AI’s divine intervention

Summary

AI’s Divine Intervention: A Deep Dive into Faith and Technology

Click Here by Recorded Future News explores the intriguing intersection of faith and technology in the latest episode titled "AI’s Divine Intervention," released on April 8, 2025. Hosted by Dina Temple-Raston, the episode delves into the personal journey of Joe Suh, a seasoned Silicon Valley professional, and his innovative use of artificial intelligence (AI) to bridge his spiritual life with his tech expertise. This comprehensive summary captures the key discussions, insights, and conclusions drawn throughout the episode.

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1. Introduction to Joe Suh

Dena Temple Raston opens the episode by introducing Joe Suh, a Silicon Valley veteran with two decades of experience in tech giants like Samsung and Intel. Despite his professional success, Joe faced personal struggles during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to a spiritual dry spell.

• [00:34] Dena Temple Raston: "Joe had spent two decades in Silicon Valley and most of his life as a practicing Christian."

Joe reveals that although the pandemic brought financial stability after selling his own tech company, it also exacerbated his mental health and familial issues.

• [01:06] Joe Suh: "But, yeah, I had some personal struggles, struggles in, like, with family life and mental health. And a lot of it was Covid as well."

2. Rediscovering Faith Through Menlo Church

Amidst his struggles, Joe felt the need to reconnect with his faith. This journey led him to Menlo Church, a Presbyterian congregation in the San Francisco Bay Area, drawn by the teachings of Pastor John Ortberg.

• [01:49] Dena Temple Raston: "So we started church shopping and eventually found Menlo Church."

Joe admired Pastor Ortberg for his ability to blend theological depth with practical, accessible teachings.

• [02:06] John Ortberg: "So I want to say hi to everybody that's in this room and everybody joining us at all of our campuses, people tuning in online."

3. The Birth of a Virtual Pastor

When Pastor Ortberg unexpectedly stepped down amid controversy, Joe found himself adrift once more. Determined to maintain his spiritual guidance, Joe devised a unique solution: creating a chatbot trained on Pastor Ortberg's extensive library of sermons.

• [03:05] Joe Suh: "My prayers aren't answered?"

The chatbot, aptly named "John Ortbot," provided Joe with scripture-based responses and frameworks to ponder theological questions without judgment.

• *[07:07] Joe Suh: "It's not going to give you a yes or no response. It's going to give you some things to think about. It'll give you some biblical references. It'll give you kind of a framework to think about it. And that was all very helpful."

4. The Renaissance of Christian Tech

Joe’s innovative approach sparked a broader renaissance within the Christian tech industry. Former Harvard Divinity School cultural anthropologist Heather Milquist Leto highlights the longstanding relationship between religion and technological advancements.

• *[07:34] Heather Milquist Leto: "Religion has always been leading kind of the mainstreaming of technological change throughout American history."

From the printing press to televangelism and now AI, churches have continually adapted technology to spread their message and engage congregants.

5. Opportunities and Innovations with AI in Churches

Joe expanded his AI endeavors beyond personal spiritual guidance. Recognizing the potential for broader application, he developed a platform that repurposes sermons into diverse media formats such as newsletters, Instagram reels, podcasts, and multi-language video sermons.

• *[14:11] Joe Suh: "But what the churches want is, okay, the individual homily or sermon. Take that recording, run it through your AI algorithms, and spit out some new resources for us to send to our congregation between Sundays."

Kenny Jang, founder of AI for Church Leaders, emphasizes the rapid innovation and practical applications AI brings to church operations, including content creation and donation management.

• *[17:23] Kenny Jang: "AI for church leaders started as a group, it's now, I don't know, it's on its way to 7,000 people."

6. Ethical and Theological Concerns

Despite the promising advancements, the integration of AI into religious practices raises significant ethical and theological questions. Concerns about AI "hallucinating" or providing inaccurate information pose risks of misleading congregants.

• *[15:12] Joe Suh: "A very common concern and objection we get from pastors is, how do I trust this thing? Is this thing going to hallucinate?"

Heather Milquist Leto discusses the delicate balance between leveraging technology and preserving the sacredness of religious practices.

• *[19:04] Heather Milquist Leto: "There was really an interesting case in Finland actually, where someone sued the Jehovah's Witnesses because they were concerned that the door to door visits by the Jehovah's Witnesses was collecting information and a violation of their privacy..."

7. Expert Insights on Technology and Religion

Heather Milquist Leto provides a critical perspective on how AI might alter the essence of religious communities. She underscores the importance of maintaining human connection and the inherently personal nature of spiritual growth, which AI cannot replicate.

• *[20:21] Dena Temple Raston: "...spiritual growth isn't usually fast. It's not clean, it's not automated. It's messy, really personal, full of doubt."

Meanwhile, Kenny Jang highlights how AI can enhance church efficiency without compromising the human touch essential to faith-based communities.

• *[17:41] Dena Temple Raston: "He also advises on the business of running a church because yes, churches have bills."

8. Conclusion: Balancing Technology and Faith

The episode concludes with a thoughtful reflection on the potential of AI to support and enhance religious practices while cautioning against losing the fundamental human elements that define faith communities. Heather Milquist Leto believes that technology can aid churches if used thoughtfully, ensuring that the sacred remains undisturbed.

• *[21:06] Heather Milquist Leto: "The thing that often concerns me about religion and technology is that technology is being used to replace some of the things that are perhaps most essential and valuable to religious practice or to any kind of social community."

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Final Thoughts

"AI’s Divine Intervention" meticulously examines the symbiotic relationship between artificial intelligence and religious life, using Joe Suh's personal narrative as a compelling case study. The episode illuminates both the innovative possibilities and the ethical dilemmas that arise when faith intersects with advanced technology. Listeners are encouraged to ponder how AI can be harnessed to strengthen spiritual communities without diminishing the profound human connections at their core.

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For those intrigued by the fusion of technology and spirituality, "AI’s Divine Intervention" offers a nuanced exploration of modern faith in the digital age. Tune in to Click Here every Tuesday and Friday for more stories that unravel the complexities of our cyber and intelligence-driven world.

Transcript

[Dena Temple Raston]

From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click here. Joe Suh was in a bit of a pandemic spiral when he got this wild idea. Not a sourdough starter, not a new side hustle, something much bigger, a way to bring two huge parts of his life together. Faith and tech.

[Joe Suh]

2022 is when I started to get spiritually curious again. I kind of wanted to get back into church.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Joe had spent two decades in Silicon Valley and most of his life as a practicing Christian. And when the world essentially shut down for Covid, things were actually going pretty well for Joe. After years of punching the clock at big tech companies like Samsung and Intel, he had started his own company and managed to sell it. Though he says looking back on it, not everything in his life was that great.

[Joe Suh]

But, yeah, I had some personal struggles, struggles in, like, with family life and mental health. And a lot of it was Covid as well. Right. I mean, we were all kind of stuck inside. And I suppose a good Christian would kind of lean into their faith during those challenging times, but I actually leaned.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Out, which was odd because Joe had been a churchgoer his whole life. He was raised Cathol.

[Joe Suh]

And then during COVID I fell out of church. I mean, partly because we couldn't go to church, but I was pretty much out of. Out of my faith. I was actually in a very spiritually dry place. And then I kind of realized, oh, well, I should actually revisit my faith and find answers during these challenging times.

[Dena Temple Raston]

So we started church shopping and eventually found Menlo Church, a Presbyterian congregation in the San Francisco Bay area.

[Joe Suh]

And what drew me to that church was this one particular pastor whose books.

[Dena Temple Raston]

I read, a pastor named John Ortberg.

[John Ortberg]

So I want to say hi to everybody that's in this room and everybody joining us at all of our campuses, people tuning in online.

[Joe Suh]

And I felt like he combined a lot of the theology and kind of the biblical academia with more practical things like popular books.

[John Ortberg]

I want to talk to you about the day when Jesus came to the Bay Area and met a man who was kind of the poster boy for Silicon Valley.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Joe felt like he'd found a spiritual home, that things in his life had started to click again. And then this pastor, who seemed to be speaking so directly to Joe, stepped down from the church unexpectedly amid some controversy. And Joe felt lost all over again. But then he came up with a very unique solution, a way to keep that pastor's guidance in his life. He created a chatbot trained on years of sermons from his fallen pastor, John Ortberg. So even with Ortberg gone, he could ask questions, what do I do when.

[Joe Suh]

My prayers aren't answered?

[Dena Temple Raston]

And get answers like this from his chatbot.

[John Ortberg]

When prayers seem unanswered, it's essential to remember that God cares about your pain and can be expected to do something about it. Psalms are filled with moments of protests and cries and confusion.

[Dena Temple Raston]

I'm Dena Temple Rastin, and this is Click Here, a podcast about all things cyber and intelligence. We tell true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. And today, it turns out the Christian tech industry is having a bit of a renaissance. From believers creating chatbots to churches experimenting with AI for everything from spreading the good word to to increasing donations, there.

[Heather Milquist Leto]

Is a tendency to think about religion as being a completely different sphere than, you know, other kind of business spheres or community spheres. And so their use of technology can seem somewhat strange. But really, they're grappling with a lot of the same questions that businesses are, that social groups are, and communities everywhere.

[Dena Temple Raston]

But some skeptics worry that something sacred is getting lost in translation. Stay with us. Support for Click Here comes from CleanMyMac. A cluttered desktop isn't just an eyesore. It wastes mental energy, slows down your Mac, hampers focus. Since 2008, CleanMyMac has helped users optimize their devices, and the latest version focuses on comprehensive care, not just cleaning. With CleanMyMac, you'll boost both your Mac's performance and your productivity by easily identifying and removing large, unnecessary files, including cache files. CleanMyMac finds outdated files that can be safely removed, so there's no need to worry about losing important documents or photos. Decluttering isn't just about speed. It's about creating an environment that helps you work smarter, not harder. Your Mac will continue to run clutter free with the Smart Care feature, ensuring your Mac stays in top shape. With just one click, you can effortlessly clean up ram, manage processes, and even check for malware. Deep clean your Mac, scan for potential threats, and boost performance, all with one click. Experience CleanMyMac for yourself. Try it free for seven days and use promo code. Click as in Click here to save an additional 20% on your purchase at cleanmymac.com from Recorded Future news. This is Click Here. So when Pastor Ortberg stepped down from the leadership at Menlo Church, Joe didn't have the energy to try to find a new pastor. And then a couple of Years later, when ChatGPT took the Internet by storm, he started dabbling with it. He'd worked with AI in large language models, or LLMs. When he was at Samsung, they had.

[Joe Suh]

An AI research lab in San Jose. And so I got to experiment with some of the early AI reinforcement learning type of technologies.

[Dena Temple Raston]

And Joe did what most of the rest of us did when chatgpt suddenly appeared. He put the chatbot through its paces, marveling at how it could riff on text, synthesize ideas, answer any questions he asked. And he started to think, hmm, maybe this can help me on my spiritual journey too. So Joe started posing theological questions. And he watched as ChatGPT effortlessly repurposed existing information and interacted in near human ways. And it gave him a lot of the answers he was searching for. So he started to wonder, could this chatbot fill the void left by Pastor Ortberg?

[Joe Suh]

I missed his teachings, and so I took all of his previous sermons and teachings and shoved it into an LLM.

[Dena Temple Raston]

He created a virtual version of his favorite teacher, a kind of John Ortbot.

[Joe Suh]

I wanted to see if I could still retain some of the wisdom and teachings that he brought.

[Dena Temple Raston]

And what Joe was doing wasn't exactly as far fetched as it seems. Just ask Heather Milquist Leto. She spent years as a cultural anthropologist at Harvard Divinity School studying the intersection of religion and technology.

[Heather Milquist Leto]

Religion has always been leading kind of the mainstreaming of technological change throughout American history. So religion is everywhere in the story of tech.

[Dena Temple Raston]

The invention of the printing press, largely driven by a desire to democratize the Bible. When radio came around, pastors grabbed mics and started broadcasting sermons into homes. The National Council of Catholic Men presents the Catholic Hour. And with television came the rise of televangelists.

[Joe Suh]

Ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome John Osteen.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Be watching for these stories on Fridays, 700 Club. The Internet only drove this further. It ushered in YouTube sermons and Bible podcasts. In fact, one of the world's most popular podcasts is called the Bible in a Year. So for churches, tech adoption is actually kind of a thing. And Heather says Joe's church, Menlo Church, is a perfect example of where that is happening the most, because it isn't some quaint congregation in the East Bay. It's a classic megachurch.

[Heather Milquist Leto]

So there is really a long history of megachurches in America, but they really picked up in the late 19th and early 20th century, along the time of certain media advancements like radio and later television.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Megachurches, if you haven't been, are less stained glass, more stage lighting. Any Congregation with over 2,000 members qualifies. And Heather started her research looking at megachurches in South Korea one even had.

[Heather Milquist Leto]

About a million congregants. So it's just a completely different scale of operation.

[Dena Temple Raston]

And here's the thing about churches that big, they rely on tech. They have to. There's no pulpit loud enough. Often the entire institution is built around a magnetic leader, a pastor with gravity, where megachurches are truly, well, mega. And to share that charisma with thousands across campuses, cities, even time zones, they broadcast.

[Joe Suh]

I want to extend a special welcome to our Bay Area campuses in San.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Mateo, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Saratoga. Those of you joining online, even from around the world, like at Joe's church.

[Joe Suh]

I think there's about 5,000 people that attend weekly. Because it's multi campus, we actually don't see the pastor in person. We actually see a broadcast of the pastor, which was kind of a foreign thing to me at first, but it's something I got accustomed to.

[Dena Temple Raston]

So John Ortberg, the pastor Joe likes so much, well, their relationship was completely.

[Joe Suh]

Virtual because Menlo Church is such a large church that I actually never met him.

[Dena Temple Raston]

And here's why that's important. Large language models like ChatGPT require data, lots of it. And Joe's church, because of its mega churchness, had a treasure trove of data, literally years of sermons, all helpfully online and easy to download. And that's what he fed into his chatbot to create his very own virtual pastor. And he didn't hold back. He started feeding the chatbot the kinds of questions he'd never quite had the courage to ask in real life.

[Joe Suh]

How should Christians think about divorce? Can someone lose their salvation? Is homosexuality really a sin?

[Dena Temple Raston]

And this is what surprised him most. It wasn't just that the chatbot had answers. It was how it responded to him, completely without judgment.

[Joe Suh]

I've been a Christian for so long. I mean, some of these are fundamental questions that, you know, I'd be a little bit embarrassed to also ask.

[Dena Temple Raston]

The chatbot didn't preach. It reflected, offered scripture, gave frameworks.

[Joe Suh]

It's not going to give you a yes or no response. It's going to give you some things to think about. It'll give you some biblical references. It'll give you kind of a framework to think about it. And that was all very helpful.

[Dena Temple Raston]

He began to rely on this virtual pastor in ways he never could in real life. And that raised a new question. Did he need to tell Pastor John what he was doing? He decided that he needed to. So he reached out and the pastor agreed to meet.

[Joe Suh]

It was good for him to know that, you know, I'M a real person. My intentions are genuine. I'm not trying to commercialize his likeness or make his chatbot say something crazy.

[Dena Temple Raston]

So it was the summer of 2023, and they met at a local diner in San Jose. Pastor Ortberg, in the flesh, sat across from Joe, French fries in one hand, phone in the other. And Joe opened his little invention, and the pastor typed in a question while Joe waited nervously.

[Joe Suh]

I remember him looking at it and saying, yeah, that's. That's something I would say. He was pretty blown away by it, and he. Yeah, he thought it was the coolest thing.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Now, when Joe dreamed all this up, it never occurred to him to sell it, at least not at first. This was personal, a tool to keep him tethered to something that grounded him. But now that he had Pastor John's blessing, his Silicon Valley brain kicked in, and he started to wonder, hmm. Could other churches use something like this? After the break, Joe Suh shops around his AI Pastor, stay with us.

[Morgan Sung]

Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from kqed, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life.

[Dena Temple Raston]

You don't know what's true or not because you don't know if AI was involved in it.

[Morgan Sung]

So my first reaction was, ha, ha, this is so funny. And my next reaction was, wait a minute. I'm a journal. Is this real?

[Dena Temple Raston]

And I think we will see a twitch streamer president, maybe within our lifetimes.

[Morgan Sung]

You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Chatgpt, AI machine, satellite, engine ignition. Click here and lift up. When Jose built his chatbot, he thought he was solving a problem. But as he started to talk to pastors, he realized maybe it was a solution fit for him. But what they needed was something else entirely. Turns out they didn't need AI to answer theological questions. That's what they went to divinity school for. What they needed was something to help them connect with their communities and to grow them.

[Joe Suh]

But what the churches want is, okay, the individual homily or sermon. Take that recording, run it through your AI algorithms, and spit out some new resources for us to send to our congregation between Sundays. Because that message, that sermon, that homily, you know, gets spoken for 20 minutes on a Sunday morning.

[Dena Temple Raston]

So Joe pivoted. He built exactly what they asked for. A platform that digests sermons and builds additional materials for congregants based on what it learned. Newsletters, Instagram reels, podcasts, even video sermons translated into other languages.

[Joe Suh]

I'd say the Majority of people are blown away. And pastors tell us all the time, this, this Bible study is better than anything I could have come up with. Or this devotional is great. It's. It's something that would have taken me hours to. To create. So we get a lot of that, but we also get some weary folks.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Those weary folks have theological concerns, but also some more universal ones, too.

[Joe Suh]

A very common concern and objection we get from pastors is, how do I trust this thing? Is this thing going to hallucinate?

[Dena Temple Raston]

Hallucinate. That's the AI term for when a chatbot makes stuff up. And it sounds spooky, but for religious leaders, it's more than that. It could potentially lead their flocks astray. So Joe built in some guardrails.

[Joe Suh]

And so one of the very first things we did was we made sure that we have timestamp reference links to everything that the chatbot returns. So, you know, it'll give a response to a question. And then after every paragraph, there's a. There's a timestamp link. And if you click on that link, it goes to that particular YouTube video and that particular point in the message where he referenced that concept or idea.

[Dena Temple Raston]

He also added a search engine, not for the Bible, but for sermons, tens of thousands of them, that his team uploads every week.

[Joe Suh]

See that there's a Bible verse that you're curious about or that you're going to preach about if you're a pastor? Well, we're going to make. We're making a tool available such that you can search whatever passage you have in mind. You could see what thousands of other pastors have said about that particular piece of scripture.

[Dena Temple Raston]

A powerful tool, but one that prompts other questions.

[Joe Suh]

So the concern there is, am I enabling pastors to plagiarize off of each other? And so that's. That's something I kind of wrestle with, is I am making it very easy to. For pastors to see what other churches have said about any particular topic.

[Dena Temple Raston]

And Joe's not the only one navigating this new terrain. The questions he was asking about ethics and authorship and even originality were echoing across church offices. And where some might see risk, others see opportunity.

[Kenny Jang]

Innovation's happening quicker than dog years. At this point in a single given year, you're having seven leapfrogs. You're having more than that. It's almost on a weekly basis, new stuff is coming out.

[Dena Temple Raston]

That's Kenny Jang. He runs a consultancy called AI for Church Leaders, a kind of tech support for pastors and Like Joe Kenny's company helps churches generate content and translate sermons.

[Kenny Jang]

AI for church leaders started as a group, it's now, I don't know, it's on its way to 7,000 people. We started a training platform, we built a summit, we built use case specific stuff. So like we built repurposeyourserman.com so you should use AI to repurpose your sermon long form content into short form 10 different ways.

[Dena Temple Raston]

He also advises on the business of running a church because yes, churches have bills. They pay rent, utilities, salaries, and those are all paid for by donors. And now AI is helping them track those donations and notice when something seems to be a little off.

[Kenny Jang]

If someone's giving regularly and the behavior drops, money is related to many other things that we believe, right, Spiritually, all that kind of stuff. And so either you preached a sermon that pissed them off, right, and then they stopped giving, or more likely there is some ministry moment happening. Death in the family, stress at work, conflict, you know, something, something's going on. Well then that's a short list to identify. Then we can then go and have a checkpoint and reach out to you. If no one's reached out to you or haven't seen you in a while, give you a call, take you out to lunch or breakfast or coffee. There's a way to start to build that relationship and then provide that opportunity for the church to be the church of support and care and things like that.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Other apps go even further. Not just managing donations, but finding disciples. Glue, a Christian tech platform, launched a tool that tracks evangelism. Spreading the good word, who you prayed for, who you spoke to, what you said. And that's where the data trail starts to feel, well, less divine. Here's Heather again.

[Heather Milquist Leto]

There was really an interesting case in Finland actually, where someone sued the Jehovah's Witnesses because they were concerned that the door to door visits by the Jehovah's Witnesses was collecting information and a violation of their privacy in terms of what their household makeup looked like and things like that. And they won.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Tracking your neighbor, even with what the user feels are good intentions, raises a lot of ethical red flags.

[Heather Milquist Leto]

You have to think what that does to you as a neighbor. How does that change your relationship to your neighbors? Is it really so important that we should be tracking these like we might track business expenses?

[Dena Temple Raston]

And for churches, especially small ones, this technological shift raises another concern. What if AI makes them obsolete?

[Heather Milquist Leto]

AI in churches has caused a lot of people to reflect on what is at the core of Christianity. And what is more incidental or non essential about Christianity. The hope is that AI will make these churches more efficient. Then the question becomes what are the things that we need to be more efficient at? And what are the things in which maybe we shouldn't seek efficiency?

[Dena Temple Raston]

Because spiritual growth isn't usually fast. It's not clean, it's not automated. It's messy, really personal, full of doubt.

[Heather Milquist Leto]

AI and different LLMs, they're being used often so that people can move quickly to some sort of answer where, you know, grappling with these questions has always been kind of one of the most valuable things that people find in the practice of religion. And so, you know, maybe it's not so valuable to type something into an LLM and get a quick answer when the point is really to be reflecting and thinking about these things deeply yourself.

[Dena Temple Raston]

And Heather, despite her concerns, believes technology can help churches, but only if it doesn't replace what's sacred.

[Heather Milquist Leto]

The thing that often concerns me about religion and technology is that technology is being used to replace some of the things that are perhaps most essential and valuable to religious practice or to any kind of social community. And it's being done without enough kind of careful reflection and thought.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Careful reflection and thought. Not exactly AI's strong suit, but still there's potential if churches can wield the tool without losing their human touch. This is Click Here.

[Zach Hirsch]

Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on? Click here. Then check out our sister publication the Record from Recorded Future News. You'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London and Kyiv, among others. And you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to the Record Media.

[Dena Temple Raston]

Here are some of the top cyber and intelligence headlines of the past week. From a shakeup inside one of the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world to a high stakes economic showdown with China with massive implications for the tech sector and a last minute reprieve for an app that's become a cultural phenomenon. It's Tuesday, April 8th. Late last week, something extraordinary happened at the National Security Agency. This morning, a major shakeup at the National Security Agency.

[Heather Milquist Leto]

General Timothy Hawk, out as director of the NSA and head of U.S. cyber Command.

[Dena Temple Raston]

General Hawk was overseas when he got an early morning call from the Pentagon saying his services would no longer be needed. The Pentagon did not provide a reason for his dismissal. This kind of abrupt turnover is almost unheard of. So the question is why? To hear far right activist Laura Loomer tell it, she was behind it. She visited the White House last week with a list of people in national security she said needed to be fired because they were insufficiently loyal to President Trump. She claims General Hawk was fired because he was on her list. Insiders say that there were other clashes behind the scenes between Hawke and the administration that were to blame. They declined to provide details on the record. General William Hartman, the current cybersecurity deputy director, will serve as acting NSA director. The dismissal comes amid a flurry of Trump administration decisions that appear to weaken U.S. cyber defenses. The president has rolled back election and disinformation related cyber defenses in a series of cuts and has taken aim at a lot of the nation's early warning systems meant to protect critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. Mass layoffs at CISA are expected this week. Meanwhile, a different kind of tension this time economic is unfolding between the US And China. China is imposing retaliatory tariffs against the US and anxiety over those moves is showing up in the stock market. The tit for tat tariffs are starting to shake the tech sector. Apple, Amazon, Meta their share prices have fallen about 5% out of concern that the supply chain as they know it is about to be upended. The big question Will these tariffs bring jobs in manufacturing back to the US or simply raise prices for everyone? So far, the markets haven't been very optimistic. And finally TikTok. At the end of last week, the President made a surprise announcement.

[Joe Suh]

New details emerging on who's in talks to buy TikTok. President Trump on Air Force One hinting an agreement could come soon.

[Dena Temple Raston]

We're very close to a deal with a very good criminal reaper, but it isn't quite there yet. So the president extended the deadline on the ban by 75 days. The deal thought to be on the table involves Oracle and BlackRock, though it's still unclear whether China will even let TikTok's parent company sell. While all of this is playing out in the us there's new trouble for TikTok in Europe. The Irish Data Protection Commission could be announcing this by the end of the month. A 500 million euro fine on TikTok for sending European data out to China to be excess. That fine comes after a multi year investigation that found that TikTok was in violation of Europe's strict data protection law, the GDPR. So while teens in the US may be punching the air, TikTok's future in America and beyond is still deeply uncertain.

[Heather Milquist Leto]

Foreign.

[Morgan Sung]

Was produced by Zach Hirsch, Megan Dietrich, Erica Gaeda, Sean Powers and Dina Temple Raston. It was edited by Karen Duffin Fact Checked by Darren Ankrum and contains original music by Ben Levingston with some other music from Blue Dot sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley and our illustrator is Megan Goff. Martin Peralta is our sound designer and engineer. Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and prx. Tune in on Friday for Mic Drop, which features our favorite interview of the week. We'll have a new episode of Click Here on Tuesday. We'll see you then.

[Zach Hirsch]

If you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up the day's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication the Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to TheRecord Media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.