The Download: AI hiring biases, and weather data sabotage

This is today’s edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI is more likely than humans to form biases when hiring The next time you apply for a job, AI may screen your résumé before any human sees it. But there’s good reason to question whether AI will judge you fairly. We already know that LLMs pick up human biases from their training data. New research suggests they can also develop their own biases from experience—and stereotype job applicants more than humans do. As AI companies race to build agentic models that remember the tiniest details about users, they may be handing them ammunition for forming those biases. Read the full story on AI’s alarming potential to stereotype job applicants . —Michelle Kim The risk of weather data sabotage is rising Every morning, airline dispatchers, grid operators, and farmers around the world make decisions based on weather forecasts. More recently, the forecasts have become relevant for another industry: prediction markets, where people bet money on all kinds of real-world events, including the weather. The temptation to manipulate weather data to get an edge in these markets, combined with a collective move toward data-driven AI weather forecasting, is starting to put the accuracy of weather predictions at risk. As experts in the field, we can foresee scenarios where the risks snowball into far bigger, more systemic problems. Find out why the threats to weather data are growing—and how to stay ahead of them . —Monique Kuglitsch, Jesper Dramsch, Franz G. Kuglitsch, & Andrea Toreti The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 SpaceX is negotiating to sell the Pentagon AI compute It would provide data center capacity worth billions of dollars. ( WSJ $) + Deepening ties between Elon Musk’s company and the DoD. ( Reuters $) + Meanwhile, Anthropic is in talks with Meta to