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On New Year’s Eve, Lee Zeldin did something out of character for an Environmental Protection Agency leader who has been hacking away at regulations intended to protect Americans’ air and water.He announced new restrictions on five chemicals commonly used in building materials, plastic products and adhesives, and he cheered it as a “MAHA win.”It was one of many signs of a fragile collaboration that’s been building between a Republican administration that’s traditionally supported big business and a Make America Healthy Again movement that argues corporate environmental harms are putting people’s health in danger.The unlikely pairing grew out of the coalition’s success influencing public health policy with the help of its biggest champion, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As health secretary, he has pared back vaccine recommendations and shifted the government’s position on topics like seed oils, fluoride and Tylenol.Building on that momentum, the movement now sees a glimmer of hope in the EPA’s promise to release a “MAHA agenda” in the coming months.At stake is the strength of President Donald Trump’s coalition as November’s midterm elections threaten his party’s control of Congress. After a politically diverse group of MAHA devotees came together to help Trump return to the White House a little more than one year ago, disappointing them could mean losing the support of a vocal voting bloc.Activists like Courtney Swan, who focuses on nutritional issues and has spoken with EPA officials in recent months, are watching closely.“This is becoming an issue that if the EPA does not start getting their stuff together, then they could lose the midterms over this,” she said.Christopher Bosso, a professor at Northeastern University who researches environmental policy, said Zeldin didn’t seem to take MAHA seriously at first, “but now he has to, because they’ve been really calling for his scalp.” MAHA wins a seat at the table Last year, prominent activist Kelly Ryerson was so frustrated with the EPA over its weakening of protections against harmful chemicals that she and other MAHA supporters drew up a petition to get Zeldin fired.The final straw, Ryerson said, was the EPA’s approval of two new pesticides for use on food. Ryerson, whose social media account “Glyphosate Girl” focuses on nontoxic food systems, said the pesticides contained “forever chemicals,” which resist breakdown, making them hazardous to people. The EPA has disputed that characterization.But Ryerson’s relationship with the EPA changed at a MAHA Christmas party in Washington in December. She talked to Zeldin there and felt that he listened to her perspective. Then he invited her and a handful of other activists to sit down with him at the EPA headquarters. That meeting lasted an hour, and it led to more conversations with Zeldin’s deputies.“The level of engagement with people concerned with their health is absolutely revolutionary,” Ryerson said in an interview. She said the agency’s upcoming plan “will say whether or not they take it seriously,” but she praised MAHA’s access as “unprecedented.”Rashmi Joglekar, associate director of science, policy and engagement at the University of California San Francisco’s Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment, said it’s not typical for an activist group to meet with the EPA administrator. She said MAHA’s ability to make inroads so quickly shows how “powerful” the coalition has become.The movement’s influence is not just at the EPA. MAHA has steered federal and state lawmakers away from enacting liability shields that protect pesticide manufacturers from expensive lawsuits. In Congress, after MAHA activists lobbied against such protections in a funding bill, they were removed. A similar measure stalled in Tennessee’s legislature.Zeldin joined a call in December with the advocacy group MAHA Action, where he invited activists to participate in developing the EPA’s MAHA agenda. Since then, EPA staffers have regularly appeared on the weekly calls and promoted what they say are open-door policies.Last month, Ryerson’s petition to get Zeldin fired was updated to note that several signers had met with him and are in a “collaborative effort to advance the MAHA agenda.”Zeldin’s office declined to make him available for an interview on his work with MAHA activists, but EPA Press Secretary Brigit Hirsch said the forthcoming agenda will “directly respond to priorities we’ve heard from MAHA advocates and communities.”The American Chemistry Council said “smart, pro-growth policies can protect both the environment and human health as well as grow the U.S. economy.” EPA’s alliance with industry raises questions Despite the ongoing conversations, the Republican emphasis on deregulation still puts MAHA and the EPA on a potential collision course.Lori Ann Burd, the environmental health program director at The Center for Biological Diversity, said the administration has a particularly strong alliance with industry interests.As an example, she pointed to the EPA’s proposal to allow the broad use of the weed killer Dicamba on soybeans and cotton. A month before the announcement, the EPA hired a lobbyist for the soybean association, Kyle Kunkler, to serve in a senior position overseeing pesticides.Hirsch denied that Kunkler had anything to do with the decision and said EPA’s pesticide decisions are “driven by statutory standards and scientific evidence.”Environmentalists said the hiring of ex-industry leaders is a theme of this administration. Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva, for example, are former higher-ups at the American Chemistry Council, an industry association. They now work in leadership in the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, which oversees pesticide and toxic chemical regulation.Hirsch said the agency consults with ethics officials to prevent conflicts of interest and ensures that appointees are qualified and focused on the science, “unlike previous administrations that too often deferred to activist groups instead of objective evidence.”Alexandra Muoz, a molecular toxicologist who works with MAHA activists on some issues and was in the hourlong meeting with Zeldin, said she could sense industry’s influence in the room.“They were very polite in the meeting. In terms of the tone, there was a lot of receptivity,” she said. “However, in terms of what was said, it felt like we were interacting with a lot of industry talking points.” Activists await the EPA’s MAHA agenda Hirsch said the MAHA agenda will address issues like lead pipes, forever chemicals, plastic pollution, food quality and Superfund cleanups.Ryerson said she wants to get the chemical atrazine out of drnking water and stop the pre-harvest desiccation of food, in which farmers apply pesticides to crops immediately before they are harvested.She also wants to see cancer warnings on the ingredient glyphosate, which some studies associate with cancer even as the EPA said it is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans when used as directed.While she’s optimistic that the political payoffs will be big enough for Zeldin to act, she said some of the moves he’s already promoting as “MAHA wins” are no such thing.For example, in his New Year’s Eve announcement on a group of chemicals called phthalates, he said the agency intends to regulate some of them for environmental and workplace risks, but didn’t address the thousands of consumer products that contain the ingredients.Swan said time will tell if the agency is being performative.“The EPA is giving very mixed signals right now,” she said. Sejal Govindarao, Ali Swenson and Michael Phillis, Associated Press
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Cybersecurity researchers have discovered roughly 1,000 unprotected gateways to OpenClaw, an open-source and proactive AI agent that can be controlled through text conversations with apps like WhatsApp or Telegram. The gateways were found on the open internet, allowing anyone to access users personal information. One white hat hacker also reportedly gamed OpenClaws skills system, which lets users add plugins for tasks like web automation or system control, to reach the top of the rankings and be downloaded by users around the world. The skill itself was innocuous, but it exploited a security vulnerability that someone more nefarious could have used to cause serious harm. Access to those gateways would allow hackers to reach the same files and content OpenClaw can access, meaning full read and write control over a users computer and any connected accounts, including email addresses and phone numbers. A number of incidents exploiting those vulnerabilities have already been reported. OpenClaw, originally called Clawdbot, was released in November 2025 by Peter Steinberger, an Austrian-born, London-based developer best known for creating a tool that lets apps display and edit PDFs natively. The launch followed a wave of advances in AIs ability to interact with files that began in late 2025. Late last year, many people began experimenting with Anthropics Claude Code, an agentic AI that links to a computers file system through the terminal or command line and responds to conversational prompts to build large projects independently, with some oversight. The tool excited many users but also discouraged others who were uncomfortable working in a non-graphical interface. In response, Anthropic set Claude Code to work autonomously on a sibling product, Claude Work, which layers a more user-friendly interface on top. While it has gained some traction, it is a third-party product built by a developer outside Anthropic that has captured the most attention. Steinbergers OpenClaw mimics the best features of Claude Code, but with more functionality and the ability to proactively work on tasks without being prompted. That proactivity is a key differentiator between the tool, which was forced to rename itself Moltbot and then OpenClaw last week after a request from Anthropic, and other AI systems. Its potential has energized the tech sector, driven a spike in Mac Mini sales as a popular way to host the agent, and come to dominate certain corners of X and Reddit. The problem is that the very thing that makes OpenClaw so appealing, the ability to oversee an eager AI assistant without specialist coding knowledge and with an easy setup, is also what makes it so concerning. I love it, yet [I’m] instantly filled with fear, says Jake Moore, a cybersecurity expert at Eset. Moore says users are so excited by the idea of OpenClaw as a personal assistant that they are granting it unrestricted access to their digital lives, sometimes while hosting their instances on incorrectly configured virtual private servers. That leaves them vulnerable to hacking. Opening private messages and emails to any new technology comes with a risk and when we dont fully understand those risks, we could be walking into a new era of putting efficiency before security and privacy, Moore warns. The same access that makes OpenClaw powerful is also what makes it dangerous if it is compromised. If one of the devices Clawdbot is running on is compromised, an attacker would then gain access to everything including full history and highly sensitive information, he says. Steinberger did not respond to multiple interview requests, but he has published extensive security documentation for Moltbot online, even if many users may not incorporate it into their setups. That concerns cybersecurity experts. Developments like Clawdbot are so seductive but a gift to the bad guys, says Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey in the U.K. With great power comes great responsibility and machines are not responsible, he says. Ultimately the user is. The way OpenClaw operates, running without oversight and acting as an always-on assistant, may cause users to forget that responsibility until it is too late. Some have already demonstrated that Moltbot can be vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, in which harmful instructions are embedded in websites or emails in the hope that AI agents will absorb and follow them. I wonder who these users think will be blamed when agentic AI empties their account or posts hateful thoughts, Woodward says.
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So-called rare earth elements arent actually rare. Its just difficult to refine them into the purified forms that are needed for making things like electronics or clean energy tech. The standard processes are also toxic, which is one reason that the world has outsourced production to China. Supra, a startup that spun out of the University of Texas at Austin, is taking a different approach thats clean, low-cost, and makes it possible to capture some of the billions of dollars worth of critical minerals that are trapped in waste in the U.S. Dr. Sessler [Photo: Supra] The companys technology uses supramolecular receptors, a string of molecules built to grab specific molecules like a baseball glove, says CEO Katie Durham. Jonathan Sessler, a chemistry professor at UT Austin, first designed receptors like these to target cancer cells. Then he realized that they could also be designed to target critical minerals. My original analogy was we were going to be making a chemical sponge, Sessler says. It would go in and capture these elements and we would pick it up and wring it out. In the final design, the nanometer-sized receptors are embedded into a polymer filled with tiny pores that increase the surface area for capturing metal ions. The material is 3D-printed into reusable cartridges. [Photo: Genesis Cosme/The University of Texas at Austin] At a mine or industrial site, tailings or wastewater can flow through a series of the cartridges, each targeting a specific element. The receptors bind minerals in alcohol and release them when theyre rinsed with water, using little energy and avoiding the use of toxic chemicals. The process, which the company says is 100 times more selective and faster than current rare earth refining, can also be used on electronic waste. [Photo: Supra] In lab tests on cobalt, the technology was able to capture 100% of the element, isolating it completely from other elements like lithium in a solution. The tech can be customized for any element. As it comes to market, the startup is focused first on scandium and gallium, two valuable rare earth elements that currently are imported from China. The U.S. is 100% import-dependent on them, and we really did not see a lot of other startups trying to address that, says Durham. By collecting the trace amounts of scandium in industrial waste in the U.S., the company hopes it can change how the element is sourced. [Photo: Supra] The value varies wildly depending on purityscandium, for example, can sell for $300 per kilogram at 99.9% purity, but $3,200 per kilogram at 99.99% purity. The purest form, at 99.9999%, sells for $500,000 per kilogram. (The startup is still optimizing its process, but is aiming for the highest purity.) The company plans to launch its first pilots with partners later this year. Supra is one of a handful of startups working on ways to make rare earth production feasible in the U.S. Others include Phoenix Tailings, which works both with mined material and waste; and Cyclic Materials, which extracts and refines rare earths from end-of-life products. Because of the demand for an American supply chain, Supra plans to focus first in the U.S. But the company eventually wants to make their products available globallyincluding in China, to help with the pollution challenge there. The world has gotten lazy and let China pay the environmental cost, says Sessler.
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