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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. Familiar tensions around Sam Altman OpenAI CEO Sam Altman voiced his support for Anthropic in its dispute with the Pentagon over the use of its AI for targeting autonomous weapons and in domestic mass surveillance. He did so in a company meeting and during a CNBC Squawk Box appearance last Friday, the day Anthropic was effectively blacklisted by the The President administration. But two days earlier, on Wednesday, Altman had reportedly already begun talking to the Pentagon abou…

Daylight savings time (DST) is just around the corner. This Sunday, March 8, the clocks will spring forward again, and with the change comes the ongoing conversation about, well—why are we doing this, anyway? According to an AP-NORC poll, only 12% of Americans favor DST, while 47% oppose it and 40% are neutral. In Canada’s British Columbia (BC) province, the government has finally decided to take matters into its own hands, and come this Sunday, daylight saving time (DST) will be permanent year-round. “This decision isn’t just about clocks. It’s about making life easier for families, reducing disruptions for businesses and supporting a stable, thriving economy,” B…

A defiant Elon Musk on Wednesday took the stand in a jury trial to defend himself against accusations that he engaged in a pattern of deceptive behavior that misled investors as he attempted to back out of his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter before he finally completed the takeover. The civil trial in San Francisco centers on a class-action lawsuit filed just before Musk took control of Twitter, a social media service he renamed X, in October 2022, six months after agreeing to buy the embattled company for $44 billion, or $54.20 per share. The price paid by the world’s richest man represents sliver of a fortune now estimated at $841 billion. The case, which represents T…

Just days after abandoning its planned Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition, Netflix is back with a very different kind of deal: The streaming giant has acquired InterPositive, a startup founded by actor and director Ben Affleck that is developing AI tools for filmmakers. InterPositive’s entire team will join Netflix as part of the acquisition, and Affleck himself will become an advisor to the streamer. Financial details of the deal weren’t disclosed. Affleck founded InterPositive in 2022 after realizing that existing AI video models weren’t ready to produce Hollywood-grade footage from scratch. “Together with a small team of engineers, researchers and creatives, I bega…

You’ve probably seen compounding making headlines recently, and not for the right reasons. From so-called “personalized” GLP-1s flooding the market to telehealth startups touting hormone “rebalancing” kits, compounding has become a buzzword for companies looking to shortcut regulation. Much of the scrutiny is justified; some companies exploit compounding to bypass evidence standards or chase fast revenue. But when compounding is grounded in rigorous data, fills a real market gap, and meets a clinical need, it can meaningfully accelerate access to therapies that would otherwise take years to reach patients. In women’s health, especially, it can bridge the gap between u…

In September 2025, the nation received its latest report card on 12th-grade math from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. These results should be a wake-up call for any American concerned about the future of education and workforce development in the United States. The findings showed that 78% of 12th graders were not proficient in mathematics, with more students than ever falling below the math proficiency benchmarks established by the National Center for Education Statistics. This widening skills gap signals serious trouble ahead for the American workforce. As the future of work becomes increasingly dependent on STEM skills, we are failing to equip millions…

Picture two scenes. In the first, a Swiss train pulls away at exactly 10:02 a.m. If you’re not on the platform, it’s already too late. Precision is respect. It always comes first. In the second, a family minibus idles with the engine running. Somebody’s cousin is late. “We can’t leave without him.” The whole group waits because relationships matter more than the clock. These two images capture what anthropologist Edward T. Hall described in the 1950s as monochronic and polychronic relationships to time. In monochronic cultures, time is linear and segmented. You do one thing at a time. You respect deadlines. You don’t interrupt. In polychronic cultures, by contrast, ti…

The job market is tough right now: AI résumé filters, the rise of ghost jobs, and waves of industry-wide layoffs. Many workers cling tightly to their jobs in this environment, a phenomenon known as “job hugging.” But a surprising number of mid-career millennials aren’t scrambling to avoid redundancy. Instead, they admit they’d prefer an external push out the door because the alternative—voluntarily navigating a chaotic job market—feels far too risky. And experts say it’s a trend that should leave the cohort right below millennials worried. A recent survey of 2,000 Gen Z and millennial workers in the US by online education platform ELVTR found that 37% of mill…

Stock trading platform Robinhood has announced its newest offering: the Robinhood Platinum Card. The upgraded option comes two years after the company unveiled its first credit card, the Gold Card. “We built the Gold Card to be the best card for everyday spending, and customer demand showed us there was room to push the boundaries even further,” Deepak Rao, the vice president and general manager of Robinhood Money, said in the announcement. “The Platinum Card offers higher limits, elite rewards and luxury benefits, and raises the bar for what customers should expect from a premium credit card.” Although you can request access, the new Platinum Card is invit…

Picture this: It’s lunchtime in the 1960s, and you’re out with co-workers enjoying not one, not two, but three cocktails with your meal. While the three-martini lunch seems improbable today, workplaces still can be boozy places. After-work happy hours, corporate parties and client meetings at fancy bars are still expected in many areas of American corporate culture. Talking about sobriety with managers and colleagues therefore can be daunting for people in recovery from alcohol addiction. Professionals in some industries fear being judged for needing help or missing out on career advancement opportunities if social drinking is encouraged as part of a job. Treatment pro…

Jurors in a bellwether trial about the impacts of social media on children watched a deposition of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday that explored what the architects of Facebook and Instagram knew from internal research about the negative experiences of young users and how the company responded. New Mexico’s attorney general alleges that Meta violated state consumer protection laws in failing to disclose what it knew about the dangers of addiction to social media as well as child sexual exploitation on the company’s platforms. Attorneys for Meta say the company discloses risks and makes efforts to weed out harmful content and experiences — acknowledging that some ba…

Late last month, frozen food manufacturer Ajinomoto Foods North America announced a recall of roughly 3 million pounds of not-ready-to-eat products after customers reported finding glass in rice. In the U.S., many of the recalled products were sold at Trader Joe’s locations. Now that the recall has been dramatically expanded, with new products being pulled from the shelves. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? On March 3, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) posted a recall notice announcing that Ajinomoto Foods North America was expanding its earlier recall to include an additional 33 million pounds of various ready-to-eat and not-re…

In January, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, announced that it would use its chatbot to develop an AI tutoring system for more than a million students in El Salvador. The announcement came on the heels of similar ones from OpenAI, which is connecting students in Kazakhstan with its ChatGPT Edu services, and from Microsoft, which is similarly equipping students and teachers in the United Arab Emirates with AI-based tools and training. While other countries are executing on national infrastructure projects for the AI era and treating it as an economic imperative, here in the United States, we can’t seem to move past a narrative of how AI makes it easier…

The Social Security Administration is rolling out some big changes to how it handles disability payments while also upgrading its customer service. The changes come in the aftermath of a major overhaul by DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, in 2025, which resulted in the layoffs of more than 7,000 workers. First, let’s take a look at disability payments. The new process aims to cut the time it takes to determine eligibility for Social Security, speed up the time it takes beneficiaries to receive their checks, and, according to the Washington Examiner, reduce the agency’s current backlog. The SSA had a backlog of claims that was on track to exc…

In the high-stakes world of revenue orchestration, a quiet but costly friction is slowing down deals. It isn’t market volatility or budget cuts—it’s a fundamental disconnect between the generations tasked with closing the sale. Steve Cox, CEO of the newly merged sales tech powerhouse SalesLoft and Clari, sat down with me recently to discuss a startling finding from their latest report: generational conflict is costing sales organizations an estimated $56 billion in lost productivity annually. That’s not a typo. Billion, with a B. “When Boomers hear ‘AI makes you faster,’ what they really hear is ‘You’re too slow,’” Cox explains. Meanwhile, 39% of Gen Z sellers pre…

There’s a new exercise trend making the rounds on the internet: Tai Chi walking, inspired by a centuries-old Chinese martial art that incorporates flowing hand and foot movements with breath and mindfulness. Also know as “meditation in motion” (and dubbed “medication in motion”), Tai Chi is a gentle form of exercise that has a number of reported health benefits, primarily strength, flexibility, and balance, and, to a lesser degree, aerobic conditioning, according to an article from Harvard Medical School. Without using weights or resistance bands, you can gain upper-body strength through arm exercises that use your core and back muscles in a similar way. Another s…

Raising venture capital for a physical-world company can feel harder than getting struck by lightning. You could be standing on a mountain for months, holding a metal pole in a storm, waiting. And you probably still wouldn’t get hit. Meanwhile, it can seem like founders in San Francisco announce a new AI round every other week. Capital moves quickly when you’re building software that rides the current hype cycle. If you’re building something that touches atoms instead of code, like manufacturing, energy, agriculture, or materials, you’re often grinding quietly. The timelines are longer. The checks are fewer. The rejections stack up. And pardon my French, but you get y…

On the northern outskirts of Beijing, massive holes in the earth bear the scars of what it’s taken to fuel the Chinese capital’s growth into a sprawling megacity that more than 22 million people call home. The site was a quarry that from 1990 to 2015 provided the raw material to help Beijing grow at hyperspeed, supplying everything from skyscrapers to roads to the main stadium built for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Last operated by Beijing Xingfa Cement Co., its closure left behind a negative space that is the inverse of the vertical urbanity of Beijing. Now, after nearly a decade of planning and design, the quarry’s rehabilitation into a striking and surreal 265-acre p…

It’s well known that artificial intelligence has driven skyrocketing demand for electrical power, computing hardware, and network connectivity at data centers. But AI has also quietly shifted how consumers use their home internet service. AT&T reports a recent boost in the share of data that customers upload through its network as they communicate with AI systems. “In 2025, customers’ upload traffic grew two times faster than download traffic,” says Jenifer Robertson, executive vice president and general manager for AT&T Mass Markets. “And that’s driven by AI use.” Historically, home internet use has centered on downloading data—accessing websites, scroll…

In 1994, Bernard Tschumi, then Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture in New York, launched an experiment that banned paper and hand drawings, requiring architecture students to use computers instead. Together with the rise of computer-aided programs, Tschumi’s “Paperless Studio” accelerated the profession’s embrace of digital tools and reshaped how architects conceived ideas. Now that AI has entered the picture, you’d be forgiven for thinking the architectural sketch as we know it is dead. Quite the opposite. “We are in a world that is now completely dominated by digital tools, but something strange is happening: The hand sketch is back,” says …

I may have just seen the biggest interface breakthrough in years. Or not. But I think so? Things are moving so fast that it’s hard to tell. Ryo Lu, head of design at the white-hot coding tool Cursor has invited me to their charcoal-hued San Francisco studio. Before anyone says hello, I’m greeted by a pile of footwear in the entry of the no-shoes open office. I suddenly regret my choice to wear my New Balance loafers without socks. The softspoken Lu, donning the creative-approved uniform of flowy wide-legged pants and a button down, weaves me through desks—past half a sports bar’s worth of uptime monitors and a shelf of knicknacks including a New Jeans record …

The numbers on a new patriotic Pennsylvania license plate were designed to be easy to read, but they’ve actually introduced a new point of confusion. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro announced the “Let Freedom Ring” specialty license plate last summer to promote the commonwealth’s role in America’s founding 250 years ago. The cream-colored plate depicts a dark blue Liberty Bell in the background, along with the previously mentioned slogan and commonwealth’s name in red. None of that is at issue, though: The problem is the style of the zero. The number has a slash through its counter to prevent confusion with the letter O. Now, however, Pennsylvania toll came…