Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Tim. As Apple’s CEO did in President Donald Trump’s first term, Tim Cook is once again deftly navigating trade tensions without attracting an unwanted spotlight. His political skills look even sharper given the spectacle surrounding his industry counterparts, though investors are eager to hear his thoughts on tariffs during tomorrow’s earnings call.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Jeff. Amazon’s discount vertical known as “Haul” mulled a plan to show customers how tariffs impacted prices, but it scrapped the idea after the White House cried foul, once again putting Amazon founder and chairman Jeff Bezos in a difficult political spot.

Arguing with a wall. Researchers at the University of Zurich are facing potential legal action from Reddit for conducting an experiment on whether AI chatbots could change people’s opinions. They deployed a series of bots disguised as human users on the platform, which commented more than 1,000 times in the popular page for discussing controversial topics “Change My View,” 404 Media reported.

The bots took on individual personas, including a Catholic who identified as gay and a Black man opposing Black Lives Matter. The company’s chief legal officer called the experiment “highly unethical,” adding that it violated the platform’s rules and those of the specific forum in which the bots were commenting. Reddit is reaching out with “formal legal demands,” he said.

Reddit users railed against the study in the forum, criticising the researchers’ “deceptive” behavior and raising questions about how many more bots they are unknowingly engaging with online. The incident adds to growing concerns about AI’s ability to mislead humans.

Ahead of Trump’s visit to the Gulf region in May, his administration is considering scrapping a Biden-era executive order that limited semiconductor distribution and upset some of the countries there, Reuters reported.

The previous White House proposed a tiered system that determined a nation’s access to advanced AI chips, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE facing caps on the coveted products. Those countries have become major players in the AI race, but the Biden rules have been obstacles to their ambitions. The Trump team is now considering replacing them with a licensing system, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, a potential move that Silicon Valley would also cheer.

One area where tech is still facing headwinds in Washington is antitrust. Google CEO Sundar Pichai is scheduled to take the stand today in the Justice Department’s antitrust trial against the search giant, which was already deemed a monopoly.

China has upped its AI game once again. Tech and e-commerce giant Alibaba on Tuesday released a new version of its open-source model series, Qwen3, that outperforms OpenAI’s o1 and Deepseek’s R1 on benchmarks but still falls short of Google’s industry-leading Gemini 2.5 Pro, according to the company. Meanwhile, telecommunications firm Huawei is preparing to test a new AI chip that it hopes will rival Nvidia’s most powerful processors, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The breakthroughs signal China’s effectiveness in building up its own AI industry despite efforts from the US government to limit it, including cutting the country’s access to top-tier chips and the equipment to make its own. Qwen3’s performance makes it a formidable competitor not only in China but in the US market as well, AI analysts told CNBC. While the US is still producing the world’s best AI models, Chinese models have rapidly caught up in quality — closing the gap in key benchmarks from a double-digit lag two years ago to near parity today, a Stanford University report found.

“I haven’t had this much fun in a long time.”

— Palantir CEO Alex Karp at the Hill and Valley Forum in Washington, DC, after verbally sparring with two protesters who accused his company of creating technology that kills Palestinians. Karp has been a vocal defender of Israel’s response to the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and has called on Palantir employees to quit if they don’t like his views. He said on Wednesday that he enjoyed the discourse, and called one of the protesters an “unwitting product of an evil force: Hamas.”

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The Trump administration is focusing on the wrong problem when it comes to AI, tech venture capitalist Reid Hoffman said Friday at Semafor’s World Economy Summit. Opposition to “woke AI” is “detrimental to American success” and economic growth, he said when asked about David Sacks’ role as the new White House AI czar.

Sacks, who is tasked with creating an AI action plan, and other right-wing tech figures have repeatedly railed against what they perceive as “woke” AI models from US firms — for example, image generators that depicted historically white figures, like the US Founding Fathers, as people of color.

Such criticism “makes a very nice political headline,” Hoffman said, but amounts to “noises” and a “foolish” perspective. “Focus on the things that matter. Now, they may get there. I hope they do,” he said, referring to the Trump administration.

Whether the White House can reassess its focus will be tested in the coming months. A House Republican and the Judiciary Committee’s chair recently subpoenaed 16 major tech companies — including OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google — about whether the Biden administration colluded with AI firms to manipulate algorithms against conservative ideologies. The investigation is ongoing.

Some of the biggest US power companies are at odds with senior Trump administration officials on how to fill the country’s looming electricity deficit and beat China at the AI race, Semafor’s Tim McDonnell reports.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said during the World Economy Summit last week that the continued use of federal tax credits to replace fossil fuels in the electric grid with renewables “would be catastrophic for our country.”

But executives of companies managing the delivery of power to new data centers have a more nuanced view. Even as rising trade barriers with China make some technologies more expensive, a combination of renewables and batteries is still seen as the cheapest and fastest way to put new electrons on the grid, with nuclear still a few years away and coal largely rejected by tech companies.

“Before, I always argued that you need some gas in the [power] mix to make it cheaper,” said Andrés Gluski, CEO of the multinational energy company AES, one of the top power providers for data centers in the US, at WES. “Now, I would argue that you need renewables in the mix to make it cheaper. Over the next five years, the bulk of new energy in the US is going to be renewables.”

President Donald Trump flew to Michigan Tuesday to tout 100 days of aggressive executive action. His next 100 will be a heavier lift because he will have to rely on the rest of his party, Semafor’s Shelby Talcott, Burgess Everett and Eleanor Mueller report.

Successfully corralling the GOP’s narrow House and Senate majorities into delivering the next chunk of his agenda by passing his tax plan — “the big prize,” as Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., described it to Semafor — will require the president to tap new depths of patience and focus.