In a trade secrets suit between Apple and medtech company Masimo over smartwatch technology, the Silicon Valley talent war is taking center stage against the backdrop of an AI boom and national dialogue around noncompete clauses.

In April, a federal jury was tasked with deciding a case alleging that Apple poached top talent from Masimo and used its technology to develop a blood-oxygen monitoring sensor for the Apple Watch. The jury came back one juror short of a consensus, resulting in a mistrial last week.

But the case is about more than smartwatches; it’s also about what tech employees take with them when they leave a job, something that’s increasingly important as Big Tech workers decamp for AI startups.

Keep reading here.—MA

You’ve heard of SaaS, but how about CaaS? That’s right: Compliance as a service has entered the chat, and it’s gonna make waves in the security and privacy world. Streamlined compliance? Sounds like a dream.

And Secureframe’s here to make it come true. They can automate your entire compliance process within tons of security frameworks—including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI, and GDPR—all while continuously detecting and remediating misconfigurations across your tech stack.

The cherry on top? Secureframe is currently offering a personalized demo that covers:

• automating the audit-readiness process
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Set compliance to cruise control.

Agtech is probably pretty happy with recent news from the Hill. Google? Maybe not so much. Here’s our dispatch from the intersection of tech and politics for last week:

Big Tech in the spotlight: The Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony from academic experts and trade organizations in support of a bill that’s likely to make Big Tech squirm: The Advertising Middlemen Endangering Rigorous Internet Competition Accountability Act, or the AMERICA Act. (Woof. Perhaps they could’ve workshopped that name a little bit more…)

According to a fact sheet shared by bill sponsors, the proposed legislation would prohibit digital advertising companies from “owning more than one part of the digital ad ecosystem” if they process more than $20 billion in digital ad transactions (a threshold easily cleared by the likes of Google and Meta).

The AMERICA Act, which has bipartisan support, “would most likely require Google and Facebook to divest significant portions of their advertising businesses,” the fact sheet states.

Keep reading here.—MA

SpaceX’s Starship took to the skies in April, albeit for a very short time. The launch of the world’s largest-ever spaceship was literally explosive—the Starship suffered a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” or, simply put, blew up.

Starship’s debris spread all over the Boca Chica, Texas, launch site and beyond, dropping particulate matter well outside SpaceX’s projected blast zone, affecting wildlife and nearby communities.

While no injuries were reported, the failed test mission set off a chain of actions by the Federal Aviation Administration and surfaced new questions about the relationship between private space entities and the local and federal governments they interact with.

Keep reading here.—JM

Stat: Five to 20. That’s the number of years Geoffrey Hinton, “the godfather of AI,” thinks it will likely take for AI algorithms to “outstrip” their human creators, Wired reported.

Quote: “It’s the branding, right? When I think of Facebook, I think ugh, like cheugy, older people, like parents posting pictures of their kids, random status updates, and also people fighting about political issues.”—Devin Walsh, 24, to the Associated Press

Read: Liz Holmes wants you to forget about Elizabeth (the New York Times)

Buh-bye, bugs : QA Wolf gets web apps to 80% automated, end-to-end test coverage in just 4 months—with unlimited parallel test runs and a Zero Flake Guarantee. Book your 90-day pilot.*

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Catch up on the top Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Last week’s roundup of Biden admin proposals to regulate the tech industry
• Marissa Mayer on the AI search race, technology fears, and her biggest Yahoo regrets
• Why consultancies are spending big on generative AI