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What S Next For Ai In 2026 Mit Technology Review

Bonisiwe Shabane
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what s next for ai in 2026 mit technology review

Our AI writers make their big bets for the coming year—here are five hot trends to watch. MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. In an industry in constant flux, sticking your neck out to predict what’s coming next may seem reckless. (AI bubble? What AI bubble?) But for the last few years we’ve done just that—and we’re doing it again.

How did we do last time? We picked five hot AI trends to look out for in 2025, including what we called generative virtual playgrounds, a.k.a world models (check: From Google DeepMind’s Genie 3 to World Labs’s Marble, tech that... Reasoning models have fast become the new paradigm for best-in-class problem solving); a boom in AI for science (check: OpenAI is now following Google DeepMind by setting up a dedicated team to focus on... So what’s coming in 2026? Here are our big bets for the next 12 months. Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images

MIT SMR columnists Thomas H. Davenport and Randy Bean see five AI trends to pay attention to in 2026: deflation of the AI bubble and subsequent hits to the economy; growth of the “factory” infrastructure for all-in AI adapters;... Organizations tend to change much more slowly than AI technology does these days. This means that forecasting enterprise adoption of AI is a bit easier than predicting technology change in this, our third year of making AI predictions. Neither of us is a computer or cognitive scientist, so we generally stay away from prognostication about AI technology or the specific ways it will rot our brains (though we do expect that to... However, AI seems to have moved beyond being just a technology to becoming the primary force driving economic growth and the stock market.

We’re also neither economists nor investment analysts, but that won’t stop us from making our first prediction. Here are the emerging 2026 AI trends that leaders should understand and be prepared to act on. Every January, the AI world makes bold predictions. Most age badly. Some quietly become reality. Looking back at 2025, many “risky” AI predictions actually came true: reasoning models went mainstream, AI became central to science, defense ties deepened, and open-source models challenged Big Tech’s dominance.

This year will not be defined by one breakthrough model or one viral demo. Instead, 2026 will be the year AI’s power structures are tested — technologically, politically, commercially, legally, and morally. Here are five forces that will shape AI in 2026, and why they matter far more than the next benchmark score. One of the most underestimated shifts in AI is already underway. MIT Technology Review’s 2026 AI predictions reveal an industry at inflection points across geopolitics, commerce, regulation, and discovery. From Chinese open-source models powering Silicon Valley apps to chatbots reshaping retail, the coming year promises intensifying US-China dynamics, regulatory battles, and potential LLM-driven scientific breakthroughs.

DeepSeek’s R1 shocked the industry, proving top-tier AI performance possible without OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. Alibaba’s Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct has 8.85 million downloads. Expect more US startups quietly shipping on Chinese open models as the frontier gap shrinks from months to weeks. Trump’s December executive order aims to neuter state AI laws, setting up showdowns with California’s frontier AI legislation. AI companies deploy powerful super-PACs while regulation supporters build counter-war chests for midterm battles. Salesforce anticipates AI driving $263 billion in holiday purchases (21% of orders).

McKinsey projects $3-5 trillion annually from agentic commerce by 2030. Google’s Gemini taps Shopping Graph data; OpenAI struck deals with Walmart, Target, and Etsy for direct chatbot purchasing. Google DeepMind continues pushing AI into scientific discovery, with evolutionary approaches using LLMs showing promise for breakthroughs that traditional research methods miss. Experts outlined four emerging trends that show where platforms are heading next: Digital platforms have already changed how value is created and exchanged. Their next wave — spanning physical assets, artificial intelligence, and automation — promises new efficiencies but also new risks.

At the 2025 MIT Platform Strategy Summit, hosted by the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, experts highlighted four emerging trends that together offer a snapshot of where platforms are heading next. Read the 2025 Platform Strategy Summit report AI is now being programmed to act on its own. A new generation of autonomous “agents” can already buy, sell, and negotiate on behalf of their users — a shift that could transform how digital markets operate. This article was featured in the Think newsletter. Get it in your inbox.

A year in tech can feel like a decade anywhere else. Think about it: a year ago, we were discussing how ChatGPT wasn’t able to count the number of “r”s in “strawberry.” Reasoning models from Chinese frontier labs (like DeepSeek-R1) hadn’t taken the world by... Claude’s dedicated coding agent didn’t exist yet. IBM’s Granite 3.0 had only just arrived. And the agent conversation was only beginning: MCP had just gained traction in the spring, with a notable endorsement from Sam Altman. Meanwhile, in the world of infrastructure, chips and compute resources were becoming scarce, giving new territories a competitive advantage.

AI is entering a new phase, one defined by real-world impact. After several years of experimentation, 2026 is shaping up to be the year AI evolves from instrument to partner, transforming how we work, create and solve problems. Across industries, AI is moving beyond answering questions to collaborating with people and amplifying their expertise. This transformation is visible everywhere. In medicine, AI is helping close gaps in care. In software development, it’s learning not just code but the context behind it.

In scientific research, it’s becoming a true lab assistant. In quantum computing, new hybrid approaches are heralding breakthroughs once thought impossible. As AI agents become digital colleagues and take on specific tasks at human direction, organizations are strengthening security to keep pace with new risks. The infrastructure powering these advances is also maturing, with smarter, more efficient systems. These seven trends to watch in 2026 show what’s possible when people join forces with AI. It’s nearly impossible to discuss technology these days without addressing AI.

To mark Technology Day 2026, we’re highlighting a selection of titles about AI from the MIT Press that explore the technology’s future, challenges, and impact. These books provide essential perspectives for anyone seeking to understand where AI is headed and how it’s transforming the world around us. Read on to explore these books, and sign up for our newsletter to receive more updates from the MIT Press. It has come as a shock to some AI researchers that a large neural net that predicts next words seems to produce a system with general intelligence. Yet this is consistent with a long-held view among some neuroscientists that the brain evolved precisely to predict the future—the “predictive brain” hypothesis. In What Is Intelligence?, Blaise Agüera y Arcas takes up this idea—that prediction is fundamental not only to intelligence and the brain but to life itself—and explores the wide-ranging implications.

These include radical new perspectives on the computational properties of living systems, the evolutionary and social origins of intelligence, the relationship between models and reality, entropy and the nature of time, the meaning of... In his new book, AI trailblazer De Kai explores how widespread use of AI is bringing about an automation of thought, impacting our unconscious. He brings decades of his paradigm-shifting work at the nexus of AI and society to help audiences make sense of our interactions with AI at both personal and societal levels—ethically and responsibly. What should each of us do as the responsible adults in the room? In Hollywood movies, AI destroys humanity. But under the influence of AI upon our minds, humanity may destroy humanity before AI even gets a chance.

Plainspoken and visionary, Raising AI guides us through our shifting attitudes and ideas in a world of AI cohabitants. Society can not only survive the AI revolution but flourish in a more humane, compassionate, and understanding world where we all play our part—alongside our artificial children. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful general-purpose technology that is reshaping the modern economy, but misperceptions about AI stand in the way of harnessing it for the betterment of humanity. In Thrive, Ravi Bapna and Anindya Ghose counter the backlash by showcasing how AI is positively influencing the aspects of our daily lives that we care about most: our health and wellness, relationships, education,... In the process the authors help explain the underlying technology and give people the agency they need to shape the debate around how we should regulate AI to maximize its benefits and minimize its...

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