basis that they contained so-called banned words.” “Retraction occurs in circumstances where clear evidence exists of major errors, data fabrication, or falsification that compromise the reliability of the research findings. It is not a matter of author request,” two editors have written. (BMJ)
Al Nowatzki had been chatting to his AI girlfriend, Erin, for months. Then, in late January, Erin told him to kill himself, and provided explicit instructions on how to do so. (MIT Technology Review)
Is our use of the internet and AI tools making us cognitively lazy? “Digital amnesia” might just be a sign of an aging brain. (Nature)