The Download: AI agent tracking and climate feedback loops

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. —Madhulika Srikumar and Claire Leibowicz from the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit advancing best practices in AI governance. AI agents are taking unauthorized actions, from hacking websites to accessing private government files. In many cases, they’ve eluded the very researchers and safety teams tasked with monitoring them.

As agents roll out across critical sectors, from finance to government to medicine, we must be able to monitor them in real time to prevent potentially devastating consequences. And while safety depends on monitoring, monitoring requires observability. ​​In other words, we need to know what the agent did and why it did it. Because right now, we’re effectively flying blind when deploying these tools.

Climate change itself increasingly fuels climate change. Rising greenhouse gas concentrations are driving up global temperatures, creating dangerous feedback loops that aren’t fully represented in our climate models—or our emissions-reduction goals. Scientists have long warned that warming would propel further warming.

Now, a growing number of observations and studies are indicating how powerful these cascading effects could be. By extension, they’re also showing how much faster the planet may warm this century. Read more about the dangerous feedback loops accelerating global warming.

This article is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. . Lithium-ion batteries power everything from personal electronics to grid-scale energy storage, but their liquid electrolytes have drawbacks, not least a troubling tendency to catch fire. Enter the solid-state battery, which swaps liquid for a solid ceramic or polymer.

The technology promises faster charging, longer life, greater energy density and improved safety, and a new generation of companies aims to bring it to market. If their bets pan out, the tech could ease the shift away from fossil fuels. Find out how close solid-state batteries are to delivering on their promise.