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In a finding that cuts to the heart of AI's role in public policy, researchers used large language models to replay fifty years of EPA decisions on glyphosate, the widely used herbicide. The result was striking — not a single AI-generated ruling came out more lenient than the human original, suggesting these models may carry a cautious, even conservative regulatory instinct baked into their training data.
That raises a deeper question about metaphor and design, which brings us to a piece making the rounds in developer circles this week. A new essay argues that framing AI agents as a software factory is fundamentally misleading. The factory model implies predictable throughput and interchangeable parts, but agentic systems are messier, more contextual, and far less mechanical than that framing suggests. Getting the metaphor wrong, the author contends, leads to getting the architecture wrong.
And in a story that sits at the intersection of politics and science, Colossal Biosciences CEO Ben Lamm has secured Trump administration backing for a program to collect DNA from endangered species. Lamm's argument was straightforward — conservation doesn't pause for election cycles, and building genomic archives now could matter enormously for species survival decades down the line.
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