Plus: Google, Microsoft, and Meta track users even when they opt out.

From inside a money-laundering center in Cambodia, an employee opens a popular Vietnamese banking app on his phone. The app asks him to upload a photo associated with the account, so he clicks on a picture of a 30-something Asian man.

Next, the app requests to open the camera for a video “liveness” check. The scammer holds up a static image of a woman bearing no resemblance to the man who owns the account. After a 90-second wait—as the app tells him to readjust the face inside the frame—he’s in. 

The exploit he’s demonstrating, in a video shared with me by a cyberscam researcher named Hieu Minh Ngo, is possible thanks to one of a growing range of illicit hacking services, readily available for purchase on Telegram, that are designed to break “Know Your Customer” (KYC) facial scans.

These banking and crypto safeguards are supposed to confirm that an account belongs to a real person, and that the user’s face matches the identity documents that were provided to open the account. But scammers are bypassing them in order to open mule accounts and launder money. Rather than using a live phone camera feed for a liveness check, the hacks typically deploy a tool known as a virtual camera. Users can replace the video stream with other videos or photos—depicting a real or deepfake person or even an object.

As financial institutions enact enhanced security measures aimed at stopping cyberscammers, these workarounds are the latest round in the cat-and-mouse game between criminal operators and the financial services industry.

Over the course of a two-month investigation earlier this year, MIT Technology Review identified 22 Chinese-, Vietnamese-, and English-language public Telegram channels and groups advertising bypass kits and stolen biometric data. The software kits use a variety of methods to compromise phone operating systems and banking applications, claiming to enable users to get around the compliance checks imposed by financial institutions ranging from major crypto exchanges such as Binance to name-brand banks like Spain’s BBVA. 

“Specializing in bank services—handling dirty money,” reads the since-deleted Telegram bio of the program used by the Cambodian launderer, complete with a thumbs-up emoji. “Secure. Professional. High quality.” Some of the channels and groups had thousands of subscribers or members, and many posted bullet points listing their services (“All kinds of KYC verification services”; “It’s all smooth and seamless”) alongside videos purporting to show successful hacks. 

Telegram says that after reviewing the accounts, it removed them for violating its terms of service. But such online marketplaces proliferate easily, and multiple channels and groups advertising similar tools remain active.

Banks and butchers

The rise in KYC bypasses has occurred alongside an expansion of a global industry in “pig-butchering” cyberscams. Crypto platforms and banks around the world are facing increasing scrutiny over the flow of illegally obtained money, including profits from such scams, through their platforms. This has prompted tightened banking regulations in countries such as Vietnam and Thailand, where governments have increased customer verification and fraud monitoring requirements and are pushing for stronger anti-money-laundering safeguards in the crypto industry.

Chainalysis, a US blockchain analysis firm, estimates that around $17 billion was stolen in 2025 in crypto scams and fraud, up from $13 billion in 2024. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, meanwhile, warned in a recent report that the expansion of Asian scam syndicates in Africa and the Pacific has helped the industry “dramatically scale up profits.”

That combination of factors—more scrutiny, but also more revenue—has vaulted KYC bypasses to the center of the online marketplace for cyberscam and casino money launderers. Although estimates vary, cybersecurity researchers say these kinds of attacks are rising: The biometrics verification company iProov estimated that virtual-camera attacks were more than 25 times as common worldwide 2024 than in 2023, while Sumsub, a company providing KYC services, reported that “sophisticated” or multi-step fraud attempts, including virtual-camera bypasses, almost tripled last year among its clients. 

Three financial institutions that were named as targets on such Telegram channels—the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, as well as BBVA and UK-based Revolut—told me they’re aware of such bypasses and emphasize that they’re an industry-wide challenge. A spokesperson from Binance said it has “observed attempts of this nature to circumvent our controls,” adding that “we have successfully prevented such attacks and remain confident in our systems.”  BBVA and Revolut also declined to comment on whether their safeguards had been breached.

It’s difficult to estimate success rates, because companies may not be aware of bypasses—or report them—until later. “What’s important is what we don’t see,” Artem Popov, Sumsub’s head of fraud prevention products, told me, referring to attacks that go undetected. “There’s always part of the story where it might be completely hidden from our eyes, and from the eyes of any company in the industry, using any type of KYC provider.”

How criminals navigate a compliance maze 

Advertisements for the exploits appear simple enough, but on the back end, building a successful bypass is complex and often involves multiple methods. Some channels offer to jailbreak a physical phone so that scammers can trigger the use of a virtual camera (VCam) instead of the built-in one whenever they’d like. Other hacks inject code known as a “hooking framework” into a financial institution’s app that triggers the VCam to open. Either way, VCams can be used to dupe KYC safeguards with images or videos that replace genuine, live video of the account’s owner.

Sergiy Yakymchuk, CEO of Talsec, a cybersecurity company that primarily serves financial institutions, reviewed details from the Telegram channels identified by MIT Technology Review and says they are consistent with successful tactics used against his banking and crypto clients. His team received help requests from banks and exchanges for roughly 30 VCam-based hacks over the past year, up from fewer than 10 in 2023. 

Increasingly, hackers compromise both the phone itself and the code of the financial institutions’ apps before feeding the virtual camera a mix of stolen biometrics and deepfakes, Yakymchuk says.

“Some time ago, it was enough to decompile the app of a bank and distribute this on Telegram, and that was everything you needed,” he says. “Now it’s not enough, because you have KYC—and more and more things are needed.”

For money launderers, KYC bypasses have “become essential for everything right now—because scam compounds need to move money,” says Ngo, the researcher who shared the demo video. A convicted former hacker who became a cybersecurity advisor for the Vietnamese government, Ngo now runs an anti-scam nonprofit and helps law enforcement investigate money laundering. 

He describes how the process works in the case of pig-butchering scams: Funds originating with victims are received into bank accounts controlled or rented by a money-laundering network, known colloquially as “water houses.” Money launderers use KYC bypasses to access the accounts and quickly redistribute the profits before converting them into digital assets—typically in the form of the stablecoin Tether, a type of cryptocurrency that is pegged to the US dollar.

These transactions often happen in seconds, under tightly orchestrated management. “They know, very clearly, the flow of how the banks verify or authenticate accounts,” Ngo says. 

A cat-and-mouse game 

The growth of cyberscam money laundering has led to heightened scrutiny of financial institutions. In 2023, Binance pleaded guilty in US federal courts to operating without anti-money-laundering safeguards. Donald Trump pardoned former Binance CEO Chaopeng Zhao last October.

Recent analysis from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found that after Zhao’s guilty plea, more than $400 million continued to move to Binance from Huione Group, a Cambodia-based firm that the US sanctioned after the Treasury Department deemed it a “critical node” for money laundering in pig-butchering scams.

Binance says it has “state-of-the-art security systems” that prevented billions in fraud losses and that the company processed more than 71,000 law enforcement requests in 2025.

But John Griffin, a finance and blockchain expert at the University of Texas at Austin, does not think the exchanges are sufficiently secure. “Even though they have all this press about ‘Oh, yes, we’ve changed this and that’—well, the proof is in the pudding. The criminals are still using your exchange,” Griffin told me of the industry at large. “So there must be holes.” (Binance says it “objects to the dubious findings” of Griffin’s work tracking the flow of criminal profits across exchanges like Binance, Huobi, OKX, and Tokenlon, calling it “misleading at best and, at worst, wildly inaccurate.”)

Binance also pointed out that some purported bypass services are themselves scams, casting doubt on whether successful bypasses are as widespread as the Telegram marketplace may suggest. Engaging with such services “exposes individuals to significant security risks,” a spokesperson said. “Even where access appears to be granted, accounts are often already restricted by internal detection and compliance controls, rendering them nonfunctional for trading or withdrawals.”

Regulators around the world are trying to catch up. In Thailand, where citizens’ bank accounts regularly serve as money mules for cyberscams based in neighboring Myanmar and Cambodia, new legislation has enhanced KYC monitoring, limited daily transactions, and strengthened oversight bodies’ ability to suspend accounts. The US money-laundering regulator, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, issued a warning against KYC deepfakes and the use of VCams in late 2024, encouraging platforms to track broader transaction patterns to identify money laundering.

For scammers, any new security or reporting requirements will make bypasses harder, but “it’s not going to stop them,” Ngo says. “It’s just a matter of time.”

For four days in February 2019, some 30 synthetic biologists and ethicists hunkered down at a conference center in Northern Virginia to brainstorm high-risk, cutting-­edge, irresistibly exciting ideas that the National Science Foundation should fund. By the end of the meeting, they’d landed on a compelling contender: making “mirror” bacteria. Should they come to be, the lab-created microbes would be structured and organized like ordinary bacteria, with one important exception: Key biological molecules like proteins, sugars, and lipids would be the mirror images of those found in nature. DNA, RNA, and many other components of living cells are chiral, which means they have a built-in rotational structure. Their mirrors would twist in the opposite direction. 

Researchers thrilled at the prospect. “Everybody—everybody—thought this was cool,” says John Glass, a synthetic biologist at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, California, who attended the 2019 workshop and is a pioneer in developing synthetic cells. It was “an incredibly difficult project that would tell us potentially new things about how to design and build cells, or about the origin of life on Earth.” The group saw enormous potential for medicine, too. Mirror microbes might be engineered as biological factories, producing mirror molecules that could form the basis for new kinds of drugs. In theory, such therapeutics could perform the same functions as their natural counterparts, but without triggering unwelcome immune responses. 

After the meeting, the biologists recommended NSF funding for a handful of research groups to develop tools and carry out preliminary experiments, the beginnings of a path through the looking glass. The excitement was global. The National Natural Science Foundation of China funded major projects in mirror biology, as did the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space.

By five years later, in 2024, many researchers involved in that NSF meeting had reversed course. They’d become convinced that in the worst of all possible futures, mirror organisms could trigger a catastrophic event threatening every form of life on Earth; they’d proliferate without predators and evade the immune defenses of people, plants, and animals. 

“I wish that one sunny afternoon we were having coffee and we realized the world’s about to end, but that’s not what happened.”

Kate Adamala, synthetic biologist, University of Minnesota

Over the past two years, they’ve been ringing alarm bells. They published an article in Science in December 2024, accompanied by a 299-page technical report addressing feasibility and risks. They’ve written essays and convened panels and cofounded the Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund (MBDF), a broadly funded nonprofit charged with supporting work on understanding and addressing the risk. The issue has received a blaze of media attention and ignited dialogues among not only chemists and synthetic biologists but also bioethicists and policymakers.  

What’s received less attention, however, is how we got here and what uncertainties still remain about any potential threat. Creating a mirror-life organism would be tremendously complicated and expensive. And although the scientific community is taking the alarm seriously, some scientists doubt whether it’s even possible to create a mirror organism anytime soon. “The hypothetical creation of mirror-­image organisms lies far beyond the reach of present-day science,” says Ting Zhu, a molecular biologist at Westlake University, in China, whose lab focuses on synthesizing mirror-image peptides and other molecules. He and others have urged colleagues not to let speculation and anxiety guide decision-making and argued that it’s premature to call for a broad moratorium on early-stage research, which they say could have medical benefits. 

But the researchers who are raising flags describe a pathway, even multiple pathways, to bringing mirror life into existence—and they say we urgently need guardrails to figure out what kinds of mirror-biology research might still be safe. That means they’re facing a question that others have encountered before, multiple times over the last several decades and with mixed results—one that doesn’t have a neat home in the scientific method. What should scientists do when they see the shadow of the end of the world in their own research? 

Looking-glass life

The French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur was the first to recognize that biological molecules had built-in handedness. In the late 19th century, he described all living species as “functions of cosmic asymmetry.” What would happen, he mused, if one could replace these chiral components with their mirror opposites? 

Scientists now recognize that chirality is central to life itself, though no one knows why. In humans, 19 of the 20 so-called “standard” amino acids that make up proteins are chiral, and all in the same way. (The outlier, glycine, is symmetrical.) The functions of proteins are intricately tied to their shapes, and they mostly interact with other molecules through chiral structures. Almost all receptors on the surface of a cell are chiral. During an infection, the immune system’s sentinels use chirality to detect and bind to antigens—substances that trigger an immune response—and to start the process of building antibodies. 

By the late 20th century, researchers had begun to explore the idea of reversing chirality. In 1992, one team reported having synthesized the first mirror-image protein. That, in turn, set off the first clarion call about the risk: In response to the discovery, chemists at Purdue University pointed out, briefly, that mirror-life organisms, if they escaped from a lab, would be immune to any attack by “normal” life. A 2010 story in Wired highlighting early findings in the area noted that if a such a microbe developed the ability to photosynthesize, it could obliterate life as we know it. 

The synthetic biology community didn’t seriously weigh those threats then, says David Relman, a specialist who bridges infectious disease and microbiology at Stanford University and a trailblazer in studying the gut and oral microbiomes. The idea of a mirror microbe seemed too far beyond the actual progress on proteins. “This was almost a solely theoretical argument 20 years ago,” he says. 

Now the research landscape has changed. 

Scientists are quickly making progress on mirror images of the machinery cells use to make proteins and to self-replicate. Those components include DNA, which encodes the recipes for proteins; DNA polymerases, which help copy genetic material; and RNA, which carries recipes to ribosomes, the cell’s protein factories. If researchers could make self-replicating mirror ribosomes, then they would have an efficient way to produce mirror proteins. That could be used as a biological manufacturing method for therapeutics. But embedded in a self-­replicating, metabolizing synthetic cell, all these pieces could give rise to a mirror microbe. 

When synthetic biologists convened in Northern Virginia in 2019, they didn’t recognize how quickly the technology was advancing, and if they saw a threat at all, it may have been obscured by the blinding appeal of pushing the science forward. What’s become apparent now, says Glass, is that scientists in different disciplines, all related to mirror life, were largely unaware of what other scientists had been doing. Chemists didn’t know that synthetic biologists had made so much progress on creating mirror cells with natural chirality from scratch. Biologists didn’t appreciate that chemists were building ever-larger mirror macromolecules. “We tend to be siloed,” Glass says. And nobody, he says, had thought to seriously examine the immune system concerns that had already been raised in response to earlier work. “There was not an immunologist or an infectious disease person in the room,” Glass says, reflecting on the 2019 meeting. “I may have come closest, given that I work with pathogenic bacteria and viruses,” he adds, but his work doesn’t address how they cause infections in their hosts.

These scientists also didn’t know that around the same time as their meeting, another conversation about mirror life was happening—a darker dialogue that was as focused on danger as it was on discovery. Starting around 2016, researchers with a nonprofit called Open Philanthropy had begun compiling research files on catastrophic biological risks. The organization, which rebranded as Coefficient Giving in 2025, funds projects across a range of focus areas; it adheres to a divisive philanthropic philosophy called effective altruism, which advocates giving money to projects with the highest potential benefit to the most people. While that might not sound objectionable, critics point out that the metrics devotees use to gauge “effectiveness” can prioritize long-term solutions while neglecting social injustices or systemic problems. 

Someone in Open Philanthropy’s bio­security group had suggested looking into the risks posed by mirror life. In 2019 the organization began funding research by Kevin Esvelt, who leads the Sculpting Evolution group at the MIT Media Lab, on biosecurity issues, including mirror life. He began reading up to see whether mirror life was something to worry about.

Esvelt made waves in 2013 for pioneering the use of CRISPR to develop a gene drive, a technology that could spread genetic changes introduced into a living organism through a whole population. Researchers are exploring its use, for example, to make mosquitoes hostile to the parasite that causes malaria—and, as a result, lower their chance of spreading it to humans. But almost immediately after he developed the tool, Esvelt argued against using it for profit, at least until proper safeguards could be set and its use in fighting malaria had been established. “Do you really have the right to run an experiment where if you screw up, it affects the whole world?” he asked, in this magazine, in 2016. At the Media Lab, Esvelt leads efforts to safely develop gene drives that can be deployed locally but prevented from spreading globally. 

Esvelt says he’s often thinking about the security risks posed by self-sustaining genetically engineered technologies, and research led him to suspect that the threat of mirror organisms hadn’t been seriously interrogated. The more he learned about microbial growth rates, predator-prey and microbe-microbe interactions, and immunology, the more he began to worry that mirror organisms, if impervious to the innate defenses of natural ones, could cause unstoppable infections in the event that they escaped the lab. 

Even if the first experimental iteration of such a germ were too fragile to survive in the environment or a human body, Esvelt says, it would be a light lift to genetically engineer new, more resilient versions with existing technology. Even worse, he says, the results could be weaponized. The possible path from 2019 to global annihilation seemed almost too direct, he found. 

But he wasn’t an expert in all the scientific fields involved in research on mirror life, so he started making calls. He first described his concerns to Relman one night in February 2022, at a restaurant outside Washington, DC. Esvelt hoped Relman would tell him he was wrong, that he’d missed something over the years of gathering data. Instead, he was troubled. 

The concern spreads

When Relman returned to California, he read more about the technology, the risks, and the role of chirality in the immune system and the environment. And he consulted experts he knew well—ecologists, other microbiologists, immunologists, all of them leaders in their fields—in an attempt to assuage his concerns. “I was hoping that they’d be able to say, I’ve thought about this, and I see a problem with your logic. I see that it’s really not so bad,” he says. “At every turn, that did not happen. Something about it was new to every person.” 

The concern spread. Relman worked with Jack Szostak, a professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago, and a group of researchers to see if it was possible to make an argument that mirror life wasn’t going to wipe out humanity. Included in that group was Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota. She was a natural choice: Adamala had shared the initial grant from the NSF, in 2019, to explore mirror-life technologies. 

She also became convinced the risk was real—and was dumbfounded that she hadn’t seen it earlier. “I wish that one sunny afternoon we were having coffee and we realized the world’s about to end, but that’s not what happened,” she says. “I’m embarrassed to admit that I wasn’t even the one that brought up the risks first.” Through late 2023 and early 2024, the endeavor began to take on the form of a rigorous scientific investigation. Experts were presented with a hypothesis—namely, that if mirror cells were built, they would pose an existential threat—and asked to challenge it. The goal was to falsify the hypothesis. “It would be great if we were wrong,” says Vaughn Cooper, a microbiologist at the University of Pittsburgh and president-elect of the American Society for Microbiology. 

Relman says that as the chemists and biologists learned more about one another’s work and began to understand what immunologists know about how living things defend themselves, they started to connect the dots and see an emerging picture of an unstoppable synthetic threat.

Some scientists have pushed back against the doomsday scenario, suggesting that the case against mirror life offers an “inflated view of the danger.”

Timothy Hand, an immunologist at the University of Pittsburgh who hadn’t participated in the 2019 NSF meeting, wasn’t initially worried when he heard about mirror life, in 2024. “The mammalian immune system has this incredible capability to make antibodies against any shape,” he says. “Who cares if it’s a mirror?” But when he took a closer look at that process, he could see a cascade of potential problems far upstream of antibody production. Start with detection: Macrophages, which are cells the immune system uses to identify and dispatch invaders, use chiral sensing receptors on their surfaces. The proteins they use to grab on to those invaders, too, are chiral. That suggests the possibility that an organism could be infected with a mirror organism but not be able to detect it or defend against it. “The lack of innate immune sensing is an incredibly dangerous circumstance for the host,” Hand says.

By early 2024, Glass had become concerned as well. Relman and James Wagstaff, a structural biologist from Open Philanthropy, visited him at the Venter Institute to talk about the possibility of using synthetic cell technology—Glass’s specialty—to build mirror life. “At first I thought, This can’t be real,” Glass says. They walked through arguments and counterarguments. “The more this went on, the more I started feeling ill,” he says. “It made me realize that work I had been doing for much of the last 20 years could be setting the world up for this incredible catastrophe.” 

In the second half of 2024, the growing group of scientists assembled the report and wrote the policy forum for Science. Relman briefed policymakers at the White House and members of the national security community. Researchers met with the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. “We briefed the United Nations, the UK government, the government of Singapore, scientific funding organizations from Brazil,” says Glass. “We’ve talked to the Chinese government indirectly. We were trying to not blindside anybody.” 

A year and a half on, the push has had an impact. UNESCO has recommended a precautionary global moratorium on creating mirror-life cells, and major philanthropic organizations that fund science, including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, have announced they will not finance research leading to a mirror microorganism. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists highlighted considerations about mirror life in its most recent report on the Doomsday Clock. In March, the United Nations Secretary-General’s Scientific Advisory Board issued a brief highlighting the risks—noting, for example, that recent progress on building mirror molecules could reduce the cost of creating a mirror microbe. 

“I think no one really believes at this stage that we should make mirror life, based on the evidence that’s available,” says James Smith, the scientist who leads the MBDF, the nonprofit focused on assessing the risks of mirror life, which is funded by Coefficient Giving, the Sloan Foundation, and other organizations. The challenge now, Smith says, is for scientists to work with policymakers and bioethicists to figure out how much research on mirror life should be permitted—and who will enforce the rules.

Drawing the line

Not everyone is convinced that mirror organisms pose an existential threat. It’s difficult to verify predictions about how mirror microbes would fare in the immune system—or the larger world—without running experiments on them. Some scientists have pushed back against the doomsday scenario, suggesting that the case against mirror life offers an “inflated view of the danger.” Others have noted that carbohydrates called glycans already exist in both left- and right-handed forms—even in pathogens—and the immune system can recognize both of them. Experiments focused on interactions between the immune system and mirror molecules, they say, could help clarify the risks of mirror organisms and reduce uncertainty. 

Even among those convinced that the worst-case scenario is possible, researchers still disagree over where to draw the line. What inquiries should be allowed and what should be prohibited?

Andy Ellington, a biotechnologist and synthetic biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, doesn’t think mirror organisms will come to fruition anytime soon. Even if they do, he isn’t sure they will pose a threat. “If there is going to be harm done to the human race, this is about position 382 on my list,” he says. But at the same time, he says it’s a complicated issue worth studying more, and he wants to see the conversations continue: “We’re operating in a space where there’s so much unknown that it’s very difficult for us to do risk assessment.” 

Even among those convinced that the worst-case scenario is possible, researchers still disagree over where to draw the line. What inquiries should be allowed and what should be prohibited? 

Adamala, of the University of Minnesota, and others see a natural line at ribosomes, the cellular factories that transform chains of amino acids into proteins. These would be a critical ingredient in creating a self-replicating organism, and Adamala says the path to getting there once mirror ribosomes are in place would be pretty straightforward. But Zhu, at Westlake, and others counter that it’s worth developing mirror ribosomes because they could possibly produce medically useful peptides and proteins more efficiently than traditional chemical methods. He sees a clear distinction, and a foundational gap, between that kind of technology and the creation of a living synthetic organism. “It is crucial to distinguish mirror-image molecular biology from mirror-image life,” he says. That said, he points out that many synthetic molecules and organisms containing unnatural components, including but not limited to the mirror-image subset, might pose health risks. Researchers, he says, should focus on developing holistic guidelines to cover such risks—not just those from mirror molecules. 

Even if the exact risk remains uncertain, Esvelt remains more convinced than ever that the work should be paused, perhaps indefinitely. No one has taken a meaningful swing at the hypothesis that mirror life could wipe out everything, he says. The primary uncertainties aren’t around whether mirror life is dangerous, he points out; they have more to do with identifying which bacterium—including what genes it encodes, what it eats, how it evades the immune system’s sentinels—could lead to the most serious consequences. “The risk of losing everything, like the entire future of humanity integrated over time, is not worth any small fraction of the economy. You just don’t muck around with existential risk like that,” he says. 

In some ways, scientists have been here before, working out rules and limits for research. Two years after the start of the covid-19 pandemic, for example, the World Health Organization published guidelines for managing risks in biological research. But the history is much deeper: Horrific episodes of human experimentation led to the establishment of institutional review boards to provide ethical oversight. In the early 1970s, in response to concerns over lab-acquired infections and growing use of biological warfare, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention established biohazard safety levels (BSLs), which govern work on potentially dangerous biological experiments.

And in 1975—at the dawn of recombinant DNA research, which allows researchers to put genetic material from one organism into another—geneticists met at the Asilomar conference center in Pacific Grove, California, to hammer out rules governing the work. There were concerns over what would happen if some virus or bacterium, genetically engineered to have traits that would make it particularly dangerous for people, escaped from a lab. Scientists agreed to self-imposed restrictions, like a moratorium on research until new safety guidelines were in place. As a result of the meeting, in June 1976 the NIH issued rules that, among other things, categorized the risks associated with rDNA experiments and aligned them with the newly adopted BSL system.

Asilomar is often hailed as a successful model for scientific self-governance. But that perception reflects a tendency to recall the meeting through a nostalgic haze. “In fact, it was incredibly messy and human,” says Luis Campos, a historian of science at Rice University. Equally brilliant Nobelists argued on either side of the question of whether to rein in rDNA research. Technical discussions dominated; talks about who would be affected by the technology were missing. The meeting didn’t start establishing guidelines, says Campos, until the lawyers mentioned liability and lab leaks. 

For now it’s unclear whether these examples of self-­governance, which arose from the demonstrated risks of existing technologies, hold useful lessons for the mirror-life community. Three competing images of the future are coming into focus: Mirror life might not be possible, it might be possible but not threatening, or it might be possible and capable of obliterating all life on Earth. 

Scientists may be censoring themselves out of fear and speculation. To some, shutting down the work seems necessary and urgent; to others, it is unnecessarily limiting. What’s clear is that the question of what to do about mirror life has been both illuminating and disorienting, pushing scientists to interrogate not only their current research but where it might lead. This is uncharted territory. 

Stephen Ornes is a science writer based in Nashville, Tennessee.

Correction (April 15): An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that David Relman briefed the National Security Agency. Relman says he briefed members of the national security community.

The practice of privacy-led user experience (UX) is a design philosophy that treats transparency around data collection and usage as an integral part of the customer relationship. An undertapped opportunity in digital marketing, privacy-led UX treats user consent not as a tick-box compliance exercise, but rather as the first overture in an ongoing customer relationship. For the companies that get it right, the payoff can bring something more intangible, valuable, and durable than simple consent rates: consumer trust.

The opportunities of privacy-led UX have only recently come into focus. Adelina Peltea, the chief marketing officer at Usercentrics, has seen enterprise sentiment shift: “Even just a few years ago, this space was viewed more as a trade-off between growth and compliance,” she says. “But as the market has matured, there’s been a greater focus on how to tie well-designed privacy experiences to business growth.”

And it turns out that well-designed, value-forward consent experiences routinely outperform initial estimates.
Touchpoints for privacy-led UX often include consent management platforms, terms and conditions, privacy policies, data subject access request (DSAR) tools, and, increasingly, AI data use disclosures.

This report examines how data transparency builds trust with customers; how this, in turn, can support business performance; and how organizations can maintain this trust even as AI systems add complexity to consent processes.

Key findings include the following:

• Privacy is evolving from a one-time consent transaction into an ongoing data relationship. Rather than asking users for broad permissions up front, leading organizations are introducing data-sharing decisions gradually, matching the depth of the ask to the stage of the customer relationship. Companies that take this tack tend to gather both a larger quantity and higher quality of consumer data, the value of which often compounds over time.
• Privacy-led UX is a prerequisite for AI growth. The consumer data that organizations gather is rapidly becoming a core foundation upon which AI-powered personalization is built. Organizations that establish clear, enforceable privacy and data transparency policies now are better positioned to deploy AI responsibly and at scale in the future. This starts with correctly configured consent mode across ad platforms.
• Agentic AI introduces new levels of both complexity and opportunity. As AI systems begin acting on users’ behalf, the traditional consent moment may never occur. Governing agent-generated data flows requires privacy infrastructure that goes well beyond the cookie banner.
• Realizing the advantages of privacy-led UX requires cross-functional collaboration and clear leadership. Privacy-led UX touches marketing, product, legal, and data teams—but someone must own the strategy and weave the threads together. Chief marketing officers
• (CMOs) are often best positioned for that role, given their visibility across brand, data, and customer experience.
• A practical framework can support businesses in getting it right. Organizations must define their data collection and usage strategies and ensure their UX incorporates data consent, including a focus on banner design. Following a blueprint for evaluating and improving privacy-led UX supports consistency at every consent touchpoint.

Download the report.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.

This report, which is based on a survey of 300 engineering and technology executives, finds that software engineering teams are seeing the potential in agentic AI and are beginning to put it to use, but so far in a mainly limited fashion. Their ambitions for it are high, but most realize it will take time and effort to reduce the barriers to its full diffusion in software operations. As with DevOps and agile, reaping the full benefits of agentic AI in engineering will require sometimes difficult organizational and process change to accompany technology adoption. But the gains to be won in speed, efficiency, and quality promise to make any such pain well worthwhile.

Key findings include the following:

Adoption momentum is building. While half of organizations deem agentic AI a top investment priority for software engineering today, it will be a leading investment for over four-fifths in two years. That spending is driving accelerated adoption. Agentic AI is in (mostly limited) use by 51% of software teams today, and 45% have plans to adopt it within the next 12 months.

Early gains will be incremental. It will take time for software teams’ investments in agentic AI to start bearing fruit. Over the next two years, most expect the improvements from agent use to be slight (14%) or at best moderate (52%). But around one-third (32%) have higher expectations, and 9% think the improvements will be game changing.

Agents will accelerate time-to-market. The chief gains from agentic AI use over that two-year time frame will come from greater speed. Nearly all respondents (98%) expect their teams’ delivery of software projects from pilot to production to accelerate, with the anticipated increase in speed averaging 37% across the group.

The goal for most is full agentic lifecycle management. Teams’ ambitions for scaling agentic AI are high. Most aim for AI agents to be managing the product development and software development lifecycles (PDLC and SDLC) end to end relatively quickly. At 41% of organizations, teams aim to achieve this for most or all products in 18 months. That figure will rise to 72% two years from now, if expectations are met.

Compute costs and integration pose key early challenges. For all survey respondents—but especially in early-adopter verticals such as media and entertainment and technology hardware—integrating agents with existing applications and the cost of computing resources are the main challenges they face with agentic AI in software engineering. The experts we interviewed, meanwhile, emphasize the bigger change management difficulties teams will face in changing workflows.

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This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.

Plus: human scientists still trounce the top AI agents at complex tasks.

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.

Just before Artemis II began its historic slingshot around the moon, Jared Isaacman, the recently confirmed NASA administrator, made a flurry of announcements from the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC. He said the US would soon undertake far more regular moon missions and establish the foundations for a base at the lunar south pole before the end of the decade. He also affirmed the space agency’s commitment to putting a nuclear reactor on the lunar surface.

These goals were largely expected—but there was still one surprise. Isaacman also said NASA would build the first-ever nuclear reactor-powered interplanetary spacecraft and fly it to Mars by the end of 2028. It’s called the Space Reactor-1 Freedom, or SR-1 for short. “After decades of study, and billions spent on concepts that have never left Earth, America will finally get underway on nuclear power in space,” he said at the event. “We will launch the first-of-its-kind interplanetary mission.”

A successful mission would herald a new era in spaceflight, one in which traveling between Earth, the moon, and Mars would—according to a range of experts—be faster and easier than ever. And it might just give the US the edge in the race against China—allowing the country to beat its greatest geopolitical rival to landing astronauts on another planet.

While experts agree the timeline is extremely tight, they’re excited to see if America’s space agency and its industry partners can deliver an engineering miracle. “You wake up to that announcement, and it puts a big smile on your face,” says Simon Middleburgh, co-director of the Nuclear Futures Institute at Bangor University in Wales.

Little detail on SR-1 is publicly available, and NASA’s own spaceflight researchers did not respond to requests for comment. But MIT Technology Review spoke to several nuclear power and propulsion experts to find out how the new nuclear-powered spacecraft might work.

Nuclear propulsion 101

Traditionally, spaceflight has been powered by chemical propulsion. Liquefied hydrogen and liquefied oxygen are mixed, and then ignited, within a rocket; the searingly hot exhaust from this explosion is ejected through a nozzle, which propels the rocket forth.

Chemical propulsion offers a significant amount of thrust and will, for the foreseeable future, still be used to launch spacecraft from Earth. But nuclear propulsion would enable spacecraft to fly through the solar system for far longer, and faster, than is currently possible. 

“You get more bang per kilogram,” says Middleburgh. A nuclear fuel source is far more energy-dense than its conventional cousin, which means it’s orders of magnitude more efficient. “It’s really, really, really high efficiency,” says Lindsey Holmes, an expert in space nuclear technology and the vice president of advanced projects at Analytical Mechanics Associates, an aerospace company in Virginia. 

The approach also removes one other element of the traditional power equation: solar. Spacecraft, including the Artemis II mission’s Orion space capsule, often rely on the sun for power. But this can be a problem, since it doesn’t always shine in space, particularly when a planet or moon gets in its way—and as you head toward the outer solar system, beyond Mars, there’s just less sunlight available. 

To circumvent this issue, nuclear energy sources have been used in spacecraft plenty of times before—including on both Voyager missions and the Saturn-interrogating Cassini probe. Known as radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs, these use plutonium, which radioactively decays and generates heat in the process. That heat is then converted into electricity for the spacecraft to use. RTGs, however, aren’t the same as nuclear reactors; they are more akin to radioactive batteries—more rudimentary and considerably less powerful.

So how will a nuclear-reactor-powered spacecraft work? 

Despite operational differences, the fundamentals of running a nuclear reactor in space are much the same as they are on Earth. First, get some uranium fuel; then bombard it with neutrons. This ruptures the uranium’s unstable atomic nuclei, which expel a torrent of extra neutrons—and that rapidly escalates into a self-sustaining, roasting-hot nuclear fission reaction. Its prodigious heat output can then be used to produce electricity.

Doing this in space may sound like an act of lunacy, but it’s not: The idea, and even a lot of the basic technology, has been around for decades. The Soviet Union sent dozens of nuclear reactors into orbit (often to power spy satellites), while the US deployed just one, known as SNAP-10A, back in 1965—a technological demonstration to see if it would operate normally in space. The aim was for the reactor to generate electricity for at least a year, but it ran for just over a month before a high-voltage failure in the spacecraft caused it to malfunction and shut down. 

Now, more than half a century later, the US wants its second-ever space-based nuclear reactor to do something totally different: power an interplanetary spacecraft.

To be clear, the US has started, and terminated, myriad programs looking into nuclear propulsion. The latest casualty was DRACO, a collaboration between NASA and the Department of Defense, which ended in 2025. Like several previous efforts, DRACO was canceled because of a mix of high experimentation costs, lower prices for conventional rocket propulsion, and the difficulty of ensuring that ground tests could be performed safely and effectively (they are creating an incredibly powerful nuclear reaction, after all).

But now external considerations may be changing the calculus. The Artemis program has jump-started America’s return to the moon, and the new space race has palpable momentum behind it. The first nation to deploy nuclear propulsion would have a serious advantage navigating through deep space. 

“I think it’s a very doable technology,” says Philip Metzger, a spaceflight engineering researcher at the Florida Space Institute. “I’m happy to see them finally doing this.”

One version of this technology is known as nuclear thermal propulsion, or NTP. You start with a nuclear reactor, one that’s cooking at around 5,000°F. Then “you’ve got a cold gas, and you squirt cold gas over the hot reactor,” says Middleburgh. “The gas expands, you shoot it out the back of a nozzle, and you have an impulse. And that impulse drives you forward.” 

Because the thrust depends on the speed of the gas being ejected, the propellant gas needs to be light, making hydrogen a popular choice. But hydrogen is a corrosive and explosive substance, so using it in NTP engines can make them precarious to operate. On top of this, NTP doesn’t necessarily have a very long operating life.

Alternatively, there’s nuclear electric propulsion, or NEP, which “is very low thrust, but very efficient, so you can use it for a long period of time,” says Sebastian Corbisiero, the US Department of Energy’s national technical director of space reactor programs. This method uses heat from a fission reactor to generate power. That power is used to electrify a gas and then  blast it out of the spacecraft, generating thrust.  

Both NTP and NEP have been investigated by US researchers, because both have the added benefit of making it easier and safer for human beings to explore the solar system. Astronauts in space are exposed to harmful cosmic radiation, but because nuclear propulsion makes spacecraft speedier and more agile, they’d spend less time in it. “It solves the radiation problem,” says Metzger. “That’s one of the main motivations for inventing better propulsion to and from Mars.”

How to build a nuclear-powered spaceship

For SR-1, NASA has opted for nuclear electric propulsion. NEP is “a much simpler affair” than its thermal counterpart, says Middleburgh. Essentially, you just need to plug a nuclear reactor into a power-and-propulsion system. Luckily for NASA, it’s already got one.

For many years, NASA—along with its space agency partners in Canada, Europe, Japan, and the Middle East—was preparing for Gateway, meant to be humanity’s first space station to orbit around the moon. Isaacman canceled the project in March, but that doesn’t mean its technology will go to waste; the power-and-propulsion element of the nixed space station will be used in SR-1 instead. This contraption was going to be powered by solar energy. It’ll now be attached to an in-development nuclear reactor custom built to survive in space.

What might the SR-1 look like? MIT Technology Review saw a presentation by Steve Sinacore, program executive of NASA’s Space Reactor Office, that offers some clues. So far, the concept art makes it look like a colossal fletched arrow. At the back will be the power-and-propulsion system, while its tip will hold a 20-kilowatt-or-greater uranium-filled nuclear reactor. (For context, a typical nuclear plant on Earth is 50,000 times more powerful, producing a gigawatt of power.) 

The “fletches” on SR-1 are large fins that allow the reactor to cool down. “You have to have really large radiators,” says Holmes, since the nuclear fission process produces so much heat that much of it has to be vented into space—otherwise, the reactor and spacecraft will melt.

According to that presentation, the spacecraft’s hardware development is due to start this June. By January 2028, SR-1’s systems should be ready for assembly and testing. And by that October, the spacecraft will arrive at the launch site, ready for liftoff before the year’s end. Will the nuclear reactor manage to hold itself together? “Going through the launch safely is going to be a challenge,” says Middleburgh. “You are being shaken, rattled, and rolled.” 

Then, he says, “once you’re up in space, once you’ve got through that few minutes of hell in getting there, it’s zero-gravity considerations you have to worry about.” The question then becomes: Will the mechanics of the reactor, built on terra firma, still work? 

For safety reasons, the nuclear reactor will be switched on around two days post-launch, when it’s comfortably in space. Uranium isn’t tremendously dangerous by itself, but that can’t be said of the nuclear waste products that emerge when the reactor is activated, so you don’t want any of that to fall back to Earth. 

If this schedule is adhered to, and SR-1 works as planned, it’s expected to reach Mars about a year after launch. “It’s an aggressive timeline,” says Holmes, something she suspects is being driven partly by China’s and Russia’s own deep-space nuclear ambitions. The two countries aim to place their own nuclear reactor on the moon’s surface to power the planned International Lunar Research Station—a jointly operated lunar base—by 2035. 

Whether it flies or fails in space, SR-1’s operations should help NASA with putting a nuclear reactor on the moon soon after. “All of the things we’d be learning about how that system operates in space [are] very helpful for a surface application, because basically it’s the same,” says Corbisiero. “There’s still no air on the moon.”

And if SR-1 does triumph, it will be a game-changing victory for NASA. It will also be “a massive win for the human race, frankly,” says Middleburgh. “It will be a marvel of engineering, and it will move the dial in humans potentially taking a step on Mars.” Like many of his colleagues, including Holmes, he remains thrilled by the prospect of the first-ever nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft—even with the incredibly ambitious timeline. 

“These are the things that get us up in the morning,” he says. “These are the sorts of things we will remember when we’re old.”

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Sur un continent où des millions de personnes restent exclues de l’accès à une technologie de qualité, Maguelone Biau et Kadia Faye font le pari que la solution ne réside pas dans des appareils neufs moins chers, mais dans une seconde vie donnée aux meilleurs. Leur startup, Sikili, vend des smartphones et appareils électroniques reconditionnés certifiés à Abidjan et Dakar : iPhone, Samsung, MacBook, testés sur 65 points de contrôle, couverts par une garantie de 12 mois et livrés en 48 heures. Jusqu’à 40% moins chers que le neuf. Avec un SAV local. Sans mauvaise surprise.

En Afrique francophone, le taux de pénétration des smartphones varie de bien moins de 20 % de la population dans les pays les plus pauvres et fragiles à environ 45 à 60 %, voire plus, sur les principaux marchés tels que le Sénégal, la Côte d’Ivoire et le Cameroun. 

L’adoption des smartphones est freinée par des contraintes financières. En 2024, la GSMA estimait qu’un smartphone d’entrée de gamme coûtait environ 26 % du revenu mensuel moyen en Afrique subsaharienne (y compris les pays francophones), à quoi s’ajoutent des prix élevés pour les données, des taxes, de faibles revenus et un important fossé d’utilisation : la majorité des personnes qui vivent déjà dans une zone couverte par le haut débit mobile n’utilisent toujours pas l’Internet mobile parce qu’elles ne possèdent pas de smartphone, n’ont pas les moyens de se connecter ou ne disposent pas des compétences nécessaires et ne perçoivent pas le besoin d’aller sur Internet.

Sikili est plus qu’un projet commercial. C’est un premier argument concret pour ce que pourrait être l’économie circulaire en Afrique de l’Ouest, et l’histoire de deux femmes qui ont choisi de la construire ensemble, sur deux pays, à partir de rien.

Nous avons discuté avec Biau et Faye afin de mieux comprendre les défis auxquels ils sont confrontés pour s’implanter sur les marchés africains francophones, ainsi que ce qu’il faut pour développer une entreprise de reconditionnement qui inspire confiance sur des marchés où la logistique est inégale, la confiance des consommateurs fragile, et où il est tout aussi difficile d’augmenter l’offre que de trouver une demande.

Parlons des technologies grand public.

Maguelone Biau est franco-ivoirienne. Elle est arrivée en Côte d’Ivoire après une carrière en France, et n’est jamais repartie. 

“Je me sentais bien ici et j’y suis restée,” dit-elle. “Mes amis sont principalement ivoiriens ou d’Afrique de l’Ouest. Ma vie est ici.” 

Après neuf ans à Abidjan—avec des passages au Ghana, en Ouganda et au Sénégal—elle avait déjà lancé une première startup qui n’a pas abouti. 

Plutôt que de baisser les bras, elle a utilisé les fonds restants de ses premiers investisseurs pour chercher méthodiquement une nouvelle idée. 

“J’ai eu le luxe de chercher quelque chose de nouveau,’ dit-elle. “J’ai pris toutes les industries, toutes les opportunités, en regardant aussi ce qu’il y avait ailleurs.” 

Le reconditionné connaissait un essor mondial, surtout en Amérique latine, en Asie, et commençait à émerger en Afrique de l’Est. Le vide en Afrique de l’Ouest était évident.

Le parcours de Kadia Faye est différent. Sénégalaise, avec près d’une décennie chez Philip Morris, Samsung puis Canon sur des marchés allant de l’île Maurice à l’Afrique de l’Ouest, elle avait développé une expertise solide en retail, B2B et marketing, exactement la force commerciale dont Sikili aurait besoin. 

Mais au moment où elle croise la route de Maguelone, elle se posait de grandes questions sur sa carrière. 

“L’entrepreneuriat était dans ma tête mais je ne pensais pas que ça allait arriver aussi tôt,” avoue-t-elle. “Je pensais que ça allait se faire d’ici 5 ou 10 ans.”

La mise en relation s’est faite par un contact commun, un investisseur de la première aventure de Maguelone qui connaissait Faye. Leur première conversation a duré 45 minutes. 

“Ça fait vraiment matchmaking,” se souvient Faye en riant. “C’était assez fluide, on semblait assez aligné sur certaines choses.” 

S’en sont suivis des appels d’une heure par semaine, pendant des mois, alors que Faye était encore chez Canon et que Maguelone construisait à temps plein.

Ce qui a tout scellé, c’est un voyage. Faye s’est rendue à Abidjan pour un événement Canon, c’était la première fois qu’elle rencontrait Maguelone en personne. 

Elle en est repartie avec deux certitudes : Canon n’était pas son avenir, et Maguelone l’était. 

“Quand elle a officiellement fait sa demande—’Est-ce que tu serais prête à me rejoindre à 100%?’—j’avais déjà pris ma décision,” dit-elle. Elle a remis sa démission chez Canon à son retour à Dakar.

Pourquoi le choix du co-fondateur est décisif

L’histoire de Sikili est, en grande partie, une histoire sur la puissance de choisir le bon partenaire, et aucune des deux fondatrices ne s’en cache. 

“Je ne savais pas que je ferais de l’entrepreneuriat et je doute que j’aurais pu le faire en Europe,” dit Biau. 

Mais elle est tout aussi claire sur le fait qu’elle n’aurait pas construit Sikili seule. Ce qui l’a convaincue chez Faye, ce n’était pas uniquement les compétences, c’était le caractère. 

“Ce qui m’a convaincu chez Faye, c’est sa constance. C’est quelqu’un qui a une force de caractère qui fait que c’est toujours agréable de travailler avec elle. On a réussi à la fois à développer un fort lien amical tout en restant pro,” dit Biau.

La complémentarité était naturelle, mais a nécessité une intentionnalité sur les rôles. 

Biau, initialement prévue sur la supply chain, a migré vers les relations avec les investisseurs, la finance et les opérations, des compétences qu’elle a développées organiquement. 

Faye, avec son ADN commercial de Samsung et son sens du relationnel, a pris le lead sur la distribution et les partenariats. 

“Naturellement, des choses se dessinent,” dit Biau. “Il faut capitaliser sur la complémentarité.”

Elles ont aussi mis en place un mécanisme de gouvernance pour éviter les blocages : chaque co-fondatrice a le dernier mot dans son domaine. 

“Si Kadia a la distribution, et si j’ai un avis qui n’est pas le sien, c’est elle qui est décisionnaire,” explique Biau. “On n’est jamais allé au clash.” 

Pour Faye, cet alignement va plus loin que le processus. “On n’est pas complémentaires pour rien,” dit-elle simplement.

Pour quiconque construit une startup, le sous-texte est important : la première aventure de Maguelone a trébuché, en partie, parce qu’elle naviguait en territoire inconnu sans repère. Sikili a réussi à décoller, en partie, parce qu’elles se sont trouvées en premier.

La newsletter continue après cette publicité.

2. Construire le modèle : lentement et délibérément

3. Deux marchés, une entreprise

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