COVER STORY This issue: The standoff at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue was not much of a spectacle.  On the first day of February, a handful of men working for Elon Musk had come to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a few blocks from the White House, demanding full access to its headquarters. The agency’s staff refused. No guns were drawn. No punches thrown..To understand the world we live in, read TIME.

Researchers are racing to understand why. Dr. Frank Frizelle has operated on countless patients in his career as a colorectal surgeon. But there’s one that stayed with him. In 2014, he was treating a woman in her late 20s suffering from bowel cancer—already a rare situation, given her age. But it became even more unusual when her best friend visited for in the hospital and told Frizelle that she had many of the same symptoms as his patient…

The release of DeepSeek R1 stunned Wall Street and Silicon Valley in January, spooking investors and impressing tech leaders. But amid all the talk, many over-looked a critical detail about the way the new Chinese artificial intelligence model functions—a nuance that has researchers worried about humanity’s ability to control sophisticated new AI systems. It’s all down to an innovation in how DeepSeek R1 was trained—one that led to surprising…