I wrote about everything happening too much in 2026 and the rise of ‘monitoring the situation. How total bombardment is partly a surrender to the internet and its logic and algorithms—a kind of attentional death
For the Atlantic's April issue, I go deep in the race to power the AI boom: Elon Musk's gas turbines, the data center capital of the world, the underbelly of a nuclear reactor.
Before bots can remake civilization, AI firms must reshape our planet in their technology's image. Call it terraforming.
Read the hilarious @kait.bsky.social on the Grammarly kerfuffle. Stay for the amazing kicker. God damn.
"The guy pouring my beer in Anchorage told me that he knew there was no truth to decades-old rumors about a research facility 200 miles to the northeast. Nobody was up there talking to aliens or controlling people’s minds. 'They just do the aurora,' he said" @kait.bsky.social
Something like the Pentagon–Anthropic standoff was inevitable due to a much deeper problem: Nobody will claim—and actually, nobody has to claim—responsibility for the consequences of generative AI.
www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
"I recently learned that Wiles ordered Waltz to turn his phone over to Elon Musk—at the time a kind of one-man Genius Bar for White House officials—who reported back to Wiles that my phone number did not get “sucked in” to Waltz’s phone."
Talked to contract, national-security, and technology legal experts about OpenAI's deal with the Pentagon. They had concerns.
www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
Wrote about the central lie of prediction markets. How they are the perfect technology for a low-trust society, simultaneously exploiting and reifying an environment in which believing the motives behind any person or action becomes harder. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
omg charles yu in the atlantic!!!(!!)
"Voice encodes experience, loss, pain, joy. We don’t acquire voice in spite of failure, but through it. Because of it."
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
Dean Ball, a former AI adviser to Donald Trump, tells Matteo Wong that the administration’s standoff with Anthropic is a dire sign for America:
Can’t recommend this enough, especially as an intellectually stimulating reprieve from intellectually sad times: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/p...
NEW: The reason that Anthropic wasn’t okay with simply confining its models to the cloud
An update here, perhaps the terms are not truly the same, working to figure this out. If you want to chat I’m on signal @matteowong.52
OpenAI just swooped in and agreed to a contract with DOD… with the exact same terms DOD was protesting with Anthropic. The mess only piles higher: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
The Trump administration has suspended federal agencies’ access to Anthropic, @matteowong.bsky.social reports, in an escalation that signals a potentially seismic shift in relations between Silicon Valley and the federal government.
NEW: Documents viewed by @michaelscherer.bsky.social and @kait.bsky.social give a candid look at how Meta approaches the issue of child safety. For years, it dragged its feet on features that would help prevent groomers from targeting kids, explicitly prioritizing growth and engagement instead.
I checked with Terence Tao about all the excitement around AI for mathematics research: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
Del Bigtree, who has been a close adviser to RFK Jr, is "more than anti-vaccine: He’s pro-infection."
www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/...
Essential essay from @cwarzel.bsky.social: "Nihilism is now the lingua franca of the internet."
www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
RFK Jr. has talked up the promise of infusing his department with AI for months—but the full extent of his AI push is just now becoming clear, Matteo Wong and Nicholas Florko write:
Nobody can readily discern irony from sincerity anymore in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and perhaps anywhere. As for The March for Billionaires? Well, you had to be there...
www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
Moltbook is weird and fascinating and scary. It's also a signal about the present-day internet as much, if not more than, a glimpse into its future
"One student came up to me after the first flash essay, a little frustrated and worried that he wasn’t meeting the mark. He felt like he was writing into the complete unknown, rather than with a plan in mind. I said that was exactly the point."
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
From this morning: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
