Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, January 14th. I'm Bell Lin for The Wall Street Journal.

The online rumor mill went into overdrive as fires raged in L.A., making it the newest frontier for public officials to battle.

We'll find out how officials are combating these falsehoods and why they're so dangerous.

And then, the U.S. is imposing some of its strongest measures yet to limit Chinese advances in artificial intelligence.

Our reporter Asa Fitch tells us what these rules entail and why the chipmaker

invidia is so against them.

But first, new rules out this week are a final push by the Biden administration in a

year's long effort to use export controls to stem China's advances

in chipmaking and AI. The rules require companies to get government approval to export certain

information about their AI models and set up large AI computing facilities overseas.

Strict sales restrictions on these chips are already in

place for China, Iran and other U.S. adversaries, and the new rules carve out exemptions for a group

of 18 close U.S. allies and partners, that includes countries like the U.K., France, and Germany.

That's according to a senior administration official.

For more on this, we're joined by our reporter, Aza Fitch.

Asa, why is the government implementing this latest batch of rules?

The concern is a national security concern largely. The U.S. government is worried that

if China is allowed to access the most sophisticated AI chips and AI models, they could use those models and chips to develop their military to develop things like weapons, bio weapons, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, even.

There's a whole range of other potential dangers in the view of the U.S. government, at least, in allowing China to get access

to these things. Now, China is already restricted heavily in its access ability to just buy

AI chips and use AI models. But the concern that this set of regulations try to address is that

China could go to other countries and set up infrastructure in and

...