Arm CEO Rene Haas has a unique, bird’s eye view of the tech industry. His company’s chip designs are in the majority of devices you use on a daily basis, from your smartphone to your car. The SoftBank-backed company he leads is worth almost $150 billion, which is now considerably more than Intel.

With the news earlier this week that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger “retired” and Intel is evaluating its options for a possible spinoff or outright sale, I wanted to hear what Haas thought should happen to his longtime frenemy. There were reports that he approached Intel about buying a big chunk of the company before Gelsinger was ousted. At the same time, Arm is also rumored to be eyeing an expansion into building its own chips and not just licensing its designs. 

Haas and I touched on all that and more in an exclusive interview earlier today, which will air in full on a future episode of Decoder. (You can listen to my episode about AI spending in the enterprise that just came out as well.) In the meantime, I wanted to give subscribers the first peek at the highlights from my conversation with Haas.

The following interview has been edited and condensed:

On what he makes of the Intel situation:

As someone who has been in the industry my whole career, it is a little sad to see what’s happening… Intel is an innovation powerhouse. At the same time, you have to innovate in our industry. There are lots of tombstones of great tech companies that don’t reinvent themselves. 

I think Intel’s biggest dilemma is how to disassociate being either a vertical company or a fabless company, to oversimplify it. That is the fork in the road that they’ve faced for the last decade. Pat [Gelsinger] had a strategy that was very clear that vertical was the way to win. In my opinion, when he took that strategy on in 2021, that was not a three-year strategy. That was a five-to-10-year strategy. He’s gone and there’s a new CEO to be brought in and the decision has to be made. 

My personal bias says that vertical integration is a pretty powerful thing. If they could get that right, I think they would be in an amazing position. But the cost associated with it is so high that it may be too big of a hill to climb.

I’m not going to comment on the rumors that we wanted to buy them. But I think, again, if you’re a vertically integrated company and the power of your strategy is in the fact that you have a product and you have fabs, inherently, you have a potential huge advantage in terms of cost versus the competition. When Pat was the CEO, I did tell him more than once, “You ought to license Arm because if you’ve got your own fabs, fabs are all about volume and we can provide volume.” I wasn’t successful in convincing him to do that.

On the rumors that Arm will build its own AI chips:

If you’re defining a computer architecture and you’re building the future of computing, one of the things you need to be very mindful of is that link between hardware and software in terms of really understanding where the tradeoffs are being made, where the observations are being made, what are the ultimate benefits to consumers from a chip that has that type of integration.

That is easier to do if you’re building something than if you’re licensing IP… If you’re building something, you’re much closer to that interlock, and you have a much better perspective in terms of the design tradeoffs to make. So, if we were to do something, that would be one of the reasons.

On Arm’s ongoing lawsuit with Qualcomm:

The current update is that it plans to go to trial on December 16th, which isn’t very far away. I can appreciate — because we talk to investors and partners — that what they hate the most is uncertainty. But on the flip side, I would say the principles as to why we filed the claim are unchanged. 

On Sam Altman’s prediction that AGI will arrive in 2025:

I know he has his own definitions for AGI and his reasons for those definitions. I don’t subscribe so much to what is AGI versus ASI [artificial superintelligence]. I think more around when these AI agents start to think and reason and invent. To me, that is a bit of a “cross the Rubicon” moment… If you would have asked me this question a year ago, I would have said it’s quite a ways away. You ask that question now, [and] I say it is much closer. 

On David Sacks being named President-elect Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar:

Kudos to him. I think that’s a pretty good thing. It’s quite fascinating that if you go back eight years to Trump 1.0, in terms of where we were in December as he was starting to fill out his Cabinet choices and appointees, it was a bit chaotic. At the same time, there wasn’t a lot of representation from the tech world. 

This time around, whether it’s Elon [Musk], whether it’s David [Sacks], whether it’s Vivek [Ramaswamy] — I know Larry Ellison has been very, very involved in terms of discussions with the administration — I think it’s a good thing. Having a seat at the table and having access to policy, I think, is really good. 

Samsung’s shake-up

Big leadership changes hit Samsung Electronics this week, per an internal memo I’ve obtained. North America CEO KS Choi is out and has been replaced by Yoonie Joung, a 33-year company veteran. Dave Das now solely oversees the mobile business while former co-head Brent Yoo is heading to Brazil to run sales there. And Shane Higby now runs the following divisions: Home Entertainment, Display, and Digital Appliance. There were a bunch of other shuffles at the C-level, but those are the highlights. 

Samsung has been restructuring across the board for months now and did layoffs in Choi’s division at the end of September, so this week’s news isn’t really a surprise. Perhaps the company hasn’t announced this news externally yet because its Korean investors will be meeting in the US next week (a company rep didn’t have a comment by press time). 

“Our sales have been down, especially in consumer electronics,” one company insider tells me. “My guess is that we’re just not hitting our targets quarter-over-quarter and so he [Choi] had to go.”

“You’ve probably grown in the last eight years. He has, too.”

It was fascinating to be in the audience at the DealBook Summit for the first public interview Jeff Bezos has done in years. While I maybe should have been expecting it, I was still shocked at how much he gushed about Donald Trump and his archnemesis for Blue Origin, Elon Musk. 

Another part of the interview that stood out was when Bezos said he is spending a lot of time at Amazon, “95-percent” of which is focused on AI. This week, Amazon announced its Nova family of foundational AI models at AWS re:Invent — a project I first scooped in this newsletter earlier this year. 

Amazon is obviously still playing catch-up in the AI race, but it seems to have closed meaningful ground with Nova. If anything, this week shows how quickly the AI race is still shifting. It feels like any of the big players could leap ahead at any moment. Even if you’re an AI skeptic, that’s pretty exciting.

Elsewhere

Job board

Some other notable job moves this week:

More links

If you aren’t already getting new issues of Command Line, don’t forget to subscribe to The Verge, which includes unlimited access to all of our stories and an improved ad experience on the web. You’ll also get full access to my archive, featuring scoops about companies like Google, Meta, OpenAI, and more.

As always, I want to hear from you, especially if you have a tip or feedback. Respond here, and I’ll get back to you, or ping me securely on Signal. I’m happy to keep you anonymous. 

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You may want to be extra careful if you're booking holiday travel for family and friends this year through <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a>. A stunned user recently discovered that a typo in an email address could inadvertently share private trip info with strangers, who can then access sensitive information and potentially even take over bookings that <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> automatically adds to their accounts.

This issue came to light after a <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> user, Alfie, got an email confirming that he had booked a trip he did not.

At first, Alfie assumed it was a phishing attempt, so he avoided clicking any links in the email to prevent any malicious activity and instead went directly to his <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> account to verify that the trip info wasn't there. But rather than feeling the sweet relief that his account had not been compromised, he was shocked to find the trip had somehow been booked through his account.

Alfie told Ars he was "quite sure" he had not been hacked but could not explain how the booking got there. He contacted a <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> support team member, who he said also seemed surprised, putting him on hold for 10 minutes and telling him that "they had not seen anything like it in the many years they had worked there." By the end of the call, Alfie was told that the issue was escalated to security teams who would follow up within 48 hours.

But <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> never followed up, leaving Alfie in limbo. Over the next few days, the dates of the odd booking came and went without any response from the travel site. Frustrated, Alfie reached out to Ars to investigate his privacy and security concerns, and <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> similarly appeared evasive, responding quickly to Ars but then again going silent. It took weeks to finally get an answer, but <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> eventually explained exactly what happened and why there is no fix coming.

"The security and privacy of our customers’ information are a top priority for Booking.com," Booking.com's spokesperson told Ars. "Following our investigation, we found that the issue occurred due to a customer input error during the reservation process, where he inadvertently entered an incorrect email address. That email address, however, belonged to another <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> customer"—Alfie—"which caused the reservation to be linked to their account."

For <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a>, it's essential that users can book travel for other users by adding their email addresses to a booking because that's how people frequently book trips together. And if it happens that the email address added to a booking is also linked to an existing <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> user, the trip is automatically added to that person's account. After that, there's no way for <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> to remove the trip from the stranger's account, even if there's a typo in the email or if auto-complete adds the wrong email domain and the user booking the trip doesn't notice.

According to <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a>, there is nothing to fix because this is not a "system glitch," and there was no "security breach." What Alfie encountered is simply the way the platform works, which, like any app where users input information, has the potential for human error.

In the end, <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> declined to remove the trip from Alfie's account, saying that would have violated the privacy of the user booking the trip. The only resolution was for Alfie to remove the trip from his account and pretend it never happened.

Alfie remains concerned, telling Ars, "I can't help thinking this can't be the only occurrence of this issue." But Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, a senior staff technologist for the digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars that after talking to other developers, his "gut reaction" is that <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> didn't have a ton of options to prevent typos during bookings.

"There's only so much they can do to protect people from their own typos," Hoffman-Andrews said.

One step <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> could take to protect privacy

Perhaps the bigger concern exposed by Alfie's experience beyond typos is Booking.com's practice of automatically adding bookings to accounts linked to emails that users they don't know input. Once the trip is added to someone's account, that person can seemingly access sensitive information about the users booking the trip that <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> otherwise would not share.

While engaging with the <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> support team member, Alfie told Ars that he "probed for as much information as possible" to find out who was behind the strange booking on his account. And seemingly because the booking was added to Alfie's account, the support team member had no problem sharing sensitive information that went beyond the full name and last four digits of the credit card used for the booking, which were listed in the trip information by default.

"They revealed to me the full email address of the person who made the booking, as well as the country in which they were located," Alfie told Ars. "With this information, it was trivial to identify the individual via LinkedIn."

Alfie raised concerns to Ars about Booking.com's resolution, suggesting that some sort of validation should be required before <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> adds trips to a user's account. He feared that people with bad intentions could take advantage of typos and potentially harm people booking trips by possibly messing with the booking or finding out where people who shared info in error live and targeting their homes while they're on vacation.

"The potential for this to go very wrong is quite concerning," Alfie told Ars. "Allowing access to all the details of a booking to someone else via the simple act of accidentally entering an incorrect email address—without any form of validation—seems like a really bad idea. That I was intentionally supplied all the details needed to take ownership of (and/or attend?!?) this booking is scary."

Hoffman-Andrews told Ars that while typos seem inevitable, <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> could potentially fix the issue by building capabilities for users to rescind bookings inadvertently inviting strangers to attend.

"It seems like attaching that trip to somebody's <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> account and not letting the original user call it back and say, 'oops,' undo that part," could "in theory" be implemented, Hoffman-Andrews told Ars.

Alfie told Ars that he has no plans to stop using <a href="http://Booking.com" rel="nofollow">Booking.com</a> over the weird experience but agreed that users need to be able to cut strangers off when they're accidentally sent private trip info that Hoffman-Andrews said is "definitely pretty sensitive."

"What if the person booking realized their mistake after the fact?" Alfie said. "It doesn't seem there is any way for them to undo this, and they certainly couldn't undo the automated email that already got sent out containing a good deal of information."