US strike plans for Yemen leaked on Signal | Software giant SAP becomes Europe's largest company | Tesla's self-driving trial hampered by Chinese data laws

Mar 24, 2025

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Several top officials in the Trump administration discussed highly sensitive military plans using an unclassified chat application that inadvertently included a journalist, the White House acknowledged Monday. The Washington Post
German software company SAP overtook Danish healthcare company Novo Nordisk as Europe's largest company by market capitalisation on Monday. Reuters
Tesla said on Monday it would release its smart driving-assistance feature in China after completing regulatory approval, following complaints that a limited-time free trial of its Full Self-Driving service had been temporarily paused. Reuters

China

Tesla halts driving-assistance software trial in China, pending approval
Reuters
Tesla said on Monday it would release its smart driving-assistance feature in China after completing regulatory approval, following complaints that a limited-time free trial of its Full Self-Driving service had been temporarily paused. Tesla has offered such trials in the United States, where its FSD system does not require navigation maps to be accurate or up-to-date because local training of the AI helps the technology drive better. But in China, Tesla has been unable to train the system with data from its 2 million EVs because of the country's data laws.

China touts business potential to US companies despite 'rising instability'
Reuters
Liz Lee
Beijing is keen to stabilise foreign investment and attract new capital as policymakers try to boost domestic consumption to offset the impact of U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods. Several global investment banks have acknowledged China's latest supportive policy moves, with Nomura, ANZ, Citi and Morgan Stanley all raising their forecasts for the country's 2025 economic growth by 50 basis points since last week. However, they all fell short of China's official growth target of around 5%, citing U.S. tariffs and domestic deflationary pressures.

Apple is welcome to expand investment in China, commerce minister tells CEO
Reuters
China's commerce minister told Apple CEO Tim Cook on Monday that the company is welcome to expand investment in the country, a ministry statement showed. Foreign CEOs were attending the China Development Forum in Beijing on Sunday and Monday, with some expected to meet President Xi Jinping on Friday, sources have told Reuters.

China's Xiaomi to raise up to $5.27 billion from share sale
Reuters
Kane Wu and Scott Murdoch
Xiaomi reported last week an almost 50% jump in fourth-quarter revenue and raised its target for electric vehicle deliveries this year to 350,000 from 300,000. Xiaomi's top-up placement adds to a recent rush of Chinese firms' carrying out equity capital market deals in the first few months of 2025. Total equity issuance from Chinese firms in the first quarter reached $16.8 billion, LSEG data showed, more than double the amount seen a year earlier.

USA

White House acknowledges ‘inadvertent’ leak involving top Trump officials
The Washington Post
Dan Lamothe and Michael Birnbaum
Several top officials in the Trump administration discussed highly sensitive military plans using an unclassified chat application that inadvertently included a journalist, the White House acknowledged Monday, a development that swiftly drew criticism from Washington’s national security establishment. Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council, said the message thread revealed in an extraordinary report by the Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, “appears to be authentic,” and that administration officials were “reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.”

The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans
The Atlantic
Jeffrey Goldberg
It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.
Washington aghast at Trump administration’s war plan group chat
POLITICO
Amy Mackinnon, Robbie Gramer, Paul McLeary and Jack Detsch
Inside the Pentagon, officials expressed shock that the officials used a Signal chat for such sensitive discussions. “No, no they didn’t,” said one Defense official. “Just absolutely unbelievable.”

23andMe goes bankrupt as only 550,000 subscribe to gene testing
Bloomberg
Steven Church, Harry Suhartono and Constantine Courcoulas
23andMe Holding Co., which provides medical and ancestry-related genetic testing, filed for bankruptcy after it was unable to find a buyer to rescue it from insolvency proceedings and the board of directors rejected a buyout offer from co-founder Anne Wojcicki. Despite collecting DNA from saliva samples from more than 15 million customers, the company hasn’t been profitable since going public in 2021. That personal information can now be sold as part of a court-supervised auction, 23andMe said in a filing.

Trump’s plans to save TikTok may fail to keep it online, Democrats warn
The Verge
Lauren Feiner
Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), and Cory Booker (D-NJ) say they oppose the TikTok ban, which was passed by Congress in an overwhelming vote last year and required the app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest it by January 19th or face an effective expulsion. But, they write in a letter to Trump, “it is unacceptable and unworkable for your Administration to continue ignoring the requirements in the law, as you did in January by extending the divestment deadline to April 5.”

Americas

Canadian arm of China’s largest bank had plans to set up payments processor to collect spending data
The Globe and Mail
Rita Trichur
The Canadian subsidiary of China’s largest bank spearheaded a project to establish a new payments processor that would collect financial information about Canadians of Chinese descent, as well as Chinese nationals and other consumers, according to a person familiar with the matter.

North Asia

AI chip startup FuriosaAI rejects Meta’s $800 million offer
Bloomberg
Yoolim Lee and Riley Griffin
Meta had been in discussions about acquiring Seoul-based FuriosaAI since the start of this year, said the person, who asked not to be identified as the matter is private. FuriosaAI is one of only a handful of Asian startups that have attracted Meta. Led by June Paik, who previously worked at Samsung Electronics Co. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., it develops semiconductors for AI inferencing, or services.

Australia should work with South Korea to secure undersea cables
The Strategist
Jihoon Yu
South Korea boasts advanced technical expertise, while Australia has strong maritime capabilities and intelligence connections and is geographically well-placed. The two countries should combine these strengths to secure undersea infrastructure.

Southeast Asia

AI boom turns Asian data centers into magnets for loan deals
Bloomberg
Kari Soo Lindberg
In the span of a week, two major Asian data center operators secured their biggest-ever loans, partly earmarked for the expansion of their operations in Malaysia, which is becoming a hub for these facilities. The deals show how much of a data center hotspot Asia has become, with demand set to expand by about 32% a year through 2028, according to data by real state services firm Cushman and Wakefield, outpacing the US’s expected growth of 18%.

Malaysia to crack down on Nvidia chip flows under US pressure
Financial Times
Owen Walker and Alec Russell
The country’s trade minister said Washington was demanding Malaysia closely track the movement of high-end Nvidia chips that enter the country over suspicions that many are ending up in China, in violation of US export rules. He added that he had formed a task force with digital minister Gobind Singh Deo to tighten regulations around Malaysia’s burgeoning data centres industry, which relies on chips from industry leader Nvidia.

Ukraine-Russia

Hijacking news: Fake media sites sow Ukraine disinformation
France 24
NewsGuard has identified 1,265 sites that present themselves as neutral news outlets but are backed by or tied to partisan groups or hostile governments, including Russia and Iran. "These sites are often designed to mimic the tone, layout, and branding of traditional local news in order to launder false narratives through seemingly trustworthy, independent sources," NewsGuard researcher McKenzie Sadeghi told AFP.

Arsonist, Killer, Saboteur, Spy
Foreign Affairs
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan
In the first decade of this century, when Russian spy agencies carried out assassinations abroad, those attacks had an obvious Russian state signature. Most of the sabotage operations the Kremlin has launched over the past two years lack direct traces to Russia. Many also involve local perpetrators who have been recruited via social media for one-off jobs for a few hundred dollars.

Cyberattack disrupts train ticket sales in Ukraine
TechCrunch
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
Ukraine’s state-owned railway operator Ukrzaliznytsia said Monday that it was hit by a large-scale cyberattack. The cyberattack affected online ticket sales, including via the mobile app, while trains continue to operate, according to the railway operator’s statement on its official Telegram channel.

Europe

Software maker SAP unseats Novo Nordisk as Europe's largest company
Reuters
Lucy Raitano and Samuel Indyk
At 0900 GMT, SAP had a market cap of $340 billion, slightly more than Novo Nordisk, according to Reuters calculations using LSEG Workspace data. SAP is Europe's largest software maker, providing business application software used by companies for finance, sales, supply chain and other functions. Its shares have surged in recent years, in part due to optimism that its cloud business will be a major beneficiary of recent investment in generative artificial intelligence.

CEO of software giant SAP urges end to Trump tariff war
The Australian Financial Review
Paul Smith
SAP’s fortunes are important to many of Australia’s biggest companies, with 91 per cent of ASX 200 companies using its software, the company said. It usually provides core business information systems – known as enterprise resource planning – and lists companies including Woolworths, Coles, the big four banks and Woodside among numerous long-term local clients.

Romanian media watchdog defies Musk over censorship claims
POLITICO
Eliza Gkritsi
Romania's social media regulator has hit back at Washington's claims that it is censoring speech, saying it is instead fighting an information war with Russia to stop election meddling. Pavel Popescu, the vice president of telecom and media regulator ANCOM, told POLITICO in an interview that a "hybrid war" was underway and that "we are fighting it. We are fighting it at the highest level with all the institutions."

Trump’s aggression sours Europe on US cloud giants
WIRED
Matt Burgess
On March 18, politicians in the Netherlands House of Representatives passed eight motions asking the government to reduce reliance on US tech companies and move to European alternatives. Two European-based cloud service companies, Exoscale and Elastx, tell WIRED they have seen an uptick in potential customers looking to abandon US cloud providers over the last two weeks—with some already starting to make the jump.

UK

Threat of state-sponsored cyber attacks could make UK terror insurer ‘obsolete’
Financial Times
Lee Harris
Many cyber insurance policies would not be triggered in the event of a state-backed cyber attack, leaving the UK government as the “insurer of first resort”. Insurance clients have objected to the industry’s refusal to cover state-backed cyber attacks, as it leaves them exposed to hackers allied with foreign adversaries. Governments have typically distinguished terrorism, involving rogue actors, from acts of war. But that boundary has become harder to draw — raising questions over whether Pool Re still has a role.

Africa

Nvidia tapped by tycoon Masiyiwa to build first AI factory in Africa
Bloomberg
Ray Ndlovu
Cassava Technologies, founded by Zimbabwean telecoms tycoon Strive Masiyiwa, has tapped Nvidia Corp. to build Africa’s first artificial intelligence factory. Cassava will deploy Nvidia’s advanced computing and AI software at its data centers in South Africa by June 2025, and then at its other facilities in Egypt, Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria, according to a statement released on the company’s website.

Big Tech

Media outlets are purging freelancers to try to fend off search declines
Business Insider
Lucia Moses
Google began cracking down last year on third-party material provided to publishers that it considered spammy and designed to take advantage of reputable outlets' search authority. The move affected some freelancer-written product review articles and coupon pages. In response, Dotdash Meredith and Forbes cut ties with some freelancers and assigned their own staffers to rewrite freelancer stories, according to multiple people at each outlet and documents seen by Business Insider.

Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI’s Sora is plagued by sexist, racist, and ableist biases
WIRED
Reece Rogers and Victoria Turk
In Sora’s world, everyone is good-looking. Pilots, CEOs, and college professors are men, while flight attendants, receptionists, and childcare workers are women. Disabled people are wheelchair users, interracial relationships are tricky to generate, and fat people don’t run.

Microsoft announces security AI agents to help overwhelmed humans
The Verge
Tom Warren
Microsoft launched its AI-powered Security Copilot a year ago to bring a chatbot to the cybersecurity space, and now it’s expanding it with AI agents that are designed to autonomously assist overwhelmed security teams. Microsoft is unveiling six of its own AI agents for its Security Copilot, as well as five that have been created by its partners.

How software engineers actually use AI
WIRED
WIRED Staff
Three in four coders have tried AI. Of them, the vast majority use it at least once a week. Three-quarters of people who’ve been coding for less than a year call themselves AI optimists. Nearly one in three veteran coders (20-plus years) integrate AI tools directly into their coding environments.

Miscellaneous

Drama over quantum computing’s future heats up
The Verge
Sophia Chen
The controversy centers on Microsoft’s February claim that it had built a new type of quantum hardware — a topological qubit, made from a pattern of electrons on a tiny wire. That would make quantum computers easier to scale up to something big enough to actually be useful. But in the journal article accompanying the release, the editors wrote that Microsoft had not conclusively shown the electrons forming the signature pattern, known as Majorana zero modes. Nature had retracted a similar paper by a Microsoft-affiliated team in 2021.

A growing industry bets on the ocean to capture carbon
Associated Press
Helen Wieffering
Dozens of other companies and academic groups are pitching the same theory: that sinking rocks, nutrients, crop waste or seaweed in the ocean could lock away climate-warming carbon dioxide for centuries or more. Nearly 50 field trials have taken place in the past four years, with startups raising hundreds of millions in early funds. Those leading the efforts, including Will Burt, Planetary’s chief ocean scientist, acknowledge they’re entering uncharted territory — but say the bigger danger for the planet and the oceans is not moving quickly enough.

Events & Podcasts

Free Webinar – Human Rights in a Digital Age
Intopia
Naomi Saines
Join us for the launch of the Disability Discrimination Act: Guidelines on Equal Access to Digital Goods and Services! Intopia and the Australian Human Rights Commission will be hosting a ‘Human Rights in a Digital Age’ webinar to mark the launch on Wednesday 2nd April 12:30PM to 1:30PM AEDT.

Jobs

Tech Reporter (London)
POLITICO
POLITICO is looking for a tech reporter to join our U.K. team and contribute to our subscription service focused on U.K. tech policy. The role would suit a scoop-hungry, energetic journalist who relishes technical detail, is alive to the politics underpinning policy decisions, and is looking to stand out.