Meghan McCarty Carino

All right, well, now we want to talk about a potential front in the war with Iran.

This week, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned that it plans to begin physically attacking American private tech companies with infrastructure in the Middle East.

That includes companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, NVIDIA, Palantir, more than that.

The IRGC says that these are legitimate targets because...

Their technology has been used in attacks, you know, that have killed Iranians, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Parash, what did you make of this?

Yeah, I think that's an interesting piece, how closely intertwined these companies have become with the military as dual-use technology seems to have become more important, you know, as we've seen with AI.

And tell us more about kind of how important the Gulf region has become to many U.S.

tech companies.

I mean, we saw this sort of spree of deals being made just in the last year.

There was this, you know, Trump administration led tour of the Gulf region where a lot of tech leaders came.

And there's just there's been a lot of kind of collaboration and development there, right?

Well, now we want to go to our home state of California, where the governor this week issued a new executive order that requires safety and privacy guardrails for AI companies that contract with the state.

Paresh, what's kind of the subtext going on here?

On top of that, California has sort of been out in front with, you know, trying to regulate the AI industry, which is mostly based here in California, which has also put it in tension with the Trump administration just in the act of trying to do that, right?

That was Paresh Devay at Wired.

You can find the full video of this episode of Marketplace Tech Bytes Week in Review on our YouTube channel, Marketplace APM.

And subscribe if you haven't already to watch us every Friday.

Daniel Shin produced this episode.

Jesus Alvarado also produces our show.