TL;DR
Tesla filed a bespoke Roadster badge trademark, its first standalone vehicle branding apart from the Cybertruck. The car was promised in 2017 for 2020 delivery and remains unbuilt, with a reveal now expected in late May or June 2026.
Tech
ChatGPT now lets you name someone to check in if things get dark
AI chatbots have made it surprisingly easy to talk about anything, and that includes some of the heaviest topics imaginable. That openness has always been a double-edged sword. OpenAI is now taking a step to address that, with a new feature that brings a trusted person into the picture when things get serious.
The company is rolling out a new feature called Trusted Contact, and it is starting to appear in ChatGPT settings for adult users. It lets users name one person who can be alerted if ChatGPT detects a serious self-harm concern.
How does Trusted Contact work?
Setting up a Trusted Contact is optional, but if you do decide to set it up, then you have to make sure that the contact you are nominating is at least 18 years old, or 19 in South Korea. Once you name someone, they get an invitation explaining what the role actually means, and they have one week to accept it before the feature goes live. If they decline, you can pick someone else.
The alert system itself is not automatic. If ChatGPT’s systems flag a conversation as potentially concerning, the chatbot first tells the user that their Trusted Contact may be notified, and it also nudges the user to reach out directly with some suggested conversation starters. A small team of specially trained human reviewers then steps in to assess the situation. Only if they confirm a serious risk does the contact actually get notified, via email, text, or in-app notification. The alert does not share chat transcripts or conversation details. It simply says that self-harm came up in a potentially concerning way and asks the contact to check in. OpenAI says it aims to complete that human review in under one hour.
Why is OpenAI adding this now?
Trusted contact is part of a broader set of safety features on the platform. Previously, OpenAI added features that let parents receive alerts when a linked teen account shows signs of distress. Trusted Contact is the adult-facing extension of this same feature. It was reportedly developed with input from clinicians, researchers, and mental health organizations, including the American Psychological Association.
All that said, it is worth mentioning that Trusted Contact does not replace crisis hotlines, emergency services, or professional mental health care. ChatGPT will still direct users toward those resources when needed. Users can remove or change their Trusted Contact at any time, and contacts can remove themselves whenever they want.
The reality of the matter is that ChatGPT is being used for some deeply personal conversations, whether OpenAI planned for that or not. Adding a feature like Trusted Contact is a move in the right direction, and also an admission that a chatbot can only do so much.
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Tech
Microsoft employees learn details of voluntary retirement package: Here’s what the company is offering
Microsoft employees eligible for the company’s first-ever voluntary retirement program are learning the details of the package Thursday morning, including the size of cash payments, length of healthcare coverage, and vesting of stock awards if they take the company’s offer.
As described in an internal summary viewed by GeekWire, lump-sum cash payments will range from eight weeks to 39 weeks (about nine months) of base pay, depending on level and tenure.
Participants would also receive up to five years of continued access to Microsoft’s medical, dental, and vision coverage for themselves and their dependents. Microsoft would fully subsidize the cost in the first year, with participants paying standard COBRA rates after that. The coverage could end sooner for those who reach Medicare eligibility at age 65.
Unvested stock awards would continue to vest for six months after an employee’s departure, extending to 12 months for those with 24 or more years at Microsoft.
Some longer-tenured employees who meet additional age and service thresholds could qualify for continued vesting of all eligible unvested awards on their original schedule.
Eligible employees have 30 days to decide whether to accept the offer. There are no apparent restrictions on what employees could do after accepting the offer, such as finding other employment.
Announced by the company on April 23, the program is rare in the tech industry, where companies have relied on layoffs, stricter performance reviews, and return-to-office policies to manage headcount. Microsoft itself laid off more than 15,000 employees last year and began requiring Seattle-area workers to return to the office three days a week in February.
An estimated 7% of Microsoft’s 125,000-person U.S. workforce, or roughly 8,750 employees, is eligible for the program, which is open to those at Level 67 and below whose age plus years of service totals 70 or more. Microsoft said it is a one-time offer.
On Microsoft’s earnings call last week, CFO Amy Hood disclosed that the company expects to take a $900 million charge related to the voluntary retirement program in the current quarter. She also said headcount declined year over year and will continue to decline in fiscal 2027.
“Why are you here?” Fabrizio Pilo, an electrical engineer, asks me as we sit in an outdoor café near his home in Cagliari, an ancient city on the island of Sardinia. It’s a fair question. I’m a journalist from the United States. I’d just stepped off my flight 2 hours prior and come straight to this meeting, suitcase still stowed in my rental car.
I’m here to see three intriguing new energy projects under development in Sardinia. I’d heard there’s strong public resistance to renewable energy, and I want to understand why that is. I tell Pilo, who is vice rector for innovation at the University of Cagliari, that I hope he’ll share some insights before I head out on a reporting trip across the island. (My answer seems to satisfy him, and he kindly gives me an hour of his time).
This won’t be the first time that I’m asked to explain my presence on the island. I’d expected it, to some extent; I’m a foreign journalist poking around, after all.
What I didn’t expect was the depth of Sardinians’ distrust, not just of journalists, but of any outsider, particularly ones with authority. Over the last few years, developers of wind and solar projects, most of whom aren’t from here, have been absorbing the bulk of this smoldering, communal wariness.
Activists Maria Grazia Demontis [left] and Alberto Sala, photographed inside the archaeological monument Giants’ Tomb of Pascarédda, have worked to stop the construction of wind farms by organizing protests and taking legal actions through their organization Gallura Coordination. Luigi Avantaggiato
In fact, the resistance is so widespread among Sardinians that over the course of two months in 2024, a grassroots petition to ban new wind and solar projects gathered over 210,000 certified signatures. That’s more than a quarter of Sardinia’s typical voter turnout and represents a cross-party consensus. People stood in long lines in public squares to sign. And it worked: Political leaders responded swiftly with an 18-month moratorium on renewable energy construction.
“I’ve never seen so much engagement for anything” in Sardinia, says Elisa Sotgiu, a literary sociologist at the University of Oxford, who was born and raised on the island. “Sardinia has a bunch of problems like enormous unemployment. There’s lots of emigration because there are no jobs. It’s one of the poorest areas in Europe. The area is just decaying,” she says. “And yet the thing people are demonstrating against is renewable energy.”
And the opposition continues: A network of mayors has mobilized for the cause. Thousands of people show up at organized protests. Activists vandalize grid equipment. Families are passing down these stories of resistance to their children as a point of pride. Local media outlets are egging it on, frequently publishing misinformation tinged with fearmongering.
These aren’t just NIMBY complaints—not in the pejorative sense, at least. The resistance, and the distrust underlying it, is rooted in the island’s complex history, both recent and ancient. It’s based on a past that the Sardinian people carry with them—a past that has seeded a deep sense of suspicion and vulnerability. Resistance, I learn, is part of what it means to be Sardinian.
Fabrizio Giulio Luca Pilo, vice rector of innovation at the University of Cagliari, has been working to help Sardinia transition to cleaner, more reliable energy. Luigi Avantaggiato
“It is a very sad situation,” Pilo tells me. “There are a lot of economic reasons to do the [energy] transition.” It could attract new companies such as data centers, which would create new jobs, he argues. It could reduce Sardinia’s reliance on imported gas and fuel, making the island more independent. New economic activity on the island might help reverse its population decline, he adds.
And while what’s happening on Sardinia is unique, it also represents a larger trend: A growing number of communities around the world are opposing wind- and solar-farm construction, to the consternation of stakeholders. By 2025, nearly one-fourth of the counties in the United States had enacted some impediment to new utility-scale wind and solar energy—up from as few as 15 percent two years earlier, according to a USA Today analysis. In Africa, community pushback successfully canceled major projects such as the 60-megawatt Kinangop Wind Park in Kenya. In India, local pastoralists are challenging the 13-gigawatt Ladakh solar and wind project. And the European Union’s top-down push for renewable energy has created opposition in many communities.
Their reasons vary—land-use preferences, generational ethos, government resentment, property values, economic effects, aesthetics—but all of these struggles have this in common: The resisters are passionate and they are often successful in blocking development.
This is a looming problem for the energy transition. Unlike large, centralized coal and nuclear power plants, renewable energy is geographically spread out, so it touches far more communities. Sardinia offers one of the clearest cases of what can go wrong when renewable-energy developers and authorities fail to consider the complexities of the local situation on the ground.
Why is Sardinia resisting renewable energy?
Roughly the size of New Hampshire, Sardinia juts out of the Mediterranean Sea about 200 kilometers west of Italy’s mainland. Technically it’s part of Italy, but Sardinians are quick to point out their island’s autonomous status—a subtle way of saying, “We do things our way.” Its mountains seem to echo the sentiment. With the highest peaks running in a chain along the east side of the island, Sardinia resolutely turns its back to the mainland.
At first glance, the island looks like the kind of place that’s ripe for an energy transition. Its two coal plants are aging and are targeted to be shut down to meet climate commitments. It has no nuclear power, nor does it produce its own natural gas. Wind and sun, however, are abundant and could easily meet the energy needs of Sardinia’s sparse population of about 1.5 million.
But while the resources may be ready for a transition, the people emphatically are not. When I first arrive in Sardinia and take in its beauty, I assume that the impetus behind the fight against wind and solar farms boils down to how they look. Waves of silicon, metal, and concrete would spoil views of Sardinia’s stunning beaches, rugged mountains, ancient pastures, and idyllic medieval villages, after all.
Residents of the city of Orgosolo in 1969 famously stopped the construction of a military firing range on communal grazing land known as Pratobello. Its village walls are still covered in murals advocating social protest and antiauthoritarianism. Luigi Avantaggiato
But the island’s aesthetic—and the tourism industry that depends on it—are only part of the equation. The far stronger cultural forces at play are rooted in Sardinia’s past. Over millennia, the island has endured successive invasions from outsiders seeking to exploit the land. These incursions, and Sardinians’ rebellious responses to them, have become an integral part of the island’s identity passed down through generations.
The invasions started with the relatively peaceful settlement of the Phoenicians in the 9th and 8th centuries B.C.E. Then came the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Iberians, who conquered with violence, looting, and enslavement. But legend has it that despite the might of these ancient conquerors, pockets of Sardinia sometimes managed to defend themselves. “Not even the Roman empire could conquer the shepherds of the highland regions,” is the oft-repeated tale. Whether that’s true or just an idealization is beside the point; such stories serve as an enormous source of pride and identity.
Sardinia exported nearly 40 percent of the electricity it generated in 2025, largely to Corsica and the Italian mainland via two existing submarine cables.
The island is “fiercely proud of its identity…especially in the center of Sardinia, which was the most resistant part,” says Andrea Vargiu, a sociologist at the University of Sassari in Sardinia. “This long history of exploitation is still in our DNA, along with a proud sense of autonomy,” he says.
Sardinia’s unification, in the mid-1800s, with what would become the Kingdom of Italy is seen by many as an act of colonization. It didn’t help that Italy then proceeded to exploit Sardinia’s forests and other resources for the benefit of the mainland—a practice that continued through the 20th century, says Vargiu.
Sardinian bandits sometimes fought back with their own sense of justice, settling matters through raids, kidnappings, and violence. Their stories live on in Sardinian lore with an almost mythical quality, the brigands admired for their intractability.
Pasquale Mereu, mayor of Orgosolo, helped organize the Pratobello 24 movement against renewable energy in Sardinia. Luigi Avantaggiato
Italy’s use of the island for military purposes particularly irked locals. In a famous case in 1969, residents of the town of Orgosolo successfully thwarted the construction of a firing range on communal grazing land known as Pratobello. That name has since become synonymous with the defense of one’s territory, and a rallying cry.
“Sardinia has always been a land of conquest,” says Pasquale Mereu, mayor of Orgosolo, who spoke with IEEE Spectrum through an interpreter. “We believe that even today we are still a colony of Italy, and I’m not ashamed to say it even though I represent an institution.”
A longstanding mural on one of his village’s walls reads: “You are in the territory of Orgosolo; here the people rule supreme and the government obeys.”
Sardinia’s History Shapes its Identity
Driving around the island and talking to people, I can feel the weight of Sardinia’s history—and people’s propensity for holding onto it. Elaborate heritage festivals occur nearly every autumn weekend in the island’s interior. They’re well attended, multigenerational affairs that aim to keep old traditions alive. In the medieval town of Belvì, men roast chestnuts—marroni—over an open fire in a frying pan the size of a swimming pool and then serve them to the crowd by shoveling them into troughs. They’re delicious. In an adjacent amphitheater, the crowd sways along to costumed performers leading traditional dances.
Then there are the Bronze Age stone structures, called nuraghi, that are pretty much everywhere. Built before the violent conquests, these conical towers have come to symbolize a romanticized vision of the heyday of Sardinia’s independence. More than 7,000 of them remain, ranging from unremarkable piles of rocks to complex towers, each one carefully documented on an interactive online map. I visit one of the more intact ones that’s fenced off and requires an admission fee. As I take some video with my phone, an employee asks me who I am and what I’m doing and informs me I’ll need to get permission from the government before posting anything online.
This rock hollowed out by erosion and walled up with stones was likely used by shepherds as a shelter near the historic Sardinian village of Tempio Pausania. Luigi Avantaggiato
But in interviews with residents, I’m continually reminded of the darker side of Sardinia’s past. People often bring up painful things that happened 50 or 500 years ago. A middle school science teacher named Giannina Serpi, and her husband, Roberto Moro, meet me at a café in the seaside town of Sant’Antioco. When I ask why people are so opposed to renewable energy, they (like many people I interviewed) point to the 1970s.
Sheep return from pasture in Bonorva, Sardinia, near the Bonorva wind farm operated by EDF Renewables. Luigi Avantaggiato
That decade brought a new kind of exploitation: not by empires or governments, but by technology companies. Petrochemical, aluminum, and other industrial companies from overseas built factories on the island, creating jobs and adjacent businesses. But after a few decades, economic and geopolitical factors led the companies to close the factories, sinking local economies and in some cases leaving behind toxic contamination.
In the northern city of Porto Torres, several petrochemical plants, a thermoelectric power plant, and an industrial harbor employed about 8,000 workers in the early 1970s. But the oil crises of that decade took its toll on jobs, and when environmental contamination became evident in the 1990s, employment plunged further. By 2010, most of the petrochemical plants had closed. Studies show that residents of Porto Torres during that time had curiously high rates of death from cancer, although there is no consensus on the cause.
Similarly, studies have found higher rates of lead in children in the Portovesme area in the southwest, about a 20-minute drive from where I sit with Serpi and Moro in Sant’Antioco. There, the U.S. aluminum producer Alcoa operated a smelter that employed about 500 people and supported an estimated 1,500 adjacent jobs. But the company shut down the smelter in 2012. Three years earlier, Russian aluminum manufacturer Rusal had idled its Eurallumina factory nearby.
The impacts of these events still feel fresh, Serpi explains through a digital translator. She says she teaches this history to her students but doesn’t tell them how to feel about it. “I let them decide,” she says.
Energy Colonialism in Sardinia
Against this backdrop, renewable-energy developers in the early 2010s began sizing up Sardinia. They were drawn by the cheap land, low population, strong wind, and sun that shines an average of about 300 days a year. EF Solare Italia commissioned an 11-MW solar plant in 2010. Rome-based Enel Green Power began construction of a 90-MW wind farm in Portoscuso the following year.
Other developers followed, and they mostly came from elsewhere—mainland Italy, Europe, and later, China. The way many Sardinians saw it, the new plants didn’t bring many long-lasting jobs. Most of the work ended after the design and installation phases, and profits went back to the companies’ headquarters outside of Sardinia, they argued. People called it “energy colonialism” and lauded landowners who refused to sell or lease their property to developers.
Pink granite called Ghiandone Limbara was extracted from the Sinnada quarry in northern Sardinia from the late 1970s to 2011. Luigi Avantaggiato
The uncle of Oxford’s Sotgiu is one of those landowners. She says that a couple of years ago a solar company asked him if he would allow the installation of an array on his family farm in Logudoro in Sardinia’s interior. “From that, he would have gotten something around €150,000 a year, which is more money than he’s seen in his life,” says Sotgiu. The money could have covered his three kids’ college education, she says. “But he refused.”
He had many reasons. For one, switching from sheep grazing to the more passive business of leasing land would have put the fate of his income in the hands of an outsider. “If you deprive a region of any sort of economy that is self-reliant, then it’s really fragile,” says Sotgiu. Her uncle didn’t trust that the income would last, and worried he’d be left with a ruined farm, she says. Plus, his farm has been in the family for generations and one of his sons is interested in continuing the business. “So I understand his pride in saying, ‘No, this is my farm, I don’t care about the money,’” she says.
Sardinia has one of the largest carbon footprints per capita in Europe.
Despite that kind of grassroots resistance, development continued. In 2023, the Italian government authorized the construction of a 1-GW submarine power cable to connect Sardinia to Sicily and the Italian mainland. When completed, the bidirectional cable, called the Tyrrhenian Link, will increase electricity exchange between the regions, bolster grid reliability, and help grid operators efficiently use more renewable energy.
Sardinian activists, however, view the cable as a way to justify even more construction of wind and solar plants, and to export the island’s energy for the benefit of non-Sardinians. The island already exports about 40 percent of its electricity, largely to Corsica and the Italian mainland via two existing submarine cables.
The Florinas wind farm, commissioned in 2004, was one of the earliest wind farms built in Sardinia. Luigi Avantaggiato
And then came the tipping point. In June 2024, in an effort to meet the European Union’s 2030 renewable energy targets, Italy committed to building more than 80 GW of new wind and solar energy capacity over December 2020 levels. The national government divvied up the burden among its regions and told Sardinia to build its portion, 6.2 GW.
The move triggered an onslaught of requests from wind and solar developers wanting to build projects in Sardinia. The queue at one point topped 50 GW of grid-connection requests. That represented more than 700 solar and wind projects, many of which came from companies outside of Sardinia.
The southern newspaper L’Unione Sarda ran wild with the numbers. Almost daily, for months, it published stories about the “wind assault.” The call-to-arms posts urged people to protest. “The Attack on the Landscape Does Not Stop; The Threat From Agrivoltaics Is Growing,” read a July 2024 headline. Unsubstantiated articles tried to link wind and solar developers to organized crime.
“It was scaremongering,” says Sotgiu. “It was a little dishonest, as I saw it, because they kept exaggerating and scaring people into thinking that we were going to be invaded.” (Representatives of the newspaper declined to comment.)
The numbers did scare people. Lost was the fact that a grid-connection request is just the start of a multiyear process that involves permitting and legal review and often ends in withdrawn or downsized projects. Submitting a request is inexpensive, and developers often cast a wide net by entering lots of these queues globally to increase the odds of being accepted. In the end, only a fraction come to fruition. In other words, building all, or even most, of the requested 50 GW was never going to happen.
“I tried to explain this” to the public, says an industrial engineer at the University of Cagliari, in Sardinia, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid any detrimental impacts of speaking out. “I went to the regional television station. But it’s difficult with technical information. And the newspaper communication is so bad, and its impact is so strong in the community, that it’s very difficult to change people’s minds,” he says.
Pratobello 2024 and Anti-Wind Protests
And so the collective angst caused by powerful outsiders, industry, and the state united Sardinians into a singular cause. Faced with what felt like another attempted conquest, they did what their families and community had taught them to do: They resisted. Says Mereu: “This is what we are rebelling against: the idea that Sardinians are few and therefore must put up with everything.”
In a nod to the 1969 resistance in Orgosolo, they dubbed the movement “Pratobello 2024.” Activist groups, called “committees,” organized protests, and created social media campaigns and videos. Thousands of people started showing up at planned demonstrations. A lawyer went on a hunger strike. Vandals unscrewed bolts on wind turbine blades and set fire to grid and construction equipment.
Italy’s transmission system operator, Terna, had to switch to company cars without logos to avoid being targeted. Students studying the electricity system in a master’s program sponsored by Terna were verbally attacked at an airport, according to a professor at their school who spoke with me about the violence.
Celebrities got involved. Italian actress and Bond Girl Caterina Murino met with Sardinia’s president to ask her to reject wind farms. Murino posted on Instagram: “Nobody touch Sardinia!!!!” On Italian national TV, the jazz legend Paolo Fresu performed on trumpet while popular TV host Geppi Cucciari read an impassioned lament about the exploitation of the island.
Sardinian author Erre Push penned a graphic novel titled Fàula Birdi about a protagonist who resisted an imposition from outsiders. He wrote it upon the request of the activist group ReCommon, whose mission is to “challenge corporate and state power responsible for the plunder of territories.” Push hopes the book will inspire more people to follow the protagonist’s lead. “Renewables are another imposition like in the past—not to help Sardinians but to help external people like industry managers or founders of companies,” he told me through an interpreter.
Concerned about the influx of solar and wind farms being built in Sardinia by outsiders, Roberto Pusceddu, under his pen name Erre Push, published a graphic novel that aimed to inspire young people to resist such impositions. Luigi Avantaggiato
Mereu and a network of mayors drafted the petition that gathered so many signatures. The people had spoken. In response, Sardinian politicians passed a law that imposed an 18-month ban on construction of wind and solar projects within 7 km of a nuraghe or other archeological site. It wasn’t a total ban, but it might as well have been. “If you put a circle with a 7-km radius around each archeological site, you cover all of Sardinia,” says Emilio Ghiani, a power systems expert at the University of Cagliari. “In this way, it is impossible to find a place to install a new plant.”
The move was like giving the Italian government—and the EU’s clean energy targets—the middle finger. And it sent renewable-energy developers scrambling. One company building an agriphotovoltaic plant raced to bring construction to 30 percent completion, which the new law said was the threshold for being allowed to proceed. The company asked not to be named in this story to avoid trouble.
Furious, the government in Rome challenged the Sardinian regional law in Italy’s Constitutional Court, and in January this year it prevailed. In its decision, the court rejected the law, saying that renewable-energy projects should be evaluated case by case.
Project development quickly resumed. So did the backlash. A headline in L’Unione Sarda declared: “Enough With Top-Down Decisions Without Consulting Communities.”
Sardinia’s Renewable Energy Conflict
Where the island goes from here is unclear. There’s a willingness among a portion of the population to move forward with an energy transition. For example, some of Sardinia’s largest cheese makers are powering their operations with renewable energy and installing systems to utilize waste heat for efficiency. But for the most part, the public isn’t budging in its resistance. Researchers are trying to dispel inaccurate information, but regional newspapers seem bent on perpetuating fear.
Plus, there are technical issues to work out before a full-scale energy transition can be made. Sardinia’s transmission system was built around the centralized generation of two coal plants; it wasn’t made for the distributed generation of wind and solar plants. Renewables require a more dynamic grid, more energy storage, and a wider range of power sources to compensate for their intermittency. Engineers are working on it, but they’ve got a ways to go.
The new Tyrrhenian Link undersea power cable will help with that. By connecting Sardinia, Sicily, and the mainland, the cable creates more flexibility in the system. When wind or solar generation slows in Sardinia, for example, electricity from the mainland can fill in the gap, and vice versa. “It will increase the reliability of the system, and after it’s installed, it will be possible to switch off the old generation plants that use coal,” says Ghiani. In January, Terna finished laying the western section of the cable between Sardinia and Sicily, and in April it completed the eastern section between Sicily and Campania on the mainland. Doing so set a world record for power cable depth, at 2,150 meters below sea level, according to Terna.
Italy originally ordered Sardinia’s two coal plants to shut down by 2025 but later extended the deadline to 2038.
The link is one of the most innovative high-voltage direct current (HVDC) projects in Europe. It can move up to a gigawatt of power and reverse that power flow nearly instantaneously. By using voltage source converter (VSC) technology, it can also help prevent power-flow problems by regulating frequency and smoothing out oscillations in the grid in real time. And it has black-start capability: In the event of a shutdown, it can help restore the grid without relying on an external electric network. These features are particularly helpful for an isolated network like Sardinia’s.
Italy has created new incentives and regulations to build a market for grid-scale energy storage. Having plenty of storage is a key to scaling up renewables because it provides backup power when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. To this end, Italy created MACSE, an auction that gives storage developers revenue certainty. Its name translates to mechanism for the procurement of electricity storage capacity. The first auction round, in September, successfully awarded 10 GWh.
Energy experts in Sardinia are also working with policymakers to change the rules around grid-connection requests. But these kinds of nerdy details don’t grace most household conversations.
Industrial Sites Host Energy Storage
Something more accessible that the public can get behind is building renewables on Sardinia’s abandoned industrial sites. “To be honest, not everything is so beautiful here. We have a lot of industrial areas where you can place PV panels. We have a lot of rooftops,” electrical engineer Pilo says. “We have unused coal mines.” I visit one such project that’s proceeding with local support—or at least without much opposition. It’s a coal mine near Gonnesa that shut down in 2018 and is now being turned into a data center and a pumped-hydro energy storage system.
The plan is to move water through the mine’s vertical geometry via an enclosed membrane—like a soft pipe—and use the flow to turn a turbine that generates electricity. The water then gets pumped back to the surface and stored in pear-shaped vessels above ground. The scheme will help power the data center, which will be built both above and below ground, including in the mine’s largest chambers nearly 500 meters below the Earth’s surface.
Energy Vault will remove old mining equipment from the Carbosulcis coal mine near Gonnesa to make way for an underground data center [above]. It will be powered by a pumped-hydro energy storage system that flows through the mine’s vertical geometry and stores water in above-ground tanks [top].Luigi Avantaggiato
Energy storage developer Energy Vault is building it, and despite being based in Lugano, Switzerland—that is, not Sardinia—the company seems to have avoided protest. It helps that the mine is owned by Carbosulcis, a Sardinian regional-government-owned company, which is calling the shots on the project.
Plus, doing nothing with the mine costs money. The mine closed eight years ago because it wasn’t profitable, but Carbosulcis must continue maintaining it because of its high methane emissions, which require monitoring and ventilation to prevent explosions and leaks. Carbosulcis managers figured that if they’re going to continue putting money and personnel into the mine, they might as well do something useful with it, Luca Manzella, vice president for Europe, Middle East, and Africa at Energy Vault, says as he and I tour the mine.
An innovative project in Sardinia’s interior—Energy Dome’s grid-scale carbon dioxide battery—seems to be avoiding protest as well. Built in a gated industrial complex near Ottana, this energy-storage facility looks like a giant bubble—the kind that fits over a stadium or tennis complex. It’s filled with carbon dioxide that is compressed to store 200 MWh of electricity for the grid. Although the bubble is visible from several of the surrounding hillside villages, and although the developer is headquartered on the mainland, there’s little sign of public pushback.
Energy Dome began operating its 20-megawatt, long-duration energy-storage facility in July 2025 in Ottana, Sardinia. In partnership with Google, the company this year aims to build replicas of the system on multiple continents.Luigi Avantaggiato
Another path forward is through “energy communities.” In this grassroots approach, consumers work together to build their own solar plant or other power generation. Dozens of these communities are already active on the island, according to the Sardinian Electricity Association, a group that provides guidance to consumers.
But by far the greatest need is for energy developers and authorities to understand the people and the history of the land on which they want to build. “When Europe or the national government make a law, they have to also consider the background of Sardinian people and why they are so afraid,” says Simone Micheletti, CEO at Futura Group, a renewable-energy developer based in Serramanna, Sardinia. “You cannot apply the same law to Sweden and Sicily. Sometimes you need to understand [the situation] locally,” he says.
Decision makers everywhere would be wise to listen. Otherwise, they may suffer the same fate as their counterparts in Sardinia: despised by locals, delayed by politics, and surprised at how badly it all went.
Special thanks to Luigi Avantaggiato for interpreting and additional reporting.
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Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.
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Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.
The completed NYT Mini Crossword puzzle for May 8, 2026.
Mini across clues and answers
1A clue: Squash
Answer: SMUSH
6A clue: Monopoly card with a question mark on one side
Answer: CHANCE
7A clue: “Help! Help!”
Answer: MAYDAY
8A clue: Path around the sun
Answer: ORBIT
9A clue: Pressing desires
Answer: NEEDS
Mini down clues and answers
1D clue: Social media button with an arrow
Answer: SHARE
2D clue: Answer between “yes” and “no”
Answer: MAYBE
3D clue: Took back
Answer: UNDID
4D clue: Ad-libs in jazz singing
Answer: SCATS
5D clue: “Yo!”
Answer: HEY
6D clue: “Dude!”
Answer: CMON
Tech
Tesla files bespoke Roadster badge trademark as nine-year-old supercar promise nears a reveal that has been pushed back every year since 2020
Tesla has filed a trademark for a bespoke Roadster badge that looks like it belongs on a Lamborghini. The car it will adorn was first promised nine years ago.
A prototype debuted in November 2017 with a 200 kilowatt-hour battery, a claimed 620-mile range, a 1.9-second zero-to-60 time, and a starting price of 200,000 dollars. Production was set for 2020. It did not happen in 2020, or 2021, or 2022, or any year since.
The trademark filing, submitted to the United States Patent and Trademark Office on 28 April on an intent-to-use basis, covers a stylised triangular shield bearing the Roadster wordmark and four vertical lines that, according to the filing, represent “speed, propulsion, heat, or wind.” It is the most tangible thing Tesla has produced for the Roadster in nearly a decade.
The badge
The trademark application is unusual for Tesla. Apart from the Cybertruck’s angular two-part emblem, the company has never given one of its vehicles a standalone badge. The Model S, 3, X, and Y use Tesla’s corporate T logo. The Roadster is getting the kind of bespoke branding treatment normally reserved for supercar marques: a dedicated shield, a custom wordmark in a stretched angular font with segmented letterforms, and a separate silhouette mark consisting of three flowing curved lines that form the vehicle’s profile.
Tesla filed two distinct trademark applications. The first is a stylised “ROADSTER” wordmark in a triangular shield. The second is the vehicle silhouette. Both were filed on an intent-to-use basis, meaning Tesla has declared a plan to put these marks into commercial use but has not yet done so.
Elon Musk explicitly deprioritised the Roadster in favour of the Cybertruck in 2022, telling investors the truck would come first. The Cybertruck eventually launched in late 2023 after its own multi-year delay. The Roadster has remained in a state of perpetual imminence since, with Musk offering periodic updates that have served primarily to push the timeline further out.
During Tesla’s first-quarter 2026 earnings call, Musk said the Roadster would be unveiled “maybe in a month or so,” pushing the reveal to late May or early June 2026. He described the upcoming event as “one of the most exciting product unveils ever.” If the reveal happens on schedule, it will be the first time in nine years that any public commitment regarding the Roadster has been met.
The promises
The Roadster’s specification sheet has not remained static during the delay. It has escalated. The 2017 prototype claimed a 1.9-second zero-to-60 time. In 2021, Musk revised the target to 1.1 seconds. In 2024, he announced the goal had been pushed below one second.
The optional SpaceX package, first described in 2018, would reportedly include approximately 10 cold-air rocket thrusters integrated into the vehicle body to enhance cornering, braking, and acceleration. Musk has suggested the thrusters could enable the car to “fly,” though the definition of flight in this context remains unclear. The 620-mile range claim from 2017 has not been revised. The 200,000 dollar base price, announced nearly a decade ago, has also not been updated.
Tesla has raised its 2026 capital expenditure to 25 billion dollars, allocated across six simultaneous new production lines covering the Cybercab robotaxi, the Semi truck, next-generation vehicle platforms, Optimus humanoid robots, energy storage, and battery manufacturing. The Roadster is not named as a priority in the capex allocation.
Production, by Musk’s own framing during the earnings call, would follow 12 to 18 months after the demonstration, pointing to a start date somewhere in mid-to-late 2027 or into 2028. The customers who placed 50,000 dollar deposits for the Founders Series edition in 2017 will have waited more than a decade for delivery if that timeline holds.
The market
The electric supercar market that existed when the Roadster was announced in 2017 was effectively empty. The Rimac Concept Two was a prototype. The Lotus Evija was years from production. The Pininfarina Battista had not been announced.
Nine years later, the market has filled in around the space the Roadster was supposed to occupy. Rimac has been delivering the Nevera since 2023, holding the production electric vehicle acceleration record at 1.74 seconds to 60 miles per hour. The Lucid Air Sapphire delivers 1,234 horsepower for 249,000 dollars. Porsche has accelerated its electrification strategy, launching the all-electric Cayenne and iterating on the Taycan. BYD’s premium Denza brand has unveiled a 1,000-horsepower electric sedan targeting Porsche and Tesla simultaneously.
Former Tesla and Polestar executives have launched their own electric sports car ventures, targeting the sub-100,000 dollar segment that the Roadster’s 200,000 dollar price point leaves open. The Roadster’s original specifications, revolutionary in 2017, are now achievable by multiple manufacturers.
The sub-two-second zero-to-60 time that made the Roadster prototype a sensation is now a threshold that the Rimac Nevera, Pininfarina Battista, and Lucid Air Sapphire have all crossed. The SpaceX thruster package remains the only specification that no competitor has attempted, and it remains the specification that has never been demonstrated in a production vehicle.
The question
The trademark filing is the kind of signal that Tesla’s investor and fan communities parse with the intensity of Kremlinologists reading a Pravda editorial. A bespoke badge implies a product distinct enough from the Tesla brand to warrant its own identity. The intent-to-use filing implies a legal expectation that the mark will be commercially deployed. The timing, weeks before a promised reveal, implies coordination on a product launch. None of this constitutes a car.
What the trademark does reveal is how Tesla wants the Roadster to be perceived. The shield shape, the angular typography, and the vehicle silhouette are the visual language of a supercar brand, not a technology company. The Cybertruck’s aesthetic was aggressively anti-automotive, a stainless steel polygon that rejected every convention of vehicle design. The Roadster badge suggests the opposite: a deliberate embrace of the iconography that Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Porsche have used for decades to signal exclusivity and heritage.
Tesla is not trying to disrupt the supercar market with the Roadster. It is trying to join it. The badge is the application letter. The car, if it arrives, will determine whether the application is accepted. And if the pattern of the past nine years holds, the badge will remain the most beautifully designed element of a product that exists primarily as a promise. The vertical lines, according to the filing, represent speed. For the moment, they represent patience.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, we don’t need a Grok.
Brian Barrett: Grok would just say that it’s sick.
Zoë Schiffer: Grok mitigating the fight between the mom and the person who’s yelling at her about her baby.
Leah Feiger: I really, really feel for these workers, and I really, really feel for all of these customers that were stranded. Spirit in so many ways, like something that we love to make fun of just a little bit, like you take Spirit when you have to, but also it was actually available and it worked and it wasn’t nearly as expensive as anyone else. It’s kind of sad, especially when I look at the shrinking airline industry in the US, when I look over at Europe and I’m like, “You guys have so many low-cost carriers.” And especially with all of the deals, everything back and forth between JetBlue and Spirit that got squashed, it was just a little bit sad to see that happen.
Brian Barrett: And Leah, when you say stranded, I want to be clear, that’s literal. I think some of these employees, they were not in their home cities when Spirit shut down. So they had to rely on other airlines offering them a jump seat or a travel pass to get home. Fortunately, it’s apparently a very communal industry. Other airlines helped them out. Other airlines are offering preferential employment interviews to Spirit Airline employees. But can you imagine, I’m in London right now, and if WIRED shut down and I had to find another way home. I mean, I’d be OK, but—
Leah Feiger: No, but it would also just be ridiculous. This is wild. I think of that 30 Rock episode when Liz Lemon is like, “Oh yeah, this is my flight.” And they’re like, “Sorry, we’re out of flights now. We just make popcorn,” which was incredible to see, but that’s so real.
Brian Barrett: I think from a consumer level, if you were going to book tickets for the summer, do it soon because now it’s a supply and demand thing, right? A whole airline is gone. That’s a lot of seats that aren’t there, so there’s more scarcity. Prices are going up basically at the worst possible time for people like myself who are thinking about planning some time for summer travel with, again, two kids.
Zoë Schiffer: Coming up after the break, we’ll be getting into the news of the hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship. Should we be concerned, or are we panicking for no reason? We’ll find out.
Leah Feiger: So in recent days, there have been more and more headlines of a hantavirus outbreak happening on the MV Hondius, a Dutch-flagged cruise ship. The cruise departed from the south end of Argentina over a month ago, making stops in Antarctica, the island of Saint Helena, among other stops. The trouble started when a man started showing symptoms like a fever, a headache, and eventually this became a respiratory illness. He died on board and a few weeks later, his wife did as well. She was later confirmed to have the hantavirus too. As of this week, seven cases have now been confirmed and the ship is currently carrying 147 passengers and crew. To help us understand what on earth is going on, we are joined by WIRED staff writer Emily Mullin.
OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft, its longtime investor and cloud partner, has grown increasingly complicated over the years as the ChatGPT-maker has grown into a behemoth competitor.
But Microsoft executives had reservations about sending additional funding to OpenAI as far back as 2018 when it was just a small nonprofit research lab, according to emails between more than a dozen Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella, shown in a federal court on Thursday during the Musk v. Altman trial.
The emails show how Microsoft, at the time, wavered over what has since been held up as one of the most successful corporate partnerships in tech history. Several Microsoft executives said in the emails their visits to OpenAI did not indicate any imminent breakthroughs in developing artificial general intelligence. In 2017, much of OpenAI’s work was focused on building AI systems that could play video games, which showed early signs of success. But OpenAI needed five times more computing power than it had originally secured from Microsoft to continue the project.
Microsoft worried that not providing support could push OpenAI into the arms of Amazon, the world’s dominant cloud computing provider at the time. Roughly 18 months after the emails were sent, Microsoft announced a landmark $1 billion investment in OpenAI after the lab created a for-profit arm that provided the tech giant with the potential to generate a return of $20 billion.
Microsoft declined to comment.
Elon Musk’s attorneys introduced the emails to show Microsoft’s evolving relationship with OpenAI. After Musk reached out to Nadella, Microsoft in 2016 agreed to provide $60 million worth of cloud computing services to OpenAI at a steep discount. OpenAI consumed the services twice as fast as expected.
The email chain kicked off on August 11, 2017, with Nadella reaching out to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to congratulate the lab on winning a video game competition using AI to mimic a human player. Ten days later, Altman responded seeking $300 million worth of Microsoft Azure cloud computing services.
“We could figure how to fund some of it but not that much,” Altman wrote, apparently seeking a financial handout and engineering help. “I think it will be the most impressive thing yet in the history of AI.”
Nadella asked four lieutenants for their input on how to respond three days later. Microsoft’s AI team saw “no value in engaging,” according to a response from Jason Zander, Microsoft’s executive vice president, that also documented how other teams felt. Its research team thought its own work was “more advanced,” while the public relation teams didn’t like the idea of supporting a group pushing the idea of “machines beating humans.” Ultimately, Zander suggested that Azure would benefit from associating with Musk and Altman but that he wouldn’t want to “take a complete bath,” or large financial hit, in doing so.
A subsequent analysis showed that Microsoft stood to lose about $150 million over several years if it provided the services Altman wanted, according to one email. “Unless he can help us draw a more direct networking effect with OpenAI -> Microsoft business value, we will wind up having to pass,” Zander wrote.
The thread went dark for several months, but was revived on January 10, 2018, with an email to Nadella from Brett Tanzer—who signed off his emails with “Brettt”—then a director on the Azure cloud unit. Altman had told Tanzer that OpenAI could license its gaming AI to Microsoft’s Xbox video game division in exchange for “$35-50 million in Azure Credits.” But Xbox couldn’t commit that much money. Microsoft planned to tell Altman there would be no more discounts after that March, per Tanzer’s email.
AeroKoi set out to answer a simple question. Could a desktop 3D printer produce train whistles that captured the exact chords once carried across fields and towns by steam engines? After months of steady work the answer arrived loud and clear through shop air at 120 pounds per square inch.
Rail lovers still feel a sentimental tug from such noises, as steam engines carried multi-note whistles that signaled their arrival from afar, with the train itself still invisible on the horizon. Modern diesels have much simpler horns, but for many people, the originals remain the gold standard, richer, more alive, and somehow more memorable. AeroKoi began with a small setup and quickly developed expertise. The early prototypes were crude, with PVC pipe wrapped around the printed parts and air forced via a nozzle. Unfortunately, the tones came out weak and strange, lacking the deep resonance he desired. Direct airflow proved to be the main issue. Real whistles work a little differently, allowing the air to build up in a bowl-shaped chamber before directing it out through a super-narrow slit and into the bell.
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That small idea actually opened the door to advancement. Every new iteration included a correct bowl, fine-tuned the slit width, and altered the distance between the bowl and the bell edge. He cut the four-inch-diameter whistles into vertical pieces that stacked nicely in a regular printer bed. For the majority of the experiments, simple PLA was used, with a carbon fiber blend added for stiffness where it was most needed. Layer height remained constant at 0.2 millimeters, with six walls and 25% infill to prevent the sections from collapsing with each blast of pressure.
As the plastic started rolling off the reel, the designs became more sophisticated. An early six-chime model sounded slightly better, but not quite right. The larger bells required greater airflow, thus threaded inlets progressed from quarter-inch fittings to half-inch and finally full-inch NPT ball valves for much smoother control. He included spacers between the parts to allow him to adjust the spacing between the bowl and the lip without having to reprint the entire whistle. Low notes now have a little extra internal room to assist them carry further, as shown by the original illustrations.
Today, two final whistles are available for anyone to download and print. One is a straight copy of a Santa Fe Railroad six-chime whistle, while the other is a Northern Pacific five-chime replica. Both are intended to be printed in pieces, assembled with simple fittings, and sound out lovely clean chords when connected to a compressor. The Santa Fe one feels unusually completed; all of the notes fit together perfectly, with no shrieking or rattling that plagued previous printers.
[Source]
Off-Prem
Things are heating up in a single datacenter, but not in a good way
Amazon Web Services is working to address a power outage that has created “impairments” to services served from the notorious US-EAST-1 region.
A May 7 incident report time-stamped 5:25 PM PDT (00:25 UTC Friday) states that AWS spotted problems in the use1-az4 availability zone of the US-EAST-1 Region. A subsequent update states “EC2 instances and EBS volumes hosted on impacted hardware are affected by the loss of power during the thermal event.”
An update time-stamped 6:47 PM PDT reveals“We continue to work towards mitigating the increased temperatures to its normal levels,” but warns “Other AWS services that depend on the affected EC2 instances and EBS volumes in this Availability Zone may also experience impairments.”
At 8:06 PM PDT Amazon said it was “actively working to restore temperatures to normal levels … though progress is slower than originally anticipated.”
The cloudy concern said it made “incremental progress to restore cooling systems” but users of EC2 Instances, EBS Volumes, and other services are “experiencing elevated error rates and latencies for some workflows.”
AWS has also shifted traffic away from the stricken AZ, and suggested companies shift workloads into other US-EAST-1 availability zones.
Good luck getting that done because the update admits “Customers may experience longer than usual provisioning times.”
US-EAST-1 is arguably AWS’s problem child, as it was the site of major outages that took big chunks of the internet offline in 2021 and then again in October 2025 .
AWS execs have told The Register the region isn’t inherently more fragile than other parts of the Amazonian cloud, but often runs things at bigger scale than elsewhere and therefore imposes extra stress on services.
The Register will update this story as the situation evolves. ®
Generative AI bear Gary Marcus called the AI capex boom the “greatest capital misallocation in history.” Goldman Sachs analyst Eric Sheridan reaches the opposite conclusion in his “AI in a Bubble?” research package. Sheridan argues that this is not a hope-and-hype cycle like 1999 but a scale and monetization cycle, with tangible revenue growth and extraordinary market momentum.
So, who’s right? Jobs, pensions, and trillions of stock-market dollars, are at stake with implications for all of us.
I focus on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the most informative window into the broader conundrum: it is the largest of the cloud businesses, the one with the cleanest revenue disclosure, and the one whose CEO has put the most specific quantitative defense on the table.
The chart below previews where this analysis lands: three plausible curves for AWS revenue, all consistent with the data through Q1 2026, each implying a different return on the $200 billion Amazon plans to spend this year. The disagreement between bulls and bears is essentially a disagreement about which curve materializes.
The bulls argue that hyperscalers fund this build-out from cash flow rather than debt, which makes the AI capex boom different from the historical telecom and railway bubbles. Indeed, AWS grew 28% last quarter, its fastest pace in 15 quarters, validating that enterprise demand for AI compute is real and accelerating.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has framed the company’s $200 billion 2026 capex plan as demand-driven rather than speculative, with strong expected return on invested capital. Stanford professor Gilad Allon offers the strongest non-Wall-Street version of the same argument: the AI build-out is funded primarily by cash-rich incumbents rather than leveraged speculative entrants, and high barriers to entry in chips, data centers, and power limit the kind of fragmented overbuilding that produces classic bullwhip dynamics. In essence, the bull case is that the technology is real, the demand is real, and being too cautious is its own kind of mistake.
In contrast, the bears argue that the AI capex math depends on assumptions that current operating numbers don’t yet support.
Venture capitalist Tom Tunguz notes that Bank of America projects hyperscaler debt issuance of $175 billion this year, six times the prior five-year average — a sharp departure from the cash-flow-funded story the bulls rely on. The asset-durability defense runs into Microsoft’s own admission that $37.5 billion of a single quarter’s capex was allocated to short-lived assets, mainly GPUs that depreciate in five years rather than the thirty-year horizon of telecom or rail.
Beyond the curve question, the bears point to financial fragilities that run independently of demand: Oracle’s leverage, Amazon’s sharp pivot to debt funding, and the circular customer-financing arrangements that tie hyperscaler revenue to a small number of model labs whose own revenue depends on capital markets staying open. In essence, the bear case is that the financial structure is changing, the demand assumptions are fragile, and being too aggressive is courting financial disaster.
Returning to our chart, the structure of the disagreement becomes concrete. The bull case assumes that the recent acceleration in AWS growth is the new normal and that growth rates keep climbing — producing roughly $66 billion in quarterly revenue by Q4 2027 and AWS-quality returns on the $200 billion capex.
The bear case assumes the recent acceleration was a catch-up move and that sequential dollar additions stabilize around the current $2 billion per quarter — producing roughly $52 billion in quarterly revenue and acceptable but disappointing returns.
The catastrophe case is below the bear case: AI workload demand actually reverses, and the GPU layer no longer earns enough revenue to recover its cost. The gap between the bull and bear cases is not whether the capex pays off but how well it does.
Consider the late-1990s fiber boom, when telecom companies laid more than 80 million miles of fiber-optic cable across the U.S. to carry the data traffic of the emerging internet. It didn’t collapse because operators ran out of money. It collapsed because WorldCom told the market that internet traffic was doubling every hundred days when the actual rate was once a year. The predicted curve was wildly off, and capital flowed accordingly.
By 2002, 85 to 95% of the fiber laid in the 1990s remained dark, and roughly $2 trillion dollars in market value had been wiped out. Demand eventually arrived — YouTube, streaming, the cloud — but it arrived a decade later, and the people who built it out lost their shirts. The relevant question for AI is not whether demand exists, which it plainly does, but whether it is growing fast enough to absorb $700 billion in annual capex
The data that resolves the disagreement is roughly 12 months away and will arrive in the regular cadence of quarterly earnings. By Q1 2027, the divergence between the bull and bear paths becomes visible in the AWS data: at that point, AWS quarterly revenue will be either accelerating toward the high $40 billions, tracking flat against the low $40 billions, or showing the first signs of inflecting downward.
None of those outcomes is currently disprovable from the trajectory through Q1 2026, which is why the hyperscalers can keep raising debt and the market keeps buying it. Anyone telling you they are certain which curve will materialize is selling something.
As for me, I just bought a 12-month supply of popcorn.
[Editor’s note: GeekWire publishes guest opinion pieces representing a range of perspectives. The views expressed are those of the author.]
Anthropic on Tuesday unveiled a suite of updates to its Claude Managed Agents platform at its second annual Code with Claude developer conference in San Francisco, introducing a new capability called “dreaming” that lets AI agents learn from their own past sessions and improve over time — a step toward the kind of self-correcting, self-improving AI systems that enterprises have demanded before trusting agents with production workloads.
The company also moved two previously experimental features — outcomes and multi-agent orchestration — from research preview into public beta, making them broadly available to developers building on the Claude platform. Together, the three features address what Anthropic says are the hardest problems in running AI agents at scale: keeping them accurate, helping them learn, and preventing them from becoming bottlenecks on complex, multi-step work.
Early adopters are already reporting significant results. Legal AI company Harvey saw task completion rates increase roughly 6x after implementing dreaming. Medical document review company Wisedocs cut its document review time by 50% using outcomes. And Netflix is now processing logs from hundreds of builds simultaneously using multi-agent orchestration.
The announcements come at a moment of extraordinary momentum for Anthropic. CEO Dario Amodei disclosed during a fireside chat at the conference that the company’s growth has outpaced even its own aggressive internal projections.
In the first quarter of 2026, Anthropic saw what Amodei described as 80x annualized growth in revenue and usage — far exceeding the 10x annual growth the company had planned for. API volume on the Claude platform is up nearly 70x year over year, and the average developer using Claude Code now spends 20 hours per week working with the tool.
“We tried to plan very well for a world of 10x growth per year,” Amodei said. “And yet we saw 80x. And so that is the reason we have had difficulties with compute.”
How Anthropic’s dreaming feature teaches AI agents to learn from their own history
Dreaming is the most novel of the three features and the one Anthropic is most eager to distinguish from conventional memory systems. While the company launched agent memory earlier this year — allowing Claude to retain preferences and context within and across individual sessions — dreaming works at a higher level of abstraction. It is a scheduled process that reviews an agent’s past sessions and memory stores, extracts patterns across them, and curates those memories so agents improve over time. It surfaces insights that no single agent session could see on its own: recurring mistakes, workflows that multiple agents converge on independently, and preferences shared across a team of agents.
Alex Albert, who leads research product management at Anthropic, explained the concept in an interview at the conference. He described dreaming as analogous to how people within organizations create skills after working through a task. “They might do a workflow with Claude, and at the end of that workflow, after they’ve iterated and zigzagged a little bit, they want to record that path from A to B,” Albert said. “A very similar thing is happening with dreaming — instead of you manually creating the skill from your experience working with Claude, the model is doing it, so it has that same context for a future session.”
Crucially, dreaming does not modify the underlying model weights. “We’re not changing the model itself through dreaming — it’s not doing updates to the weights or anything like that,” Albert said. Instead, the agent writes learnings as plain-text notes and structured “playbooks” that future sessions can reference, making the entire process observable and auditable by humans. When asked about the trust implications of agents consolidating their own knowledge, Albert acknowledged that “there is a level of trust that you need to place” but noted that all memories are inspectable and that smarter models are getting progressively better at managing this process. “They’re learning to write better notes for their future self,” he said.
A live demo showed AI agents improving overnight without human guidance
During the keynote, the Anthropic team demonstrated all three features live on stage using a fictional aerospace startup called “Lumara” that needed to autonomously land drones on the moon for resource mining. The team configured a multi-agent system with three specialists — a commander agent responsible for overall mission success, a detector agent that identified high-quality landing sites, and a navigator agent that handled safe drone flight and landing — and defined a success rubric requiring soft landings, clear ground, and enough fuel reserves for a return trip to Earth.
An initial simulation across six hypothetical landing sites produced strong but imperfect results. To improve, the presenters triggered a dreaming session directly from the Claude Developer Console. Overnight, the dreaming agent reviewed all past simulation sessions and wrote a detailed descent playbook — a comprehensive set of heuristics drawn from patterns across multiple mission runs. When the team ran a new simulation the following morning with the dreaming-derived playbook in memory, the results improved meaningfully on the sites that had previously underperformed.
“All we had to do was just have Caitlin press a button,” said Angela Jiang, Head of Product for the Claude Platform, referring to her colleague on stage. “All dreaming.”
The demo illustrated how the three features compose together in practice. Multi-agent orchestration split the complex task across specialists with independent context windows. Outcomes provided the rubric against which a separate grader agent evaluated each run. And dreaming extracted lessons across those runs to improve future performance — forming what Anthropic describes as a continuous improvement loop that requires no human intervention between iterations.
Why Anthropic built a separate ‘grader’ agent to check Claude’s own work
The outcomes feature, now in public beta, gives developers a way to define what success looks like using a rubric — a structural framework, a presentation standard, a brand voice, or any other set of criteria — and then lets the agent iterate toward that standard autonomously. What makes outcomes architecturally distinctive is its separation of concerns. When an agent completes its work, a separate grader agent evaluates the output against the developer-defined rubric in its own independent context window. Because the grader operates in a fresh context, it is not influenced by the working agent’s reasoning or accumulated biases from the session.
When the grader identifies gaps between the output and the rubric, it pinpoints specifically what needs to change, and the working agent takes another pass. This loop continues until the rubric criteria are met — without a human needing to review each attempt.
Albert described Anthropic’s broader verification strategy as employing “more test time compute, more models thinking about a problem for longer, to check over the work of another.” He acknowledged that having a model check its own work raises reasonable questions, but said a fresh context window reviewing completed work consistently outperforms asking the same long-running thread to identify its own bugs. “You will get higher success if you give that output to a fresh Claude and say, ‘what bugs do you see?’” he said. “There is still something to the attention” that degrades over very long sessions — a limitation he said Anthropic is actively working to fix in future models.
The approach mirrors strategies already in use at GitHub. Mario Rodriguez, Chief Product Officer at GitHub, described during a separate talk at the conference how Copilot uses a similar advisor pattern with Claude models — pairing a smaller, cheaper model as an executor with a larger model as a mentor. When the smaller model encounters a problem beyond its capability, it calls the larger model for guidance, then continues executing on its own. Rodriguez said the approach delivers near-Opus-level intelligence at significantly lower cost, and that GitHub inserts critique models at three specific points in the coding workflow: after drafting a plan, after a complex implementation, and after writing tests but before running them.
Parallel AI agents can now tackle tasks too complex for a single model thread
Multi-agent orchestration, the third feature moving to public beta, allows a lead agent to decompose a large task into subtasks and delegate each one to a specialist agent — each with its own model, system prompt, tools, and independent context window. Every step in the process is traceable in the Claude Console, showing which agent did what, in what order, and why.
The design gives each sub-agent an isolated context, which Anthropic says produces better results than having a single agent attempt to hold all the complexity in one thread. “Each sub-agent has its own independent thread and context window,” the keynote presenters explained. “This is very intentional — we found that by splitting the work and then merging the results, we get better outcomes.”
Albert offered his own heuristic for when multi-agent architectures make sense versus sticking with a single thread. “Parallel agents are better for investigation,” he said — situations where there is a lot of context that will ultimately be discarded. “If you’re trying to answer a specific question, you don’t need all the search results from the areas where it didn’t find the answer. You just need the answer.” He described spinning up disposable sub-agents for specific retrieval tasks and bringing only the result back to the main thread. Increasingly, he said, the model itself will decide when to parallelize. “In the future, you won’t really care if it’s one agent or multi-agent or whatever’s happening. You just have a Claude that you’re talking to, and it will deploy the right architecture automatically.”
Anthropic’s bigger bet: closing the gap between AI capabilities and real-world adoption
The three features arrive as part of a broader platform push that Anthropic framed throughout the conference as closing “the gap between what AI can do and what it’s actually doing for people.” Ami Vora, Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer, set the theme in her opening keynote, noting that while model capabilities are advancing on an exponential curve, most organizations are still adopting AI on a linear path.
Dianne Penn, who leads product for Anthropic’s research team, described the company’s measure of progress as “task horizon” — how long an AI agent can work autonomously while improving the quality of its deliverables. “This time last year, models could work for minutes,” she said. “Now, most of us have agents running for hours on end. Tomorrow, we’ll have agents that are proactive, always on, and know what to work on without losing the frame.”
The event also included several infrastructure announcements designed to help developers keep pace. Anthropic said it is doubling its five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans, and raising API rate limits considerably. The company announced a partnership with SpaceX to use the full capacity of its Colossus data center to expand compute availability — a direct response to the demand crunch Amodei described.
All three features are built into Claude Managed Agents, which launched in public beta on April 8 as an opinionated harness that bundles best practices including memory, tool integration, and action handling. Anthropic says teams using Managed Agents have shipped 10x faster than those building their own agent infrastructure from scratch. Albert described the platform using an operating system analogy: “With managed agents, you don’t need to think about all the technicalities of how you set up the surrounding system,” he said. “You’re building an application for Macs — you don’t want to go have to re-implement every detail of macOS.”
What dreaming, outcomes, and multi-agent orchestration mean for the future of enterprise AI
The competitive implications are significant. As AI agent platforms from OpenAI, Google, and others compete for developer adoption, Anthropic is betting that production reliability — not just raw model intelligence — will determine which platform wins enterprise budgets. The dreaming feature in particular stakes out new territory: while other platforms offer memory and tool use, the idea of agents systematically reviewing their own histories to extract reusable knowledge goes further toward the kind of continuously improving systems that enterprises need before delegating high-stakes work.
The conference showcased companies already operating at that scale. Mercado Libre, Latin America’s largest e-commerce platform, has 23,000 engineers running Claude Code, has reviewed more than 500,000 pull requests with human oversight, and is aiming for 90% autonomous coding by the third quarter of this year. Shopify has deployed Claude Code across not just engineering but design, product, and data science teams.
But it was Dario Amodei who articulated the most expansive vision for where all of this leads. He described a progression from single agents to multiple agents to whole organizational intelligence — from “a team of smart people in a room” to what he called “a country of geniuses in the data center.” And he reiterated a prediction he made roughly a year ago: that 2026 would see the first billion-dollar company run by a single person. “Hasn’t quite happened yet,” he said. “But we’ve got seven more months.”
Dreaming is available now in research preview. Outcomes and multi-agent orchestration are in public beta and available to all developers on the Claude platform. Whether seven months is enough time for a solo founder to build a billion-dollar business remains an open question — but after Tuesday, they have a few more tools to try.
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