SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The former chief security officer for Uber was sentenced to probation Thursday for trying to cover up a 2016 data breach in which hackers accessed tens of millions of customer records from the ride-hailing service.

Joseph Sullivan was sentenced to a three-year term of probation and ordered to pay a fine of $50,000, the U.S. attorney’s office announced.

Sullivan, 54, of Palo Alto was convicted by a federal jury in San Francisco last October of obstructing justice and concealing knowledge that a federal felony had been committed.

It was believed to be the first criminal prosecution of a company executive over a data breach.

Sullivan was hired as Uber’s chief security officer in 2015. In November 2016, Sullivan was emailed by hackers, and employees quickly confirmed that they had stolen records on about 57 million users and also 600,000 driver’s license numbers, prosecutors said.

After learning of the breach, Sullivan began a scheme to hide it from the public and the Federal Trade Commission, which had been investigating a smaller 2014 hack, authorities said.

According to the U.S. attorney’s office, Sullivan told subordinates that “the story outside of the security group was to be that ‘this investigation does not exist,’ ” and arranged to pay the hackers $100,000 in bitcoin in exchange for them signing non-disclosure agreements promising not to reveal the hack. He also never mentioned the breach to Uber lawyers who were involved with the FTC’s inquiry, prosecutors said.

Uber’s new management began investigating the breach in the fall of 2017. Despite Sullivan lying to the new chief executive officer and others, the truth was uncovered, and the breach was made public, prosecutors said.

Sullivan was fired along with Craig Clark, an Uber lawyer he had told about the breach. Clark was given immunity by prosecutors and testified against Sullivan.

Prosecutors had recommended a sentence of 15 months in federal prison for Sullivan, who submitted more than 100 letters of support from friends, family and colleagues.

In an April sentencing memo, prosecutors said that showed that Sullivan is “a wealthy, powerful man” with a deep network of family and friends.

“There cannot be two different systems of justice, one for the privileged and another for the rest,” the memo argued. “Any such perception would do grievous damage to public respect for the law.”

His lawyers argued that Sullivan already “has suffered, and will continue to suffer, significant consequences because of this case.”

No other Uber executives were charged in the case.

The hackers pleaded guilty in 2019 to computer fraud conspiracy charges and are awaiting sentencing.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Carrie Fisher is receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a May the Fourth tribute to one of the “Star Wars” franchise’s most beloved figures.

On Thursday, Fisher — who died in 2016 — joins “Star Wars” co-stars Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill on the Hollywood tourist attraction that recognizes luminaries from film, television, music and other entertainment industries. The trio’s stars are all located on the 6,800 block of Hollywood Boulevard, near where the original film debuted in 1977.

Fisher played Leia Organa, who over six films morphed from a princess to a general leading the forces of good in its fight against oppressive regimes aiming to control a galaxy far, far away. Billie Lourd will be accepting the star on behalf of her mother.

Fans have long campaigned for her to receive a Walk of Fame star. The honor comes on May the Fourth, essentially an official holiday for Star Wars fans that’s a play on a line that Fisher said often in the films, “May the Force be with you.”

Devotees worldwide celebrate with a variety of tributes, while retailers hold special sales on Star Wars merchandise.

The induction ceremony will be held at 11:30 a.m. Pacific and livestreamed by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.

Fisher will be given the 2,754th star on the Walk of Fame. Ford received his star in 2003 and Hamill was honored in 2018.

Walk of Fame stars are given to performers who are nominated and a $75,000 fee is now required to create the star and maintain it.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sounding alarms about artificial intelligence has become a popular pastime in the ChatGPT era, taken up by high-profile figures as varied as industrialist Elon Musk, leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky and the 99-year-old retired statesman Henry Kissinger.

But it’s the concerns of insiders in the AI research community that are attracting particular attention. A pioneering researcher and the so-called “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton quit his role at Google so he could more freely speak about the dangers of the technology he helped create.

Over his decades-long career, Hinton’s pioneering work on deep learning and neural networks helped lay the foundation for much of the AI technology we see today.

There has been a spasm of AI introductions in recent months. San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company behind ChatGPT, rolled out its latest artificial intelligence model, GPT-4, in March. Other tech giants have invested in competing tools — including Google’s “Bard.”

Some of the dangers of AI chatbots are “quite scary,” Hinton told the BBC. “Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.”

In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Hinton also pointed to “bad actors” that may use AI in ways that could have detrimental impacts on society — such as manipulating elections or instigating violence.

Hinton, 75, says he retired from Google so that he could speak openly about the potential risks as someone who no longer works for the tech giant.

“I want to talk about AI safety issues without having to worry about how it interacts with Google’s business,” he told MIT Technology Review. “As long as I’m paid by Google, I can’t do that.”

Since announcing his departure, Hinton has maintained that Google has “acted very responsibly” regarding AI. He told MIT Technology Review that there’s also “a lot of good things about Google” that he would want to talk about — but those comments would be “much more credible if I’m not at Google anymore.”

Google confirmed that Hinton had retired from his role after 10 years overseeing the Google Research team in Toronto.

Hinton declined further comment Tuesday but said he would talk more about it at a conference Wednesday.

At the heart of the debate on the state of AI is whether the primary dangers are in the future or present. On one side are hypothetical scenarios of existential risk caused by computers that supersede human intelligence. On the other are concerns about automated technology that’s already getting widely deployed by businesses and governments and can cause real-world harms.

“For good or for not, what the chatbot moment has done is made AI a national conversation and an international conversation that doesn’t only include AI experts and developers,” said Alondra Nelson, who until February led the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and its push to craft guidelines around the responsible use of AI tools.

“AI is no longer abstract, and we have this kind of opening, I think, to have a new conversation about what we want a democratic future and a non-exploitative future with technology to look like,” Nelson said in an interview last month.

A number of AI researchers have long expressed concerns about racial, gender and other forms of bias in AI systems, including text-based large language models that are trained on huge troves of human writing and can amplify discrimination that exists in society.

“We need to take a step back and really think about whose needs are being put front and center in the discussion about risks,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of the nonprofit AI Now Institute. “The harms that are being enacted by AI systems today are really not evenly distributed. It’s very much exacerbating existing patterns of inequality.”

Hinton was one of three AI pioneers who in 2019 won the Turing Award, an honor that has become known as tech industry’s version of the Nobel Prize. The other two winners, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, have also expressed concerns about the future of AI.

Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, signed a petition in late March calling for tech companies to agree to a 6-month pause on developing powerful AI systems, while LeCun, a top AI scientist at Facebook parent Meta, has taken a more optimistic approach.