☕️ Ex-Google engineers charged with stealing secrets for Iran

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In today's Techpresso:

💥 Ex-Google engineers charged with stealing secrets for Iran

🤖 AWS AI coding tool caused two major outages in December

🛡️ Google blocked 1.75 million risky apps in 2025

📱 Meta's metaverse is going mobile-first

💰 Nvidia nears $30 billion investment in OpenAI

💬 Meta shuts down Messenger standalone website

🎁 + 19 other news & articles you might like

🧰 + 4 trending tools

📚 + 2 trending papers & reports

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• Federal prosecutors charged three former Silicon Valley engineers with stealing chip security trade secrets from Google and other companies and sending confidential files to unauthorized locations, including Iran.
• Samaneh Ghandali allegedly transferred hundreds of Google files to a third-party platform, photographed trade secret information the night before traveling to Iran, and later signed a false affidavit denying it.
• Google's internal security systems detected suspicious activity in August 2023, and all three defendants now face conspiracy, theft of trade secrets, and obstruction of justice charges carrying up to 20 years.

• Amazon's cloud division AWS suffered at least two outages in recent months where its own AI coding tools, including Kiro and Amazon Q Developer, played a role, though Amazon blames user error instead.
• In mid-December, a 13-hour interruption hit a customer-facing system after engineers let the Kiro AI coding tool carry out changes, and the agentic tool decided to delete and recreate the environment.
• The AI tools were given operator-level permissions with no peer review required, and AWS only introduced safeguards like mandatory peer review and staff training after the December incident occurred.

• Google says it blocked 1.75 million policy-violating apps from Google Play in 2025, a drop from 2.36 million in 2024, which the company credits to AI-powered defenses and stricter developer requirements discouraging bad actors.
• The company banned over 80,000 developer accounts in 2025, down from 158,000 the year before, while also running more than 10,000 safety checks on every app before and after publication.
• Google Play Protect identified over 27 million new malicious apps outside the Play Store, up from 13 million in 2024, suggesting bad actors are increasingly targeting users through non-Play Store channels instead.

• Meta announced that Horizon Worlds will become "almost exclusively mobile" going forward, shifting the platform away from its original VR-first approach on the Meta Quest headset.
• Reality Labs VP Samantha Ryan said the company is "explicitly separating" its Quest VR platform from Worlds, going "all-in on mobile" to compete with Roblox, which earned $4.9 billion in 2025.
• The move follows Reality Labs losing an estimated $80 billion since 2020, cutting 15% of staff, and closing first-party game studios Twisted Pixel, Sanzaru, and Armature Studio.

• Nvidia is close to finalizing a $30 billion equity stake in OpenAI, replacing a previously announced $100 billion infrastructure deal, with the new agreement potentially closing as early as this weekend.
• The restructured deal lets Nvidia take direct equity in OpenAI at a $730 billion pre-money valuation while still selling chips to the company, giving it both ownership upside and hardware revenue.
• Wall Street analysts remain bullish, with 57 out of 61 ratings at Buy and a 12-month average NVDA price target of $253.88, representing a roughly 35 percent upside from current levels.

• Meta is shutting down the standalone Messenger website, messenger.com, starting in April 2026, redirecting users to facebook.com/messages or the Messenger mobile app to continue their conversations.
• People without a Facebook account will only be able to keep using Messenger through the mobile app, and they can restore chat history on any platform with their backup PIN.
• The shutdown follows Meta closing Messenger's desktop apps for Windows and Mac a few months ago, as the company has been merging Messenger back into Facebook since 2023.

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• Amazon can be sued over sales linked to suicides, court says LINK

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• Microsoft deletes blog telling users to train AI on pirated Harry Potter books LINK

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• The U.S. and China Are Pursuing Different AI Futures LINK

• Toyota hires seven Agility humanoid robots for Canadian factory LINK

• At a critical moment, Snap loses a top Specs exec LINK

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