China plots pathway to tech supremacy through brain-computer interfaces | Trump calls on CEO of Intel to resign over China investments | Hackers using fake summonses in attacks on Ukraine

Plus, GPT-5 is being released to all ChatGPT users

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The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest focuses on the topics we work on, including cybersecurity, critical technologies, foreign interference & disinformation.

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• China has unveiled a road map to achieve critical technological advances by 2027, with brain-computer interfaces playing a pivotal role in the nation’s tech rivalry with the United States. South China Morning Post

• President Donald Trump called on the CEO of Intel to resign because of conflicts of interest, adding to the challenges for a company that is supposed to anchor restoration of the US semiconductor industry. Bloomberg

• Hackers have been sending fake summons emails purportedly from Ukrainian courts to target the country’s government, military and defense sector in a new cyberespionage campaign, researchers have found. The Record by Recorded Future

China

China plots pathway to tech supremacy through brain-computer interfaces
South China Morning Post
Zhang Tong
China has unveiled a road map to achieve critical technological advances by 2027, with brain-computer interfaces playing a pivotal role in the nation’s tech rivalry with the United States. Seven ministries, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, jointly released a policy blueprint on Thursday providing innovation and implementation guidelines for China’s BCI industry.

USA

Trump calls on CEO of tech firm Intel to resign over China investments
Bloomberg
Peter Elstrom and Emily Forgash
President Donald Trump called on the chief executive officer of Intel Corp. to resign because of what he called conflicts of interest, adding to the challenges for a company that is supposed to anchor restoration of the US semiconductor industry.

Federal court filing system hit in sweeping hack
POLITICO
John Sakellariadis and Josh Gerstein
The electronic case filing system used by the federal judiciary has been breached in a sweeping cyber intrusion that is believed to have exposed sensitive court data across multiple U.S. states, according to two people with knowledge of the incident. The hack, which has not been previously reported, is feared to have compromised the identities of confidential informants involved in criminal cases at multiple federal district courts, said the two people, both of whom were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the hack.

Exclusive: Rubio orders US diplomats to launch lobbying blitz against Europe's tech law
Reuters
Humeyra Pamuk
President Donald Trump's administration has instructed U.S. diplomats in Europe to launch a lobbying campaign to build opposition to the European Union's Digital Services Act, which Washington says stifles free speech and imposes costs on U.S. tech companies, an internal diplomatic cable seen by Reuters showed. In a State Department cable dated August 4, signed by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the agency said the EU was pursuing "undue" restrictions on freedom of expression in its efforts to combat hateful speech, misinformation and disinformation, and the DSA was further enhancing these curbs.

Inside the US government's unpublished report on AI safety
WIRED
Will Knight
The National Institute of Standards and Technology conducted a groundbreaking study on frontier models just before Donald Trump's second term as president—and never published the results. The teams identified 139 novel ways to get the systems to misbehave including by generating misinformation or leaking personal data. More importantly, they showed shortcomings in a new US government standard designed to help companies test AI systems.

Trump says US to levy 100% tariff on imported chips, but some firms exempt
Reuters
Andrea Shalal, David Shepardson and Arsheeya Bajwa
President Donald Trump said the United States will impose a tariff of about 100% on imports of semiconductors but offered up a big exemption - it will not apply to companies that are manufacturing in the U.S. or have committed to do so.

Americas

Canada’s fight over digital sovereignty is just getting started
CCPA
Gabriel Rojas Hruška
President Donald Trump and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro are both infamous for their unfiltered and disinformation-laden use of social media. This routine spreading of disinformation serves a purpose for these men and their extremist political projects—as well as for the social media firms that help to spread it without any apparent concern or legal liability for the societal impacts and outcomes. The wide and deep spread of disinformation on the internet has been tied to accelerating mistrust in democratic institutions and social breakdown.

North Asia

Japanese newspaper Yomiuri sues Perplexity AI over copyright
Nikkei Asia
The Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings, publisher of Japan's largest daily newspaper, has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, alleging copyright infringement, the company announced Thursday. The suit was filed with the Tokyo District Court, with Yomiuri seeking compensation of 2.16 billion yen ($14.7 million) for damages caused by unauthorized use of its articles in Perplexity's AI searches.

Japan looks to virtual reality, AI to pass on A-bomb survivors' legacy
Nikkei Asia
Yuki Sakurada
As the number of storytellers who can recount the horrors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki continues to fall, with fewer than 100,000 survivors left, efforts to preserve and pass on their experiences are turning to new technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence.

Taiwan’s chipmakers fear costly choice: Trump’s tariffs or US factories
South China Morning Post
Lawrence Chung
Taiwan’s export-reliant economy is under mounting pressure following US President Donald Trump’s declaration that Washington would impose a 100 per cent tariff on imported semiconductors – unless companies establish operations in the United States. The latest blow came as a 20 per cent US tariff on Taiwanese goods took effect on Thursday. The dual tariff threats have rattled Taiwan’s hi-tech sector and sparked urgent debate over whether more Taiwanese firms – particularly in the semiconductor supply chain – will be forced to shift investments to the US to maintain market access and competitiveness.

South Korea says Samsung, SK Hynix will not be subject to 100% US chip tariffs
Reuters
South Korea's top trade envoy Yeo Han-koo said on Thursday that Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will not be subject to 100% U.S. tariffs on chips. Yeo said on radio that among various countries, South Korea will face the most favourable U.S. tariff rates on chips under the trade deal between Washington and Seoul.

Ukraine – Russia

Hackers using fake summonses in attacks on Ukraine's defense sector
The Record by Recorded Future
Daryna Antoniuk
Hackers have been sending fake summons emails purportedly from Ukrainian courts to target the country’s government, military and defense sector in a new cyberespionage campaign, researchers have found. The attackers behind the campaign — tracked as UAC-0099 by Ukraine’s computer emergency response team — have been active in the country since at least 2022 and have gained unauthorized remote access to dozens of local computers, Ukrainian cybersecurity authorities previously said.

Middle East

The invisible side of manipulation: How the Iranian regime suppressed #mahsaamini on Persian Twitter
Clingendael
Iranian users had published over 500 million tweets with the hashtag #MahsaAmini by late 2022. Twitter emerged as a major space for online dissent. A few months later in 2023, the Iranian regime had effectively suppressed the hashtag. To do so, the regime deployed direct counter-tactics like internet shutdowns, blockage and surveillance, but also indirect tactics like mobilizing regime-linked social media users and social bots, as well as spreading disinformation.

Big Tech

Apple hit by string of departures in AI talent war
Financial Times
Apple has hemorrhaged around a dozen artificial intelligence staff to rivals since January, making it one of the prime victims in Silicon Valley's fierce AI talent war. The exodus of staff from Apple's AI team over the last seven months has seen senior researchers leave variously for Meta, OpenAI, xAI, Cohere, and others.

Nvidia reiterates its chips don’t have back doors
The Wall Street Journal
Jiahui Huang
Nvidia reiterated that its chips don’t—and shouldn’t—have back doors or kill switches, days after Beijing summoned the U.S. artificial-intelligence chip giant over national-security concerns. “There are no back doors in NVIDIA chips. No kill switches. No spyware,” Nvidia said in a blog post late Tuesday. “That’s not how trustworthy systems are built—and never will be.”

Artificial Intelligence

GPT-5 is being released to all ChatGPT users
The Verge
Alex Heath
OpenAI is releasing GPT-5, its new flagship model, to all of its ChatGPT users and developers. CEO Sam Altman says GPT-5 is a dramatic leap from OpenAI’s previous models. He compares it to “something that I just don’t wanna ever have to go back from,” like the first iPhone with a Retina display. OpenAI says that GPT-5 is smarter, faster, and less likely to give inaccurate responses.

Kakao to debut first OpenAI collaboration next month
The Korea Herald
Jie Ye-eun
Kakao said Thursday that it would unveil the first outcome of its collaboration with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, at its annual developer conference “if(kakao)” next month, with plans to launch the product by year-end officially. Kakao also unveiled plans to launch Korea’s first on-device AI service based on its lightweight model through its mobile messenger KakaoTalk, signaling a new era of embedded AI experiences.

Google commits US$1bn for AI training at US universities
InnovationAus
Kenrick Cai
Alphabet’s Google on Wednesday announced a three-year, $1 billion commitment to provide artificial intelligence training and tools to U.S. higher education institutions and nonprofits. More than 100 universities have signed on to the initiative so far, including some of the nation’s largest public university systems such as Texas A&M and the University of North Carolina. Participating schools may receive cash funding and resources, such as cloud computing credits towards AI training for students as well as research on AI-related topics.

AI reshapes intelligence analysis as great power competition intensifies
Associated Press
The global focus in national security is pivoting away from counterterrorism and toward great power competition with adversaries such as China and Russia, driving significant change in the tools and techniques used in intelligence analysis. This is all occurring as artificial intelligence, once viewed as a speculative enhancement to traditional tradecraft, has evolved into a critical factor for how U.S. intelligence professionals collect, process, and act on massive volumes of data.

A single poisoned document could leak ‘Secret’ data via ChatGPT
WIRED
Matt Burgess
The latest generative AI models are not just stand-alone text-generating chatbots—instead, they can easily be hooked up to your data to give personalized answers to your questions. OpenAI’s ChatGPT can be linked to your Gmail inbox, allowed to inspect your GitHub code, or find appointments in your Microsoft calendar. But these connections have the potential to be abused—and researchers have shown it can take just a single “poisoned” document to do so.

Encryption made for police and military radios may be easily cracked
WIRED
Kim Zetter
Two years ago, researchers in the Netherlands discovered an intentional backdoor in an encryption algorithm baked into radios used by critical infrastructure–as well as police, intelligence agencies, and military forces around the world–that made any communication secured with the algorithm vulnerable to eavesdropping. When the researchers publicly disclosed the issue in 2023, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, which developed the algorithm, advised anyone using it for sensitive communication to deploy an end-to-end encryption solution on top of the flawed algorithm to bolster the security of their communications.

Inside the AI race: Can data centres ever truly be green?
Financial Times
In the hills of what used to be coal country in western Pennsylvania, artificial intelligence is giving new life to a decommissioned coal plant. Now being converted into a giant gas powered facility, it will supply new US data centres needing “round-the-clock reliable power”, said the company behind the project, Homer City Redevelopment. “This project is an investment in the future.” The plant is expected to be the largest in the US, producing up to 4.5 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power several San Francisco-sized cities.

Events & Podcasts

The Sydney Dialogue 2025
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute is pleased to announce the Sydney Dialogue, the world’s premier policy summit for critical, emerging and cyber technologies, will return on 4-5 December. Now in its fourth year, the dialogue attracts the world’s top thinkers, innovators and policymakers, and focusses on the most pressing issues at the intersection of technology and security. TSD has become the place where new partnerships are built among governments, industry and civil society, and where existing partnerships are deepened.

Outer Space Security Conference 2025
This event will offer the diplomatic community and experts from industry, the military, academia and civil society a vital opportunity to engage in dialogue on the complex challenges surrounding outer space security. The conference will bring together experts to explore technical, legal and policy solutions aimed at ensuring that outer space remains peaceful, secure and accessible to all. Join on Tuesday, 9 September – Wednesday, 10 September 2025, Palais des Nations (Room VII) Geneva, and online via Zoom.

Jobs

Events Manager
ASPI
ASPI has an exciting opportunity for an experienced and motivated events professional to join the organisation as Events Manager. Lead a small, dedicated, tight-knit team to deliver a program of internationally renowned events on a variety of topics ranging from defence and national security to cyber and critical technologies. The closing date for applications is Thursday 21 August 2025 – an early application is advised as we reserve the right to close the vacancy early if suitable applications are received.

Defence Strategy Program Coordinator
ASPI
ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program analyses how Australia defends its national interests in an era of intensifying strategic competition. Our research focuses on three areas: understanding Australia’s security environment and regional partnerships; developing military strategy, deterrence concepts, and future force design; and strengthening the defence industrial base, supply chains, and economic resilience. Together, these efforts provide government, industry, and the public with evidence‑based insights to enhance Australia’s defence. The closing date for applications is Thursday 28 August 2025 – an early application is advised as we reserve the right to close the vacancy early if suitable applications are received.

The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest is brought to you by the Cyber, Technology & Security Programs team at ASPI and supported by partners.