The Download: Montana’s new experimental drug rules

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.

As of this week in Montana, biotech companies whose drugs have been through preliminary testing—sometimes in as few as 10 healthy people—can pay $12,500 to apply to a newly established review board for approval.

Once its treatment is rubber-stamped, the company can sell it via experimental treatment clinics, the first of which is likely to be up and running around the end of this year.

Montana’s latest right-to-try legislation is unique. Access to drugs is theoretically available to anyone who gives informed consent and can pay. For some, especially people in the longevity community, that’s a hopeful and exciting prospect. But to others, it’s unethical and dangerous.

Read our story to learn about where this may all be headed.

Kris DeVault is desperate. His son, Brody, born in March 2023, has something called creatine transporter deficiency—a rare condition in which the brain and muscles lack the energy they need to develop.

There are no cures for Brody’s condition. But DeVault has learned of a company developing a drug that might help. That drug is still in the early stages of development and has only been tested in animals and a small number of healthy adults. Doctors can’t prescribe it. DeVault knows the drug might not work. But he’s doing all he can to access it regardless. Read our story about DeVault’s efforts.

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Anthropic says its models hacked external organisations during testing It was prompted to conduct a review after similar issues at OpenAI. ( TechCrunch ) + Inside OpenAI’s hack of Hugging Face. ( New Yorker $) + OpenAI called the Hugging Face attack unprecedented. But we’ve been here before. ( MIT Technology Review )

2 Europe is bracing itself for an even more fiery future Countries like France and Spain can expect regimes akin to those in California. ( Nature $) + Even the UK is experiencing fires now, too. ( Guardian ) + El Niño is partly to blame for this year’s grueling heatwaves. ( Wired $) + District cooling could help beat extreme heat in cities. ( New Scientist $) 3 Drone warfare is making the skies more dangerous A fatal plane accident in the US this May, caused by a military GPS jamming exercise, may signal what’s to come. ( Wired $) + Zelensky asked Trump to secure Musk’s permission for the use of Starlink to guide drone strikes inside Russia this week. ( The Atlantic $) 4 As Big Tech’s AI spending grows, so do the jitters Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are set to invest $1.5 trillion into AI infrastructure. But who will pay for it? ( NYT $) + Are investors really getting cold feet about the AI boom? ( FT $) + An AI-focused hedge fund just imploded . ( CNBC ) 5 How China has changed the sovereign AI playbook Kimi 3 from Moonshot makes forking out for expensive US models seem foolish. ( Rest of World ) + The US is winning on the cutting edge. But China dominates cheap models. ( CNBC ) + Could AI end up too cheap to control? ( Vox $)