The Download: energy transmission and US threats against Chinese AI

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. The power line that could reshape New York’s grid is hitting snags During a heat wave on July 3, New York State’s grid imported enough electricity from Canada to meet about 9% of its total demand that day. Some of that power shuttled in on a 339-mile power line stretching from Quebec to Queens. It opened in May and is officially the longest underground transmission line in North America. It could provide up to 20% of New York City’s electricity demand, largely with abundant hydropower from Quebec. One wrinkle: The line has been down for most of this month, and some experts are concerned about how drought will affect the power supply feeding it. Still, the line could help shape the future of our grid, if it can overcome these sorts of snags. Read our story to understand how. —Casey Crownhart This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 The US Treasury is threatening to sanction Chinese AI companies Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has accused Moonshot of improperly distilling Anthropic’s Fable model. (TechCrunch) + Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is arguing that America has nothing to fear from Chinese AI. (Axios) + Like it or not, Chinese models are now part of the global AI infrastructure. (Rest of World) + China’s AI models have Trump’s AI world at war with itself. (MIT Technology Review) 2 Why the OpenAI hack is the scariest AI mishap yet AI’s capabilities seem to be starting to outpace our current ability to control them. (The Economist $) + Hugging Face had to turn to a Chinese AI model to rescue it from the hack. (BI) 3 Visually impaired Europeans can now get an implant that restores sight And Americans may not have to wait long to receive it, too. (STAT) + This retina implant lets people with vision loss do a crossword puzzle. (MIT Technology Review) 4 A bellwether lawsuit suing Meta for social media addiction has been dropped There are, however, many more waiting in the wings. (NYT $) 5 Here’s how ICE gets its hands on Americans’ data As soon as you open a credit card or phone account, its agents can see where you live. (404 Media) + States are warring with the Trump administration over the right to see ICE agents’ faces. (Wired $) 6 We urgently need to grapple with AI’s environmental impact As the world warms, is the price we’re paying worth it? (The Verge) + We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. (MIT Technology Review) 7 Privacy issues with smart glasses need an industrywide fix That’s according to Samsung, which is unveiling glasses it developed with Google this fall. (Bloomberg $) 8 The US Army is begging soldiers to limit their AI use The token crisis comes for us all eventually, it seems. (Ars Technica) 9 Wh…