Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

The Tea app is a place for women to share red or green flags about men, but it recently suffered a major data breach. Plus, why some members of Congress are protesting a deal with China to allow Nvidia to sell its H20 chips to the country. And YouTube is rolling out new age estimation technology to protect younger users. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino is joined by Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to discuss all this.

Simon Johnson, Nobel-winning economist, joined Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to explain his current thinking about AI and inequality. He says the tech could bring productivity gains, but they might not benefit everyone.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks to Sayash Kapoor, a PhD candidate at Princeton and co-author of “AI Snake Oil." He says small tweaks to AI chatbots can often have big, unpredictable effects.

In Canada, road freight is part of the backbone of the economy — historically moving about four-fifths of all goods across the country, with demand growing. But trucking is changing, with digital freight-matching platforms reshaping how drivers find work and how goods get delivered. The BBC’s Sam Gruet reports.

Temperatures this summer have been hotter than usual, a trend we have come to expect with climate change as records are continually surpassed. While many of us can ride out extreme heat in the comfort of air conditioned interior spaces, outdoor workers don’t have that option and must contend with the risks of serious injury which can be acute and long lasting. A fast growing market for wearable cooling products, both in high tech and low tech varieties, is attempting to meet the challenge. Among those products is the CülCan, made by the Tennessee based small business Black Ice.  “If you can pull heat away from your hand, it'll cool your whole body down. And so that's what we've done with the CülCan. It's basically a five inch cylinder that contains our special coolant,” said Mike Beavers, co-founder of Black Ice. A key selling point of the product, according to Beavers, is that the coolant inside, which is a chemical composition Beavers designed, doesn’t get as cold as ice, so it is easier to use on a person’

NASA employees protest budget cuts, Google reportedly eyes licensing deals with 20 national news organizations, and President Donald Trump signed three executive orders on AI this week. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams is joined by Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at venture firm Collab Capital, to break down these stories.

This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.High-flying and high-tech, the very latest in drone technology took to the skies over an airfield near the Danish city of Odense.At the International Drone Show, 50 exhibitors showed off their wares. And because more money is flowing into military budgets, the emphasis was on defense.Danish company Quadsat makes drones with satellite reading software. Besides civilian uses, the devices can also identify enemy radar."Over the years, we have seen an increasing interest from the defense side, no doubt about that, and that's also where we have a lot of work currently being carried out," said Klaus Aude, Quadsat’s chief commercial officer.Leaders of the NATO military alliance have agreed to ramp up defense spending to 5% of their countries' economic output by 2035, following months of pressure from President Donald Trump.Nordic countries have already committed to bigger budgets. Among them, NATO’s newest members Finland and Sweden, as well as long time members N

ProPublica has recently discovered blueprints for an automated computer program that could potentially share millions of IRS taxpayer records with ICE, as the Trump administration continues to step up deportations and criminal investigations. When Marketplace asked for comment about the system uncovered by ProPublica, a senior DHS official cited a recent memorandum of understanding that allowed for the sharing of specific taxpayer info with appropriate safeguards and said descriptions of this system as "surveillance" were "absurd."Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with William Turton, one of the reporters on the ProPublica investigation, about how exactly this program would work.

You might have heard Meta has been on a bit of a hiring spree recently as it tries to build out its new AI Superintelligence team. The company has reportedly been offering hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to attract leading AI researchers from rivals like OpenAI, Google and Apple.And it's not just Meta doing the poaching. Tech companies big and small are jumping into the AI Wars. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Natasha Mascarenhas, a reporter at The Information, about the AI talent wars happening behind the scenes of Silicon Valley.More on this“Meta hires two Apple AI researchers for Superintelligence push, Bloomberg News reports” - from Reuters“Anthropic Revenue Hits $4 Billion Annual Pace as Competition With Cursor Intensifies” - from The Information

With the passage of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, numerous Biden-era clean energy incentives will begin to phase out. Many of those incentives were aimed at onshoring energy and battery manufacturing. Energy demand is only expected to rise as more data centers are built to service AI and electric and autonomous vehicles become more widespread. And storage for that energy has to come from somewhere. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Jeremy Michalek, a professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, about the impacts of the Big Beautiful Bill clean energy rollbacks. 

This week on Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review, leaders of tech, energy and private equity promised to invest more than $90 billion to build an AI hub Pennsylvania. Plus, the Trump Administration says chipmaker Nvidia can sell its semiconductors to China again, following a brief ban. But first, Crypto Week wraps up on Capitol Hill. Congress advanced a trio of cryptocurrency bills that could pave the way for more adoption and regulation of digital currencies like bitcoin.Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at the Information, about the details of those three bills.

Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Joseph Cox, a reporter at the tech news site 404 Media, about his recent reporting on how ICE is uses ISO ClaimSearch, among other databases, to find deportation targets.

Know how some companies intentionally make it hard for customers to fix their own gadgets? In the armed forces, as military contractors consolidate and equipment becomes increasingly software-driven, it's become a problem. Now, some Pentagon leaders are talking about adding right to repair provisions into procurement contracts. Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with now-retired Master Sergeant Wesley Reid, who's spoken out in favor of the military's right to repair, informed by his experiences at an Afghanistan army field hospital in the late 2000s.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Adam Aleksic, author of the new book “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language." He’s a trained linguist and also an influencer who goes by the handle "Etymology Nerd" online. True to his name, he told us what he means when he uses the term “algospeak.”

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Rebecca Lester, a professor of accounting at Stanford, about a tax provision within the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that could further tech R&D and innovation.

X CEO Linda Yaccarino leaves the social media giant on the heels of antisemitic posts from AI chatbot Grok. SCOTUS rejects a challenge to a Texas law for age verification online. President Trump this week said he’ll impose a 50% tariff on copper. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino is joined by Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to discuss all this.

For years, AI crawlers have scraped data and content from the internet for free. But last week, Cloudflare attempted to change that. With an update to its web services, the tech company keeps AI crawlers out by default. The hope? To create a new economic model that makes AI companies finally pay for the content they collect.In this episode, Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Cloudflare co-founder and CEO, Matthew Prince, about his vision for a fairer internet.

The National Weather Service lost some 600 positions early in the second Trump administration, through early retirements and layoffs. Now the agency says it’s working to fill some “mission-critical” roles. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has also proposed cutting the greater NOAA budget by more than 25% next year.A rising chorus of meteorologists and climate experts warn that efforts to shrink the federal workforce and downplay global warming could compromise accurate weather forecasts and climate monitoring.

As technology has advanced, the ways countries fight wars has changed drastically. Now, AI companies are hoping technology can also play peacekeeper and prevent the next global conflict.Anadyr Horizon, one of the AI startups, developing what many are calling “peace tech,” is doing so through simulating future conflicts and the world leaders they may involve.

More than half of all Americans have used artificial intelligence tools recently, according to a study published by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Menlo Ventures. And one in five people use it daily. Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Amy Wu Martin, a partner at Menlo Ventures, to learn how they’re using it in their day-to-day lives.