The Biden administration has forced a Saudi Aramco-backed venture capital firm to sell its shares in a Silicon Valley AI chip startup backed by OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday. The US Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, ruled that Prosperity7 should divest its shares of Rain Neuromorphics Inc. as part of an investigation into the company for possible national security concerns.

Rain’s chips are designed to mimic how the brain works and aim to serve companies using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. The technology differs from most computer chips, which reduce reality to ones and zeros. Instead, Rain’s chips “read” incremental information such as sound waves.

Its first product, a neuromorphic memory chip, can quickly store and retrieve large amounts of data. The second, a specialized neural network processor, is meant to help train machine learning systems. The company’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Gordon Wilson, told Reuters he hopes to have the first commercially viable AI chip in 2023.

The company has raised $25 million from investors, including Prosperity7. The company’s investors seek to capitalize on the growing demand for hardware capable of running AI applications such as natural language processing and image recognition.

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A recent study found that artificial intelligence algorithms can be used to predict social media posts, such as a person’s mood or how they will respond to certain situations. This can be useful for marketers, who can use these models to determine which advertisements will attract the most attention and increase sales.

However, critics say that the technology has the potential to be weaponized for nefarious purposes, such as by analyzing user behavior and predicting which posts will appeal to them. The researchers behind the new study cited several potential threats to the safety of the technology, including that hackers could use it to manipulate human emotions and to spread false information.

The upheaval at OpenAI has spooked employees, with many of its more than 700 staff members signing a letter saying they would quit in solidarity unless the board resigns and brings back Altman and President Greg Brockman. Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s most prominent investors, later announced that it would hire both of them to lead a new AI research initiative.

Despite the turmoil, some of the tech industry’s most prominent entrepreneurs are preventing future scandals by putting safeguards in place to protect nonprofits from being overly focused on money. In a rare move, they’re converting the company into a for-profit corporation that will replace the nonprofit but will remain governed by it. The big question now is whether this strategy will work in the long run, and if so, what kind of guardrails it will include. Ari Shapiro joins us to take a look.