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Hi there, and welcome back to the AI Brief! It’s only been a little over two weeks since OpenAI announced it had found a recording device planted in one of its offices. And already the tech world is being roiled by another spy plot.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia and a close ally of Donald Trump, has been implicated in a federal investigation involving a foreign intelligence agent and American-made AI chips smuggled into China. Much remains to be discovered about the classified probe, and Nvidia has denied any wrongdoing. But according to the Times, Trump was briefed on the intel last year and refused to take action.

Meanwhile, the feds are cracking down on so-called “surveillance pricing,” the practice of monitoring consumer behavior to provide individualized prices. Does this mean the end of ridiculously steep airline costs? Almost certainly not, but it doesn’t hurt to dream.

→ Federal probe reportedly links Jensen Huang to Chinese spy
→ FTC requests info about surveillance pricing from nine American companies
→ Man successfully obtains religious exemption from using AI at work

...and all the AI news we couldn’t fit here.

Nvidia became the most valuable company in the world by building the chips that have powered the AI boom. Controlling who has access to those chips, meanwhile, has been a key point of leverage for the Trump administration as it seeks to maintain technological supremacy over China. But Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, has lobbied heavily to get those export restrictions lifted—with some success.

Those lobbying efforts are sure to face new scrutiny after the New York Times reported on Thursday that Huang has been identified by U.S. intelligence officials as being in contact with a woman who’s believed to be a spy working for Beijing.

The Federal Trade Commission has sent a letter to nine American companies requesting information on their alleged “surveillance pricing” practices. In a nutshell, that’s a technique vendors sometimes use to give consumers individualized prices based on their past shopping behaviors, zip codes, and other personal data. The idea, at least according to critics, is to give each person the maximum price that companies believe they’ll be willing to pay. The FTC’s letter gives the nine companies—Delta, United, JetBlue, Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, Target, and Walmart—45 days to respond.

“We intend to scrutinize the opaque methodology that some companies in these industries may be using to determine how much consumers pay or how much gig workers are paid for the same product or service,” FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson said in an official press release.

Good news for anyone out there with moral qualms about using AI: With a little faith, you could become a conscientious objector to the technology—at least while you’re at work. As the Religion News Service reported, 45-year-old David Durman, an employee of the University of Kentucky, successfully received a religious exemption to using AI in the workplace. Durman isn’t religious in the usual sense of that word; he is, however, a self-described humanist, and that was apparently good enough for his employer to let him off the hook.

In his accommodation request, Durman wrote: “Substituting automated machine processing for human presence, authentic listening, and personal responsibility in my work directly conflicts with my obligation to uphold human dignity and flourishing as primary.”

At a time when some tech companies are promoting AI as a form of automated and frictionless companionship, it’s always good to see someone choosing other people over bots.

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