Last year, China saw a boom in foundation models, the do-everything large language models that underpin the AI revolution. This year, the focus has shifted to AI agents—systems that are less about responding to users’ queries and more about autonomously accomplishing things for them.  There are now a host of Chinese startups building these general-purpose digital tools, which can answer emails, browse the internet to plan vacations, and even design an interactive website. Many of these have emerged in just the last two months, following in the footsteps of Manus—a general AI agent that sparked weeks of social media frenzy for invite codes after its limited-release launch in early March.  These emerging AI agents aren’t large language models themselves. Instead, they’re built on top of them, using a workflow-based structure designed to get things done. A lot of these systems also introduce a different way of interacting with AI. Rather than just chatting back and forth with users, they are optimized for managing and executing multistep tasks—booking flights, managing schedules, conducting research—by using external tools and remembering instructions.  China could take the lead on building these kinds of agents. The country’s tightly integrated app ecosystems, rapid product cycles, and digitally fluent user base could provide a favorable environment for embedding AI into daily life.  For now, its leading AI agent startups are focusing their attention on the global market, because the best Western models don’t operate inside China’s firewalls. But that could change soon: Tech giants like ByteDance and Tencent are preparing their own AI agents that could bake automation directly into their native super-apps, pulling data from their vast ecosystem of programs that dominate many aspects of daily life in the country.  As the race to define what a useful AI agent looks like unfolds, a mix of ambitious startups and entrenched tech giants are now testing how these tools might actually work in practice—and for whom. Set the standard It’s been a whirlwind few months for Manus, which was developed by the Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. The company raised $75 million in a funding round led by the US venture capital firm Benchmark, took the product on an ambitious global roadshow, and hired dozens of new employees.  Even before registration opened to the public in May, Manus had become a reference point for what a broad, consumer‑oriented AI agent should accomplish. Rather than handling narrow chores for businesses, this “general” agent is designed to be able to help with everyday tasks like trip planning, stock comparison, or your kid’s school project.  Unlike previous AI agents, Manus uses a browser-based sandbox that lets users supervise the agent like an intern, watching in real time as it scrolls through web pages, reads articles, or codes actions. It also proactively asks clarifying questions, supports long-term memory that would serve as context for future tasks. "Manus represents a promising product experience for AI agents," says Ang Li, cofounder and CEO of Simular, a startup based in Palo Alto, California, that’s building computer use agents, AI agents that control a virtual computer. “I believe Chinese startups have a huge advantage when it comes to designing consumer products, thanks to cutthroat domestic competition that leads to fast execution and greater attention to product details.” In the case of Manus, the competition is moving fast. Two of the most buzzy follow‑ups, Genspark and Flowith, for example, are already boasting benchmark scores that match or edge past Manus’s.  Genspark, led by former Baidu executives Eric Jing and Kay Zhu, links many small “super agents” through what it calls multi‑component prompting. The agent can switch among several large language models, accepts both images and text, and carries out tasks from making slide decks to placing phone calls. Whereas Manus relies heavily on Browser Use, a popular open-source product that lets agents operate a web browser in a virtual window like a human, Genspark directly integrates with a wide array of tools and APIs. Launched in April, the company says that it already has over 5 million users and over $36 million in yearly revenue. Flowith, the work of a young team that first grabbed public attention in April 2025 at a developer event hosted by the popular social media app Xiaohongshu, takes a different tack. Marketed as an “infinite agent,” it opens on a blank canvas where each question becomes a node on a branching map. Users can backtrack, take new branches, and store results in personal or sharable “knowledge gardens”—a design that feels more like project management software (think Notion) than a typical chat interface. Every inquiry or task builds its own mind-map-like graph, encouraging a more nonlinear and creative interaction with AI. Flowith’s core agent, NEO, runs in the cloud and can perform scheduled tasks like sending emails and compiling files. The founders want the app to be a “knowledge marketbase”, and aims to tap into the social aspect of AI with the aspiration of becoming “the OnlyFans of AI knowledge creators”. What they also share with Manus is the global ambition. Both Genspark and Flowith have stated that their primary focus is the international market. A global address Startups like Manus, Genspark, and Flowith—though founded by Chinese entrepreneurs—could blend seamlessly into the global tech scene and compete effectively abroad. Founders, investors, and analysts that MIT Technology Review has spoken to believe Chinese companies are moving fast, executing well, and quickly coming up with new products.  Money reinforces the pull to launch overseas. Customers there pay more, and there are plenty to go around. “You can price in USD, and with the exchange rate that’s a sevenfold multiplier,” Manus cofounder Xiao Hong quipped on a podcast. “Even if we’re only operating at 10% power because of cultural differences overseas, we’ll still make more than in China.” But creating the same functionality in China is a challenge. Major US AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have opted out of mainland China because of geopolitical risks and challenges with regulatory compliance. Their absence initially created a black market as users resorted to VPNs and third-party mirrors to access tools like ChatGPT and Claude. That vacuum has since been filled by a new wave of Chinese chatbots—DeepSeek, Doubao, Kimi—but the appetite for foreign models hasn’t gone away.  Manus, for example, uses Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet—widely considered the top model for agentic tasks. Manus cofounder Zhang Tao has repeatedly praised Claude’s ability to juggle tools, remember contexts, and hold multi‑round conversations—all crucial for turning chatty software into an effective executive assistant. But the company’s use of Sonnet has made its agent functionally unusable inside China without a VPN. If you open Manus from a mainland IP address, you’ll see a notice explaining that the team is “working on integrating Qwen’s model,” a special local version that is built on top of Alibaba’s open-source model.  An engineer overseeing ByteDance’s work on developing an agent, who spoke to MIT Technology Review anonymously to avoid sanction, said that the absence of Claude Sonnet models “limits everything we do in China.” DeepSeek’s open models, he added, still hallucinate too often and lack training on real‑world workflows. Developers we spoke with rank Alibaba’s Qwen series as the best domestic alternative, yet most say that switching to Qwen knocks performance down a notch. Jiaxin Pei, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford’s Institute for Human‑Centered AI, thinks that gap will close: “Building agentic capabilities in base LLMs has become a key focus for many LLM builders, and once people realize the value of this, it will only be a matter of time." For now, Manus is doubling down on audiences it can already serve. In a written response, the company said its “primary focus is overseas expansion,” noting that new offices in San Francisco, Singapore, and Tokyo have opened in the past month. A super‑app approach Although the concept of AI agents is still relatively new, the consumer-facing AI app market in China is already crowded with major tech players. DeepSeek remains the most widely used, while ByteDance’s Doubao and Moonshot’s Kimi have also become household names. However, most of these apps are still optimized for chat and entertainment rather than task execution. This gap in the local market has pushed China’s big tech firms to roll out their own user-facing agents, though early versions remain uneven in quality and rough around the edges.  ByteDance is testing Coze Space, an AI agent based on its own Doubao model family that lets users toggle between “plan” and “execute” modes, so they can either directly guide the agent’s actions or step back and watch it work autonomously. It connects up to 14 popular apps, including GitHub, Notion, and the company’s own Lark office suite. Early reviews say the tool can feel clunky and has a high failure rate, but it clearly aims to match what Manus offers. Meanwhile, Zhipu AI has released a free agent called AutoGLM Rumination, built on its proprietary ChatGLM models. Shanghai‑based Minimax has launched Minimax Agent. Both products look almost identical to Manus and demo basic tasks such as building a simple website, planning a trip, making a small Flash game, or running quick data analysis. Despite the limited usability of most general AI agents launched within China, big companies have plans to change that. During a May 15 earnings call, Tencent president Liu Zhiping teased an agent that would weave automation directly into China’s most ubiquitous app, WeChat.  Considered the original super-app, WeChat already handles messaging, mobile payments, news, and millions of mini‑programs that act like embedded apps. These programs give Tencent, its developer, access to data from millions of services that pervade everyday life in China, an advantage most competitors can only envy. Historically, China’s consumer internet has splintered into competing walled gardens—share a Taobao link in WeChat and it resolves as plaintext, not a preview card. Unlike the more interoperable Western internet, China’s tech giants have long resisted integration with one another, choosing to wage platform war at the expense of a seamless user experience. But the use of mini‑programs has given WeChat unprecedented reach across services that once resisted interoperability, from gym bookings to grocery orders. An agent able to roam that ecosystem could bypass the integration headaches dogging independent startups. Alibaba, the e-commerce giant behind the Qwen model series, has been a front-runner in China's AI race but has been slower to release consumer-facing products. Even though Qwen was the most downloaded open-source model on Hugging Face in 2024, it didn’t power a dedicated chatbot app until early 2025. In March, Alibaba rebranded its cloud storage and search app Quark into an all-in-one AI search tool. By June, Quark had introduced DeepResearch—a new mode that marks its most agent-like effort to date.  ByteDance and Alibaba did not reply to MIT Technology Review’s request for comments. “Historically, Chinese tech products tend to pursue the all-in-one, super-app approach, and the latest Chinese AI agents reflect just that,” says Li of Simular, who previously worked at Google DeepMind on AI-enabled work automation. “In contrast, AI agents in the US are more focused on serving specific verticals.” Pei, the researcher at Stanford, says that existing tech giants could have a huge advantage in bringing the vision of general AI agents to life—especially those with built-in integration across services. “The customer-facing AI agent market is still very early, with tons of problems like authentication and liability,” he says. “But companies that already operate across a wide range of services have a natural advantage in deploying agents at scale.”

Last year, China saw a boom in foundation models, the do-everything large language models that underpin the AI revolution. This year, the focus has shifted to AI agents—systems that are less about responding to users’ queries and more about autonomously accomplishing things for them.  There are now a host of Chinese startups building these general-purpose digital tools, which can answer emails, browse the internet to plan vacations, and even design an interactive website. Many of these have emerged in just the last two months, following in the footsteps of Manus—a general AI agent that sparked weeks of social media frenzy for invite codes after its limited-release launch in early March.  These emerging AI agents aren’t large language models themselves. Instead, they’re built on top of them, using a workflow-based structure designed to get things done. A lot of these systems also introduce a different way of interacting with AI. Rather than just chatting back and forth with users, they are optimized for managing and executing multistep tasks—booking flights, managing schedules, conducting research—by using external tools and remembering instructions.  China could take the lead on building these kinds of agents. The country’s tightly integrated app ecosystems, rapid product cycles, and digitally fluent user base could provide a favorable environment for embedding AI into daily life.  For now, its leading AI agent startups are focusing their attention on the global market, because the best Western models don’t operate inside China’s firewalls. But that could change soon: Tech giants like ByteDance and Tencent are preparing their own AI agents that could bake automation directly into their native super-apps, pulling data from their vast ecosystem of programs that dominate many aspects of daily life in the country.  As the race to define what a useful AI agent looks like unfolds, a mix of ambitious startups and entrenched tech giants are now testing how these tools might actually work in practice—and for whom. Set the standard It’s been a whirlwind few months for Manus, which was developed by the Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. The company raised $75 million in a funding round led by the US venture capital firm Benchmark, took the product on an ambitious global roadshow, and hired dozens of new employees.  Even before registration opened to the public in May, Manus had become a reference point for what a broad, consumer‑oriented AI agent should accomplish. Rather than handling narrow chores for businesses, this “general” agent is designed to be able to help with everyday tasks like trip planning, stock comparison, or your kid’s school project.  Unlike previous AI agents, Manus uses a browser-based sandbox that lets users supervise the agent like an intern, watching in real time as it scrolls through web pages, reads articles, or codes actions. It also proactively asks clarifying questions, supports long-term memory that would serve as context for future tasks. "Manus represents a promising product experience for AI agents," says Ang Li, cofounder and CEO of Simular, a startup based in Palo Alto, California, that’s building computer use agents, AI agents that control a virtual computer. “I believe Chinese startups have a huge advantage when it comes to designing consumer products, thanks to cutthroat domestic competition that leads to fast execution and greater attention to product details.” In the case of Manus, the competition is moving fast. Two of the most buzzy follow‑ups, Genspark and Flowith, for example, are already boasting benchmark scores that match or edge past Manus’s.  Genspark, led by former Baidu executives Eric Jing and Kay Zhu, links many small “super agents” through what it calls multi‑component prompting. The agent can switch among several large language models, accepts both images and text, and carries out tasks from making slide decks to placing phone calls. Whereas Manus relies heavily on Browser Use, a popular open-source product that lets agents operate a web browser in a virtual window like a human, Genspark directly integrates with a wide array of tools and APIs. Launched in April, the company says that it already has over 5 million users and over $36 million in yearly revenue. Flowith, the work of a young team that first grabbed public attention in April 2025 at a developer event hosted by the popular social media app Xiaohongshu, takes a different tack. Marketed as an “infinite agent,” it opens on a blank canvas where each question becomes a node on a branching map. Users can backtrack, take new branches, and store results in personal or sharable “knowledge gardens”—a design that feels more like project management software (think Notion) than a typical chat interface. Every inquiry or task builds its own mind-map-like graph, encouraging a more nonlinear and creative interaction with AI. Flowith’s core agent, NEO, runs in the cloud and can perform scheduled tasks like sending emails and compiling files. The founders want the app to be a “knowledge marketbase”, and aims to tap into the social aspect of AI with the aspiration of becoming “the OnlyFans of AI knowledge creators”. What they also share with Manus is the global ambition. Both Genspark and Flowith have stated that their primary focus is the international market. A global address Startups like Manus, Genspark, and Flowith—though founded by Chinese entrepreneurs—could blend seamlessly into the global tech scene and compete effectively abroad. Founders, investors, and analysts that MIT Technology Review has spoken to believe Chinese companies are moving fast, executing well, and quickly coming up with new products.  Money reinforces the pull to launch overseas. Customers there pay more, and there are plenty to go around. “You can price in USD, and with the exchange rate that’s a sevenfold multiplier,” Manus cofounder Xiao Hong quipped on a podcast. “Even if we’re only operating at 10% power because of cultural differences overseas, we’ll still make more than in China.” But creating the same functionality in China is a challenge. Major US AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have opted out of mainland China because of geopolitical risks and challenges with regulatory compliance. Their absence initially created a black market as users resorted to VPNs and third-party mirrors to access tools like ChatGPT and Claude. That vacuum has since been filled by a new wave of Chinese chatbots—DeepSeek, Doubao, Kimi—but the appetite for foreign models hasn’t gone away.  Manus, for example, uses Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet—widely considered the top model for agentic tasks. Manus cofounder Zhang Tao has repeatedly praised Claude’s ability to juggle tools, remember contexts, and hold multi‑round conversations—all crucial for turning chatty software into an effective executive assistant. But the company’s use of Sonnet has made its agent functionally unusable inside China without a VPN. If you open Manus from a mainland IP address, you’ll see a notice explaining that the team is “working on integrating Qwen’s model,” a special local version that is built on top of Alibaba’s open-source model.  An engineer overseeing ByteDance’s work on developing an agent, who spoke to MIT Technology Review anonymously to avoid sanction, said that the absence of Claude Sonnet models “limits everything we do in China.” DeepSeek’s open models, he added, still hallucinate too often and lack training on real‑world workflows. Developers we spoke with rank Alibaba’s Qwen series as the best domestic alternative, yet most say that switching to Qwen knocks performance down a notch. Jiaxin Pei, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford’s Institute for Human‑Centered AI, thinks that gap will close: “Building agentic capabilities in base LLMs has become a key focus for many LLM builders, and once people realize the value of this, it will only be a matter of time." For now, Manus is doubling down on audiences it can already serve. In a written response, the company said its “primary focus is overseas expansion,” noting that new offices in San Francisco, Singapore, and Tokyo have opened in the past month. A super‑app approach Although the concept of AI agents is still relatively new, the consumer-facing AI app market in China is already crowded with major tech players. DeepSeek remains the most widely used, while ByteDance’s Doubao and Moonshot’s Kimi have also become household names. However, most of these apps are still optimized for chat and entertainment rather than task execution. This gap in the local market has pushed China’s big tech firms to roll out their own user-facing agents, though early versions remain uneven in quality and rough around the edges.  ByteDance is testing Coze Space, an AI agent based on its own Doubao model family that lets users toggle between “plan” and “execute” modes, so they can either directly guide the agent’s actions or step back and watch it work autonomously. It connects up to 14 popular apps, including GitHub, Notion, and the company’s own Lark office suite. Early reviews say the tool can feel clunky and has a high failure rate, but it clearly aims to match what Manus offers. Meanwhile, Zhipu AI has released a free agent called AutoGLM Rumination, built on its proprietary ChatGLM models. Shanghai‑based Minimax has launched Minimax Agent. Both products look almost identical to Manus and demo basic tasks such as building a simple website, planning a trip, making a small Flash game, or running quick data analysis. Despite the limited usability of most general AI agents launched within China, big companies have plans to change that. During a May 15 earnings call, Tencent president Liu Zhiping teased an agent that would weave automation directly into China’s most ubiquitous app, WeChat.  Considered the original super-app, WeChat already handles messaging, mobile payments, news, and millions of mini‑programs that act like embedded apps. These programs give Tencent, its developer, access to data from millions of services that pervade everyday life in China, an advantage most competitors can only envy. Historically, China’s consumer internet has splintered into competing walled gardens—share a Taobao link in WeChat and it resolves as plaintext, not a preview card. Unlike the more interoperable Western internet, China’s tech giants have long resisted integration with one another, choosing to wage platform war at the expense of a seamless user experience. But the use of mini‑programs has given WeChat unprecedented reach across services that once resisted interoperability, from gym bookings to grocery orders. An agent able to roam that ecosystem could bypass the integration headaches dogging independent startups. Alibaba, the e-commerce giant behind the Qwen model series, has been a front-runner in China's AI race but has been slower to release consumer-facing products. Even though Qwen was the most downloaded open-source model on Hugging Face in 2024, it didn’t power a dedicated chatbot app until early 2025. In March, Alibaba rebranded its cloud storage and search app Quark into an all-in-one AI search tool. By June, Quark had introduced DeepResearch—a new mode that marks its most agent-like effort to date.  ByteDance and Alibaba did not reply to MIT Technology Review’s request for comments. “Historically, Chinese tech products tend to pursue the all-in-one, super-app approach, and the latest Chinese AI agents reflect just that,” says Li of Simular, who previously worked at Google DeepMind on AI-enabled work automation. “In contrast, AI agents in the US are more focused on serving specific verticals.” Pei, the researcher at Stanford, says that existing tech giants could have a huge advantage in bringing the vision of general AI agents to life—especially those with built-in integration across services. “The customer-facing AI agent market is still very early, with tons of problems like authentication and liability,” he says. “But companies that already operate across a wide range of services have a natural advantage in deploying agents at scale.”

Last year, China saw a boom in foundation models, the do-everything large language models that underpin the AI revolution. This year, the focus has shifted to AI agents—systems that are less about responding to users’ queries and more about autonomously accomplishing things for them.  There are now a host of Chinese startups building these general-purpose digital tools, which can answer emails, browse the internet to plan vacations, and even design an interactive website. Many of these have emerged in just the last two months, following in the footsteps of Manus—a general AI agent that sparked weeks of social media frenzy for invite codes after its limited-release launch in early March.  These emerging AI agents aren’t large language models themselves. Instead, they’re built on top of them, using a workflow-based structure designed to get things done. A lot of these systems also introduce a different way of interacting with AI. Rather than just chatting back and forth with users, they are optimized for managing and executing multistep tasks—booking flights, managing schedules, conducting research—by using external tools and remembering instructions.  China could take the lead on building these kinds of agents. The country’s tightly integrated app ecosystems, rapid product cycles, and digitally fluent user base could provide a favorable environment for embedding AI into daily life.  For now, its leading AI agent startups are focusing their attention on the global market, because the best Western models don’t operate inside China’s firewalls. But that could change soon: Tech giants like ByteDance and Tencent are preparing their own AI agents that could bake automation directly into their native super-apps, pulling data from their vast ecosystem of programs that dominate many aspects of daily life in the country.  As the race to define what a useful AI agent looks like unfolds, a mix of ambitious startups and entrenched tech giants are now testing how these tools might actually work in practice—and for whom. Set the standard It’s been a whirlwind few months for Manus, which was developed by the Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. The company raised $75 million in a funding round led by the US venture capital firm Benchmark, took the product on an ambitious global roadshow, and hired dozens of new employees.  Even before registration opened to the public in May, Manus had become a reference point for what a broad, consumer‑oriented AI agent should accomplish. Rather than handling narrow chores for businesses, this “general” agent is designed to be able to help with everyday tasks like trip planning, stock comparison, or your kid’s school project.  Unlike previous AI agents, Manus uses a browser-based sandbox that lets users supervise the agent like an intern, watching in real time as it scrolls through web pages, reads articles, or codes actions. It also proactively asks clarifying questions, supports long-term memory that would serve as context for future tasks. “Manus represents a promising product experience for AI agents,” says Ang Li, cofounder and CEO of Simular, a startup based in Palo Alto, California, that’s building computer use agents, AI agents that control a virtual computer. “I believe Chinese startups have a huge advantage when it comes to designing consumer products, thanks to cutthroat domestic competition that leads to fast execution and greater attention to product details.” In the case of Manus, the competition is moving fast. Two of the most buzzy follow‑ups, Genspark and Flowith, for example, are already boasting benchmark scores that match or edge past Manus’s.  Genspark, led by former Baidu executives Eric Jing and Kay Zhu, links many small “super agents” through what it calls multi‑component prompting. The agent can switch among several large language models, accepts both images and text, and carries out tasks from making slide decks to placing phone calls. Whereas Manus relies heavily on Browser Use, a popular open-source product that lets agents operate a web browser in a virtual window like a human, Genspark directly integrates with a wide array of tools and APIs. Launched in April, the company says that it already has over 5 million users and over $36 million in yearly revenue. Flowith, the work of a young team that first grabbed public attention in April 2025 at a developer event hosted by the popular social media app Xiaohongshu, takes a different tack. Marketed as an “infinite agent,” it opens on a blank canvas where each question becomes a node on a branching map. Users can backtrack, take new branches, and store results in personal or sharable “knowledge gardens”—a design that feels more like project management software (think Notion) than a typical chat interface. Every inquiry or task builds its own mind-map-like graph, encouraging a more nonlinear and creative interaction with AI. Flowith’s core agent, NEO, runs in the cloud and can perform scheduled tasks like sending emails and compiling files. The founders want the app to be a “knowledge marketbase”, and aims to tap into the social aspect of AI with the aspiration of becoming “the OnlyFans of AI knowledge creators”. What they also share with Manus is the global ambition. Both Genspark and Flowith have stated that their primary focus is the international market. A global address Startups like Manus, Genspark, and Flowith—though founded by Chinese entrepreneurs—could blend seamlessly into the global tech scene and compete effectively abroad. Founders, investors, and analysts that MIT Technology Review has spoken to believe Chinese companies are moving fast, executing well, and quickly coming up with new products.  Money reinforces the pull to launch overseas. Customers there pay more, and there are plenty to go around. “You can price in USD, and with the exchange rate that’s a sevenfold multiplier,” Manus cofounder Xiao Hong quipped on a podcast. “Even if we’re only operating at 10% power because of cultural differences overseas, we’ll still make more than in China.” But creating the same functionality in China is a challenge. Major US AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have opted out of mainland China because of geopolitical risks and challenges with regulatory compliance. Their absence initially created a black market as users resorted to VPNs and third-party mirrors to access tools like ChatGPT and Claude. That vacuum has since been filled by a new wave of Chinese chatbots—DeepSeek, Doubao, Kimi—but the appetite for foreign models hasn’t gone away.  Manus, for example, uses Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet—widely considered the top model for agentic tasks. Manus cofounder Zhang Tao has repeatedly praised Claude’s ability to juggle tools, remember contexts, and hold multi‑round conversations—all crucial for turning chatty software into an effective executive assistant. But the company’s use of Sonnet has made its agent functionally unusable inside China without a VPN. If you open Manus from a mainland IP address, you’ll see a notice explaining that the team is “working on integrating Qwen’s model,” a special local version that is built on top of Alibaba’s open-source model.  An engineer overseeing ByteDance’s work on developing an agent, who spoke to MIT Technology Review anonymously to avoid sanction, said that the absence of Claude Sonnet models “limits everything we do in China.” DeepSeek’s open models, he added, still hallucinate too often and lack training on real‑world workflows. Developers we spoke with rank Alibaba’s Qwen series as the best domestic alternative, yet most say that switching to Qwen knocks performance down a notch. Jiaxin Pei, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford’s Institute for Human‑Centered AI, thinks that gap will close: “Building agentic capabilities in base LLMs has become a key focus for many LLM builders, and once people realize the value of this, it will only be a matter of time.” For now, Manus is doubling down on audiences it can already serve. In a written response, the company said its “primary focus is overseas expansion,” noting that new offices in San Francisco, Singapore, and Tokyo have opened in the past month. A super‑app approach Although the concept of AI agents is still relatively new, the consumer-facing AI app market in China is already crowded with major tech players. DeepSeek remains the most widely used, while ByteDance’s Doubao and Moonshot’s Kimi have also become household names. However, most of these apps are still optimized for chat and entertainment rather than task execution. This gap in the local market has pushed China’s big tech firms to roll out their own user-facing agents, though early versions remain uneven in quality and rough around the edges.  ByteDance is testing Coze Space, an AI agent based on its own Doubao model family that lets users toggle between “plan” and “execute” modes, so they can either directly guide the agent’s actions or step back and watch it work autonomously. It connects up to 14 popular apps, including GitHub, Notion, and the company’s own Lark office suite. Early reviews say the tool can feel clunky and has a high failure rate, but it clearly aims to match what Manus offers. Meanwhile, Zhipu AI has released a free agent called AutoGLM Rumination, built on its proprietary ChatGLM models. Shanghai‑based Minimax has launched Minimax Agent. Both products look almost identical to Manus and demo basic tasks such as building a simple website, planning a trip, making a small Flash game, or running quick data analysis. Despite the limited usability of most general AI agents launched within China, big companies have plans to change that. During a May 15 earnings call, Tencent president Liu Zhiping teased an agent that would weave automation directly into China’s most ubiquitous app, WeChat.  Considered the original super-app, WeChat already handles messaging, mobile payments, news, and millions of mini‑programs that act like embedded apps. These programs give Tencent, its developer, access to data from millions of services that pervade everyday life in China, an advantage most competitors can only envy. Historically, China’s consumer internet has splintered into competing walled gardens—share a Taobao link in WeChat and it resolves as plaintext, not a preview card. Unlike the more interoperable Western internet, China’s tech giants have long resisted integration with one another, choosing to wage platform war at the expense of a seamless user experience. But the use of mini‑programs has given WeChat unprecedented reach across services that once resisted interoperability, from gym bookings to grocery orders. An agent able to roam that ecosystem could bypass the integration headaches dogging independent startups. Alibaba, the e-commerce giant behind the Qwen model series, has been a front-runner in China’s AI race but has been slower to release consumer-facing products. Even though Qwen was the most downloaded open-source model on Hugging Face in 2024, it didn’t power a dedicated chatbot app until early 2025. In March, Alibaba rebranded its cloud storage and search app Quark into an all-in-one AI search tool. By June, Quark had introduced DeepResearch—a new mode that marks its most agent-like effort to date.  ByteDance and Alibaba did not reply to MIT Technology Review’s request for comments. “Historically, Chinese tech products tend to pursue the all-in-one, super-app approach, and the latest Chinese AI agents reflect just that,” says Li of Simular, who previously worked at Google DeepMind on AI-enabled work automation. “In contrast, AI agents in the US are more focused on serving specific verticals.” Pei, the researcher at Stanford, says that existing tech giants could have a huge advantage in bringing the vision of general AI agents to life—especially those with built-in integration across services. “The customer-facing AI agent market is still very early, with tons of problems like authentication and liability,” he says. “But companies that already operate across a wide range of services have a natural advantage in deploying agents at scale.”

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Key Takeaways New EU rules take effect June 20, 2025, requiring mobile phones and tablets to be easier and cheaper to repair, including mandatory access to spare parts for up to seven years. Devices must meet durability standards, such as resistance to drops, water, and dust, and batteries must retain 80% capacity after 800 cycles. Manufacturers must offer 5 years of software updates and grant repair professionals access to firmware and repair tools to ensure long-term device usability. Energy consumption is expected to drop, with households projected to save €98 over five years due to longer-lasting, more repairable devices. In a win for the right to repair, the European Union (EU) has released its new energy labeling and ecodesign requirements for mobile phones, tablets, and even cordless phones.  Once implemented, this would help extend the product lifetime of these devices by making them cheaper and easier to repair. Up Ahead: Long-Lasting and Easy-to-Repair Devices The new ecodesign and energy labeling regulations will apply to devices sold in the EU effective June 20, 2025. One key area is the availability of spare parts. Once the regulations take effect, critical spare parts for a device must remain available for seven years from the last day the producer stops selling it. These parts must also be available to repairers within 5–10 working days. Mobile phones, cordless phones, and tablets under the ecodesign regulations must also be resistant to scratches and accidental drops, and be protected from dust and water.  The EU also specified that batteries must withstand at least 800 charge and discharge cycles while holding 80% of their initial capacity. These measures could help ensure devices last longer, thus reducing the need to replace them and lowering their cost of ownership. The requirements go beyond just the hardware. On the software side, manufacturers must also provide at least 5 years of operating system upgrades and give professional repairers access to software or firmware.  These would allow devices to continue to run smoothly and protect them from security vulnerabilities. On top of the ecodesign requirements, the EU also specified energy labeling requirements on the applicable devices. The labels would provide information about the device’s repairability score, energy efficiency, battery longevity, dust and water protection, and resistance to accidental drops. Having clear and easy-to-understand labels can help consumers in the EU make better choices when buying phones and tablets. They’ll know at a glance whether a device can withstand drops or if the batteries will remain reliable for as long as possible. The Projected Impact of the Ecodesign and Energy Labeling Requirements With the new requirements, the EU expects a significant reduction in the energy consumption of the applicable devices. Regarding charging time, this should go down from 2.5 to 1.75 hours per day.  Also, the annual electrical consumption of high-end smartphones is projected to decrease by 25%, while it’s 23% for tablets by 2030. Making devices easier to repair is also seen to reduce the acquisition costs of devices by € 98 per household in five years. A Win for the Right to Repair, But Obstacles Lie Ahead While the EU has already made significant progress in the area of the right to repair, many countries remain well behind. In the US, for instance, only a handful of states like California and Colorado have already enacted right-to-repair laws, while most of the country has yet to catch up. Without laws like these, most manufacturers won’t have the incentive to make their devices easier to repair.  A quick look at iFixit’s smartphone repairability scores shows that only Fairphone, which scored a perfect 10, HMD (9), and Nokia (8) had high scores among current phones. At the same time, Apple’s iPhone 16 line received a respectable 7. The Fairphone 5, launched in 2023, is especially notable for its repairability. According to iFixit, it’s easy to disassemble with common tools, the battery can be replaced quickly, and manuals and replacement parts are available to DIYers. As for the others, Ifixit gave Google’s Pixel 9 series a 5 for making it difficult to remove the battery and the USB-C port and requiring a replacement adhesive to secure the screen or back glass instead of using clips or fasteners. Meanwhile, the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra received a 4 because the battery is attached with a strong adhesive, and repairing the screen needs a lot of disassembly. All in all, we remain hopeful that with the EU’s lead, manufacturers can finally be encouraged to make repairing their devices easier than ever before. As technology continues to evolve—from the return of 'dumbphones' to faster and sleeker computers—seasoned tech journalist, Cedric Solidon, continues to dedicate himself to writing stories that inform, empower, and connect with readers across all levels of digital literacy. With 20 years of professional writing experience, this University of the Philippines Journalism graduate has carved out a niche as a trusted voice in tech media. Whether he's breaking down the latest advancements in cybersecurity or explaining how silicon-carbon batteries can extend your phone’s battery life, his writing remains rooted in clarity, curiosity, and utility. Long before he was writing for Techreport, HP, Citrix, SAP, Globe Telecom, CyberGhost VPN, and ExpressVPN, Cedric's love for technology began at home courtesy of a Nintendo Family Computer and a stack of tech magazines. Growing up, his days were often filled with sessions of Contra, Bomberman, Red Alert 2, and the criminally underrated Crusader: No Regret. But gaming wasn't his only gateway to tech.  He devoured every T3, PCMag, and PC Gamer issue he could get his hands on, often reading them cover to cover. It wasn’t long before he explored the early web in IRC chatrooms, online forums, and fledgling tech blogs, soaking in every byte of knowledge from the late '90s and early 2000s internet boom. That fascination with tech didn’t just stick. It evolved into a full-blown calling. After graduating with a degree in Journalism, he began his writing career at the dawn of Web 2.0. What started with small editorial roles and freelance gigs soon grew into a full-fledged career. He has since collaborated with global tech leaders, lending his voice to content that bridges technical expertise with everyday usability. He’s also written annual reports for Globe Telecom and consumer-friendly guides for VPN companies like CyberGhost and ExpressVPN, empowering readers to understand the importance of digital privacy. His versatility spans not just tech journalism but also technical writing. He once worked with a local tech company developing web and mobile apps for logistics firms, crafting documentation and communication materials that brought together user-friendliness with deep technical understanding. That experience sharpened his ability to break down dense, often jargon-heavy material into content that speaks clearly to both developers and decision-makers. At the heart of his work lies a simple belief: technology should feel empowering, not intimidating. Even if the likes of smartphones and AI are now commonplace, he understands that there's still a knowledge gap, especially when it comes to hardware or the real-world benefits of new tools. His writing hopes to help close that gap. Cedric’s writing style reflects that mission. It’s friendly without being fluffy and informative without being overwhelming. Whether writing for seasoned IT professionals or casual readers curious about the latest gadgets, he focuses on how a piece of technology can improve our lives, boost our productivity, or make our work more efficient. That human-first approach makes his content feel more like a conversation than a technical manual. As his writing career progresses, his passion for tech journalism remains as strong as ever. With the growing need for accessible, responsible tech communication, he sees his role not just as a journalist but as a guide who helps readers navigate a digital world that’s often as confusing as it is exciting. From reviewing the latest devices to unpacking global tech trends, Cedric isn’t just reporting on the future; he’s helping to write it. View all articles by Cedric Solidon Our editorial process The Tech Report editorial policy is centered on providing helpful, accurate content that offers real value to our readers. We only work with experienced writers who have specific knowledge in the topics they cover, including latest developments in technology, online privacy, cryptocurrencies, software, and more. Our editorial policy ensures that each topic is researched and curated by our in-house editors. We maintain rigorous journalistic standards, and every article is 100% written by real authors.

Once again, Sam Altman wants to show you the future. The CEO of OpenAI is standing on a sparse stage in San Francisco, preparing to reveal his next move to an attentive crowd. “We needed some way for identifying, authenticating humans in the age of AGI,” Altman explains, referring to artificial general intelligence. “We wanted a way to make sure that humans stayed special and central.” The solution Altman came up with is looming behind him. It’s a white sphere about the size of a beach ball, with a camera at its center. The company that makes it, known as Tools for Humanity, calls this mysterious device the Orb. Stare into the heart of the plastic-and-silicon globe and it will map the unique furrows and ciliary zones of your iris. Seconds later, you’ll receive inviolable proof of your humanity: a 12,800-digit binary number, known as an iris code, sent to an app on your phone. At the same time, a packet of cryptocurrency called Worldcoin, worth approximately $42, will be transferred to your digital wallet—your reward for becoming a “verified human.” Altman co-founded Tools for Humanity in 2019 as part of a suite of companies he believed would reshape the world. Once the tech he was developing at OpenAI passed a certain level of intelligence, he reasoned, it would mark the end of one era on the Internet and the beginning of another, in which AI became so advanced, so human-like, that you would no longer be able to tell whether what you read, saw, or heard online came from a real person. When that happened, Altman imagined, we would need a new kind of online infrastructure: a human-verification layer for the Internet, to distinguish real people from the proliferating number of bots and AI “agents.”And so Tools for Humanity set out to build a global “proof-of-humanity” network. It aims to verify 50 million people by the end of 2025; ultimately its goal is to sign up every single human being on the planet. The free crypto serves as both an incentive for users to sign up, and also an entry point into what the company hopes will become the world’s largest financial network, through which it believes “double-digit percentages of the global economy” will eventually flow. Even for Altman, these missions are audacious. “If this really works, it’s like a fundamental piece of infrastructure for the world,” Altman tells TIME in a video interview from the passenger seat of a car a few days before his April 30 keynote address.Internal hardware of the Orb in mid-assembly in March. Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe project’s goal is to solve a problem partly of Altman’s own making. In the near future, he and other tech leaders say, advanced AIs will be imbued with agency: the ability to not just respond to human prompting, but to take actions independently in the world. This will enable the creation of AI coworkers that can drop into your company and begin solving problems; AI tutors that can adapt their teaching style to students’ preferences; even AI doctors that can diagnose routine cases and handle scheduling or logistics. The arrival of these virtual agents, their venture capitalist backers predict, will turbocharge our productivity and unleash an age of material abundance.But AI agents will also have cascading consequences for the human experience online. “As AI systems become harder to distinguish from people, websites may face difficult trade-offs,” says a recent paper by researchers from 25 different universities, nonprofits, and tech companies, including OpenAI. “There is a significant risk that digital institutions will be unprepared for a time when AI-powered agents, including those leveraged by malicious actors, overwhelm other activity online.” On social-media platforms like X and Facebook, bot-driven accounts are amassing billions of views on AI-generated content. In April, the foundation that runs Wikipedia disclosed that AI bots scraping their site were making the encyclopedia too costly to sustainably run. Later the same month, researchers from the University of Zurich found that AI-generated comments on the subreddit /r/ChangeMyView were up to six times more successful than human-written ones at persuading unknowing users to change their minds.  Photograph by Davide Monteleone for TIMEBuy a copy of the Orb issue hereThe arrival of agents won’t only threaten our ability to distinguish between authentic and AI content online. It will also challenge the Internet’s core business model, online advertising, which relies on the assumption that ads are being viewed by humans. “The Internet will change very drastically sometime in the next 12 to 24 months,” says Tools for Humanity CEO Alex Blania. “So we have to succeed, or I’m not sure what else would happen.”For four years, Blania’s team has been testing the Orb’s hardware abroad. Now the U.S. rollout has arrived. Over the next 12 months, 7,500 Orbs will be arriving in dozens of American cities, in locations like gas stations, bodegas, and flagship stores in Los Angeles, Austin, and Miami. The project’s founders and fans hope the Orb’s U.S. debut will kickstart a new phase of growth. The San Francisco keynote was titled: “At Last.” It’s not clear the public appetite matches the exultant branding. Tools for Humanity has “verified” just 12 million humans since mid 2023, a pace Blania concedes is well behind schedule. Few online platforms currently support the so-called “World ID” that the Orb bestows upon its visitors, leaving little to entice users to give up their biometrics beyond the lure of free crypto. Even Altman isn’t sure whether the whole thing can work. “I can see [how] this becomes a fairly mainstream thing in a few years,” he says. “Or I can see that it’s still only used by a small subset of people who think about the world in a certain way.” Blania (left) and Altman debut the Orb at World’s U.S. launch in San Francisco on April 30, 2025. Jason Henry—The New York Times/ReduxYet as the Internet becomes overrun with AI, the creators of this strange new piece of hardware are betting that everybody in the world will soon want—or need—to visit an Orb. The biometric code it creates, they predict, will become a new type of digital passport, without which you might be denied passage to the Internet of the future, from dating apps to government services. In a best-case scenario, World ID could be a privacy-preserving way to fortify the Internet against an AI-driven deluge of fake or deceptive content. It could also enable the distribution of universal basic income (UBI)—a policy that Altman has previously touted—as AI automation transforms the global economy. To examine what this new technology might mean, I reported from three continents, interviewed 10 Tools for Humanity executives and investors, reviewed hundreds of pages of company documents, and “verified” my own humanity. The Internet will inevitably need some kind of proof-of-humanity system in the near future, says Divya Siddarth, founder of the nonprofit Collective Intelligence Project. The real question, she argues, is whether such a system will be centralized—“a big security nightmare that enables a lot of surveillance”—or privacy-preserving, as the Orb claims to be. Questions remain about Tools for Humanity’s corporate structure, its yoking to an unstable cryptocurrency, and what power it would concentrate in the hands of its owners if successful. Yet it’s also one of the only attempts to solve what many see as an increasingly urgent problem. “There are some issues with it,” Siddarth says of World ID. “But you can’t preserve the Internet in amber. Something in this direction is necessary.”In March, I met Blania at Tools for Humanity’s San Francisco headquarters, where a large screen displays the number of weekly “Orb verifications” by country. A few days earlier, the CEO had attended a $1 million-per-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago with President Donald Trump, whom he credits with clearing the way for the company’s U.S. launch by relaxing crypto regulations. “Given Sam is a very high profile target,” Blania says, “we just decided that we would let other companies fight that fight, and enter the U.S. once the air is clear.” As a kid growing up in Germany, Blania was a little different than his peers. “Other kids were, like, drinking a lot, or doing a lot of parties, and I was just building a lot of things that could potentially blow up,” he recalls. At the California Institute of Technology, where he was pursuing research for a masters degree, he spent many evenings reading the blogs of startup gurus like Paul Graham and Altman. Then, in 2019, Blania received an email from Max Novendstern, an entrepreneur who had been kicking around a concept with Altman to build a global cryptocurrency network. They were looking for technical minds to help with the project. Over cappuccinos, Altman told Blania he was certain about three things. First, smarter-than-human AI was not only possible, but inevitable—and it would soon mean you could no longer assume that anything you read, saw, or heard on the Internet was human-created. Second, cryptocurrency and other decentralized technologies would be a massive force for change in the world. And third, scale was essential to any crypto network’s value. The Orb is tested on a calibration rig, surrounded by checkerboard targets to ensure precision in iris detection. Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe goal of Worldcoin, as the project was initially called, was to combine those three insights. Altman took a lesson from PayPal, the company co-founded by his mentor Peter Thiel. Of its initial funding, PayPal spent less than $10 million actually building its app—but pumped an additional $70 million or so into a referral program, whereby new users and the person who invited them would each receive $10 in credit. The referral program helped make PayPal a leading payment platform. Altman thought a version of that strategy would propel Worldcoin to similar heights. He wanted to create a new cryptocurrency and give it to users as a reward for signing up. The more people who joined the system, the higher the token’s value would theoretically rise. Since 2019, the project has raised $244 million from investors like Coinbase and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. That money paid for the $50 million cost of designing the Orb, plus maintaining the software it runs on. The total market value of all Worldcoins in existence, however, is far higher—around $12 billion. That number is a bit misleading: most of those coins are not in circulation and Worldcoin’s price has fluctuated wildly. Still, it allows the company to reward users for signing up at no cost to itself. The main lure for investors is the crypto upside. Some 75% of all Worldcoins are set aside for humans to claim when they sign up, or as referral bonuses. The remaining 25% are split between Tools for Humanity’s backers and staff, including Blania and Altman. “I’m really excited to make a lot of money,” ” Blania says.From the beginning, Altman was thinking about the consequences of the AI revolution he intended to unleash. (On May 21, he announced plans to team up with famed former Apple designer Jony Ive on a new AI personal device.) A future in which advanced AI could perform most tasks more effectively than humans would bring a wave of unemployment and economic dislocation, he reasoned. Some kind of wealth redistribution might be necessary. In 2016, he partially funded a study of basic income, which gave $1,000 per-month handouts to low-income individuals in Illinois and Texas. But there was no single financial system that would allow money to be sent to everybody in the world. Nor was there a way to stop an individual human from claiming their share twice—or to identify a sophisticated AI pretending to be human and pocketing some cash of its own. In 2023, Tools for Humanity raised the possibility of using the network to redistribute the profits of AI labs that were able to automate human labor. “As AI advances,” it said, “fairly distributing access and some of the created value through UBI will play an increasingly vital role in counteracting the concentration of economic power.”Blania was taken by the pitch, and agreed to join the project as a co-founder. “Most people told us we were very stupid or crazy or insane, including Silicon Valley investors,” Blania says. At least until ChatGPT came out in 2022, transforming OpenAI into one of the world’s most famous tech companies and kickstarting a market bull-run. “Things suddenly started to make more and more sense to the external world,” Blania says of the vision to develop a global “proof-of-humanity” network. “You have to imagine a world in which you will have very smart and competent systems somehow flying through the Internet with different goals and ideas of what they want to do, and us having no idea anymore what we’re dealing with.”After our interview, Blania’s head of communications ushers me over to a circular wooden structure where eight Orbs face one another. The scene feels like a cross between an Apple Store and a ceremonial altar. “Do you want to get verified?” she asks. Putting aside my reservations for the purposes of research, I download the World App and follow its prompts. I flash a QR code at the Orb, then gaze into it. A minute or so later, my phone buzzes with confirmation: I’ve been issued my own personal World ID and some Worldcoin.The first thing the Orb does is check if you’re human, using a neural network that takes input from various sensors, including an infrared camera and a thermometer. Davide Monteleone for TIMEWhile I stared into the Orb, several complex procedures had taken place at once. A neural network took inputs from multiple sensors—an infrared camera, a thermometer—to confirm I was a living human. Simultaneously, a telephoto lens zoomed in on my iris, capturing the physical traits within that distinguish me from every other human on Earth. It then converted that image into an iris code: a numerical abstraction of my unique biometric data. Then the Orb checked to see if my iris code matched any it had seen before, using a technique allowing encrypted data to be compared without revealing the underlying information. Before the Orb deleted my data, it turned my iris code into several derivative codes—none of which on its own can be linked back to the original—encrypted them, deleted the only copies of the decryption keys, and sent each one to a different secure server, so that future users’ iris codes can be checked for uniqueness against mine. If I were to use my World ID to access a website, that site would learn nothing about me except that I’m human. The Orb is open-source, so outside experts can examine its code and verify the company’s privacy claims. “I did a colonoscopy on this company and these technologies before I agreed to join,” says Trevor Traina, a Trump donor and former U.S. ambassador to Austria who now serves as Tools for Humanity’s chief business officer. “It is the most privacy-preserving technology on the planet.”Only weeks later, when researching what would happen if I wanted to delete my data, do I discover that Tools for Humanity’s privacy claims rest on what feels like a sleight of hand. The company argues that in modifying your iris code, it has “effectively anonymized” your biometric data. If you ask Tools for Humanity to delete your iris codes, they will delete the one stored on your phone, but not the derivatives. Those, they argue, are no longer your personal data at all. But if I were to return to an Orb after deleting my data, it would still recognize those codes as uniquely mine. Once you look into the Orb, a piece of your identity remains in the system forever. If users could truly delete that data, the premise of one ID per human would collapse, Tools for Humanity’s chief privacy officer Damien Kieran tells me when I call seeking an explanation. People could delete and sign up for new World IDs after being suspended from a platform. Or claim their Worldcoin tokens, sell them, delete their data, and cash in again. This argument fell flat with European Union regulators in Germany, who recently declared that the Orb posed “fundamental data protection issues” and ordered the company to allow European users to fully delete even their anonymized data. (Tools for Humanity has appealed; the regulator is now reassessing the decision.) “Just like any other technology service, users cannot delete data that is not personal data,” Kieran said in a statement. “If a person could delete anonymized data that can’t be linked to them by World or any third party, it would allow bad actors to circumvent the security and safety that World ID is working to bring to every human.”On a balmy afternoon this spring, I climb a flight of stairs up to a room above a restaurant in an outer suburb of Seoul. Five elderly South Koreans tap on their phones as they wait to be “verified” by the two Orbs in the center of the room. “We don’t really know how to distinguish between AI and humans anymore,” an attendant in a company t-shirt explains in Korean, gesturing toward the spheres. “We need a way to verify that we’re human and not AI. So how do we do that? Well, humans have irises, but AI doesn’t.”The attendant ushers an elderly woman over to an Orb. It bleeps. “Open your eyes,” a disembodied voice says in English. The woman stares into the camera. Seconds later, she checks her phone and sees that a packet of Worldcoin worth 75,000 Korean won (about $54) has landed in her digital wallet. Congratulations, the app tells her. You are now a verified human.A visitor views the Orbs in Seoul on April 14, 2025. Taemin Ha for TIMETools for Humanity aims to “verify” 1 million Koreans over the next year. Taemin Ha for TIMEA couple dozen Orbs have been available in South Korea since 2023, verifying roughly 55,000 people. Now Tools for Humanity is redoubling its efforts there. At an event in a traditional wooden hanok house in central Seoul, an executive announces that 250 Orbs will soon be dispersed around the country—with the aim of verifying 1 million Koreans in the next 12 months. South Korea has high levels of smartphone usage, crypto and AI adoption, and Internet access, while average wages are modest enough for the free Worldcoin on offer to still be an enticing draw—all of which makes it fertile testing ground for the company’s ambitious global expansion. Yet things seem off to a slow start. In a retail space I visited in central Seoul, Tools for Humanity had constructed a wooden structure with eight Orbs facing each other. Locals and tourists wander past looking bemused; few volunteer themselves up. Most who do tell me they are crypto enthusiasts who came intentionally, driven more by the spirit of early adoption than the free coins. The next day, I visit a coffee shop in central Seoul where a chrome Orb sits unassumingly in one corner. Wu Ruijun, a 20-year-old student from China, strikes up a conversation with the barista, who doubles as the Orb’s operator. Wu was invited here by a friend who said both could claim free cryptocurrency if he signed up. The barista speeds him through the process. Wu accepts the privacy disclosure without reading it, and widens his eyes for the Orb. Soon he’s verified. “I wasn’t told anything about the privacy policy,” he says on his way out. “I just came for the money.”As Altman’s car winds through San Francisco, I ask about the vision he laid out in 2019: that AI would make it harder for us to trust each other online. To my surprise, he rejects the framing. “I’m much more [about] like: what is the good we can create, rather than the bad we can stop?” he says. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to avoid the bot overrun’ or whatever. It’s just that we can do a lot of special things for humans.” It’s an answer that may reflect how his role has changed over the years. Altman is now the chief public cheerleader of a $300 billion company that’s touting the transformative utility of AI agents. The rise of agents, he and others say, will be a boon for our quality of life—like having an assistant on hand who can answer your most pressing questions, carry out mundane tasks, and help you develop new skills. It’s an optimistic vision that may well pan out. But it doesn’t quite fit with the prophecies of AI-enabled infopocalypse that Tools for Humanity was founded upon.Altman waves away a question about the influence he and other investors stand to gain if their vision is realized. Most holders, he assumes, will have already started selling their tokens—too early, he adds. “What I think would be bad is if an early crew had a lot of control over the protocol,” he says, “and that’s where I think the commitment to decentralization is so cool.” Altman is referring to the World Protocol, the underlying technology upon which the Orb, Worldcoin, and World ID all rely. Tools for Humanity is developing it, but has committed to giving control to its users over time—a process they say will prevent power from being concentrated in the hands of a few executives or investors. Tools for Humanity would remain a for-profit company, and could levy fees on platforms that use World ID, but other companies would be able to compete for customers by building alternative apps—or even alternative Orbs. The plan draws on ideas that animated the crypto ecosystem in the late 2010s and early 2020s, when evangelists for emerging blockchain technologies argued that the centralization of power—especially in large so-called “Web 2.0” tech companies—was responsible for many of the problems plaguing the modern Internet. Just as decentralized cryptocurrencies could reform a financial system controlled by economic elites, so too would it be possible to create decentralized organizations, run by their members instead of CEOs. How such a system might work in practice remains unclear. “Building a community-based governance system,” Tools for Humanity says in a 2023 white paper, “represents perhaps the most formidable challenge of the entire project.”Altman has a pattern of making idealistic promises that shift over time. He founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, with a mission to develop AGI safely and for the benefit of all humanity. To raise money, OpenAI restructured itself as a for-profit company in 2019, but with overall control still in the hands of its nonprofit board. Last year, Altman proposed yet another restructure—one which would dilute the board’s control and allow more profits to flow to shareholders. Why, I ask, should the public trust Tools for Humanity’s commitment to freely surrender influence and power? “I think you will just see the continued decentralization via the protocol,” he says. “The value here is going to live in the network, and the network will be owned and governed by a lot of people.” Altman talks less about universal basic income these days. He recently mused about an alternative, which he called “universal basic compute.” Instead of AI companies redistributing their profits, he seemed to suggest, they could instead give everyone in the world fair access to super-powerful AI. Blania tells me he recently “made the decision to stop talking” about UBI at Tools for Humanity. “UBI is one potential answer,” he says. “Just giving [people] access to the latest [AI] models and having them learn faster and better is another.” Says Altman: “I still don’t know what the right answer is. I believe we should do a better job of distribution of resources than we currently do.” When I probe the question of why people should trust him, Altman gets irritated. “I understand that you hate AI, and that’s fine,” he says. “If you want to frame it as the downside of AI is that there’s going to be a proliferation of very convincing AI systems that are pretending to be human, and we need ways to know what is really human-authorized versus not, then yeah, I think you can call that a downside of AI. It’s not how I would naturally frame it.” The phrase human-authorized hints at a tension between World ID and OpenAI’s plans for AI agents. An Internet where a World ID is required to access most services might impede the usefulness of the agents that OpenAI and others are developing. So Tools for Humanity is building a system that would allow users to delegate their World ID to an agent, allowing the bot to take actions online on their behalf, according to Tiago Sada, the company’s chief product officer. “We’ve built everything in a way that can be very easily delegatable to an agent,” Sada says. It’s a measure that would allow humans to be held accountable for the actions of their AIs. But it suggests that Tools for Humanity’s mission may be shifting beyond simply proving humanity, and toward becoming the infrastructure that enables AI agents to proliferate with human authorization. World ID doesn’t tell you whether a piece of content is AI-generated or human-generated; all it tells you is whether the account that posted it is a human or a bot. Even in a world where everybody had a World ID, our online spaces might still be filled with AI-generated text, images, and videos.As I say goodbye to Altman, I’m left feeling conflicted about his project. If the Internet is going to be transformed by AI agents, then some kind of proof-of-humanity system will almost certainly be necessary. Yet if the Orb becomes a piece of Internet infrastructure, it could give Altman—a beneficiary of the proliferation of AI content—significant influence over a leading defense mechanism against it. People might have no choice but to participate in the network in order to access social media or online services.I thought of an encounter I witnessed in Seoul. In the room above the restaurant, Cho Jeong-yeon, 75, watched her friend get verified by an Orb. Cho had been invited to do the same, but demurred. The reward wasn’t enough for her to surrender a part of her identity. “Your iris is uniquely yours, and we don’t really know how it might be used,” she says. “Seeing the machine made me think: are we becoming machines instead of humans now? Everything is changing, and we don’t know how it’ll all turn out.”—With reporting by Stephen Kim/Seoul. This story was supported by Tarbell Grants.Correction, May 30The original version of this story misstated the market capitalization of Worldcoin if all coins were in circulation. It is $12 billion, not $1.2 billion.

If you've got a Switch 2 preorder coming in hot and you want to expand the storage capacity right off the bat, then Walmart has a deal that you don't want to miss. For a very limited time, the Onn 256GB Micro SDXC Express Card is back in stock at a rock bottom price of $35.99. This listing went up in May, but I haven't seen it in stock for shipping until today. As a comparison, the official Samsung 256GB MicroSDXC Express card is currently listed for $59.99 at Target.Update: This deal might not be available for delivery for all zip codes. You can still choose in-store pickup.Onn 256GB MicroSDXC Express Memory Card for $35.99Nintendo Switch 2 CompatibleNintendo Switch 2 CompatibleOnn 256GB Micro SDXC Express Card$35.99 at WalmartOnn is Walmart's privately owned house brand, so you won't find this memory card sold anywhere else. MicroSDXC Express cards are much faster than standard MicroSDXC cards and the Onn model is no different, with speeds of up to 800MB/s write and 600MB/s read. More importantly for gamers, the Switch 2 is compatible with and can take full advantage of the capabilities of the MicroSDXC Express format.Check out these other Switch 2 accessories ahead of release3-Pack amFilm Tempered Glass Screen Protector for Nintendo Switch 22-Pack amFilm Tempered Glass Screen Protector (Matte) for Nintendo Switch 22-Pack amFilm Auto-Alignment OneTouch Tempted Glass Screen Protector (Matte) for Nintendo Switch 2amCase Carrying Case for Nintendo Switch 2I'd strongly suggest you pick up, at the very least, a screen protector and case to protect that $450 investment. These amFilm screen protectors and cases from Techmatte are guaranteed to fit your Switch 2 console. They're pretty inexpensive to start with, but some coupon codes sweeten the deal all the same. Especially for screen protectors, you want something affordable so that you can cheaply replace it if it every gets cracked under use. AmFilm (TechMatte) is one of the best selling screen protectors on Amazon; I've used several myself over the years on various electronics and they work just as well as any other screen protector on Amazon.These amFilm screen protectors and cases from Techmatte are guaranteed to fit your Switch 2 console. They're pretty inexpensive to start with, but some coupon codes sweeten the deal all the same. Especially for screen protectors, you want something affordable so that you can cheaply replace it if it every gets cracked under use. AmFilm (TechMatte) is one of the best selling screen protectors on Amazon; I've used several myself over the years on various electronics and they work just as well as any other screen protector on Amazon.The Nintendo Switch 2 Is Out on June 5Nintendo Switch 2 preorders are shipping out on June 5. If you weren't able to secure yourself one of these early units, select retailers have mentioned that there will be more available on launch day. Follow our Nintendo Switch 2 preorder guide for stock updates as soon as they go live. If you were able to secure a preorder, then check out the list of officially licensed Switch 2 accessories that are already up for preorder, including the all-new Switch 2 Pro controller.Why Should You Trust IGN's Deals Team?IGN's deals team has a combined 30+ years of experience finding the best discounts in gaming, tech, and just about every other category. We don't try to trick our readers into buying things they don't need at prices that aren't worth buying something at. Our ultimate goal is to surface the best possible deals from brands we trust and our editorial team has personal experience with. You can check out our deals standards here for more information on our process, or keep up with the latest deals we find on IGN's Deals account on Twitter.Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.

Will quantum computers crack cryptographic codes and cause a global security disaster? You might certainly get that impression from a lot of news coverage, the latest of which reports new estimates that it might be 20 times easier to crack such codes

Looking for NYT Strands answers and hints? Here's all you need to know to solve today's game, including the spangram.