After she was sworn in as the Director of National Intelligence last 12 February, Tulsi Gabbard said that she's already received a warning from congressmen about the safety of Americans' data.

A letter from Ron Wyden, a Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Andy Biggs, a Republican on the House Judiciary committee, urged Gabbard to demand the UK government retract an order that would grant them access to the cloud content of any Apple user in the world.

The Washington Post was the first to report on the order, which it said was issued in January, and which would allow the British government to view encrypted material. Wyden and Biggs asked Gabbard to push back on the "secret order."

If Apple were to build a backdoor for the UK, the congressmen said, it would undermine Americans' right to privacy, "expose them to espionage by China, Russia, and other adversaries," and threaten government agencies that use Apple products. The tech giant is reportedly not allowed to acknowledge the order.

"The company faces criminal penalties that prevent it from even confirming to the US Congress the accuracy of these press reports," the letter said.

Wyden and Biggs told Gabbard to give the UK an ultimatum: "Back down from this dangerous attack on US cybersecurity, or face serious consequences."

They also asked her office to answer three questions about the Trump administration's awareness of the order and its understanding of the 2018 CLOUD Act, which allows the US to enter bilateral agreements with foreign allies to request data information from companies without going through diplomatic channels.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been a big proponent of data encryption on iOS devices. The tech giant pushed back against the US government's request for a backdoor into iPhone users' personal information.

After a 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Apple was asked by the FBI to provide access to the shooter's data. Cook said that Apple complied with the request, but he stood firmly against building a backdoor to the iPhone.

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Tim Cook has announced last 13 February that a new addition to the Apple family tree would arrive next week. The Apple CEO even posted a seven-second clip on X teasing a launch on 19 February. He didn't provide many details, though the clip showed a metallic Apple logo with a glowing ring around it.

"Get ready to meet the newest member of the family," Cook said.

It's unclear which part of the Apple family this member will belong to; the tech giant offers smartwatches, AirPods, MacBooks, and more.

One possibility is a new generation of the iPhone SE, the lower-cost phone Apple launched in 2016. The current model, which starts at $429, was last updated in 2022. A recent Bloomberg report suggests a new SE is expected this month, offering Apple Intelligence at a more affordable price than the other iPhones that are compatible with it.

Apple's shares were up by as much as 2 percent after Cook's teaser.

Get ready to meet the newest member of the family.

Wednesday, February 19. #AppleLaunch pic.twitter.com/0ML0NfMedu

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) February 13, 2025

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The abiity of China to to launch DeepSeek's popular chatbot came under scrutiny before a U.S. government advisory panel last 6 February, with one witness stressing the role that American technology played and another cautioning that the country's ability to "iterate" other breakthroughs in the industry could overcome this factor.

Testimony before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) also came with a warning about China's ability to dominate the "potentially world-changing technology of" artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

Hanna Dohmen of Georgetown University's Centre for Security and Emerging Technology, said China's "most advanced [AI] models, including DeepSeek R1, are largely relying on US-made semiconductors, including chips that companies stockpiled before the controls took effect.

"As these stockpiles deplete over the next couple of years, the controls have the potential to create a growing gap between the AI chip quantity and quality inside and outside of China," said Dohmen.

"But that gap will only hold if US export controls on chip manufacturing tools and other measures aimed at slowing China's semiconductor fabrication capacities are effective.

"Similar to the stockpiles of AI chips, Chinese equipment firms also stocked up on foreign equipment before controls were implemented," she added. "This, once again, imposes a lag between the control when the controls were implemented and when the controls will bite."

The hearing, titled "Made in China 2025: Who Is Winning?", referred to a plan Beijing unveiled in 2015 to establish the country's dominance in industries ranging from AI, robotics, aerospace and new materials to new energy vehicles.

It came amid mounting concern among US policymakers about the unexpected success of DeepSeek-R1, the company's open-source reasoning model released on 20 January.

The AI model has shown capabilities comparable to those of more advanced models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, but with significantly lower training costs.

While Dohmen asserted that export controls could slow China's AI advances in the medium term, she cautioned that they create more incentive to "innovate around the controls".

"We must also consider China's own innovation capabilities and response," she said. "By limiting China's access to chips and equipment, export controls are creating an incentive to innovate around controls."

"Chinese companies are also pursuing technical strategies such as chiplet packaging and focusing on compute and algorithmic efficiencies to overcome restrictions," Dohmen added.

Chiplet manufacturing integrates smaller chips, each with a dedicated function such as data processing or storage, that are connected to become one system instead of putting all components on a single piece of silicon.

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New reports saying that dairy herds in Nevada, U.S. have been infected by a version of the H5N1 bird flu not previously seen in cows, has put virologists and researchers on high alert. Among other things, the news from the Nevada Department of Agriculture, suggests that driving the virus out of the U.S. cattle population won’t be nearly as simple as federal officials once suggested — or perhaps hoped.

On 7 February 2025, there came a second and potentially more serious blow: A technical brief by the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that the genotype, known as D1.1, contains a genetic mutation that may help the virus more easily copy itself in mammals — including humans.

This D1.1 version of the virus is the same variant that killed a man in Louisiana and left a Canadian teen hospitalized in critical condition. It is not the B3.13 genotype widely found in sick cattle dating to early last year.

"This can be of significant concern if this virus continues to spread among cows and infects more people," immunologist and former federal health official Rick Bright tells Fortune.

"This mutation has not been associated with improved human transmission, so there are no telling signs of enhanced spread yet. But when this virus gets into people, it is ready to cause a much more serious disease than the (B3.13) virus that has been circulating in cows before now.

"We have never been closer to a pandemic from this virus," Bright adds. "And we still are not doing everything possible to prevent it or reduce the impact if it hits."

The D1.1 genotype has been detected in wild birds in all North American flyways, as well as mammals and poultry, so it isn’t surprising that it’s made the leap to cows. But its newfound presence in the Nevada dairy herds is considered by many virologists to mark a sort of inflection point in the spread of H5N1, and it could spell more trouble for humans going forward.

"Given the fact that D1.1 seems to be more virulent in humans, this could indicate a major change in terms of public health risks from the earlier scenario with the B3.13 strain," veterinary science pioneer Juergen Richt, a former director at the National Institutes of Health, tells Fortune.

In response to an emailed series of questions, a spokesperson for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the agency still deems the risk to human health for the general public to be low. "However, people with close, prolonged, or unprotected exposures to infected birds or other animals (including livestock), or to environments contaminated by infected birds or other animals, are at greater risk of infection," the spokesperson said.

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ChatGPT announced that it is making some changes in its artificial intelligence tool. The ChatGPT search feature, which acts like a search engine, is now available to anyone on the chatgpt.com website, without the need to sign up.

ChatGPT can search the internet and provide links to relevant web sources. You can use natural language to ask for up-to-date sports scores, news, stock quotes and other information. If you type in a question, you can choose to press the web search icon located below the question bar. You'll then see a series of links from trusted sources. As with any use of AI, you should be aware of potential factual errors, because AI chatbots are known for hallucinations, or presenting false information as true. The provided links can assist with fact-checking.

In October, the company rolled out ChatGPT search to ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as SearchGPT waitlist users, and expanded in December to logged-in users.

The search feature is part of a greater effort to provide ChatGPT with more-useful answers, and this latest news comes as OpenAI continues to ramp up its efforts to be more widespread. Last month, OpenAI introduced a new AI agent called Operator, designed to make everyday tasks easier, from making dinner reservations to ordering groceries to filling out forms.

OpenAI and ChatGPT also face increased competition, not only from US players such as Google and Anthropic but from Chinese startup DeepSeek.

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Microsoft and OpenAI have started investigating the allegation that data output from the ChatGPT maker's technology was obtained in an unauthorized manner by a group linked to Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek, Bloomberg News reported last 28 January.

Microsoft's security researchers observed that, in the fall, individuals they believed to be connected to DeepSeek exfiltrating a large amount of data using the OpenAI's application programming interface (API), the report said.

OpenAI's API is the main way that software developers and business customers buy OpenAI's services.

Microsoft, the largest investor for OpenAI, notified the company of suspicious activity, according to the Bloomberg report.

Low-cost Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, an alternative to U.S. rivals, sparked a tech stock selloff last 27 January as its free AI assistant overtook OpenAI's ChatGPT on Apple's App Store in the United States.

David Sacks, the White House's AI and crypto czar, told Fox News in an interview that it was "possible" that DeepSeek stole intellectual property from the United States.

"There's substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI's models," Sacks said.

Asked for comment on the Bloomberg report, an OpenAI spokesperson echoed Sacks in a statement that noted China-based companies and others were constantly attempting to replicate the models of leading U.S. AI companies, without specifically naming DeepSeek or any other company.

"We engage in counter-measures to protect our IP, including a careful process for which frontier capabilities to include in released models, and believe as we go forward that it is critically important that we are working closely with the U.S. government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take U.S. technology."

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