The Download: coding’s future, the ‘Steroid Olympics,’ and AI-driven science

The Download: coding’s future, the ‘Steroid Olympics,’ and AI-driven science Plus: Trump has postponed an AI order due to overregulation fears. 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. Anthropic’s Code with Claude showed off coding’s future—whether you like it or not At Anthropic’s developer event in London this week, Code with Claude, attendees were asked if they’d shipped code written entirely by Claude. Almost half the room raised their hands. Many admitted they hadn’t even read the code before pushing it live. As tools like Claude Code get better, more and more developers are happy to hand their work off to AI. Anthropic says it wants to push automation as far as it will go. But not everyone is convinced that’s the right approach. Read the full story on how AI is reshaping coding for good. —Will Douglas Heaven The Enhanced Games fit right in with the rest of 2026’s longevity vibes This Sunday, 42 athletes will gather in Las Vegas for the inaugural Enhanced Games, a controversial sporting competition that allows the use of performance-enhancing drugs. The goal? To “push the boundaries of human performance.” The event embodies a zeitgeist of peptide-crazed looksmaxxing, where consumers are encouraged to get thinner than ever, optimize for longevity, and have their “best baby.” In 2026, if you’re not enhancing, what are you even doing? Find out how the competition reflects our enhancement-obsessed era. —Jessica Hamzelou This story is from The Checkup, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things biotech. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday. Google I/O showed how the path for AI-driven science is shifting —Grace Huckins During Tuesday’s Google I/O keynote, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, proclaimed that we are “standing in the foothills of the singularity.” But what struck me as I listened in the audience was the context in which he said those words. The contrast reflects two directions for AI in science. One builds specialized systems like WeatherNext for specific problems. The other pushes toward agentic, LLM-based systems that could eventually execute cutting-edge research projects without human involvement. The big scientific announcement at I/O was Gemini for Science, which leans further into this agent-driven future. It can still call on specialized systems, but Google appears to be transitioning away from them. Here’s how the shift could affect science. Can AI learn to understand the world? Many leading AI researchers have turned their attention to a new kind of system that understands the physical environment: world models. Backed by researchers at Google DeepMind, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, and Meta’s former Chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, the idea is gaining serious momentum. Could it change how AI understands reality? MIT Technology Review editor in chief Mat Honan, senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven, and AI reporter Grace Huckins unpacked it all in an exclusive Roundtables discussion yesterday. Subscribers can watch the full…