The Download: a new Christian phone network, and debugging LLMs

The Download: a new Christian phone network, and debugging LLMs Plus: Elon Musk has admitted that xAI trained Grok on OpenAI models. This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. A new US phone network for Christians aims to block porn and gender-related content A new US-wide cell phone network marketed to Christians is set to launch next week. It blocks porn using network-level controls that can’t be turned off—even by adult account owners. It’s also rolling out a filter on sexual content aimed at blocking material related to gender and trans issues, optional but turned on by default across all plans. The trouble is, many websites don’t fit neatly into one category. That leaves its maverick founder with broad, subjective control over what is allowed or banned. Read the full story. —James O'Donnell This startup’s new mechanistic interpretability tool lets you debug LLMs The San Francisco–based startup Goodfire has released a new tool, Silico, that lets researchers peer inside an AI model and adjust its parameters during training. It could give users more control over how this technology is built than was once thought possible. The goal is to make building AI models less like alchemy and more like a science. Using a technique called mechanistic interpretability, Silico maps the neurons and pathways inside a model and lets developers tweak them to reduce unwanted behaviors or steer outputs. By exposing the “knobs and dials,” Goodfire hopes to bring AI training closer to traditional software engineering. Read the full story. —Will Douglas Heaven With mass firing, Trump deals a fresh blow to American science This past week delivered another gut punch for science in the US. This time, the target was the National Science Foundation—a federal agency that funds major research projects to the tune of around $9 billion. On Friday, the 22 scientists overseeing those efforts were all fired. Since 2025, the NSF has faced budget cuts, grant terminations, and mass firings, with staff numbers down sharply and many ambitious projects grinding to a halt. The result is a major shift in how American science is funded and governed. Discover what it means, and what’s next. —Jessica Hamzelou This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. China’s open-source bet: 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now Silicon Valley AI companies follow a familiar playbook: keep the models behind an API and charge for access. China’s leading AI labs are playing a different game, releasing “open-weight” models that developers can download, adapt, and run on their own hardware. That approach went mainstream after DeepSeek open-sourced its R1 model, which matched top US systems at a fraction of the cost. It also won something subtler: goodwill with developers. A growing cohort of Chinese labs is now following the same blueprint. As AI…