Today's News
The Defiant
Kraken and Coinbase went live with CFTC-regulated perpetual futures on Monday, ending years of offshore-only access for US traders. By Friday, CME Group sued the CFTC arguing that perpetuals should be classified as swaps under Dodd-Frank and routed through swap clearing infrastructure instead. Kalshi and eleven other venues have already filed applications under the same regulatory pathway, signaling a structural market-structure battle over how crypto derivatives integrate into US financial regulation.
US Shutdown of Anthropic's Fable Model Exposes Europe's Frontier AI Dependency
Nathan Benaich
The US government ordered Anthropic to disable its Fable model globally after claiming (disputed by Anthropic) that its safeguards could be jailbroken to expose cyber-offense capabilities, severing customer access overnight. The incident crystallizes Europe's strategic vulnerability: the continent has no compute cluster approaching xAI's Memphis facility (500K+ GPUs), no frontier model of its own, and responded to the cutoff by requesting "trusted partner" access rather than building alternatives. Nathan Benaich argues this represents a fundamental strategic failure—Europe invented modern AI but allowed talent and capability to concentrate in California, leaving it vulnerable to supply-side control by US policy.
Techmeme
Bain Capital stands to realize over $15 billion in profits on its 2018 Kioxia buyout following the company's December 2024 IPO, as the stock has surged more than 5,000% post-listing. The extraordinary returns demonstrate significant value creation in semiconductor infrastructure assets during the AI hardware buildout cycle.
Peter Thiel Leads Individual Angels With 27 Unicorn Investments; Stanford Research Ranks 11,626 Investors
Ilya Strebulaev and Dr. Paul Fang's VC Signal from Bay Area Founders Club
Stanford GSB research by Ilya Strebulaev and Paul Fang ranks 11,626 investors across individual angels, angel groups, and accelerators, finding that 91% of the top 100 are individuals despite accelerators like Y Combinator (113 unicorns) dominating absolute counts. Peter Thiel leads individual angels with 27 unicorn investments, followed by David Morin (23) and Scott Belsky (22). The finding matters for founders because individual operator-angels provide pattern-matching and network access beyond capital, while accelerators offer scale and brand de-risking.
Frontier AI Systems Out-Persuade Expert Humans by 3x on Real-World Fundraising Tasks
Jack Clark from Import AI
Researchers across Oxford, Stanford, and LSE tested AI against elite debaters and professional canvassers in 18,978 real-world conversations, finding that Anthropic's Opus 4.1/4.6 and OpenAI's GPT-4o/5.4 decisively won at changing minds on policy and donations—even when humans were coached, incentivized with £1,000 bonuses, and given advance preparation. The result establishes that frontier AI now controls a capability (persuasion at scale) that historically concentrated power among well-resourced actors, raising urgent questions about how these systems will be deployed.
DeepMind Outlines Four Distinct Pathways to Superintelligence Within 10-20 Years
Jack Clark from Import AI
Google DeepMind published a framework identifying scaling compute/data, algorithmic breakthroughs, recursive self-improvement, and multi-agent coordination as viable routes from AGI to ASI (systems exceeding human-expert collectives on virtually all tasks). The authors argue "the possibility of cruising past AGI into ASI territory within the next decade or two cannot easily be dismissed." The work is significant because it represents a major lab systematically mapping the technical and timeline scenarios for post-AGI capability jumps.