The US has charged a former Apple engineer accused of stealing the company's technology on autonomous systems, including self-driving cars, and then fleeing to China. The department of justice on Tuesday announced charges in that case and several others involving the alleged theft of trade secrets and efforts to steal technology to benefit China, Russia and Iran. Two of the cases involved what US officials called procurement networks created to help Russia's military and intelligence services obtain sensitive technology. "We stand vigilant in enforcing US laws to stop the flow of sensitive technologies to our foreign adversaries," Matt Olsen, the head of the justice department's national security division, told reporters. "We are committed to doing all we can to prevent these advanced tools from falling into the hands of foreign adversaries."

Eric Schmidt says the six-month moratorium on AI development supported by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and other tech leaders would "simply benefit China" and called instead for tighter regulation. The former Google CEO told the Australian Financial Review he was worried about the rapid development of AI and that "concerns could be understated." "I think ... things could be worse than people are saying," he said, noting that as large language models get bigger they have "emergent behaviour we don't understand." The use of generative AI has exploded in recent months with the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Bard, and Microsoft's AI-powered Bing, as well as image-generating platforms such as DALL-E and Midjourney. People have been using generative AI in both their personal and professional lives to write essays, think up recipes, summarize emails, publish articles, and craft résumés and cover letters.