Spy Games in Silicon Valley

If you work at OpenAI and someone is trying to seduce you, the company wants you to consider: Could your paramour be a spy?

The allegation this week that an OpenAI engineer from Saudi Arabia wrapped a tiny mic in toilet paper and hid it in a company conference room has suddenly raised the specter of Silicon Valley spies. But inside OpenAI and other tech companies, leaders have long warned their employees that bad actors could be after their secrets.

In training sessions, OpenAI has told employees that espionage could take the form of people listening in cafes, contacts offering money or even “honey pots” who use sex to get close to a target. Anyone, including a chatty stranger at a park with a child, could be a potential spy.

The company also instructs employees to avoid wearing anything bearing OpenAI’s logo outside of the office, my colleagues and I reported this week.

The concentration of value in a few top AI companies makes them bigger targets for spies than other firms, said Phil Venables, a partner at the cybersecurity-focused firm Ballistic Ventures and former chief information security officer for Google Cloud.

“The resources and money required to train foundation models makes them even more valuable,” he said.

—Erin is a technology reporter based in San Francisco

Spooked investors are fleeing some of the big-tech companies that reached new highs on the back of the AI boom. But Michael Dell says his company is well-placed to weather a storm. Its strategy for selling powerful supercomputers makes it relatively unique among the businesses benefiting most from the world’s unprecedented AI infrastructure build-out.

We’ve spent the last decade scrolling on iPhones. Apple’s newest smart home device offers a glimpse at a different future. HomeView is a $299, seven-inch tablet and speaker powered by the recently revamped Siri AI personal assistant. And it has a major edge over competing devices from Amazon and Google: access to the data on your iPhone.

Unveiling the Roadster with out-of-this-world technology reiterated that Elon Musk has given up designing cars for regular people to drive. He says the Roadster is the last new vehicle Tesla will offer for humans to drive and is betting instead on remaking Tesla as a robotics company. In effect, Musk is leaving the mainstream car market to the Chinese.

Part of John Ternus’s strategy to keep Apple’s momentum rolling is coming into view: Expand the product line. With his new smart home push, Apple’s new chief executive has a chance to reinvigorate a stalled category and draw consumers deeper into the Apple ecosystem.

Abdulrahman Alfozan kept ties in Saudi Arabia while he rose in Silicon Valley, until federal agents alleged he hid a recorder behind a conference-room television. A lawyer representing Alfozan, asked for “everyone to withhold judgment until full facts become known.”

Frenemies: Longtime foes Meta and Apple teamed up to put a new open-weight AI model on Macs, giving developers new way to run sophisticated AI locally.

Smarten Up: Meta says it new AI model, Muse Wonder, vaults the company to the AI frontier, and will make its Muse agent smarter.

Top Secret: OpenAI alleges an ex-employee took confidential files to Apple, including detailed images of an unreleased device, turning the tables on Apple in an ongoing trade secret theft case.

…when you need to survive a debate with AI to get a job at McKinsey.

The Technology newsletter is a weekly digest of tech reviews, columns and headlines from Anne Steele and Wilson Rothman. Write to Wilson at wilson.rothman@wsj.com and Anne at anne.steele@wsj.com. Got a tip for us? Here’s how to submit.