In 2017, Beijing unveiled an ambitious roadmap to dominate artificial intelligence development, aiming to secure global leadership by 2030. By 2020, the plan called for "iconic advances" in AI to demonstrate its progress. Then in late 2022, OpenAI's release of ChatGPT took the world by surprise--and caught China flat-footed. At the time, leading Chinese technology companies were still reeling from an 18-month government crackdown that shaved around 1 trillion off China's tech sector. It was almost a year before a handful of Chinese AI chatbots received government approval for public release.

Apple has agreed to pay 95 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the privacy-minded company of deploying its virtual assistant Siri to eavesdrop on people using its iPhone and other trendy devices. The proposed settlement filed Tuesday in an Oakland, California, federal court would resolve a 5-year-old lawsuit revolving around allegations that Apple surreptitiously activated Siri to record conversations through iPhones and other devices equipped with the virtual assistant for more than a decade. The alleged recordings occurred even when people didn't seek to activate the virtual assistant with the trigger words, "Hey, Siri." Some of the recorded conversations were then shared with advertisers in an attempt to sell their products to consumers more likely to be interested in the goods and services, the lawsuit asserted. The allegations about a snoopy Siri contradicted Apple's long-running commitment to protect the privacy of its customers -- a crusade that CEO Tim Cook has often framed as a fight to preserve "a fundamental human right."

In 2024, both cutting-edge technology and the companies controlling it grew increasingly powerful, provoking euphoric wonderment and existential dread. Companies like Nvidia and Alphabet soared in value, fueled by expectations that artificial intelligence (AI) will become a cornerstone of modern life. While those grand visions are still far into the future, tech undeniably shaped markets, warfare, elections, climate, and daily life this year. Perhaps technology's biggest impact this year was on the global economy. The so-called Magnificent Seven--the stocks of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla--thrived in large part because of the AI boom, propelling the S&P 500 to new highs.

Despite their expertise, AI developers don't always know what their most advanced systems are capable of--at least, not at first. To find out, systems are subjected to a range of tests--often called evaluations, or'evals'--designed to tease out their limits. But due to rapid progress in the field, today's systems regularly achieve top scores on many popular tests, including SATs and the U.S. bar exam, making it harder to judge just how quickly they are improving. A new set of much more challenging evals has emerged in response, created by companies, nonprofits, and governments. Yet even on the most advanced evals, AI systems are making astonishing progress.

AI tools rapidly infiltrated peoples' lives in 2024, but AI lawmaking in the U.S. moved much more slowly. While dozens of AI-related bills were introduced this Congress--either to fund its research or mitigate its harms--most got stuck in partisan gridlock or buried under other priorities. In California, a bill aiming to hold AI companies liable for harms easily passed the state legislature, but was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom. This inaction has some AI skeptics increasingly worried. "We're seeing a replication of what we've seen in privacy and social media: of not setting up guardrails from the start to protect folks and drive real innovation," Ben Winters, the director of AI and data privacy at the Consumer Federation of America, tells TIME.

The myth of King Midas is about a man who wishes for everything he touches to turn to gold. This does not go well: Midas finds himself unable to eat or drink, with even his loved ones transmuted. The myth is sometimes invoked to illustrate the challenge of ensuring AI systems do what we want, particularly as they grow more powerful. As Stuart Russell--who coauthored AI's standard textbook--tells TIME over email, the concern is that "what seem to be reasonable goals, such as fixing climate change, lead to catastrophic consequences, such as eliminating the human race as a way to fix climate change." On Dec. 5, a paper released by AI safety nonprofit Apollo Research found that in certain contrived scenarios, today's cutting-edge AI systems, including OpenAI's o1 and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, can engage in deceptive behavior in pursuit of their goals--providing empirical evidence to support a concern that to date has been largely theoretical.

As companies race to build more powerful AI, safety measures are being left behind. A report published Wednesday takes a closer look at how companies including OpenAI and Google DeepMind are grappling with the potential harms of their technology. It paints a worrying picture: flagship models from all the developers in the report were found to have vulnerabilities, and some companies have taken steps to enhance safety, others lag dangerously behind. The report was published by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit that aims to reduce global catastrophic risks. The organization's 2023 open letter calling for a pause on large-scale AI model training drew unprecedented support from 30,000 signatories, including some of technology's most prominent voices.

Heating and lighting buildings requires a vast amount of energy: 18% of all global energy consumption, according to the International Energy Agency. Contributing to the problem is the fact that many buildings' HVAC systems are outdated and slow to respond to weather changes, which can lead to severe energy waste. Some scientists and technologists are hoping that AI can solve that problem. At the moment, much attention has been drawn to the energy-intensive nature of AI itself: Microsoft, for instance, acknowledged that its AI development has imperiled their climate goals. But some experts argue that AI can also be part of the solution by helping make large buildings more energy-efficient.

Can a Big Tech company be sued in Kenya for alleged abuses at an outsourcing company working on its behalf? That's the question at the heart of two lawsuits that are attempting to set a new precedent in Kenya, which is the prime destination for tech companies looking to farm out digital work to the African continent. The two-year legal battle stems from allegations of human rights violations at an outsourced Meta content moderation facility in Nairobi, where employees hired by a contractor were paid as little as 1.50 per hour to view traumatic content, such as videos of rapes, murders, and war crimes. The suits claim that despite the workers being contracted by an outsourcing company, called Sama, Meta essentially supervised and set the terms for the work, and designed and managed the software required for the task. Both companies deny wrongdoing and Meta has challenged the Kenyan courts' jurisdiction to hear the cases.

For much of 2024, one of President-elect Donald Trump's staunchest allies in Silicon Valley was David Sacks, an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and co-host of the popular podcast All-In. On his podcast and social media, Sacks argued that Trump's pro-industry stances would unleash innovation and spur growth in the tech industry. In June, Sacks hosted a fundraiser for Trump in San Francisco that included 300,000-a-person tickets. Now, Sacks has been rewarded with a position inside the White House: the brand-new role of "AI & crypto czar." It's unclear how much power this role actually has.