What's up: Get ready for 'artificial intelligence optimization" as AI upends the online search game; OpenAI has hired Instacart's CEO as head of applications; Cybersecurity company Crowdstrike announces job cuts. 

Good morning, CIOs. The Trump administration on Wednesday announced plans to overhaul an export rule that limited many countries' access to American technology, the WSJ reported. 

The rule, known as AI diffusion, had been set to go into effect May 15, and would have imposed caps on how many AI chips could go to countries such as India, Switzerland, Mexico and Israel.

Fears that other countries would route U.S. chips to China led to the rule, which was announced in the final days of the Biden administration.

The Journal reports that the focus now turns to the Trump team’s plan to remake the rule. Policymakers are weighing how to block adversaries such as China from accessing advanced chips without hurting American technology companies. Read the story. 

AI is upending the online search game, alarming marketers as AI summaries reduce website traffic, the WSJ reports. The response has been the creation of a wave of businesses claiming to specialize in new industry acronyms such as generative engine optimization (GEO), answer engine optimization (AEO) and, of course, artificial intelligence optimization (AIO).

Apple is exploring a move to AI-based search, ending an era defined by Google’s ubiquitous search engine, Bloomberg reports. Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, made the disclosure Wednesday during his testimony in the US Justice Department’s lawsuit against Alphabet Inc. The heart of the dispute is the two companies’ estimated $20 billion-a-year deal that makes Google the default offering for queries in Apple’s browser.

Alphabet shares sank 8% after Cue’s comments, CNBC reports.

Google's near-90% search share now is down from around 93% in late 2022, when ChatGPT first launched, the WSJ reports. Google has remained below the 90% mark for most of the last six months, which is a duration not seen in at least a decade. As of last month, around 400 million people were using ChatGPT on a weekly basis, according to parent company OpenAI.

OpenAI announced that Instacart CEO Fidji Simo will join the company later this year to lead its applications business, WSJ reports. Sam Altman in a memo announcing the move said Simo will focus on "enabling our ‘traditional’ company functions to scale," freeing him to "increase my focus on research, compute, and safety.” Simo has served as an OpenAI board member over the past year.

The AI company also announced OpenAI for Countries, an initiative as part of its Stargate project, that helps other nations build in-country data center capacity. The AI company said in a blog post that its goal is to pursue 10 projects with individual countries or regions as the first phase of the initiative.

The French startup Mistral AI on Wednesday launched its Le Chat chatbot for corporate use, and its CEO said the startup has tripled its revenue in the last 100 days, with demand coming particularly from outside the United States, Reuters reports.

Design software startup Figma on Wednesday debuted an AI feature to automate the process of building websites and applications, and is the company’s response to the rise of “vibe-coding” tools, CNBC reports.

Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms, is once again actively working on facial recognition, the Information reports. Earlier this year, the company discussed adding software that could identify people by name to its smart glasses and other devices, such as AI-powered earphones with cameras, according to three people involved in discussions about the feature.

Cybersecurity company Crowdstrike said it will cut about 500 jobs, or 5% of its global workforce, as part of a plan to drive efficiencies in the business. The company said Wednesday that it intends to cut positions in some areas of the business while continuing to hire customer-facing and product-engineering roles, WSJ reports.

Amazon's cloud computing division will invest $4 billion to build its first data centers and other cloud infrastructure in Chile, the company's head of South Latin America told Reuters. Amazon Web Services expects the cloud region, its third in Latin America after Brazil and Mexico, to be operational by the second half of 2026.

Arm Holdings logged higher sales in its fiscal fourth quarter, boosted by the continued adoption of its chips. But the semiconductor- and software-design company offered a disappointing outlook for the current quarter, with sales of $1.05 billion at the midpoint of the company’s forecasted range, versus the $1.1 billion analysts’ estimate, Barron's reports.

Uber Technologies swung to a first-quarter profit as riders ordered more trips on the digital taxi service, but missed Wall Street revenue estimates, WSJ reports. The San Francisco ride-hailing and food-delivery app owner swung to a profit of $1.78 billion, or 83 cents a share, from a loss of $654 million, or 32 cents a share, a year earlier.

President Trump is expected to announce a framework of a trade deal with the U.K. on Thursday, the first in what the White House hopes is a series of trade agreements since it imposed tariffs. (WSJ)

Shippers aren’t yet confident enough to return to routes through the Red Sea, despite a tentative cease-fire deal between the U.S. and Yemen’s Houthi militia. (WSJ)

The U.S. Naval Academy’s culling of hundreds of library books to comply with a Trump administration order is whipping up waves of discontent in Annapolis where institutional pride runs uncommonly deep. (WSJ)

Disney is the latest and biggest entertainment company to plant a flag in the Middle East, as it said its seventh global theme park will be located in Abu Dhabi. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.