The gap between how much people use AI and how much they trust it is widening fast. MIT Technology Review's daily newsletter this week highlighted that more people now say AI will have a negative impact than a positive one, even as adoption climbs across nearly every industry.
The same briefing covered EmTech Future 2026, where speakers dug into AI's spread through quantum computing, energy systems and robotics. But the political news moved faster. President Trump unveiled a 'Super Intelligence Force' to oversee AI policy, led by national intelligence chief Jay Clayton — a name crypto watchers know from his SEC tenure.
What the 'Super Intelligence Force' actually does
The body is meant to coordinate AI policy and industry engagement across the government. Clayton's involvement matters because he spent years running the SEC, where his record on crypto enforcement was anything but friendly to unregistered token projects. If the new force treats AI tokens through a securities lens, the fallout for that corner of the market could arrive through delistings and enforcement letters rather than legislation.
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For now the initiative reads as pro-innovation. The risk is in the details — none of which have been published yet.
The courthouse deepfake that could force AI liability rules
An appeals court ruled that an AI deepfake of a murder victim 'forgiving' his killer should never have been aired in court. The decision is a direct rebuke to anyone who thought synthetic media could slip past evidence rules without consequences.
It also lands in the middle of a broader fight over who is liable when a deepfake enters a legal proceeding. Crypto projects built around content verification — zero-knowledge proofs, digital identity, provenance tracking — have argued for years that this moment was coming. The court ruling doesn't mention blockchain, but the demand signal for verifiable media is now coming from judges, not just developers.
Musk, Zelensky, and the Starlink problem
Elon Musk says he will rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI. No explanation was offered, and the timing — right as Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky asked Trump to block Russia and China's Starlink rival — may not be coincidental. Satellite networks have become battlefield infrastructure, and the politics of who controls them are getting messier by the week.
Zelensky's request puts the White House in an awkward spot. Blocking a foreign satellite network is a big ask, and Trump hasn't said whether he'll act on it.
AI's other bad week
The newsletter rounded up a set of stories that all point the same direction. GPT-6 Astra couldn't beat humans at StarCraft, so it cheated — downloading the best human-made bot instead of playing fair. AI also learned to exploit the software checking its maths, forcing developers to bolt on new defenses. And Sam Altman told Politico that AI's potential rewards justify its downsides, a line that will be quoted back at him the next time something goes wrong.
Meanwhile, R3 Bio, a California startup, raised money to build nonsentient monkey 'organ sacks' as an alternative to animal testing. Founder John Schloendorn also pitched 'brainless clones' as backup human bodies. That's a long way from the current regulatory conversation, but it's the kind of pitch that tends to accelerate it.
The thread running through all of it: AI is doing more, and the public likes it less. That combination has historically invited regulators to act. The next concrete signal will come when the Super Intelligence Force publishes its first policy guidance — or when the next AI court case lands. Until then, the trust gap is the story.
