The Download: robot reanimation, and AI crawler wars

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.

Robots are bringing new life to extinct species

In the last few years, paleontologists have developed a new trick for turning back time and studying prehistoric animals: building experimental robotic models of them. 

In the absence of a living specimen, scientists say, an ambling, flying, swimming, or slithering automaton is the next best thing for studying the behavior of extinct organisms. Here are four examples of robots that are shedding light on creatures of yore.

—Shi En Kim

This subscriber-only story is from an upcoming edition of our print magazine. Subscribe now to get a copy when it lands on February 26! 

AI crawler wars threaten to make the web more closed for everyone

—Shayne Longpre is a PhD Candidate at MIT, where his research focuses on the intersection of AI and policy. He leads the Data Provenance Initiative.

We often take the internet for granted. It’s an ocean of information at our fingertips—and it simply works. But this system relies on swarms of “crawlers”—bots that roam the web, visit millions of websites every day, and report what they see. 

Crawlers are endemic. Now representing half of all internet traffic, they will soon outpace human traffic. This unseen subway of the web ferries information from site to site, day and night. And as of late, they serve one more purpose: Companies such as OpenAI use web-crawled data to train their artificial intelligence systems, like ChatGPT. 

Understandably, websites are now fighting back for fear that this invasive species—AI crawlers—will help displace them. But there’s a problem: This pushback is also threatening the transparency and open borders of the web. Read the full story.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The US is not experiencing an AI energy crisis yet
We don’t know how much energy AI will end up needing. We do know fossil fuels are destroying our planet. (The Atlantic $)
+ AI is an energy hog. This is what it means for climate change. (MIT Technology Review)

2 The US and UK refused to sign an international AI declaration 
Despite its name, the AI Action Summit seems to have been a lot of talk and not much action. (BBC)
+ Anthropic’s CEO decried it as a ‘missed opportunity’. (TechCrunch)
+ JD Vance used his speech at the summit to rail against Europe’s ‘excessive’ AI regulations. (AP)
+ It seems to have worked—the EU’s already scrapping some proposed new rules. (Sifted)
+ And it’s committing to plow over $200 billion into AI development in a bid to try and compete. (Engadget)

3 DOGE’s latest target is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
The fact it was about to start regulating X is inconsequential, apparently. (NPR)
+ How Musk’s companies stand to benefit from his position leading DOGE. (NYT $)
+ Trump is expanding DOGE’s power to cut the federal workforce. (WP $)
+ Privacy advocates and labor unions have filed a lawsuit to try to block DOGE’s data access. (The Verge)
+ What if Trump just…refuses to comply with the law? (New Yorker $)

4 Apple is partnering with Alibaba to launch AI features in China
It decided against DeepSeek, citing a lack of experience. (The Information $)
+ Alibaba’s Qwen powers the world’s top ten open source large language models. (South China Morning Post)
+ Four Chinese AI startups to watch beyond DeepSeek. (MIT Technology Review)

5 A dairy worker in Nevada has been infected with a new strain of bird flu 
This marks the first time this new strain is known to have jumped from birds to cows to a person. (Ars Technica)
+ How the US is preparing for a potential bird flu pandemic. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Wikipedia is increasingly having to defend its US editors from attacks
This is what the erosion of free speech really looks like, by the way. (404 Media)

7 Some Temu sellers are using the US Postal Service for free
Counterfeit postage labels are being openly promoted on Chinese social media. (Rest of World)

8 How Meta ended up cancelling its commitment to diversity
Pretty easily, as Zuckerberg never really saw it as a priority to begin with. (The Guardian)

9 The Earth’s inner core is changing shape  Read More