Technology Review

• The Download: tripping with AI, and blocking crawler bots

  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. People are using AI to ‘sit’ with them while they trip on psychedelics A growing number of people are using AI chatbots as “trip sitters”—a phrase that traditionally refers to a sober person…

• Cloudflare will now, by default, block AI bots from crawling its clients’ websites

  The internet infrastructure company Cloudflare announced today that it will now default to blocking AI bots from visiting websites it hosts. Cloudflare will also give clients the ability to manually allow or ban these AI bots on a case-by-case basis, and it will introduce a so-called “pay-per-crawl” service that clients can use to receive compensation…

• People are using AI to ‘sit’ with them while they trip on psychedelics

  Peter sat alone in his bedroom as the first waves of euphoria coursed through his body like an electrical current. He was in darkness, save for the soft blue light of the screen glowing from his lap. Then he started to feel pangs of panic. He picked up his phone and typed a message to…

• What comes next for AI copyright lawsuits?

  Last week, the technology companies Anthropic and Meta each won landmark victories in two separate court cases that examined whether or not the firms had violated copyright when they trained their large language models on copyrighted books without permission. The rulings are the first we’ve seen to come out of copyright cases of this kind.…

• Roundtables: Inside OpenAI’s Empire with Karen Hao

  Recorded on June 30, 2025 AI journalist Karen Hao’s book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, tells the story of OpenAI’s rise to power and its far-reaching impact all over the world. Hear from Karen Hao, former MIT Technology Review senior editor, and executive editor Niall Firth for a conversation exploring…