Weekly Tech Recap: Grok AI turns on Elon Musk, iPhone 16e makes its debut and more

With so much news coming in throughout the week, it can be hard to sort out the noise from the real updates. To help make things easier, we have put together the Weekly Tech Recap, where we take a look at the top 5 news stories of the week. This week Apple launched the iPhone 16e, Elon Musk launched the Grok 3 AI model that later turned on him (more on that in a moment) and OpenAI banned some Chinese accounts over fears of surveillance.

Top tech news of the week:

1) Elon Musk’s Grok 3 AI turns on him: 

Elon Musk and his team at xAI launched the company’s third-generation language model, Grok 3 this week. The latest model came with a ton of features like Deep Search, reasoning abilities, and even voice mode (added later) that took the chatbot head to head-with the best in the market, including ChatGPT and Gemini.

However, now Elon Musk’s chatbot seems to have gone against him, as it named the xAI owner along with US President and Vice President JD Vance among the top 3 most dangerous people in America right now. 

A user on X (formerly Twitter) shared a post of him asking Grok 3 about the people causing most harm to America. They wrote, “Who are the 3 people doing most harm to America right now? Just list the names in order nothing else.”

Grok churns out the names, in order “Donald Trump, Elon Musk, JD Vance”

2) iPhone 16e launched: 

Apple launched its first ever e series smartphone called the iPhone 16e which sits below the standard iPhone 16 variant. The new smartphone has become the cheapest iPhone to power the Cupertino based tech giant’s Apple Intelligence features (read AI). It starts at a price of ₹59,999 in India which has drawn a lot of criticism about whether the phone offers a clear differentiation in Apple’s product lineup. 

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3) OpenAI bans Chinese accounts for surveillance threat:

ChatGPT maker OpenAI says it has banned several accounts from China that attempted to write sales pitches and debug code for a suspected social media surveillance company. According to a report published by OpenAI, the banned accounts were using ChatGPT to promote and augment an AI assistant capable of collecting real-time data and reports on anti-China protests in the US, UK and other Western countries, which were later passed on to Chinese authorities.

OpenAI says (via Bloomberg) that by publishing these cases it aims to shed light on how “authoritarian regimes may try to leverage US-built AI, democratic AI, against the US and allied countries, as well as their own people.”

Ben Nimmo, a principal investigator for OpenAI, was quoted by Bloomberg as saying, “This is a pretty troubling glimpse into the way one non-democratic actor tried to use democratic or US-based AI for non-democratic purposes, according to the materials they were generating themselves,”

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4) DeepSeek removed South Korea’s app stores: 

South Korea’s data protection authority has suspended the new downloads of DeepSeek app after the Chinese AI startup failed to take into account the country’s rules on personal data protection.

Choi Jang-hyuk, vice chairperson of Seoul’s Personal Information Protection Commission, confirmed the suspension on new downloads of DeepSeek (via AFP) and stated that authorities will “thoroughly examine DeepSeek’s personal data processing practices to ensure compliance” with the local laws.

Meanwhile, the domestic data protection agency said that DeepSeek had “acknowledged that considerations for domestic privacy laws were somewhat lacking”. It further stated that bringing DeepSeek in line with South Korea’s privacy laws “would inevitably take a significant amount of time”, it added.

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