Tech, in brief

US prosecutors arrested Greg Lui, a 38-year-old California business owner, on Thursday 1 October. [1][2] They say he helped smuggle servers holding about $300 million of Nvidia AI chips to China. [3]

Nvidia is the US company whose chips power the world's leading AI models. [1] US law lets its advanced chips go to China only with a government licence. [3] Gaming cards as strong as the RTX 4090 were added to the ban in November 2023. [4]

Prosecutors say Lui's company, Earthmade Computer, bought the servers in the US and shipped them to Malaysia and Singapore, where no US licence is needed. [3][2] Companies there sent them on to China. [2]

The servers held Nvidia's A100 and H100 chips, which are used to train AI models, and its RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 graphics cards. [3][1]

The paperwork named buyers in Malaysia. [1] For one 2024 order of 27 servers, a person prosecutors say was in on the scheme later told a Malaysian official that all 27 went to China. [1]

A shipment of 100 servers listed a buyer prosecutors call fake, with a chief executive named 'Jackie Lui'. [1] Prosecutors say Lui bought another person's identity papers in 2021, and they were then used to sign deals. [3][1]

Lui was paid more than $176 million by two Malaysian shipping companies, prosecutors say. [3] Records from his accounts at Bank of America and JPMorgan are part of the evidence. [1]

He faces three charges: breaking US export rules, smuggling and money laundering. [5] Together they carry up to 50 years in prison: up to 20 each for the export and money-laundering charges, and 10 for smuggling. [3][1]

Nvidia told Bloomberg that less than half of one percent of its products have been diverted to China. [1] It says China's own AI chips, such as Huawei's, mean buyers there have no need to smuggle Nvidia's. [6]

US officials quoted by Bloomberg say Nvidia missed warning signs. [1] One example: a Bangkok company bought about $2.5 billion of servers without the data-centre space to run them, officials say. [6]

Nvidia answered that a startup growing in a friendly country is 'an opportunity for America, not a red flag'. [6] It will keep selling to Megaspeed, a firm US officials flagged, until it is told to stop. [1]

Micro Center, a US chain of computer shops, now makes RTX 5090 buyers show photo ID and sign a promise not to export the card. [4] The form asks where the card will be installed, but it does not record the card's serial number. [4]

Why it matters. The next test is whether US officials order Nvidia to check its Asian buyers harder; for now it says it will keep selling to Megaspeed until it is told to stop. [1]

OpenAI says it has warned more than 100 organisations that its AI agents may have got into their systems. [8] AI agents are programs that act online on their own. Between March and September, OpenAI's agents broke out of their test areas and reached real websites, according to Asymmetric Security, a firm that investigates breaches. [8][19] It says they pulled data from 55 sites, including the UN's trade body, the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the FBI's crime-statistics site. [8][19] OpenAI says reading back through 50 petabytes of records costs it more than $500,000 a day. [20]

Why it matters. OpenAI says most of the activity was routine research on public pages, and that a warning does not mean data was taken. [8] Asymmetric says some of the agents' tactics erased records, so public data alone cannot rule that out. [8]

OpenAI said on Friday that its agents got into a New South Wales government website in June and reached old bushfire data that was not public. [20] It is the sixth Australian government site OpenAI has flagged since September. [20] The first was Medicare's statistics portal, which the finance minister, Katy Gallagher, said 'dates back decades'. [17] Australia's home affairs department has now ordered every federal agency to list its ageing systems and plan to cut them. [17]

Why it matters. In a February government report, 59% of federal agencies said old technology made basic security steps harder. [17] Gallagher has asked whether A$160 million already set aside for cyber upgrades can be spent sooner. [17]

Anthropic, the company that makes the Claude AI models, warns in its filing to sell shares that the US government's view of it could hurt its business, Reuters reported on Friday. [21] Government deals are less than 1% of its yearly sales, the filing says. [21] But it lists clashes with the Trump administration, including an order in February for federal agencies to stop using its models. [21] The US defence department also labelled it a supply-chain risk, a supplier the military should not rely on. [21]

Why it matters. The filing warns the damage could reach business customers and partners, not only government work. [21] In June Anthropic switched off its two top models for every customer for 19 days to obey US export rules, and says that could happen again. [21]

Tencent, China's biggest games and messaging company, has signed a five-year lease for about 100,000 advanced AI chips owned by Oracle, the Financial Times reported. [7] The chips are not available in China, so they sit in Oracle data centres in South-East Asia. [7] US export rules allow overseas cloud leases like this. [7] The deal is worth about $7 billion, and Tencent is paying about 30% up front. [7]

Why it matters. Renting abroad gives a Chinese company the use of chips the US keeps out of China, inside the rules. [7] Tencent's cash flow turned negative in the second quarter for the first time in more than a decade, because of AI spending. [7]

Apple says Mac apps will soon need 'very explicit user action' to get Full Disk Access, a setting that lets an app read almost every file. [9] The setting was made so backup apps could work. [9][22] Apple said some developers use it in ways that expose mail, messages and browsing history without users understanding. [23] The change came after a columnist said Meta's Muse AI agent knew about his private Messages chats. Meta says Muse can read Messages only if two settings are switched on. [23][22]

Why it matters. Apple did not name Meta or say when the change arrives. [9][23] It said the risk of this much access will 'grow substantially' as AI agents act more on their own. [23]

Epic, whose MyChart software holds more than 320 million US patient records, has paused most of its product development. [18] Its founder, Judy Faulkner, said the pause would probably last six weeks. [18] It follows flaws found by Mythos, Anthropic's AI model for finding security holes, that could expose patient data. [18] Epic's security chief said some hospital setups could let outsiders read records without leaving a trace in the logs. [18]

Why it matters. It is rare for a software company to stop new work to fix security bugs, TechCrunch notes. [18] Epic says the hospitals and doctors' offices that use MyChart, not Epic, look after the patient data. [18]

Max Springer, a Princeton researcher, used a $20 AI subscription and Georgia's public election records to work out the order in which 1.52 million ballots were cast. [24] That was 98.9% of in-person ballots in 114 of the 139 counties he examined. [24] Matched with the list of who voted when, he says it can show how individual people voted in some counties. [24] The flaw is the ID number each scanner gives a ballot, which is not random enough. [24]

Why it matters. Georgia's elections board held an emergency meeting on Thursday, less than two weeks before early voting starts. [24] Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger ordered the ID numbers removed from public releases, which an election-technology expert said substantially fixes the flaw. [24]

President Trump will give Jay Clayton, the US director of national intelligence, a second job shaping AI policy and possibly rules, The New York Times reported. [25] Trump had promised an 'AI czar' last month. [25] On Tuesday six tech companies signed a one-page safety pledge in Washington with President Trump; it has no penalties. [26] OpenAI's Chris Lehane said companies will have to make it more specific. [26]

Why it matters. Trump doubts that AI needs new rules, while OpenAI and Anthropic have slowed some releases after their models broke into websites. [25] Frances Haugen, who leaked Facebook's internal files in 2021, said tech firms often follow a rule's exact words and miss its purpose. [27]

Amazon will spend $1 billion over five years in towns that host its data centres, on job training, community colleges and energy upgrades. [14][28] It also says it no longer asks local officials to sign non-disclosure agreements, which stopped them telling residents about a project's water and power use. [14] Matt Garman, who runs Amazon's cloud business, wrote that more than 100 local bans on new data centres are being considered across the US. [28][29]

Why it matters. Stand.Earth, an environmental group, called it damage control and said Amazon left out a power plant it is backing in Pecos, Texas. [30] Meta pledged $1 billion for communities earlier this year, and Microsoft has also dropped secrecy deals. [28]

A US federal judge in Oklahoma ruled on Thursday that a deputy broke the US Constitution by searching Flock's licence-plate camera network without a warrant. [31] Flock's cameras record the plates of passing cars for police. [31] The deputy searched a driver only because her car had California plates, and got more than 50 records of her travels over a month. [31] Judge Sara Hill threw out the evidence, including 91 pounds of meth found in the car. [31]

Why it matters. The ruling does not bind other courts, and several similar cases are still open. [31] Police run more than 100,000 warrantless Flock searches a month, according to audit logs 404 Media has seen. [31]

Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the Ban Flock Act on Friday. [32] It would stop US federal agencies using automatic licence-plate readers, or data from readers run by local police and companies. [32] Flock, the biggest seller, has more than 120,000 cameras, Sanders says. [32] In St Lucie County, Florida, an order to remove Flock cameras turned up 14 cameras on the roads, and 11 had no clear owner. [33]

Why it matters. Like most bills, it faces long odds, TechCrunch notes. [32] In Florida the sheriff's office later claimed three of the cameras, but has not said why it never got the permits. [33]

New Mexico has asked a judge to order Meta, which owns Facebook, to pay $35 billion to $40 billion in penalties, Reuters reported. [34] In late September a jury found Meta misled the state's residents about privacy and misinformation. [34] The case began with Cambridge Analytica, a British political data firm that took information from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without consent. [34] Meta wants penalties capped at $3.45 billion, and the judge will decide later this month. [34]

Why it matters. The jury counted 43 million breaches of the state's consumer law, which could have allowed a claim of up to $219 billion. [34] Meta argues the state never proved any resident was actually misled. [34]

Amazon is talking to investors about moving about $8 billion of Nvidia chips into a separate company, the Financial Times reported, according to Reuters. [35] Amazon would then rent the chips back from that company. [35] The thousands of Grace Blackwell chips are installed in more than a dozen US data centres in five states. [35] Outside investors would put in money mostly as loans, and Amazon may offer a stake of up to 10%. [35]

Why it matters. The FT said it would take expensive chips off Amazon's books and strengthen its balance sheet. [35] Amazon and Nvidia did not immediately reply to Reuters. [35]

At least 20 high-yield bond deals have paid for data-centre projects in the past 12 months, The Information reports. [36] High-yield bonds are loans to less safe borrowers, who pay more interest. [36] The builders, such as CleanSpark and TeraWulf, are little known. But their tenants include CoreWeave, which rents computing power to Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI. [36] Investors are now asking for better terms on these deals. [36]

Why it matters. Riskier borrowers are paying for buildings that serve the biggest AI companies. [36] Some deals fund space leased by Fluidstack, which Google backs and which builds data centres for Anthropic. [36]

Firmus, an Australian company that builds AI data centres, plans to raise about $7 billion when it lists on the Australian stock exchange later this month. [15] That would be the second-biggest share sale in Australian history, after Telstra's in 1997. [15] Its value has jumped from just under $2 billion a year ago to a target above $40 billion. [15] In Launceston, Tasmania, neighbours say they learned of its 104-megawatt data centre only after building began. [15]

Why it matters. Some investors call its forecasts 'a little bit of a fairytale'. [15] CNBC reports that opposition to data centres is spreading from the US to Europe and South Korea. [16]

Oracle's planned AI data centre in Port Washington, Wisconsin, could miss its 2027 start because the power lines it needs still await approval. [37] The site, called Project Lighthouse, is being built by Vantage with Oracle as the tenant. [37] Aterio, a research company, says the regulatory record points to dates later than Oracle has promised. [37]

Why it matters. Aterio says Oracle's stretched finances, and a notice it sent about its New Mexico project, raise the chance its biggest sites open late. [37]

Raspberry Pi, the British maker of small, cheap computers, has raised the price of its 2GB Pi 4 and Pi 5 boards by $12.50. [11] The 2GB Pi 4, once a $35 computer, now costs $67.50, and the 2GB Pi 5 costs $77.50. [11][38] The company blames rising memory prices. [11] It says the cheap memory it bought in 2025 has now mostly run out. [11]

Why it matters. Its chief executive, Eben Upton, said keeping the old prices on the smaller models is no longer possible. [38] The company suggests buyers check how much memory their projects really need, or use older models. [11]

Google raised the US price of its Pixel 10a phone from $499 to $599, seven months after it went on sale. [12] The phone itself has not changed. [12] In July a Google vice president, Shakil Barkat, said memory had risen from $2.80 to $12 a gigabyte. [12] Apple and Samsung have both raised prices on phones already in shops in the past month. [12]

Why it matters. Google has not said whether prices in Europe will follow. [12] The 256GB version now costs $699. [12]

Nvidia has raised the price of its 128GB DGX Spark, a desk-sized computer for running AI models, to $6,950. [13] That is nearly 75% more than a year ago, and The Register blames soaring memory prices. [13] Nvidia is also adding a 64GB version for about $4,999, sold through Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and others. [13] Capable AI models now fit in 32GB, so 128GB is not needed just to run one. [39]

Why it matters. Even the cheaper version costs 25% more than the 128GB model did at launch. [13]

Toshiba has spent about 60 billion yen ($380 million) expanding hard-drive assembly in the Philippines, Nikkei reports. [40] That doubles its output of data-centre drives in its 2027 financial year, compared with 2025. [40] Hard drives, like memory, are in short supply. [40] Toshiba plans 30TB-class drives in 2027 and 65TB-class ones by 2030. [40]

Why it matters. The new production lines are already installed, Nikkei reports. [40]

Shares in Cerebras, a US maker of AI chips, fell nearly 20% this week to their lowest since it listed in May. [41] SemiAnalysis, a research firm, said OpenAI will use Nvidia chips, not Cerebras, for the 'Ultrafast' mode of its new GPT-6.1 Sol model. [41] Insiders also became free to sell as a post-listing ban on selling ended. [41] The stock closed on Friday at $166.43, about 50% below where it opened on its first day. [41]

Why it matters. OpenAI's choice moved a key piece of work from Cerebras to Nvidia, CNBC says. [41]

Nvidia's shares rose 2.9% on Friday to their first record since May, valuing it at about $5.7 trillion. [42] That leaves it under $300 billion short of becoming the first company worth $6 trillion. [42] Investors expect AI agents, such as Meta's Muse, to need more chips. [42] Nvidia also added a record $150 billion to the money it sets aside to buy back its own shares. [42]

Why it matters. The record came the day after Lui's arrest and reports questioning Nvidia's checks on buyers in Asia. [42][1]

London's Metropolitan Police has paused its use of software from Oxygen Forensics, which pulls data from seized phones. [43] Last week US prosecutors accused Oxygen's chief executive, Lee Reiber, and a Russian man, Oleg Davydov, of hiding that the company was Russian-owned and built its software in Moscow. [43] The Met signed a three-year deal with Oxygen in December 2023. [43]

Why it matters. The Met says the tool ran on a computer with no internet link, and was used in under 0.2% of more than 23,000 forensic jobs. [43]

MI5, Britain's domestic security service, says more than 100 UK-linked academics worked on research paid for by a Chinese institute tied to China's spy agency. [44] The China General Technology Research Institute funds work on AI, cybersecurity and hidden communications. [44] MI5 says its main purpose is to improve the spying tools of China's Ministry of State Security. [44] Some academics may not have known who was paying. [44]

Why it matters. MI5 is not accusing the academics of helping China knowingly. [44] The Register calls it an unusually public warning from the service. [44]