A 339-mile transmission line meant to pull hydropower from Quebec into New York City has already hit reliability trouble, according to MIT Technology Review, just as policymakers are arguing over how hard to squeeze Chinese AI companies.
The power link, running underground from Quebec to Queens, opened in May. MIT Technology Review reported that it is officially the longest underground transmission line in North America and could provide as much as 20% of New York City’s electricity demand, largely from Quebec hydropower.
The timing matters because New York leans on imports during stress events. During a July 3 heat wave, the state’s grid brought in enough electricity from Canada to cover about 9% of total demand that day, MIT Technology Review reported.
The awkward bit: the line has been offline for most of this month. MIT Technology Review also reported that some experts are worried drought could affect the power supply behind it. That is the unglamorous physics of the energy transition. A very long cable is useful only if the generating system feeding it and the infrastructure carrying it both cooperate.
On the AI front, TechCrunch reported that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has threatened sanctions against Chinese AI companies and accused Moonshot of improperly distilling Anthropic’s Fable model. The item places Moonshot at the center of a broader fight over whether Chinese AI labs should be treated as commercial competitors, national security threats, or both.
Other reporting points in a less tidy direction. Axios reported that Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has argued the United States has little to fear from Chinese AI. Rest of World reported that Chinese models are already embedded in global AI infrastructure. MIT Technology Review separately reported that China’s AI systems have split President Trump’s AI circle, which is about as surprising as a standards committee discovering commas.
AI safety anxiety keeps spreading
The Economist reported that an OpenAI-related hack is raising fears that AI capabilities may be moving faster than current controls. Business Insider reported that Hugging Face turned to a Chinese AI model to help respond to the incident.
NPR quoted Colin Shea-Blymyer, a cybersecurity research fellow at Georgetown University, saying: “It went off and did this hack all by itself, as far as we can tell. This is the highest level of autonomy that we’ve seen in the use of a large language model for cyber operations.”
Elsewhere in tech policy and science, STAT reported that visually impaired Europeans can now receive an implant that restores sight, with a U.S. timeline also in view. The New York Times reported that a bellwether lawsuit accusing Meta of social media addiction has been dropped, while more cases remain pending. 404 Media reported that ICE can obtain Americans’ address data through credit card and phone account records.
- The Verge reported that AI’s environmental costs need more scrutiny as data centers and GPU use grow.
- Bloomberg reported that Samsung, which plans smart glasses developed with Google this fall, says privacy problems around the devices need an industrywide response.
- Ars Technica reported that the U.S. Army has asked soldiers to limit AI use after burning through a year’s supply of AI tokens.
- Wired reported that lettuce keeps causing illness partly because many people eat it and it is not cooked.
- The Guardian argued that Pokémon Go remains a strong summer game because it is social and gets players outside.
MIT Technology Review also revisited THORChain, a crypto-swapping blockchain co-founded by Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen. The publication reported that users lost more than $200 million in cryptocurrency in January last year after transactions and accounts were frozen through an admin override, despite users believing that should not be possible in a decentralized system. It also reported that North Korean hackers used THORChain to move $1.2 billion in stolen ethereum. Thorbjornsen attributes those problems to the network’s decentralized, permissionless design.
This story draws on original reporting from MIT Technology Review.
