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Mar 28, 2025

Bytes: Week in Review — Trump officials’ Signal leak, 23andMe goes bankrupt and chatbots take on search engines

Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, joins Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino for “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

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Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images

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AI company Anthropic recently added web search to its chatbot Claude. It joins other artificial intelligence tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT in delivering one clear answer to a web search query instead of pages and pages of links. We’ll dig into what that means for consumers and content publishers on today’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

Plus, 23andMe declared bankruptcy. So what’s gonna happen to all that genetic data?

But first — the Signal group chat heard round the world. A Trump administration official appears to have inadvertently invited a journalist into a conversation about sensitive national security issues on the secure messaging app Signal.

The app does offer end-to-end encryption, the gold standard for security in consumer-level messaging apps, but that doesn’t make it foolproof for the most sensitive of data.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, to break down all these topics.

Everything we talked about

Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal from The Atlantic

“Trump officials texted attack plans to a group chat in a secure app that included a journalist” from The Associated Press

Atlantic publishes Trump Cabinet group chat messages from The Hill

What to Know About the Fallout From the Signal Group Chat Leak” from The New York Times

“23andMe files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as co-founder and CEO Wojcicki resigns” from The Associated Press

“What 23andMe’s bankruptcy means for your DNA data” from The Associated Press

“In spite of plummeting valuation, 23andMe still aims to pivot into biotech” from “Marketplace Tech”

“I Quit Google Search for AI — and I’m Not Going Back” from The Wall Street Journal

The Team