Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian, writing to you after seeing The Jellicle Ball, a revival of Cats that I found fabulous and which the Guardian called “thrillingly new”.
Tim Cook becomes Apple’s elder statesman
Apple announced late on Monday that Tim Cook will step down as CEO but will not leave the iPhone maker. Head of hardware engineering John Ternus will succeed him on 1 September.
“I love Apple with all of my being,” Cook said in a press release announcing his succession. Cook, 65, who succeeded Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, has been CEO since 2011. With a reputation for operational and supply chain management, he has overseen the global expansion of the company and its steady series of new, updated devices, though he never attained the same visionary status as Jobs.
What’s in store for Cook’s next act?
Apple hinted at what its soon-to-be-former executive will do in its announcement: he will remain at the company as “executive chair”, a role that will entail “engaging with policymakers around the world”.
He’ll be politicking. Over the past 10 years, Cook has proved to be a successful corporate politician whose main goal is to maintain Apple’s complex global supply chain amid a fiery trade war between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, both of whom Cook has successfully negotiated with. The New York Times called him “the technology industry’s leading diplomat” – a moniker the paper also used as far back as 2018.
He has navigated Trump’s tariffs, securing an exemption for the iPhone last year, and other political whims without eliciting the lasting ire of either Maga or Blue America, no small feat in a polarized era. Trump ignominiously rechristened him “Tim Apple” during a 2019 joint public appearance. He has also moved a major portion of Apple’s manufacturing out of China to Vietnam and India in recent years. The move seems not to have angered Beijing, which is no stranger to clamping down on foreign tech but has not done so to Apple. The company has enticed tens of millions of new Chinese consumers to its phones and reported record quarterly revenue in China in January.
Ternus, Cook’s 50-year-old successor, is a longtime Apple insider, starting at the company in 2001. He is “known for deft politicking inside the giant company”, according to the Wall Street Journal. Ternus may be well-versed in internal politics, but it seems from Apple’s language that he has yet to master the diplomacy necessary to manage the sprawling train that results in the production of the iPhone. As a hardware engineer, Ternus has had less outward-facing experience than Cook, so the elder statesman will stay on to manage Apple’s foreign policy.
The AI backlash hit Sam Altman’s house. What’s the next target?
Earlier this month, an assailant tried to set Sam Altman’s home on fire with a molotov cocktail. The attack was a high-water mark in the backlash against artificial intelligence’s rapid rollout across our digital and physical worlds, and the widespread negative reaction shows signs its violent manifestation will intensify.
My colleague Nick Robins-Early assembled a detailed look at how the attack unfolded, including Altman’s response:
In the early hours of 10 April, a man approached the gate of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house in San Francisco and hurled a molotov cocktail at the building before fleeing. The suspect, 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama, was arrested less than two hours later while allegedly attempting to break into the headquarters of OpenAI with a jug of kerosene, a lighter and an anti-AI manifesto.
The targeting of Altman and OpenAI took place as widespread discontent against artificial intelligence grows, and is the most prominent attack so far against a person or business related to the technology. Moreno-Gama had a history of posting anti-AI sentiment online, in one case suggesting “Luigi-ing some tech CEOs” in a reference to Luigi Mangione, who is on trial for the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive.
Altman addressed the incident, as well as an unflattering recent New Yorker profile of him and criticism of AI, in a blogpost last weekend. He called for a de-escalation of the debate around artificial intelligence and shared a photo of his family, including his infant daughter.
Is guarding your mansion and your headquarters against terrorists the cost of doing business when inventing a world-changing technology, as Altman has repeatedly claimed ChatGPT is? In November, an anti-AI activist allegedly chained himself to the company’s doors and made threats to destroy the building and harm employees. Another gunfire incident occurred near Altman’s house just a few days after the molotov cocktail flew through the air, though the details of that incident are not clear. What might be the next target – OpenAI again, or another incarnation of the AI revolution? My money is on the latter.
Rage against AI is building across the United States, not only in San Francisco, OpenAI’s home turf. The infrastructure that underpins the technology – datacenters – causes power bills to rise and strains water resources. Generative AI’s use of art as training data is tantamount to theft to many. The US economy is broadly in a strange state of contradiction: everyday consumers feel continually injured by inflation and unable to save, but the stock market is performing spectacularly, thanks in large part to AI companies. Technology giants seem to be the only ones who are feeling good. The state of AI is likewise in a confusing dual state. The technology arrives in two forms simultaneously: as a looming alien armada whose destruction of half of all white-collar jobs is inevitable, if you ask its makers; or as a day-to-day productivity tool that is hailed by bosses as a breakthrough but that actually makes day-to-day work more difficult. It’s a crazy-making dichotomy. Small wonder, then, that Americans don’t feel good about AI.
There’s perhaps no greater symbol of the AI boom than the concrete colossuses powering it: datacenters. They are huge and hulking, inhuman and empty, and hungry for everything we can sacrifice to them: money, power, land and water. We have already seen some examples of IRL violence related to datacenters, though cyberattacks are far more common. In Indianapolis and Garland, Texas, gunmen fired bullets into the homes of officials who supported local datacenter projects, the former at the beginning of this month and the latter in 2024. In Indiana, a handwritten note reading “No Data Centers” was found tucked under a doormat at the home following the shooting.
The backlash is growing globally. Datacenters’ status as sites of huge international investment make them targets, too, though the attacks are not motivated by a commitment to AI safety like the anti-AI violence in the US. Iran bombed Amazon Web Services datacenters in Bahrain in recent months, seeking to damage an emblem of the partnership between the US and Gulf states to advance the region’s AI capabilities. The US has also reportedly hit datacenters in Iran.
Does that count as AI?
US extends painfully protracted debate over warrantless surveillance
The US Congress has hotly debated a law that permits warrantless spying on foreigners’ communications by US intelligence agencies, which sometimes includes surveilling US citizens’ correspondence with foreigners, for the better part of two decades. The law was set to expire on 20 April, but after a 3am vote and virulent arguments, it was put on life support for 10 more days.
My colleague Sanya Mansoor reports:
Both chambers of Congress voted in quick succession on Friday to pass a brief 10-day extension of a controversial warrantless surveillance law after Republican infighting tanked plans for a much longer renewal of the law with no changes.
Donald Trump had repeatedly demanded that Republican holdouts “UNIFY” behind Mike Johnson, the US House speaker, in favor of an extension of section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) without changes. But chaos ensued on Thursday evening and into the early hours of Friday as Republican leadership tried and failed twice in votes attempting to reauthorize the surveillance program, before resorting to a stopgap measure.
The law was originally set to expire on 20 April because of a sunset provision that requires it be periodically reauthorized.
As lawmakers were called back to Congress to vote in the middle of the night, discussions grew heated.
“Are you kidding me? Who the hell is running this place?” said Jim McGovern, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, during a tense floor debate. Twenty Republicans blocked their own leadership’s attempts for a procedural vote to push a clean 18-month extension through, while four Democrats crossed party lines to vote with the Republican majority.
Lawmakers eventually agreed to a 10-day extension of the surveillance program shortly after 2am ET; the Senate passed the measure later that morning.
Fisa’s provisions are a vestige of the US’s post-9/11 enthusiasm for surveillance, which reads differently today. Though former president George W Bush framed the expansion of the state’s surveillance as a matter of the US versus the world, Trump’s accusations of spying on his campaign became a wake-up call for conservatives on how broad dragnets can ensnare even the most patriotic Americans.
