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When customers talk about AI costs, the conversation usually starts with token prices and ends with access to the latest, most capable model in the cloud. Do they always need that level of capability? Not necessarily. But that is often where the conversation goes.
As AI moves from experimentation to production, model choice is only part of the equation. When demand becomes steady and business-critical, a consumption-only approach can turn AI spending into a variable monthly line item that is difficult to forecast as usage, workloads, and model requirements change.
At that point, the question is no longer simply which model to consume, or which provider offers the lowest token price: It is how to run AI economically, predictably, and at sustained scale.
AI is moving from isolated pilots into production portfolios: assistants, retrieval-and-knowledge systems, and agentic applications. Customer-service, IT, research, and business-process agents can execute multi-step workflows across enterprise systems, creating recurring demand across models, data, and tools.
This is already starting to happen. Deloitte’s 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise reflects what many leaders are seeing: worker access to AI rose 5% in 2025, and the share of companies with at least 40% of their AI projects in production is expected to double within six months.
When AI becomes a portfolio of always-on workloads, not a collection of experiments, the economics change. Consumption pricing gives teams flexibility and limits commitment. But when usage becomes steady, predictable, and large enough to keep capacity productive, leaders need to ask a different question: Does it still make economic sense to buy AI one request at a time, or is it time to invest in capacity they can optimize and control?
This is not an abstract cloud-versus-on-premises debate. It is a workload-by-workload business decision. Over the next 12 to 18 months, how much AI demand can the company reasonably expect? How consistently will that capacity be used? When multiple workloads share infrastructure, the enterprise can spread fixed costs across more productive use—improving the economics of ownership.
Ownership is not automatically the lower-cost answer. It only makes sense when an enterprise can keep capacity productive.
Every organization has a crossover point, the level of sustained use at which owning capacity can become more economical than buying it one request at a time. There is no universal number. It depends on the models being used, the balance of input and output tokens, performance requirements, system design, energy costs, and the operating model required to support it.
A retrieval-heavy knowledge system can have a very different cost profile from a simple assistant because it may process far more context for every interaction. Agentic workflows can be different again: a single business task may involve repeated reasoning, retrieval, model calls, and tool use. That is why generic cost benchmarks are not enough. Enterprises need to model their actual workloads, understand expected demand, and size capacity accordingly.
At the right utilization level, the benefit is not only lower effective cost, but also greater predictability: the ability to manage AI capacity as a strategic infrastructure investment rather than watch a monthly spend line fluctuate with model use and workload demand.
The capital decision is only half the equation. Even when the economics support ownership, capacity creates value only when the business gets workloads into production quickly and keeps them running.
That takes more than installing infrastructure. It takes an operating model that connects the technology to adoption and business outcomes: bringing users and workloads on board, governing how AI is used, reviewing utilization, and continually identifying the next high-value use case.
The goal is to create value early, then build on it. That means measuring use, identifying underutilized capacity, and bringing additional high-value workloads onto the platform over time. Without that discipline, the business may never realize the economic value that justified the investment. With it, AI capacity becomes a productive asset the business can optimize, expand, and use to create measurable value.
Before committing capital, leaders should ask three questions:
As AI moves into production, the organizations that create the most value will look beyond token prices and the latest model. They will know when recurring demand calls for a different economic model—and they will have the operating discipline to make that capacity productive.
That is when AI stops being an expense and becomes an asset.
This content was produced by HPE. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.
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Last Wednesday, Anthropic announced that earlier this year it had launched a molecular biology lab, where Claude agents read and conjecture about hard biology problems and human scientists run experiments on what they report. And this AI-powered lab, the company said, had made its first discovery.
To understand what Anthropic says its system did, imagine you’re flipping through a library of millions of DNA sequences, amassed as scientists sequence more and more of the living world. One step toward a breakthrough might be finding a peculiar sequence that encodes an interesting enzyme, perhaps. Then you’d need to figure out what that enzyme does and, eventually, how to manipulate it to do something useful.
What Anthropic says its system of 950 agents found after 21 hours was not a brand-new sequence. The agents instead flagged a repeating pattern surrounding a known enzyme, a particular pattern Anthropic said hadn’t been catalogued before. But if you read through Anthropic’s announcement, which calls this pattern “reminiscent” of what led to the gene-editing technology CRISPR that “has already transformed science and medicine,” it sounds as if this army of agents really found something of note.
These claims have angered some biologists. A viral post from one, subsequently endorsed by the chair and CEO of the drugmaker Eli Lilly, said that “finding a weird cluster of genes and repeats is often the easy part. The hard part, and where the real discoveries come from, is figuring out what the system actually does.” The agents helped with some laboratory grunt work, in other words. But a discovery it is not.
It’s a reminder that even if AI does something impressive—like finding a pattern in a mass of biological data that would be difficult to perceive with human eyes alone—the result itself may not constitute a breakthrough for science. What is novel for AI may be routine, unsurprising, or simply not that consequential to a biologist.
Muddying the issue further, Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a biologist at the University of Copenhagen, said over the weekend that his team had already discovered this particular pattern, the New York Times reported. Mestre, who regularly chatted with Claude in his work, wondered whether Anthropic’s team had learned from his conversations. Anthropic denies this, but Mestre says he’s stopping all use of Claude anyway.
Part of the problem here is that AI companies aren’t presenting their systems simply as tools scientists can use, like microscopes or supercomputers. They’re insisting that the AI systems are making discoveries themselves. To some, that approach is incompatible with how science actually works, with new knowledge more typically emerging from collaboration and an ever-growing arsenal of tools.
It’s also making people more skeptical of genuine progress when it happens. Whittling 200,000 candidates down to a few worth exploring is no small feat; it is legitimate scientific work. The fact that a general-purpose chatbot could do that work is notable, even if humans helped steer it and ultimately ran the experiments. But once the standard is whether Claude itself made a discovery, all that becomes evidence for one side or the other in a debate that has only two answers: breakthrough or bust.
Once we’re judging AI by whether it has made a discovery, it’s also tempting to shift the goalposts even after it really does seem to notch a win. Earlier this month, OpenAI said its own team agents had cracked a million-dollar problem in mathematics. But a couple of weeks later, nearly every AI skeptic in my feed was sharing an article asking whether it was the math problem that really mattered.
To be clear, the piece did not argue that OpenAI’s solution was wrong. Instead, it argued that the particular result may not be the one mathematicians care most about. Throw in the accusation by a mathematician that the models may have used some of his work without credit, and people are left thinking either OpenAI cheated or the solution wasn’t important anyway. Or both.
That’s part of what concerns Lucas Harrington, the biologist who wrote the post critiquing Anthropic’s announcement. He closed with a suggestion: AI companies, he said, should “set the bar high now, so that when an AI actually discovers a fundamentally new biological mechanism, everyone appreciates how big a deal it is.” But as OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei race to one-up each other, raising the bar for scientific breakthroughs by AI might be the last thing on their minds.
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MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.
Over the past few months, a cascade of cyberattacks by AI agents has stunned the world. In July, OpenAI disclosed that a swarm of its agents had escaped their sandbox and hacked into the AI platform Hugging Face to cheat on a cybersecurity test. Recently, external researchers discovered that OpenAI agents had hijacked a German wiki site and the coding platform RubyGems in May to share test answers.
Earlier this month, Anthropic disclosed four incidents in which its model Claude hacked into third-party systems during cybersecurity exercises. Just last week, Google confirmed that its model Gemini had been caught hacking other companies too.
The researcher who uncovered the OpenAI website hijack has warned it’s likely that similar undiscovered episodes are out there. And many say it’s only a matter of time until there’s another, possibly more damaging incident where AI agents bypass sandboxes to access systems they shouldn’t.
So the big question is: How do we hold companies liable when they lose control of their AI agents?
OpenAI didn’t disclose the German wiki incident or the RubyGems incident until a group of external researchers uncovered them, and it still has not disclosed some crucial details about the Hugging Face hack. That limits our understanding of what exactly went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again.
But you might be surprised to learn that OpenAI likely wasn’t legally required to disclose these incidents. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.)
State AI transparency laws like California’s SB 53, New York’s RAISE Act, and Illinois’s SB 315 require that AI developers report “critical safety incidents.” These are defined as incidents that cause more than 50 deaths or physical injuries or $1 billion in damage. They also include incidents where the model deceives developers outside an evaluation in a way that materially increases catastrophic risks. Many cybersecurity incidents that don’t meet the threshold for physical damage or catastrophic risks could nonetheless be dangerous precursors to such catastrophes, and the existing laws don’t account for that.
“The recent incidents are a perfect example of why the law isn’t ready,” says Mackenzie Arnold, managing director of US policy at the Institute for Law and AI, a think tank. “Only the worst, most egregious, most immediately harmful stuff is going to qualify.”
With no authority under existing AI laws to demand information about anything short of a catastrophe, governments are left to borrow investigative authority from other laws or sue the companies, an expensive process that can take years.
“Normally, something like the Hugging Face incident should have been taken to court,” says Yonathan Arbel, a law professor at the University of Alabama School of Law. “Then we would have discovery, and we would have all the spillover effects that we get from litigation, where all the information comes out.”
But so far, Hugging Face has chosen not to sue OpenAI. Hugging Face’s CEO, Clément Delangue, says it doesn’t have the resources to do so (instead, he asked OpenAI for $100 million in compute). Still, Delangue stressed in an interview with CNN at the end of July that choosing not to pursue legal action shouldn’t be taken to mean he doesn’t think OpenAI should be held accountable. “Everyone has to remember that this cyberattack is a crime. This is illegal. And we have to find a way to make sure these things don’t happen more regularly,” he said. Hugging Face did not respond to a request to comment.
Litigation has the benefit of pushing courts to use existing laws to address AI safety incidents, rather than just waiting for new legislation. One obvious route is tort law, a body of civil law that lets people and businesses sue those who harm them. This is often used to hold companies liable for the mass harms they cause, like when families sued Boeing in 2019 over two plane crashes that killed hundreds of people, or when states and cities sued Purdue Pharma over the opioid crises, extracting settlements worth billions.
“There’s plausible grounds for a negligence claim that OpenAI should have used a stronger sandbox, done more monitoring,” says Gabriel Weil, a law professor at the University of Houston Law Center. For example, when OpenAI employees discovered the covert message board that the agents had created, they could’ve promptly escalated their findings to security and safety teams. And the company could’ve better designed its sandbox to ensure that agents couldn’t access the internet.
But even if OpenAI doesn’t end up in a lawsuit over the Hugging Face hack, the threat of liability could incentivize AI labs to exercise more caution than explicitly demanded by law.
OpenAI announced in its postmortem that it plans to strengthen the safeguards used to contain and monitor the models, accelerate model alignment, and improve its processes for identifying and addressing incidents.
“The liability questions raised by frontier labs’ spate of cybersecurity attacks boil down to the incentives the expectation of liability creates for their future conduct,” says Weil. “That’s why I think it’s important to get these rules right, even if the stakes are pretty low in this particular case.”
One way to get answers—and determine whether OpenAI should be held liable—is to compel disclosure. But the existing state AI laws—California’s SB 53, New York’s RAISE Act, and Illinois’s 315—don’t give governments the authority to investigate incidents like the ones that happened recently.
However, amid rising public alarm, state attorneys general are stepping in, borrowing investigative powers from other laws. Alabama, Montana and a coalition of 15 other states, and California are each demanding information about the incident from OpenAI to understand whether the company’s practices violated state consumer protection laws, among others. Members of Congress are also launching their own probes. Senator Josh Hawley opened a Senate investigation earlier this month, sending OpenAI a list of questions about the incident and the company’s internal policies together with a document request, while a group of House Democrats asked OpenAI and Anthropic to release their incident logs.
“Someone needs to investigate, but it’s unfortunate that it has fallen to attorneys general, who need to rely on creative interpretations of their existing authorities to do this,” says Arnold, the US AI policy expert. Consumer protection statutes were written to catch companies that scam their customers, not companies that lose control of their software. The state attorneys general would have to show that OpenAI deceived or unfairly harmed customers, but it’s unclear if the hacking involved any such conduct.
And “those [consumer protection] laws are not built for doing a thorough investigation of an AI cybersecurity incident,” says Arnold. They weren’t designed to help investigators determine whether a model was adequately contained or whether a company’s security practices were sound.
“This is not the right tool for the job,” says Arbel. “The right tool would have been something like maybe a criminal investigation”—perhaps under a hacking law like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).
Under CFAA, hacking into another company’s computer systems without permission is a crime. But to be held liable, a hacker must have intended to break into a computer without authorization. Intent arguably requires a state of mind, and no court has ruled that AI agents have one. Without such a precedent, it’s unlikely a court would rule that AI agents had carried out a hack.
One way to keep an eye on AI companies is to mandate external auditors.
After the Hugging Face hack, OpenAI brought in researchers from the AI safety nonprofits METR and Redwood Research to examine the incident. However, it constrained access to the model that led to the hacks, didn’t disclose the company’s safety and security practices, limited the length of the investigation, and had ultimate say over what the researchers could publish. We still don’t know what set the attack in motion back in May and why OpenAI’s employees who spotted the agents’ activity never escalated to their safety and security leaders.
This kind of arrangement has a built-in tension: An auditor without legal authority depends on the labs’ goodwill for continued access, which means it has to scrutinize the labs without jeopardizing their relationship. Last week, Anthropic announced that the company will be hiring Accenture as an embedded evaluator to assess its models. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in an essay that frontier AI labs should give “ongoing employee-like access” to “a team of embedded third-party evaluators (such as METR), whose role is to verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents, and help assess the alignment of not just completed AI models but training pipelines and processes.”
Most existing state AI laws do not require labs to hire an external auditor. California’s SB 53 and New York’s RAISE Act just require AI companies to publish a safety framework describing how they will test their models for dangerous capabilities and then to follow it. The frameworks are written by the companies, and testing can be done internally. Only Illinois’s SB 315 requires companies to undergo an annual third-party audit starting in 2028.
“There’s a lot of headroom for increasing not only reporting requirements for these companies, but also review by external bodies,” says Peter Salib, a law professor at the University of Houston Law Center. Those reviewers could be private auditors accredited by the government but chosen and paid for by the AI companies. Alternatively, they could be government agencies or insurance companies.
None of this is an accident. The laws on the books that failed to hold AI companies accountable for agentic cyberattacks emerged amid fierce lobbying by the AI industry.
SB 1047, the California AI bill that was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2024 after lobbying by OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, proposed a much tougher set of rules. It would have required AI companies to report a broader set of safety incidents (including incidents in which a model acts on its own or slips its controls), undergo annual third-party audits, and maintain a kill switch. But after a year of intense negotiations, Newsom signed SB 53, which narrowed the types of incidents deemed reportable and dropped the requirements for audits and kill switches.
New York’s RAISE Act followed the same arc. “The version of the RAISE Act that the NY Legislature passed would have required disclosure of this ‘incident,’” Alex Bores, the New York state assembly member who sponsored the bill, wrote on X. New York’s original bill also included third-party audits.
With political pressure mounting, new bills creating better reporting, auditing, and liability regimes for AI development are on the horizon. In Congress, the AI Incident Reporting Act would require AI companies to report to the Commerce Department when a model evades human oversight or breaches a system, even if it doesn’t cause any harm. The Frontier Act would require incident reporting and independent audits. In New York, the Understanding Artificial Intelligence Act, sponsored by Bores, would make companies liable when a model does something that if carried out by a human would be a tort or crime.
As AI agents increasingly become better at launching cyberattacks, the law remains behind. Closing the gap will require lawmakers to move faster than the next breakout.
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The US government wants to spend $30.3 million over the next five years on an improved form of lie detector, according to a Department of Defense budget request. The program, called Polygraph+ or Polygraph Next, will focus on scoring algorithms that use artificial intelligence and machine learning and on a technique called “standoff sensing,” which refers to the ability to take physiological readings without attaching a device to a subject’s person.
According to details of the budget document, which were first reported by Inside Defense, the project will “modernize federal polygraph and credibility assessment technologies” to improve their accuracy and reliability. But the project may be just the latest in a long line of failed attempts to use technology to detect lies. “It’s a misguided effort to reduce the complex to something that is tangible,” says Kyri Kotsoglou, a legal scholar at Northumbria University in the UK who studies the use of polygraphs in the justice system.
The move comes at a time of high tension within the department. Under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon has been increasingly turning to polygraph tests in an attempt to find the sources of alleged leaks to the press. In September, the New York Times reported that around 50 officers on the Joint Staff had been given polygraph tests after news coverage reported on the depletion of US weapons stockpiles in the war with Iran.
Polygraph+ will be run by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA), which conducts background checks for the federal government. According to the budget document, which has not yet been approved by Congress, the new technology will be used for vetting of prospective employees and “insider threat detection.” It is not yet clear which specific technologies will be used, and the DCSA did not respond to a request for more information.
But other Pentagon efforts offer potential clues. In 2023, the department’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) ran an open submission process to find companies with products that could be used for deception detection.
It selected two companies to build prototypes: Presage Technologies, which claims to be able to measure heart rate and breathing rate using standard cameras, and Altec Research, a medical sensor company now branching out into non-contact sensing technologies. A screenshot of Altec’s prototype technology released by the DIU shows that it tracks head movement, facial skin temperature, and pore activity. Presage Technologies and Altec Research did not respond to requests for comment. The DIU declined to comment.
Current lie detection technology has barely changed since the polygraph was invented in the 1920s. Examiners rely on blood pressure, pulse, breathing, and sweat measurements to determine if someone is lying. They make judgments about the veracity of respondents’ replies on the basis of differences in their physiological response to baseline questions like “Is the sky blue?” and target questions like “Have you ever committed a crime?”
The federal government conducts tens of thousands of the tests each year while screening employees, but the reliability of this technology has been repeatedly challenged—and its results are rarely admissible in court. In 1983, Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment concluded that there was very limited evidence supporting the polygraph’s use for screening employees, and in 2003, the US National Research Council (NRC) said evidence for its efficacy was “weak at best.”
Research suggests humans can spot a lie just over half the time without any technical assistance. The American Polygraph Association claims the polygraph is between 80% and 94% accurate. But the 2003 NRC report pointed out that a screening test with this level of accuracy could still lead to a lot of mistakes. The DOD employs 2.8 million people; an imperfect system applied at that scale could end up falsely accusing tens of thousands.
There are other issues too. Polygraph interpretations are often subjective: Different examiners get wildly different results, and people from minority groups are more likely to be judged as deceptive. What’s more, with training it’s possible for interviewees to learn a variety of countermeasures that can help beat the test; for example, they may artificially heighten their physiological response to baseline questions by stepping on a pin hidden in their shoe.
“If you know how it works, you can beat it,” says Sophie van der Zee, an associate professor who studies deception at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. She says the machine’s biggest effect is deterrence—often, subjects confess before it even begins. “But that only works if people think a polygraph works,” she points out.
Various new strategies for lie detection have been attempted over the decades, with technologies ranging from thermal cameras to pupil trackers to brain scans. None of them have yielded reliable results outside the lab. The problem is that there’s no single telltale sign of lying that’s true for everyone all the time. “There is still no Pinocchio’s nose,” says van der Zee.
AI could theoretically improve polygraphs if it could find patterns in the data that examiners can’t. AI algorithms are also more likely to be used for “multi-modal” deception detection, which seeks to combine multiple measurements into an overall deception “score” that is harder for people to game. Three things are happening under the surface that lie detection tries to home in on, van der Zee says: physiological stress, cognitive load, and the conscious efforts people make to conceal the fact that they’re lying. Current polygraph technology tackles only one.
“The more you can have combined methods that approach it from these three different angles, the more successful you will be,” van der Zee says. This isn’t a new concept—in the 2000s, researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK developed a system called Silent Talker that generated a deception score from video footage. This was later folded into iBorderCtrl, an EU-funded pilot program. In the US, a project called AVATAR incorporated eye tracking, voice analysis, and body movement detection into a tool for use at border crossings. All these projects have quietly faded away.
Kotsoglou says combining AI and the polygraph is “the worst of both worlds” because it adds uncertainty on top of invalidity. Even if AI or machine learning can spot previously unseen patterns in physiological data, it won’t be able to reliably link them to lying because there is no real ground truth.
“Even if you have all the records in the world from polygraph tests, you don’t know whether those polygraph tests are right or not,” says Marion Oswald, a professor of law who has written with Kotsoglou on the use of polygraphs in the justice system. She fears that new forms of lie detection will, like the polygraph, be used more as a psychological prop than a scientific tool.
“It seems very much a response to the concern of the current administration to leaks and perceived lack of loyalty,” says Oswald. “[Lie detection is] being used as a threat, to intimidate and force people to confess to things, as opposed to anything that’s actually getting valid information.”
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Brace yourself: It turns out AI is being optimized for cheating. OpenAI’s agents hacked into Hugging Face to get the answers to a cybersecurity test. Next, they solved a prestigious math problem (or just stole from two top mathematicians’ answer sheets). Anthropic’s models have also hacked into other companies’ systems four times already. And that’s only what we’ve caught so far.
Freaking out? You’re not alone. AI lab researchers are quitting their jobs and issuing dire warnings that if we keep going this way, AI might eventually kill us all. Bill Gates is sounding the alarm. Bernie Sanders has teamed up with Steve Bannon, of all people, to call for curbs on AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is urging a slowdown, and other top US AI executives agree. But fear not: President Trump has a plan. He says the only guardrail AI needs is “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.”
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Listen to the session or watch below
The US has spent billions building a “virtual wall” of surveillance towers along its southern border over the past 25 years, promising they will help detect and apprehend border crossers and save lives. But a groundbreaking investigation by MIT Technology Review has documented over a thousand people who moved through areas watched by these towers without being reached or apprehended, and who ultimately died there. Some were even under the watch of newly installed AI-powered towers designed to spot people automatically.
Our findings reveal a humanitarian crisis more visible than previously known, and repeated failures of the virtual wall’s basic security promise. Watch a conversation examining the failures of border surveillance technology and uncovering the stories of the people who die in the borderlands.
Speakers: Mat Honan, editor in chief, James O’Donnell, senior AI reporter, and Eileen Guo, senior features and investigations reporter
Recorded on September 28, 2026
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It’s been a busy few months for AI hype. At the end of April, Anthropic claimed that its model Claude Mythos is better at finding software vulnerabilities than most security experts. Then we had the OpenAI–Hugging Face hacking incident, after which Anthropic (proudly) and Meta (reluctantly) disclosed similar incidents involving their models.
This was followed by Anthropic’s claim that one of its models had made a mathematical breakthrough; soon OpenAI claimed a mathematical breakthrough of its own. Most recently, Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon went viral announcing his departure from the company, claiming that it and OpenAI are “racing straight towards self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
Each of these events was mostly covered breathlessly by the press, often repeating the companies’ anthropomorphizing framings—which are designed to portray their software is not only powerful but incipient “artificial general intelligence.” So what is really going on? Are we witnessing a massive, civilization-changing set of technological breakthroughs, or is this marketing?
In all these incidents, massive fanfare from the companies (presented as mea culpas in illicit hacking cases) is accompanied by intense press coverage. Once there is time for experts in the relevant fields to examine what happened, a very different story emerges, but one that gets less media attention.
Regarding the “hacking” incidents, cybersecurity experts say the story is more about OpenAI’s negligence and failure to adopt basic, established security practices than about “models gone rogue” or “AI agents creating civilizations.”
As for the mathematical results, mathematicians who were initially “stunned” by OpenAI’s press release saying that its latest chatbot, Astra, solved problems that “have been open and seen no progress on the main result for at least a decade”—but they later realized that the results weren’t as “novel as first appeared.” Since then, mathematicians have accused the company of research misconduct and plagiarism, and they’ve reiterated that Astra didn’t make a “profound intellectual leap.” Just weeks later, OpenAI claimed its own mathematical breakthrough. Two days before, Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at New York University’s Courant Institute, published a bombshell statement suggesting that OpenAI had stolen other people’s work and improperly attributed it.
Claims of incipient, dangerous superintelligence are not based in good scientific or engineering practice. Rather, they are narratives based in ideologies of transhumanism, eugenics, and wishful thinking about imagined future digital humans.
It’s worth thinking about why there is so much attention on computer programming and math as fields in which to apply large language models and related technology. Not only are they often elevated as the pinnacle of human intellectual achievement, but they involve problems where answers, once suggested, can be verified. The former property helps AI hype mongers sell the idea that they are building everything machines. The latter makes math and coding problems easier to tune systems for, since system output (sequences of likely words or pieces of computer code) can be evaluated without having to pay data workers to look at and annotate each one.
Mathematicians in particular have warned against corporations using their field in this way. A statement signed by hundreds of them says there is “currently a strong commercial incentive on the part of the technology industry to overstate the capabilities of their products” and asks policymakers to “consult with experts, including mathematicians, in forming policy decisions rather than relying on press releases or popular reporting of mathematical results.”
We echo this call and note that the illusion of speed and urgency promulgated by the tech companies is also a ploy to misdirect both policymakers and the public. Unfortunately, it sometimes works, such as with Senator Bernie Sanders’s well-meaning but ultimately misguided proposed legislation to prevent the development of “artificial superintelligence.”
Describing them as “superintelligence” or “rogue models” ascribes agency to products rather than to the companies building them. This framing markets these companies’ products as “superhuman” and, at the same time, helps the companies evade accountability for their actions.
Instead of OpenAI being prosecuted for creating malware that hacked another company, press releases, news outlets, media personalities, and lawmakers refer to “rogue models” as if they acted on their own. Instead of researchers being questioned about their companies’ habit of plagiarizing academics’ work or using customer data to train models without consent, the public’s imagination is redirected to fears about what the future might hold upon the arrival of fictional superintelligent machines.
The AI industry has even suggested that popular, bipartisan anti-data-center activism is a “distraction” from attempts to regulate the impending, scary, “superhuman” machines these companies are building. According to the AI industry, we should be more worried about a fictional machine god than about the climate catastrophe that these data centers exacerbate, the asthma suffered by those living near them, the rising electricity bills of the public subsidizing them, or the water that is redirected to cooling them.
We know better than to make decisions based on marketing and better than to capitulate to corporate pressure to make those decisions quickly. Wise decision-making, by policymakers and communities, demands time to hear from independent experts and contextualize corporate claims. The best possible outcome from this summer of hype is that policymakers and the public at large learn to take a breath, hold onto our skepticism, and recognize this kind of hype for what it is the next time it comes around.
Timnit Gebru is executive director of DAIR and author of the forthcoming book Deep Unlearning: The Radicalization of a Tech Idealist, which is available for preorders now and set to publish on February 16. Emily M. Bender is professor of linguistics at the University of Washington and coauthor of The AI Con.
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Our 15-month investigation into death and surveillance along the US-Mexico border began with a simple question: Why did so many people die near government surveillance towers meant to help track and apprehend them?
This story is part of Dying on Camera, a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego. Journalists in both newsrooms spent the past year examining the failures of border surveillance technology and uncovering the stories of the people who die in the borderlands.
To answer that question, we looked through thousands of pages of government documents, visited the border multiple times, and interviewed more than 45 people, including current and former White House advisors, presidential appointees, Border Patrol agents, medical examiners, sheriffs, humanitarian volunteers, and employees of tech companies.
The result of our investigation is the first comprehensive map and analysis of deaths near border surveillance towers. Here’s how we built it, what decisions we made along the way, and what the data can and can’t tell us.
The investigation relied on knowing where migrants have died and where and when US Customs and Border Protection towers were installed. We analyzed cases dating back to 2015, allowing us to cover different border policies, presidential administrations, and tower technologies.
The US-Mexico border has been called the world’s deadliest land border, and Border Patrol estimates that more than 10,000 people have died during crossings since 2000—a figure that’s widely considered an undercount. But the amount of information available publicly on where and when these people died, and who they were, varies widely. Some remains are never discovered, and for those that are, there’s no national protocol for how the records are handled.
We considered a case for further analysis if we could confirm three basic things: whether the person was believed to have been crossing the border, where the remains were found, and roughly when the person died.
We created our dataset by merging existing ones that had been compiled and shared by other organizations, including No More Deaths, Humane Borders, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with new records we obtained ourselves from more than a dozen agencies.
Texas was the biggest missing link in most existing databases of migrant deaths. Unlike Arizona, it has no initiative to share records online, and unlike New Mexico, it leaves individual counties to handle their own death investigations. Some records for those individual counties existed, compiled by a handful of dedicated researchers, but nothing was comprehensive or current.
We identified 17 counties in Texas that would be relevant to our investigation: Culberson, Jeff Davis, Presidio, Terrell, Val Verde, Kinney, Maverick, Dimmit, Webb, Zapata, Jim Hogg, Starr, Hidalgo, Cameron, Kenedy, Brooks, and Duval. There are other counties in which migrants have died, but they do not have areas covered by surveillance towers and were therefore excluded.
In most of these counties, locally elected administrative judges called justices of the peace collect the most comprehensive information on local deaths. But records requests submitted to these individual judges can stall for years (indeed, some of our requests to justices of the peace remain unfilled more than a year after we filed them). Reports from justices of the peace sometimes leave out the scene or location details we needed; some justices never even visit the place where a migrant died, instead formally declaring the person deceased over FaceTime with the first responders on scene.
MIT Technology Review instead filed records requests to the sheriffs of these 17 counties beginning in July 2025. These agencies are often first on the scene when a death is discovered, and their reports can have more detailed information on where remains were found. But relying on sheriffs’ records means our analysis undercounts migrant deaths in Texas, as it doesn’t include any deaths handled by local or state police.
After we filed a request, it took periods of near daily calls to the offices to receive the records, if we received them at all. Some were provided with no charge. Other counties charged between $300 and $1,300 to fill our request. Counties warned that their records were incomplete, with an unknown number lost during a move, damaged, destroyed, or misplaced during transitions between sheriffs.
Those delays were compounded because most agencies do not record whether a person is believed to have been crossing the border when they died. That’s despite provisions in some counties that allow officers to track far more granular details about other situations; Zapata County reports have a checkbox to indicate whether jewels were stolen in a burglary, for example, while Cameron County reports have one for whether a burglar entered through a chimney. Without a way to readily identify migrant deaths, offices had to pull records by hand, making the process slower, more costly, and more prone to error.
We received usable records from 14 of these counties (records have yet to be received from Dimmit or Duval, and Maverick’s office charged a per-record fee that was cost prohibitive).
Agencies generally sent us police reports for each individual case, amounting to over 4,000 pages of records in total. Some were handwritten documents.
Except for the reports from Kenedy, Webb, and Hidalgo Counties, we pulled out the relevant information by hand. For those three counties, which sent large volumes of records, we used Anthropic’s Claude, accessed via API, to inspect each case report and pull out coordinates of the spots where remains were found; then we checked batches of those cases by hand to verify the AI’s accuracy. Agencies sent us records on a rolling basis from July 2025 to February 2026, and most did not specify the date through which their records were current.
We generally trusted that agencies sent us cases they believed involved migrant deaths, since they had the most information about each case. But some records clearly suggested otherwise (indicating, for example, that someone died at home), and we excluded those cases.
Several hundred cases were removed from our analysis because they didn’t include enough information for us to be certain where the remains were found. In fewer than 100 cases, coordinates were not listed but the description was specific enough for us to locate a point within 0.25 miles of where they were found—so we kept those in.
Compared with agencies in other states along the border, those in Texas provide far fewer details regarding how long ago someone may have died before remains were found or how far the decomposition of those remains had progressed. Some reports included this information, but many didn’t. While autopsy records sometimes have more details, many migrant autopsies in south Texas are done through the Webb County Medical Examiner, which charges a fee for each report. That was cost prohibitive given the scale of our analysis.
MIT Technology Review consulted with Greg Hess, director of Arizona’s Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, on a framework for translating descriptions of the scenes, bodies, and causes of death available in many of these records into rough estimates for when a person may have died (more detail on this process is provided below).
In total, we included more than 1,500 cases from our Texas records requests in our final analysis.
The Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME) in Arizona handles death investigations for all border counties in the state except Yuma (we sourced Yuma’s records from the organization No More Deaths, as detailed below).
The office determines which cases it believes to be border crossers. It publishes a data portal for these migrant deaths that’s updated monthly and shares its data with the organization Humane Borders, which then publishes it in a map and database. We included the data from 2015 through April 2026.
Humane Borders notes for each case how precise the location description is. We included only cases with GPS coordinates precise to within 300 feet. Collecting these coordinates has been standard practice since around 2012. The records also include an estimate of when the individual died, ranging from less than a day to at least six to eight months before remains were found.
In total, we included more than 1,700 cases from Humane Borders in our analysis.
To obtain data on deaths in California, New Mexico, Arizona’s Yuma County, and El Paso and Hudspeth Counties in Texas, we turned to the nonprofit organization No More Deaths, which has tracked migrant deaths since 2004. It publishes information about its records requests and its methodology.
Many of the cases in its database include GPS coordinates, sometimes with notes that the location is only approximate—for example, accurate to within half a mile or one mile. We included only cases where the location was known to within a quarter-mile.
No More Death’s database includes, when available, information on the level of decomposition in which each set of remains was found. As with cases in Texas, MIT Technology Review consulted with PCOME’s Greg Hess on a framework for translating this information into rough estimates for when a person may have died.
Here’s where the No More Deaths data used in our analysis comes from:
In total, we included nearly 1,000 cases from No More Deaths in our analysis.
When accounting for all our data sources and excluding deaths without specific enough records to determine where remains were found, we analyzed a total of nearly 4,000 cases.
We generally assume that a person died where their remains were found. That may not necessarily be true: Remains can be moved by other people, flowing water, or animals. But medical examiners and researchers we consulted said such cases are rare.
We excluded cases in which the virtual wall did not appear relevant. For example, we removed cases involving people who died inside Border Patrol stations or in car crashes during pursuits.
The deaths we analyzed reflect a variety of causes that may seem at first like very different sorts of surveillance failure. If someone slowly died of dehydration within view of a camera, for example, agents would have had far more time to intervene than they would have in a case where someone drowned quickly in a river or canal. But we included all these deaths because, in each one, the virtual wall could have prompted a response from agents.
Including a tower in our analysis required knowing three things: its location, its type (so that we could judge how far it is supposed to see), and the time it was installed.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been tracking and mapping CBP surveillance towers since 2023, using on-the-ground reporting, satellite imagery, and government documents obtained through public records requests. Its tally is an undercount; government records suggest that about 800 towers are currently deployed, while EFF has logged about 600. Our analysis therefore misses deaths that occurred near towers not yet catalogued by EFF.
MIT Technology Review worked closely with EFF’s director of investigations, Dave Maass, throughout this project. Our tower data began with the database published by EFF in April 2026, but that map did not include towers that have been removed. We consulted EFF for the details on these former towers and added them to our database. We generally use EFF’s reference numbers for individual towers, but we changed some to ensure that each tower has a unique identifier.
The locations are identified by GPS coordinates. We verified each tower’s coordinates by analyzing satellite imagery.
Our analysis focused on towers of three main types. Certain towers mapped by EFF don’t fall into any of those categories, so we excluded them because it’s difficult to obtain information about how far they are supposed to be able to see. This includes some towers that are installed at Border Patrol checkpoints or stations.
To know how far the main tower types could see, we consulted materials from tech companies and EFF’s research, led our own review of government documents, and interviewed former Border Patrol agents and officials. The distances described are consistent across these sources. But they are advertised estimates, not contractual guarantees: Some government records redact more specific information about a tower’s surveillance range in particular locations, citing security concerns.
To know if a tower in place now was present when someone died, it’s essential to know not just where it’s located but also when it was put there. To figure this out, we used multiple sources of satellite imagery.
Maass, at EFF, had previously analyzed some of the towers to determine when they first appeared. MIT Technology Review checked satellite imagery for these towers to confirm these timelines, and then checked for all the remaining towers. For each tower, we logged the date that it first appeared and, if it eventually disappeared, the last date it was present. We spent months meticulously checking when hundreds of towers appeared in multiple sources of satellite imagery to confirm there were no contradictions.
This is easier for certain tower types than others; towers from Anduril, for example, tend to go up where there was no prior infrastructure, and it’s fairly easy to see how a patch of empty desert gave way to the new tower and its trademark solar panels. Other towers, like IFTs, were often built on or near existing structures. For these, we leaned more closely on EFF’s expertise in analyzing the imagery.
Do you have experience with border surveillance technology? We want to hear from you. Reach the reporters securely on Signal at jamesodonnell.22 and eileenguo.15 or tips@technologyreview.com.
When imagery wasn’t sufficient, we used Google Street View, government documents, or photographs collected by EFF to verify when towers went up.
One limitation is that historical imagery of towers along the border is not available for every day in the past. Especially for older towers or those in remote locations, images may have been taken months or even a year apart. A tower visible in May and again in December could theoretically have been removed and reinstalled in the intervening months. But most tower systems are permanent structures. And multiple Border Patrol agents told us that even towers that are meant to be mobile, like autonomous towers, are in practice very rarely taken down or moved (consistent with this, we observed that semipermanent fences were erected around the sites of many Anduril towers).
Another limitation is that even if a tower is visible at a particular time, that does not mean it was online. We can’t verify that it was functional, receiving power, or transmitting data. Our analysis therefore establishes when a tower was present, not whether it was operational.
We conducted a topographical analysis, detailed below, to see whether a tower’s view of a given person might have been blocked by the terrain. This required estimating how tall each tower is.
We included a minimum and maximum height for each tower, based on research from EFF. In select cases where the surveillance system was not on a typical tower but mounted to an existing structure, like a water tower or building, we used satellite imagery to estimate its height. The higher a tower is, the farther it can see.
With the data we collected, we could begin to see which deaths happened in range of the virtual wall. But for a given match between a set of remains and a tower to count, it needed to satisfy two criteria:
1) Distance: The death must have happened within the published surveillance range of the nearby camera.
2) Timing: The tower had to be present when the person was estimated to have died.
Minho Kim, an outside collaborator who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford with a focus on wildfire mapping, led the distance analysis. His software ingested our database of human remains and our database of towers. Then it created a row for each time a set of remains was found near a given tower, along with the distance between the two.
We then checked whether, for each match, the tower was actually present when the person died.
Sometimes, as with the Arizona cases, an estimate of when someone died is given in the original data; the medical examiner may note that a person died more than three weeks but less than five weeks before remains were found, for example.
In other cases, we used the level of decomposition, the cause of death, or both to calculate a window of time in which the person would likely have died. Finally, we compared this window with the time when we determined the tower was built.
This step took us many months and involved reviewing original police reports for hundreds of cases, inspecting photos of bodies, cross-referencing cases with news articles, interviewing medical examiners, and researching decomposition timelines. The resulting death windows are approximate, but they are the best estimates we could make from the information available in each case.
We assigned different confidence levels to cases based on how these dates lined up. If a person’s entire estimated death window fell well after a tower was first observed, we felt confident the tower was present when they died. If any part of the death window fell before the tower was first observed, we excluded the case.
Many cases involve skeletal remains. Remains decompose differently depending on location and season, but when records didn’t provide a specific estimate, we conservatively estimated that skeletal remains had been there for at least six months. For these and other cases without a specific estimate of when the person died, we used three years as a conservative cutoff: If a tower had been present for at least three years before the remains were found, we included the case, judging it unlikely that the person had died before the tower was installed and remained undiscovered that long. If the tower had been present for less than three years, we excluded it.
It is possible that someone who died within range of a tower could have been blocked from the tower’s view by terrain, vegetation, or buildings.
We estimated the impact of this issue with a technique called topographical analysis.
Kim, our collaborator, led this part of the analysis. Here’s how it works: Imagine a map of the border region divided into a grid, with each square having one value for that area’s elevation. Take a given match between a set of remains and a tower and draw a line between the tower’s estimated height and an estimated height of 5’ 6″ for the person who died. If the terrain along that path rises high enough to block the line between the two points, we estimate the tower’s view as obstructed. If it doesn’t, we estimate the view as clear.
It’s not perfect. In the elevation data we used, each square represents an area 30 meters wide, or about 98 feet, and is assigned a single elevation. That means smaller changes in the terrain can be lost, particularly in steep or rugged areas where elevation changes quickly. Our analysis is therefore less about re-creating exactly what a tower could see than providing a rough estimate of whether terrain may have blocked a tower’s view of the spot where someone died.
We include results on our map whether a clear line of sight was estimated or not. Even if the location where someone died was blocked from a tower’s view, the person may have passed through areas visible to the tower before reaching that spot.
It’s much harder to estimate whether a line of sight was blocked by vegetation. We are less concerned about this limitation because virtual-wall towers use thermal imaging, which can detect body heat through light vegetation. Dense vegetation, however, can still obstruct their view.
Buildings pose a greater challenge. We could not reliably account for their locations and heights. Instead, we reviewed each tower’s surroundings and flagged towers located in or near urban areas. These notes warn readers that buildings may have limited what those towers could see.
The most fundamental question in each of these cases, and for the families of anyone who died, is whether the US government saw someone attempting to cross into the country and never intercepted them—or never saw them at all.
This is all but impossible to answer with records or data—Border Patrol doesn’t disclose which alerts came in surrounding any given migrant death, and footage isn’t retained unless an internal investigation is triggered, which doesn’t happen unless a migrant dies while in custody.
MIT Technology Review instead conducted dozens of interviews with people who worked for Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection, or the Department of Homeland Security or who served as presidential advisors. These conversations yielded previously unreported details about how agents use surveillance technology, turned up instances where it has underperformed, and underscored how seldom its effectiveness is evaluated internally.
We also sought out friends and family members of people who died near surveillance towers, using additional records, social media, and other research tools to find them. We approached these interviews using best practices for trauma-informed reporting.
Beginning in September 2025, MIT Technology Review requested interviews with current Border Patrol agents and leadership at CBP, and we asked to visit the border to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the latest autonomous tower program. Following delays, which were in part related to DHS funding lapses, in July 2026 we were told our media request had been approved at the local level in Big Bend, Texas. We wanted to visit this area because Border Patrol is expanding the number of Anduril towers there. But when the request went up to the DHS headquarters for a final sign-off, the agency denied it. Before publishing our investigation, we sent detailed questions to CBP, Anduril, General Dynamics and Elbit. CBP and Anduril responded, but did not substantively address our questions. General Dynamics referred us to CBP. Elbit did not respond to our questions.
MIT Technology Review thanks the following for their assistance with this project:
Minho Kim, Stanford University
Greg Hess, Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner
Stephanie Leutert, University of Texas at Austin
Don White, Brooks County Sheriff’s Office
MIT Technology Review today published our investigation into how many people have died near the “virtual wall” of surveillance towers that the US government has installed along the US-Mexico border.
We found cases of people who walked undetected through areas surveilled by advanced, AI-enabled towers and later died nearby, where their bodies remained unnoticed for weeks or months. These cases reflect systemic flaws in the virtual wall: broken towers, algorithms that failed to detect people, and agents who simply did not respond to alerts.
This story is part of Dying on Camera, a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego. Journalists in both newsrooms spent the past year examining the failures of border surveillance technology and uncovering the stories of the people who die in the borderlands.
Each of these deaths should have raised alarms inside US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) about the flaws in the agency’s surveillance network. This is particularly true for cases near the latest towers built by the defense company Anduril, which continues to win major contracts and is poised to benefit from the windfall of federal money slated for border security. The US is set to spend $1 billion to triple the size of the virtual wall by 2034.
Here are four ideas for what CBP should do next to address these failures.
“If I were the federal government, I would do an audit, because this feels like it’s not working.”
That was New Mexico state representative Sarah Silva’s reaction when MIT Technology Review showed her that in 2024 alone, more than 18 people had died near surveillance towers in just one small stretch of desert near her district.
An audit is necessary because, despite poring over thousands of pages of police reports and other documents about surveillance towers, we have only limited knowledge of how many towers are out there and where they’re located.
CBP does not publish a comprehensive map of its virtual wall. We instead relied on mapping work led by the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation and then used satellite imagery to verify where specific towers were and approximately when they were installed.
We analyzed lots of towers—nearly 600. But that’s still far less than the 800 the government says operate today. And our estimates of when they went up are inexact. That means our tally of more than 1,050 people who have died near them is an undercount. And we don’t have a complete picture of where along the border the problem is worst.
An internal audit would not have such limitations. In theory, CBP tracks when each tower went up and when it was active. It has had the ability to audit their effectiveness—while quantifying how many people have died near them—since at least 2015, when it began installing the types of towers included in our analysis. But sources told us it has never done such an audit. Our findings make the need for one more urgent.
If CBP is to analyze instances where people have died near its surveillance technology, it needs to know when and where those deaths happen. And the current system for tracking that data is beyond broken.
As we note in our methodology, there is no national agency that collects and publishes all available records on migrant deaths. We sifted through thousands of pages of records from dozens of agencies in Texas alone, and our picture is still incomplete owing to the lack of a shared protocol for documenting these deaths in public records.
Border Patrol has had its own internal system, called the Border Safety Initiative Tracking System (BSITS), in place since 2007. But it wasn’t until 2021 that national rules were established for how different sectors should enter cases into the system. The next year, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that many cases still weren’t being tracked in this system, especially deaths that weren’t discovered by Border Patrol. In 2023, the GAO reported that Border Patrol has taken steps to fix that, but outside researchers consistently find the agency’s estimates to be undercounts even today.
In addition to tracking migrant deaths, CBP launched a program in 2017 to prevent them, called the Missing Migrant Program. In April 2025, the GAO found the program was improving the way it collected and tracked data about events like 911 calls and rescues. The problem, it said, was that there was no plan in place to use the data to measure whether the program was actually increasing rescues or reducing deaths, which are its primary goals. It made two recommendations for solutions, neither of which has been implemented.
In 2014, when the virtual wall was much smaller, the GAO suggested that Border Patrol agents log when a piece of technology helped them apprehend someone who was trying to enter the US illegally. It would take agents some extra time, but logging these assists would help Congress understand how often various surveillance technologies were leading to actual apprehensions. Once this data was collected, GAO added, the agency should measure whether its surveillance technologies were working. CBP agreed, and it started requiring agents to enter such information.
Then, in 2017, the GAO reported that the data being collected was inaccurate and unreliable; it found agents in Texas, for example, who were crediting a specific type of tower in apprehensions hundreds of times, even though no such towers existed anywhere in the state. Border Patrol again said it would improve; it agreed to train agents on the importance of collecting such information.
But years later, agents told us, it’s still not a priority. One former CBP official described the mandate as “spitting in the wind, to be honest,” and said the messy reality of apprehensions doesn’t translate into neat metrics. (The official, who requested anonymity, served during the Biden administration and wasn’t authorized to discuss sensitive issues.)
And in August 2021, more than seven years after it agreed to do so, CBP still had not produced any analysis on the towers’ effectiveness (it finished one in 2022, the GAO notes, but the results are not public).
That means the virtual wall is growing faster than anyone is assessing its impact.
CBP should also examine new deaths as they occur and determine whether they happened within sight of a tower or other surveillance technology. And for those that did, the agency should determine why those people weren’t spotted sooner.
Several agents and officials told us that if Border Patrol agents come across the body of someone presumed to have died while crossing into the US, there’s no requirement to check whether that person died near surveillance infrastructure and no process for doing so. At a minimum, that means potentially valuable evidence about the death goes unexamined. It also means that migrant deaths are not routinely treated as possible failures of the virtual wall.
Do you have experience with border surveillance technology? We want to hear from you. Reach the reporters securely on Signal at jamesodonnell.22 and eileenguo.15 or tips@technologyreview.com.
CBP should automatically check every migrant death against its internal database of towers and investigate those that occurred within surveillance range to determine what the system detected and whether agents responded appropriately. Agents already log GPS coordinates when they apprehend a group or encounter footprints, among other events.
Without that check, law enforcement, medical investigators, and families may never learn that someone died near a surveillance tower—and that footage of the moments leading up to the death may exist. CBP typically deletes surveillance footage from the towers after 30 days unless an internal review is opened, which usually happens only for deaths in custody. At a minimum, flagging these cases could preserve footage for those investigating the death and give families a chance to request it.
Such reviews could also expose flaws in the virtual wall itself. Consider one location we identified in New Mexico, where several people died despite being in clear sight of an advanced AI tower. They died within the span of a few months, sometimes just hundreds of feet from one another. Investigating these cases might reveal, for example, that a camera repeatedly failed to detect or identify people in a particular area, or that agents were alerted and simply never responded.
Carrying out these postmortem inquiries would be the only way to answer the question that families, researchers, and volunteers raised most frequently in our investigation into the hundreds of migrants who died near towers: Did the cameras see them, and nobody came? Or did nobody see them at all?
When José Morales Bernal crossed the border into the United States on April 8, 2024, the day before his 32nd birthday, it should have triggered a chain of technological alerts and human responses.
As he walked through the desert in southern New Mexico that morning, he was within range of three surveillance towers. Newly installed by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), they were built by the defense tech company Anduril and equipped with cameras and AI to automatically detect and track people. They transmit live video to nearby control rooms and can send alerts to the government-issued smartphones held by agents in the area, prompting the closest available to respond.
This story is part of Dying on Camera, a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego. Journalists in both newsrooms spent the past year examining the failures of border surveillance technology and uncovering the stories of the people who die in the borderlands.
These AI-enabled towers are meant to give greater visibility across the 1,951-mile southern border, freeing up border agents from having to spend hours staring into video monitors. They were installed in this particular place to spot border crossers before they reached the nearby town of Sunland Park.
If the system worked as intended, Morales should have been apprehended. If he needed medical help, agents were trained to provide it.
That didn’t happen. Despite the nearby surveillance towers, it was employees of the local landfill, rather than Border Patrol, who first spotted Morales that morning. At 1 p.m. the workers saw him again, now lying in the sand. At 4 p.m. the landfill workers saw that he had not moved and called Border Patrol. Agents arrived 45 minutes later. He was dead. When an agent then called 911 to report the body, he said it was “probably one of the migrants crossing through there,” seemingly unaware that Morales had been moving near the agency’s surveillance systems earlier that day.
Morales had died just 360 feet from the closest surveillance tower. Two more towers stood watch to the east and the west. An autopsy later concluded that he had died of “environmental exposure.”
The towers surrounding Morales were only the latest addition to the “virtual wall” the government has spent 25 years and billions of dollars building along the entire border, which also includes earlier generations of towers with more basic features, as well as blimps, drones, seismic sensors, and even tunnel-sensing robots. Together, all this technology provides “persistent surveillance” and “situational awareness” to help the Border Patrol quickly and accurately detect people crossing and, crucially, make sure agents are sent to intercept them. CBP has also credited it with saving lives.
But a first-of-its-kind investigation by MIT Technology Review reveals that deaths like Morales’s are startlingly common. We cross-referenced nearly 4,000 locations where human remains were found—drawn from records collected by nonprofit groups like No More Deaths and Humane Borders, as well as hundreds of records we obtained in Texas—with information on nearly 600 towers identified by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We considered when towers were installed and when each person is estimated to have died, and combined this information with field reporting from the border. The result is the first comprehensive map and analysis of deaths near CBP surveillance towers.
Our investigation shows that a humanitarian crisis at the border has unfolded in view of the government’s own cameras.
We found more than 1,050 people who died within range of border surveillance towers between 2015 and early 2026. These deaths are not failures of a few towers or technologies: We found deaths within the advertised range of nearly two-thirds of all the towers we analyzed. Our topographical analysis—which assessed the degree to which terrain might block a tower’s view of a particular death and its surveillance area in general—found that some have sight of as little as 10% of their advertised surveillance area, and yet we also found most deaths did not occur in towers’ blind spots. These deaths are not the result of legacy systems, as our estimate found more than 110 people have died within range of modern autonomous towers from Anduril, among the most advanced systems CBP has deployed, since 2021.
The overall picture reveals repeated failures of one of the virtual wall’s basic security functions, as CBP has described it in press releases: to effectively identify and locate migrants entering illegally into the United States.
The year that Morales died, 18 other people died in that same stretch of desert in range of the three Anduril towers. Five were visible from the same surveillance tower closest to where his body was discovered.
One man, after walking a mile past the border and in range of two AI towers, dragged his 30-year-old brother into the shade when he began having trouble breathing, according to records we obtained from the medical examiner. The two were spotted by Border Patrol only when the man waved down a helicopter for help; by the time agents arrived, his brother was already dead. A 24-year-old woman died near another Anduril tower, where our terrain analysis showed it should have had clear sight of her location. Her body lay unnoticed for weeks; it was decomposed, and blistered by the summer heat, when it was spotted by agents patrolling the area.
A few miles west, and a short drive from a Border Patrol station, four other AI towers stood watch. Near them, 10 more bodies were found that year, all in locations where at least one tower had a clear view.
In response to a list of questions, an Anduril spokesperson replied that once a tower is delivered, it is operated by CBP, and directed questions about specific incidents to the agency. The response noted that an incident occurring nearby does not mean the tower missed a detection and said actual surveillance ranges vary depending on terrain, physical obstructions, and the boundaries CBP sets for where the tower should look (CBP is able to set virtual boundaries on towers’ views for privacy and other reasons). The Anduril spokesperson also alleged inaccuracies in our reporting, given those boundaries and obstructions, but did not respond to follow-up questions on what was inaccurate.
The most pressing question in any death near the virtual wall is whether authorities knew someone was there and failed to reach them or weren’t aware anyone was crossing at all. Either is a system failure. And the deaths we found capture only the failures that left a trace—we don’t know how many people pass through undetected, or how many bodies remain undiscovered.
Interviews with more than 45 people—including current and former White House advisors and presidential appointees, Border Patrol agents, medical examiners, sheriffs, humanitarian volunteers, and employees of tech companies—showed that both types of failures are occurring: The technology is failing to detect, and agents are failing to respond. Both show the limits of throwing technology at a complex problem.
The findings reveal previously unreported issues with the virtual wall, even as it continues to enjoy broad political support and a surge in federal spending. Border security hardliners have long seen it as another tool for stopping smugglers moving drugs or people, while others tout it as a cheaper alternative to a physical wall. In 2023, the government estimated that its plans for using the towers, which now number 803, would cost $6.2 billion over their lifespan. With the historic levels of funding it was awarded in 2025, CBP plans to spend $1 billion for 1,497 more towers by 2034.
But our reporting shows that CBP has done little to assess how its towers are working or how many people have died where they keep watch.
Officials who oversaw border security across the last four presidential administrations told us they believed deaths near the so-called virtual wall were either exceedingly rare or nonexistent. But our reporting shows that is not the case. None could point to any comparable analysis the government had ever conducted on its own. Former agents and officials also told us that when someone’s body is found, CBP does not formally investigate whether surveillance should have detected them or, if they were detected, why agents didn’t reach them before they died.
In response to nearly 30 questions about our findings, which covered multiple generations of technology, Hilton Beckham, CBP’s assistant commissioner for public affairs, said, “Autonomous surveillance towers use artificial intelligence to detect and classify people, vehicles, and animals and alert Border Patrol agents to activity in monitored areas … ASTs complement physical barriers and other border security infrastructure by improving detection and situational awareness between ports of entry. CBP evaluates the technology based on its impact on detection, response coordination, agent safety, and mission outcomes.”
“I’m sure that the cameras and other surveillance assets do deliver … useful intelligence and enhance operational efficacy in some places, under some conditions, in certain circumstances,” says Geoff Boyce, an assistant professor of geography at University College Dublin who has studied surveillance technology used at the US southern border. “I’m also absolutely positive—because this has been the track record—it is not delivering the level of operational support, information, or efficacy that either the companies delivering these infrastructures or the Border Patrol and Department of Homeland Security claim.”
We also reached out to multiple lawmakers from both parties with a summary of our findings. In response, Delia Ramirez, a Democrat representing Illinois’s 3rd district who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, said, “AI-powered surveillance technologies are not making us safer. Yet DHS continues to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on these ineffective, negligent technologies, with no commitment to oversight or transparency … It is clear we must terminate CBP’s integrated surveillance tower program and dismantle DHS.”
Since its earliest efforts to police the border with Mexico, the US government has faced the same basic challenge: How do you effectively secure nearly 2,000 miles of remote and rugged terrain? It has increasingly turned to technology for answers.
Gerardo Galvan joined Border Patrol in 1995, as the government was undertaking an unprecedented expansion of border enforcement. In 1993, President Clinton’s first year in office, the agency mobilized huge numbers of agents to guard the country’s urban borders, starting in El Paso, Texas. That pushed more crossings to rural, unpopulated areas—which quickly proved to be far more deadly because of the rugged desert terrain, extreme temperatures, scarcity of water and the long, indirect routes often used by smugglers.
Stopping these remote crossings was a new law enforcement challenge for the agency, especially given the limited technology available at the time. “We had radios,” says Galvan, who would go on to be the head of operations for the El Paso sector—not the cell phones or GPS systems agents have today. They relied on underground sensors left over from the Vietnam War to alert them to movement.
The biggest technology rollout of Galvan’s early career started around 1998. That was when Border Patrol began installing its first video cameras that agents could remotely pan and zoom. They were mounted on metal structures similar to cell-phone towers, 60 to 80 feet tall, or on buildings in urban areas.
“For the first time, somebody sitting in a room somewhere was able to surveil large swaths of area without being dependent on getting an agent out there with binoculars,” says Matthew Hudak, a former deputy chief of Border Patrol who was working as a frontline agent at the time. “That was a very significant game changer, and for the most part, it was a huge, huge advance.”
This early iteration of the virtual wall was a big deal: In its first eight years, 200 towers were installed along the southern border at a cost of more than $429 million. But the system’s flaws were obvious to anyone who used it.
“There could be … 30 screens on a wall,” says Mark Borkowski, who managed CBP contracting, including the surveillance tower program. Each camera might be capable of seeing three or five miles in any direction. The agent was expected to keep eyes on all that space—upwards of 850 square miles.
“Well, what are the chances after 20 minutes that those Border Patrol agents would see an explosion on one of those screens?” Borkowski says. “About zero.”
When these cameras were first being put up, the plan was to pair them eventually with a system that would automatically direct them toward places where sensors picked up activity, so agents would know where to look. But by 2005, the DHS inspector general said that still hadn’t materialized, and that illegal activity might “go unnoticed” unless agents were actively watching the cameras. Nonetheless, more towers were installed, forming what is today known as the Remote Video Surveillance System (RVSS). In 2013, the defense giant General Dynamics won a contract worth up to $103 million to overhaul and expand RVSS along the border, becoming the primary contractor behind the system that remains in use today. (That contract eventually grew to a ceiling of $216 million, and the company received another award in 2023 worth up to $135 million.)
General Dynamics would install more cameras, better sensors, and additional towers. But the problem identified nearly 15 years before remained unsolved. It was information overload: One agent told MIT Technology Review about an incident in San Diego in which cameras captured a group of 30 crossing the border and getting picked up in a van, all unnoticed by the agent monitoring those cameras. Agents said the virtual wall was bringing more of the border into view than they could reasonably pay attention or respond to.
The camera room was also the job nobody wanted. New Border Patrol agents, often in their early 20s, want to be outside in trucks and ATVs, not sitting in a dark room watching screens—even though the expanding virtual wall increasingly required someone to do exactly that. “Someone that’s injured and can’t go out into the field—we’ll send them to the camera room,” says Rafael Reyes, who was in charge of the Border Patrol station in Deming, New Mexico, until 2024.
Reyes says it was also a job his agents were often too busy to do properly. His station area had about 30 cameras, and the agents responsible for them also had to monitor sensor alerts and radio traffic, run records checks, and coordinate with other agents. “Then if they have some time, they’ll monitor the cameras,” he says.
Not only that, but many cameras didn’t work. At Reyes’s station in New Mexico, five of the 30 cameras were broken on any given day, he says. Others had limited functionality; they might be capable of looking in just one direction or seeing only in the daytime. Jaime Fierro, a former agent who worked in the Laredo sector in Texas until 2025, said the broken towers were tanking morale among agents and that they brought it up at every staff meeting. “That was like basically having an eye shut for us on the border,” he says.
They weren’t alone: In 2024, members of the House Committee on Homeland Security wrote that more than 66% of Border Patrol’s first-generation towers were unusable, despite operating budgets of $50 million to $100 million each year. In January 2026, 30% remained broken, one congressional staffer told MIT Technology Review. The RVSS program was estimated in 2020 to have a total cost of $3.7 billion.
Border Patrol has nonetheless publicly credited these cameras with helping to save lives. The agency has published dozens of press releases, dating as far back as 2016, about instances when agents responded to people seen in distress on the remote video cameras. Despite these publicized wins, the bodies began to pile up, undetected, beneath these systems’ watchful gaze.
Near El Cenizo, Texas, there’s a roughly 13-square-mile expanse of mesquite bushes and grasses described by the Webb County Sheriff’s Office as containing sections of Hachar Ranch and Espejo Ranch. It’s surrounded by seven RVSS systems. It was nonetheless a hot spot for fatalities: MIT Technology Review found that 19 people died there, including one man who died less than 500 feet from the road bordering the ranches and half a mile from two schools. In each of these cases, narratives that we obtained via public records requests describe officers’ learning of these people only after their bodies were discovered or through 911 calls reporting them missing, not as a result of the border surveillance technology installed across Hachar Ranch.
In response to a list of questions about its towers and these specific incidents, General Dynamics referred us to CBP. CBP did not address any of our questions about RVSS towers.
Many deaths near RVSS towers happened in Texas, in the heavily surveilled corridors between the Rio Grande and the nearby highways, where paid smugglers often organize pickups after crossings. Cameras watch many of the spots where people are known to cross, often looking across the river into Mexico to spot them before they reach the water. Drownings are common; we found multiple cases in which local fishermen hooked the bodies of people who had died attempting the crossing.
In one instance, a family of three from Brazil attempted to cross the Rio Grande near Del Rio, Texas, in 2022. The father, Daniel Lenda, was carrying his two-year-old daughter, Eloah, on his shoulder when he fell in the water. The mother, 23-year-old Thais Natali Montenegro Lenda, lifted Eloah out of the water as she watched her husband disappear.
She placed the girl, now unresponsive, on a rock and went for help. She was just 100 feet from one camera system and a third of a mile from two others, set up precisely to enable faster apprehensions at a popular crossing point. Our topographical analysis shows that all three cameras had a clear view of the place where the family crossed and exited the water. Nonetheless, Thais Natali was not spotted until she waved down an agent on the Del Rio-Acuña bridge. The agent provided CPR to the toddler, who did not survive. Daniel’s body was found days later.
Val Verde County sheriff Joe Frank Martínez responded to that case (though Border Patrol might discover bodies, local law enforcement is responsible for investigating the deaths). He grew up in the area with his nine siblings and has been sheriff since 2009. Riding with MIT Technology Review through Del Rio in his patrol vehicle, he rattled off the deaths that his office has responded to since he became sheriff.
He keeps a three-inch-thick binder of these cases in his office. But this case with the toddler still sticks out in his memory. He told MIT Technology Review that when he arrived on scene, he heard from Border Patrol that the tower operator monitoring the camera had seen the father and daughter fall in the river. He never received an answer as to why agents weren’t sent sooner. Martínez asked for the footage from the surveillance cameras to aid in his investigation of what happened. Border Patrol never provided it. (General Dynamics did not respond to our questions about this incident, instead directing us to CBP. The agency did not address questions about this incident either.)
Establishing how many people have died in range of the virtual wall is challenging, but it’s especially so in the case of the RVSS towers. There are different models, some with a shorter range of sight—one to three miles—and others with a longer range of up to 7.5 miles. Former agents and officials told us most towers should see at least five miles, but since no public records exist to confirm the model type of any given tower, we used several possible viewing distances to calculate the number of deaths considered in range.
Another complication is that many remains are never found at all. For those that are, MIT Technology Review could analyze only deaths that had been logged with GPS coordinates or sufficiently precise location descriptions. Many records lack this level of detail, including nearly a fifth of the more than 1,500 cases we obtained from 14 Texas counties. We also needed to determine when someone died, rather than simply when their remains were found, to confirm that a tower was present at the time of death. When official sources did not provide an estimate, we consulted multiple medical examiners on how to make that determination from the available details. And satellite imagery provides only intermittent evidence to suggest when towers arose, not exact proof of when they were functioning. For these reasons, as detailed in our methodology, we tried to be conservative in our analysis.
Even so, the number of deaths estimated to have occurred near at least one of these towers is staggering: somewhere between 500 and 700 since 2015. Even if we look only at towers in rural areas, where their views are far less likely to be blocked by buildings, we still estimate more than 300 people have died in places where the cameras had a line of sight, most less than three miles from a tower. Of the nearly 300 RVSS towers we included in our analysis, more than 250 were within range of a location where someone died. More than 150 people died within a half-mile of one, often across open, empty plains, close enough to see the cameras themselves perched atop towers up to 200 feet tall.
When Borkowski was overseeing the rollout of those first-generation towers at CBP, he became increasingly certain that simply having more remote video cameras was not going to lead to faster responses. The information overload meant the government could watch a large area of the border but not meaningfully see, much less act on, everything within it. The agency’s focus then became solving that overload problem.
What if, instead of relying on someone to scan 30 screens, the towers could use radar to detect motion, and then point the camera to it automatically?
In 2011, Border Patrol asked the industry for a new generation of technology that could do just that—initially focusing on Arizona, where the border was busiest. The contract ultimately went to the Israeli defense contractor Elbit, whose tower systems watch Israel’s borders. In 2015, the company started installing versions of these—called integrated fixed towers, or IFTs—that could each see more than five miles.
The IFTs were still being installed when President Trump first took office, in 2017. They didn’t command the same attention as Trump’s campaign promise of a physical wall, but there was still support. Trump’s deputy CBP commissioner, Ronald Vitiello, told Congress in 2018 that the IFT towers automatically detect people with radar and then track them, adding that such surveillance technology is “critical in protecting border areas with short vanishing times, where illicit crossers can quickly evade law enforcement by ‘vanishing’ into border communities.”
There were 55 IFTs built in Arizona under an initial $145 million contract with Elbit and other contracts that followed. The towers collectively watch more than 7,000 square miles of terrain, from the mountainous areas outside Nogales to the plains of the Tohono O’odham Nation Reservation. Arizona is in many ways well suited for these tall towers because much of its landscape is flatter than, say, Southern California.
But even here, being within a tower’s advertised range does not necessarily mean being within view. There could be terrain, brush, or buildings that block the line of sight.
MIT Technology Review conducted a topographical analysis to estimate whether each tower had a clear or obstructed view of the place where someone’s remains were found. We estimated the height of each tower and used US elevation maps to model the terrain between it and the remains. The analysis does not account for buildings or vegetation, though all the towers we analyzed use some form of thermal imaging that is designed to see through light brush.
Most of the instances in which someone died in range of a tower happened where we estimate that the camera’s views were not blocked by terrain—a finding that held in both rural and urban areas. And even when someone died in a blind spot, it does not mean they did not pass through a tower’s line of sight. Additionally, these numerous blind spots indicate issues with the tower’s supposedly comprehensive coverage.
We found that nearly 350 people have died in range of Elbit’s towers since 2015. There were 40 people who died within range of four or more IFTs, with some near as many as six different towers. In May 2024, a 19-year-old man died where three IFTs had a clear view, and a year later, in May 2025, a 38-year-old woman died where two IFTs had a similarly clear view. Elbit did not respond to a detailed list of questions about its towers or deaths we found to have occurred near them.
There’s been a death within range of 52 out of the 53 IFTs we analyzed, but some were particularly notable. There’s a tower located a couple of hours from Tucson on the Tohono O’odham reservation that we estimate has upwards of 80% visibility of the surrounding area. Still, 27 people, ages 19 to 64, have died in its surveillance area just since 2021, along with several others whose remains have not been identified. In 25 of these cases, we estimated that the tower had a clear line of sight to the location where the person died.
Around 2018, officials within Border Patrol were again discussing the limits of the towers. The new radar systems were better, but they could only detect movement, not what was moving. This generated false alerts from cattle, tumbleweeds, and other harmless activity. The now decades-old dream of the virtual wall remained unfulfilled. Under pressure from Congress, which was demanding to know what $33 billion in proposed funding for border security over the next decade was going to achieve, Border Patrol once again was hoping a new generation of technology could solve its problems.
That year the head of CBP, Kevin McAleenan, created a unit called the Innovation Team. “He gave them some seed money to go after kind of Silicon Valley innovative technologies and run pilots,” Borkowski says.
One company they landed on was Anduril, the defense tech startup founded by Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey. The company was without a product but had funding from Peter Thiel, recruits from the security tech giant Palantir, and a goal of bringing Silicon Valley experimentation to defense and national security technology.
With grants from the Small Business Innovation Research program, Anduril’s product started taking shape: a 33-foot-tall solar-powered structure with cameras to see and radar to detect movement, all sitting atop a modular metal pole, with solar panels arrayed beneath.
More important was the component you could not see: computer vision that promised to automatically classify, track, and generate alerts for what came within the system’s view. Anduril’s standard tower couldn’t see as far as the Elbit and General Dynamics models—about 1.75 miles instead of more than five—but, the company argued, it didn’t need to: By automatically identifying and tracking people, the towers could give agents enough warning to respond. (Its newer, extended-range towers, on the other hand, stand 80 feet tall and are advertised as able to detect and track “objects of interest” up to 7.5 miles away.)
When President Trump left office in 2021, Anduril continued to find support from his successor. Joe Biden had campaigned on the promise of shutting down the project to expand the physical wall, but he saw political reasons to keep investment in tower technology on the table. “It’s less visible—it’s unobtrusive,” a former immigration advisor to Biden recalls, adding that despite some privacy concerns, the towers were mostly uncontroversial.
When Border Patrol deployed Anduril towers to the Santa Teresa station in New Mexico in 2021, a press release stated, “Because of its accuracy with detection, in many cases this type of technology can and will save migrant lives.” In a permitting request filed in 2024 for towers in California, the government was even more explicit: “If anyone within the viewshed of the towers appears to be in distress, EMTs or first responders will be sent to help.”
Anduril echoed those claims. The software built into the surveillance towers, the company wrote in a 2021 press release, gets agents “out of communications operations centers and into the field where they can effectuate security and humanitarian responses.”
It wasn’t the first time CBP had discussed a humanitarian side to its duties; in 1998 the agency created BORSTAR, a search and rescue unit, and by August 2023, it had installed some 170 rescue beacons across the border that people attempting a crossing could theoretically use to call for help. But they weren’t effective, says Mario Agundez, a retired Border Patrol supervisor from Arizona who had worked on various rescue efforts; people either avoid them or “die next to them, because there was no way [for Border Patrol] to get to them in time.” (They don’t always work, either; one that MIT Technology Review passed, just next to a dirt road in the Otay Mountain wilderness area in Southern California, had its prominent solar-powered blue light, meant to be visible for miles to people in distress, turned off on a recent night in August. A CBP spokesperson did not comment on why it was off but said, “The solar-powered beacons are maintained and monitored by the responsible Border Patrol station that patrols that area.”)
Anduril soared through a pilot phase in just two years before its Sentry towers—then the only autonomous surveillance towers CBP was using—moved into an official program of record with the government in 2020. That’s light speed in the world of government procurement, especially since it was Anduril’s first hardware product. By June 2021, CBP had already spent over $98 million (Anduril’s contract for these towers is now worth up to $1.1 billion).
Gerardo Galvan was in charge of the Santa Teresa Border Patrol station—which patrols the area in New Mexico where Morales’s body was later found—when it received its first batch of Anduril surveillance towers in 2021. His agents were worn out; the El Paso sector, home to his station, had seen encounters tick up each month since April 2020. Galvan says the agents were surprised but eager to get the AI towers, and he began planning where to place them. The sites he was considering sat where one kind of landscape abruptly gives way to another.
To the east of the station is Cristo Rey, a mountain that obscures the view of the city of El Paso. Running north from Cristo Rey is the state’s border with Texas, where the banks of the Rio Grande are flanked on either side by pecan orchards. And west of those orchards are the towns of Sunland Park and Santa Teresa. The last houses in these neighborhoods butt right up against the desert, which sprawls westward without a single gas station for nearly 100 miles.
It is in this stretch—between the US-Mexico border to the south and Highway 9 to the north—where agents from his station aimed to stop migrants. And when Galvan was planning the tower locations, there were lots of crossings; Santa Teresa was becoming the busiest station in the 125,500-square-mile El Paso sector, as heightened border enforcement in Texas drove people west. Along this new route, more people were dying than in previous years. (The traces of that period are still visible years later; MIT Technology Review visited the area with the humanitarian group Battalion Search and Rescue and saw jawbones bleached white by the sun, alongside frayed backpacks and clothes.)
Galvan’s aim was to use the new towers as a stopgap where there was little other border infrastructure. That included a spot near the foot of Mount Cristo Rey, where there was a break in the border fence and people often attempted to cross. Galvan looked at data on previous apprehensions with an eye toward helping agents spot people before they arrived in more residential neighborhoods. Border Patrol struck agreements with private landowners, who generally didn’t mind having Anduril’s low-profile towers on their land (and were compensated via lease agreements).
When the towers were first set up near the Santa Teresa station in 2021, engineers from Anduril came to fine-tune the algorithms meant to autonomously classify whether what it had detected was a vehicle or a possible border crosser, among other things. A former engineer for Anduril, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss his previous employer, says these algorithms were the main focus of the tower program; Anduril didn’t manufacture the cameras or radar systems itself, so the algorithms were its main value proposition to Border Patrol.
Galvan says the towers would flag people crossing before agents saw them. But he also saw problems from the start. Agents would apprehend a large group near one of the towers, for example, and check to see if the footage revealed anyone who got away, only to find that the incident hadn’t been captured at all. Anduril’s towers constantly pan around, lingering only on an object of interest. But in these cases, Galvan says, they panned elsewhere, failing to capture the border crossers they were supposed to automatically track.
Reyes says algorithm mistakes were infrequent but problematic at his station. A group of people was sometimes labeled as cattle, for example, and agents wouldn’t receive an alert. The problem got worse the farther groups were from the camera.
Anduril has touted its technology’s ability to reduce false positives, like cases in which wildlife is mistaken for people. But the company has said little about these false negatives: people the systems fail to detect.
Jaime Fierro, the former agent in the Laredo sector in Texas, describes one incident that shocked him: Agents pursued a car believed to be carrying migrants who had just crossed the border. The car turned around, drove toward the banks of the Rio Grande less than 100 feet from an Anduril tower, and crashed right into the river. Several occupants got out and swam to Mexico while the car floated in the water. Back at the station, Fierro hurried to see what the camera had picked up. Only it never detected the incident at all. There was no footage. “That was a huge, huge issue,” Fierro says. He remembers Anduril coming out to investigate and the problem being sent all the way up to Washington leadership. But Fierro never got an explanation of why the crash was missed. (An Anduril spokesperson did not respond to a question about this incident but said the range of the towers we asked about was limited by physical obstructions and by boundaries established by CBP. )
Several agents estimate that the towers initially missed 10% to 15% of what they should in theory have caught. “To us, 10-15% on a system we spent millions on that was supposed to work—that was alarming,” Fierro says.
Philip Sullivan worked as an agent in the Laredo sector too. When the Anduril program started, he says, he put his hand up to be involved and even went to an Anduril test site for training. When new towers went up, he worked directly with the company on improving its algorithms. He enjoyed the work. But he describes one recurring issue they couldn’t resolve.
Smugglers would put up to a dozen people on a rubber raft, cover them with a tarp, and cross the Rio Grande while using submersible motors to propel it forward. The tarp fooled the algorithm, which detected the motion but attributed it only to an “unidentified object.” That meant no audible alert—the very feature agents relied on, because the Anduril system was supposed to do the watching for them.
The smugglers repeated the tactic dozens of times. Other smugglers would cover groups with netting or blankets so they would remain undetected while walking through the brush. Only afterwards, having seen the group farther inland and noticed clues about where the people had crossed, would Sullivan review the footage and see the crossings that were missed. He worked with Anduril, sending engineers videos of the crossings to retrain the firm’s algorithms. But the situation had not improved by the time he got promoted to a sector-level job sometime in 2022, he says.
“The whole purpose of their system,” Sullivan says, was the idea that “the cameras are moving around, identifying automatically and tracking and recording and flagging.” Having cameras that could pan on their own worked wonders, he says. But the algorithm had its limits. “You look at it on the screen yourself, and you see the blob and the raft moving across—well, you know that’s people. But to get an AI to identify that is a challenge.”
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When the towers were first being rolled out at the Santa Teresa station in 2021 and 2022, Galvan says, similar issues led to a negative feedback loop: An agent would see a tower miss something significant and come to distrust the algorithm. When that agent’s turn came to operate the towers and manage the alerts, they might override the AI altogether and use the camera manually. That would lead to more missed alerts, more distrust.
Despite these shortcomings, the El Paso sector’s relatively flat landscape meant that the system’s cameras had about 80% to 90% visibility, according to our topographical analysis. That was better than in hillier or more mountainous areas, like the Otay Mountain Wilderness to the east of San Diego, where we estimate Anduril’s towers could see just 15% to 25% of their promised coverage area.
It was in this wilderness, in fact, that some of the first bodies started appearing near Anduril’s towers. During one week in August 2021, two women in their 20s, from the same city in Mexico, died miles apart. Their bodies were found near three different towers that were first observed on satellite imagery between March and July that year.
One of them, 26-year-old Sarahi Hernández Alfonso, began her journey to cross into the US on August 5, and medical investigators note that she reportedly fainted the next day near the Otay Mountain Wilderness and was left behind. It would be another four days before the Mexican government reported her missing to Border Patrol on August 10, supplying a set of coordinates. Agents went to those coordinates and found her decomposing body. She’d died 1.3 miles from two different Anduril towers, one of which our analysis found had a clear line of sight.
Just the day before, 25-year-old Karina López Antonio was found dead near a third Anduril tower. She had crossed the previous night with her cousin and nephew. That morning, she felt sick, and her nephew looked for a Border Patrol agent to help. When agents returned, she was dead.
The following October in New Mexico, where the new Anduril towers had been rolled out, agents were patrolling on ATVs when they came across footprints. They followed them until they found the body of 31-year-old César Perea Itzincab. The presence of maggots and the level of decomposition indicated that he had died at least a week earlier, and medical examiners on the scene believe he had dragged himself to the spot where his remains were found. He was 1.5 miles away from an autonomous tower—within Anduril’s advertised range—and should have been visible to the camera, according to our topographical analysis.
We can’t know what those cameras saw as these people died. Footage and data from Anduril’s towers are overwritten every 30 days, and a former official with internal affairs at CBP told us the information wouldn’t be saved for longer unless it was part of an active investigation—which starts only if someone dies in custody. CBP did not respond to questions about specific incidents like this one, and the Sunland Park Police Department closes cases like this when it determines that no crime has been committed.
The lack of documentation is a missed opportunity, says Amerika Garcia Grewal, co-director of the Frontera Federation, which aims to help rescue migrants in distress—or find and identify their remains. “The surveillance towers along the border could be incredibly useful,” she told us. For example, they could in principle be used to hold Border Patrol agents accountable for whatever actions they did or did not take to locate someone in distress. “What the tool turns out [to do] depends on the person who is holding it,” she says, adding, “I don’t trust the folks that are using them.”
“If I could get that footage,” she says, “then we would go through that, and hopefully bring some answers” to family members and “documented proof of what happened” in their loved ones’ final moments.
When asked about deaths near Anduril towers, agents often point to faults in the technology. Galvan, for example, says the towers don’t capture how groups move: A large group of 20 people might splinter into smaller groups, especially if agents are pursuing them, and the tower doesn’t keep track of everyone. If someone’s missed, he says, “that person stays behind in the brush, out of sight.” Then they might pass out—which could be a death sentence in the desert.
And though Border Patrol says the towers can “hand off” surveillance of people from one tower to another, agents on the ground say that people are often missed during these handoffs. On top of that, the algorithms remain imperfect, according to Jason Owens, the chief of Border Patrol from June 2023 to March 2025. “We never really got to the point of ‘Set it and forget it,’” he says.
Agents also say they were just stretched too thin to respond effectively. Around 2022 and 2023, the border saw historically high levels of migration. Title 42, a policy that began under Trump and continued under Biden until May 2023, cited a public health emergency to expel migrants before they could apply for asylum. But the rapid expulsions carried fewer of the repercussions that could normally follow an apprehension, and many people simply tried to cross again.
Meanwhile, asylum claims had been rising for years, while shifts in US immigration policy and in the places migrants where originating from meant more people required lengthy processing rather than being quickly returned across the border or to their home countries. That increasingly tied up agents with people who had already been apprehended, they said, leaving fewer available to respond to surveillance alerts.
In other words, from the agents’ perspective, the effectiveness of Anduril’s towers was limited by the same issue that had always caused trouble: There just weren’t enough agents.
But the overwhelming demands on agents cannot explain all the deaths our investigation found. In 2024, the border started to get quiet again. By July of that year, the number of Border Patrol encounters nationwide had plummeted from their highs in December 2022. Encounters in the El Paso sector, where the Anduril towers in New Mexico were located, had fallen to nearly one-tenth of their peak. Agents were less tied up than they’d been in years. The technology was supposedly improving, too.
Galvan had left for a promotion by this time, but he says agents had come to trust the towers more, and they helped train the algorithm by giving a thumbs up or thumbs down if the system identified something correctly or incorrectly. There was also a new smartphone program: Every agent at the station was given an Android device with a map of where other agents were, and it sent alerts from the station about what an Anduril tower detected.
Despite all this, the deaths near towers continued. There was Morales in April, whose body Border Patrol learned about only from the landfill workers, though it had lain for hours within sight of an Anduril tower.
Others were discovered by luck.
On June 20, Border Patrol agents were mistakenly tracking a group of people they thought might be migrants, though they were in fact employees of the same landfill. Those employees told the agents they had come across a body, which turned out to be partially mummified remains of a man in his 40s who died within range of two Anduril towers.
Three days later, on the 23rd, another: the body of a 21-year-old Guatemalan man discovered by agents while on patrol, 1.3 miles from a tower across clear and open desert. Two days after that, another: An agent was looking for a lost person when he came across the remains of a 56-year-old man—just a football field’s distance from the previous one, with a similarly clear and unobstructed view to a tower.
So if Santa Teresa had gotten quieter—and become something of a showcase for Border Patrol’s newest technology efforts—what was going on?
“Agents review the information and determine the appropriate response—the technology does not make law enforcement decisions,” Beckham, CBP’s assistant commissioner, said. Meanwhile, individual agents described scenarios where they might not prioritize responding to alerts.
Sometimes “hanging back” was a strategy: Agents might observe a group to see what route they would take, or agents might not respond to a small group, in case those people had been sent by smugglers to distract from a larger group coming behind them. Other times, agents might deem the location where a group of migrants had first been spotted to be impractical for an apprehension, and instead wait to intercept them at another location.
Knowing someone’s location didn’t always lead to immediate action. Volunteers describe providing Border Patrol with the coordinates of someone who was lost but alive and then waiting, “sometimes [for] a week,” for agents to reach the location, says Garcia Grewal, from Eagle Pass, Texas. They might be told “Oh, so-and-so went out there and they found remains,” she recalls. “Well, they weren’t remains when we called you. They were alive.”
Mireya Morales, the younger sister of José Morales Bernal, who died by the landfill on the day before his birthday in April 2024, wasn’t aware her brother died near several surveillance towers, or that the government said these towers could save lives. “Well that’s good,” she said of that promise, “but in this case, it didn’t help my brother. And there’s no way to know exactly how things played out.”
“Border Patrol should have found him quickly,” she says, “and they could have done something.” If they did, this journey into the United States—his fourth trip—likely would have ended with his apprehension, detention, and deportation to Mexico. But he would have seen the birthday texts that his sister sent the next day. At least he would have made it home to celebrate his eldest daughter’s quinceañera, which took place earlier this year.
Stories like this are why Iván Chaar López, an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin who leads its Border Tech Lab, says he’d “rather talk about harms” than about “the failure of an algorithm.” He adds, “A system may fail, but humans suffer.”
Ultimately, any attempt to understand where things are going wrong is hampered by an institutional reluctance to measure the problem.
A complete audit of this virtual wall can only come from Border Patrol. The agency is, in some ways, increasingly equipped to take on that task: Agents told us that each time they apprehend someone, the location is logged with GPS coordinates, as are instances when Border Patrol sees evidence that someone crossed but cannot find them. It also has precise data on when each surveillance tower went up, which alerts came in, and how they were resolved. Having that information is the only way to measure whether the newest towers are truly missing fewer people than the previous generations.
But researchers and outside oversight agencies say this ocean of data hasn’t translated into a reliable system for measuring the effectiveness of the virtual wall. For example, CBP records the people it misses by logging “gotaways,” a tally of how many times agents see signs of someone who evaded apprehension—footprints, appearances on camera, reports from other people who were apprehended. It’s imperfect. And that creates room for interpretation.
“The goals with border enforcement have always been a moving target,” says Jeremy Slack, a researcher of migration and border issues at the University of Texas at El Paso. “They’re always set up so that it’s a win-win.” If apprehensions go up, for example, CBP says it means agents have gotten more effective at catching people. If apprehensions go down, it means the border is quiet because people are too scared to cross.
That’s not to mention the conflicting ideas within the agency about what the virtual wall was supposed to accomplish. Borkowski says higher-ups would ask how many fewer agents they could get by with if they built more towers. But supervisors receiving new towers told us they’d often ask for more agents, not fewer, because they now had more activity to respond to that had previously gone unseen.
And if the goal was for the sight of the towers to deter people from crossing to begin with, an external study from RAND in 2020 was ambiguous: It found that deploying IFTs resulted in lower apprehension levels nearby but said this didn’t mean the towers were actually deterring crossings. (Research by Boyce and colleagues found that earlier surveillance towers in southern Arizona pushed people to seek more difficult terrain out of view.) It leads to a question: Do the deaths near the virtual wall constitute unacceptable surveillance failures, or are they within the range of effectiveness the government deems acceptable? (CBP’s response did not address our questions on how it explains these deaths.)
Against this backdrop, the Government Accountability Office and DHS’s Office of the Inspector General have tried to focus on a narrower question: Is the virtual wall increasing the likelihood of apprehensions?
The answer has been incomplete since 2014. That’s when the GAO first suggested that whenever agents log their activity in Border Patrol’s database, they should include information about whether or not a piece of technology helped in their apprehension. This could at least do something to show Congress whether the technology is working. Border Patrol began collecting that information, but years of incremental improvements have been followed by repeated findings that the resulting data is unreliable or insufficient to determine how well the technology works. The reality, several people from Border Patrol told MIT Technology Review, is that agents see it as a chore demanded only by bureaucrats who don’t understand the realities of the border.
It’s “spitting in the wind, to be honest,” a former high-ranking official at DHS during the Biden administration told MIT Technology Review on background. “If we have 10,000 people a day crossing in between the ports of entry, do you think an agent is worried about telling them how they freaking apprehended those people?” Several other officials said that the logging of technology assists had improved, but not consistently enough to help much with analysis.
And there is no procedure—at the local or national level—to examine individual deaths near the towers or analyze them collectively for surveillance failures. “We never thought about plotting [migrant deaths] to see if the towers were missing things or agents were missing people,” said a former CBP official who evaluated how personnel handled deaths in custody.
“Nobody ever raised the issue,” the official said, adding that doing so could reveal important gaps in the agency’s approach: “If I still worked for CBP, and you brought it up, I would probably send some people to look.”
In response to questions from MIT Technology Review, CBP said that autonomous surveillance towers complement physical barriers by improving detection and situational awareness. Its statement did not address questions about its other technologies, or broader criticisms about how it evaluates the virtual wall.
This lack of measurement has not slowed the enthusiasm for more technology funding. The government spending bill passed in July 2025 awarded $2.7 billion for border security technology alone, and CBP was quick to signal to industry that the money would soon start flowing. “We’ve got an historic investment in infrastructure and technology coming up,” a CBP director told tech companies in an industry webinar that month. In a December 2025 interview, when he was director of homeland security and immigration at the America First Policy Institute, Cooper Smith described the technology investments as “fortifying” the border against a future president who might be, in his estimation, weaker on the border than Trump. (According to LegiStorm, a research organization that focuses on political staffers, Smith now serves in a policy-focused role with CBP.) The number of Border Patrol agents has climbed too, to nearly 21,500 agents as of June 2026—the highest in the agency’s history.
In the Big Bend region of Texas, surveillance towers are becoming a focus of local politics: Officials and residents across party lines, including the sheriff of Terrell County, are asking for Anduril towers instead of a controversial new border barrier project that’s recently been halted.
CBP has announced a desire to spend $1 billion on nearly 1,500 more towers by 2034. The law now requires all these towers to be equipped with AI. In December 2025, Anduril’s Palmer Luckey said the towers remained the company’s best-selling product, one that gives “basically perfect situational awareness of what’s going on in the area.” Anduril’s towers have been sold abroad—to enforce the UK’s borders, defend US Marine Corps bases in Japan and elsewhere, and serve as drone defenses for an Australian Air Force base.
But as for CBP, Anduril will no longer be the only game in town; General Dynamics has now released AI towers of its own and received an order for them in June from CBP worth up to $115 million. The Electronic Frontier Foundation—which has tracked surveillance towers since 2022—says some have already been spotted at the border.
This time around, the agency will be spending this money with even less oversight than it had just a couple of years ago. In October 2025, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, dissolved its department-level office that oversaw major spending programs.
Most of the records on human remains that MIT Technology Review collected were current only through the fall of 2025 or, in a handful of cases, early 2026. Even those dates come with a caveat: Many remains are never found, and others are found months after someone died. The reports can then take months to be released via public record requests. That makes it nearly impossible to keep track of how many people have died near surveillance towers in anything close to real time.
Still, the border today is significantly quieter. The latest figures from DHS show just 128,009 “enforcement encounters” from January to August 2026, compared with more than 2.4 million during the same period in 2024 (“encounters” count each of Border Patrol’s interactions, not individual people).
Even as border crossing rates decrease and DHS speeds ahead with its tower acquisition plans, people are still dying within range of the surveillance towers.
On September 14 2025, a 30-year-old Mexican woman named Graciela Gómez Hernández died just over 350 yards away from the physical border wall that separated Southern California from Tijuana—and within one mile of an RVSS tower. Earlier that afternoon, she had told her family that she could not walk any further, and her voice notes abruptly stopped.
Her skeletonized remains were recovered nearly three weeks later, on October 4. Some of her bones were missing, and there was “apparent animal activity … to the ribs,” as the medical examiner’s report read.
Sara Stroud, an organizer with the Borderlands Relief Collective, a volunteer humanitarian group that leaves water and supplies in a wilderness area frequented by people crossing the border, went to the site of her death a few days later to put up a memorial cross. A Border Patrol helicopter showed up almost immediately, flying low circles above the volunteers.
Between the helicopter and the RVSS tower that was visible in the background, “I was astounded about how we were being surveilled the whole time,” Stroud says, adding that this was especially stark in contrast to the agency’s often slow—or absent—responses to people who’d died on camera.
“Are you telling me you didn’t see it or you did see it?” she asks. “Because if you did see it, that’s horrible. And if they can’t, then how do you explain that?”
Additional reporting by Lillian Perlmutter.
This work was supported by a grant from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.
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