Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

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.