Driving the news: Apple CEO Tim Cook dined at breezy Mar-a-Lago last night — a day after a pilgrimage to Trump's table on Thursday by Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google cofounder Sergey Brin. Mark Zuckerberg flew in on Thanksgiving Eve. Jeff Bezos will sit down with Trump next week.
Elon Musk has sued OpenAI over its planned for-profit restructuring, but Musk's own emails show he wanted OpenAI to have a for-profit component and wanted to own and run it himself, OpenAI argues in a new court filing Friday.
Why it matters: Musk helped found OpenAI in 2015 but has since become a bitter opponent and critic of the ChatGPT maker.
Elon Musk's ongoing feud with the Securities and Exchange Commission escalated Thursday when he publicly challenged the agency, claiming it gave him 48 hours to pay a penalty or face charges related to his Twitter acquisition.
The big picture: Musk's brawl with the regulator — a six-year on-again-off-again battle involving numerous unrelated issues — has reached an inflection point.
The Republican Party will aim to get rid of daylight saving time, President-elect Trump said in a post on Truth Social Friday.
Why it matters: Most U.S. adults dislike the semi-annual clock change — currently designed to maximized daylight during summer — and lawmakers have occasionally pitched scrapping it, without official success.
President-elect Trump's inner circle rushed to claim a report acknowledging that FBI informants (but not undercover agents) were present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as proof of a baseless right wing belief that the bureau instigated the riot despite the report saying the opposite.
Why it matters: Vice President-elect Vance, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in their social media posts falsely conflated the FBI's acknowledgement that several informants were at the riot and even entered the Capitol with a long-running conspiracy theory that the FBI staged the attack to discredit then-President Trump. The report explicitly said that no FBI employees were present and that no FBI informants were authorized to participate.
iPhone users are spouting off online about Photo app changes after Apple rolled out its iOS 18 update that the company hailed as its "biggest-ever redesign to Photos."
The big picture: Users complained that the new app was confusing to navigate, but its latest iOS update rolls back some of the disliked changes.
Driving the news: The perceived weaknesses in the U.S. response to Salt Typhoon was a hot topic in Washington this week.
Senators questioned cybersecurity and telecom experts at a hearing Wednesday about the best way to secure telcos and whether it's time to consider hacking back.
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly told The Cipher Brief this week that China's attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure to date are "just the tip of the iceberg."
🫡 FBI Director Christopher Wray said he'll step down from his position on Inauguration Day. (Axios)
🪖 Advisers to the Trump transition are preparing a plan to split leadership at the U.S. Cyber Command and the NSA. (The Record)
🇰🇵 The Justice Department indicted 14 North Korean nationals for their alleged role in a scheme to steal identities and score jobs at U.S. companies. (Associated Press)
@ Industry
🧳 Yahoo has laid off around 25% of its cybersecurity team, including its entire red team, over the last year. (TechCrunch)
🤖 A look at the team that helps Anthropic test AI safety and security concerns in its products. (Wall Street Journal)
👩🏻💻 I've finally mademy way through this WSJ profile of investigative security journalist Brian Krebs, who goes to extreme, but necessary, lengths to keep his address and life secure from the criminals he's investigating. It's worth the read.
President-elect Trump and Elon Musk are finding a wellspring of unexpected cooperation from Democrats in their plans to crack down on government waste and inefficiency.
Why it matters: Trump's "Department of Government Efficiency," or DOGE, has been a mostly Republican brainstorm so far, but centrist and progressive Democrats have begun offering ideas for it.
The same advances that let cutting-edge AI reasoning models solve complex problems also seem to enable and encourage them to lay plots and deceive users.
Why it matters: This propensity for what researchers call "scheming" is precisely the kind of behavior that AI Cassandras have long predicted and warned about.
Amazon gave $1 million to President-elect Trump's inaugural fund, the company confirmed Thursday — one day after Facebook and Instagram parent Meta announced a similar donation.
Why it matters: Trump noted to CNBC's Jim Cramer on Thursday that he's returning to the White House with warmer relations with Big Tech leaders and said Amazon founder Jeff Bezos planned to visit him next week, following a similar Mar-a-Lago meeting with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
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