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Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of collapsed crypto exchange FTX, has withdrawn his request for a new trial while trying to distance his parents from recent legal efforts, according to a letter received by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s chambers on Tuesday.

Filed in the Southern District of New York, the letter was written by the former crypto mogul from a low-security correctional facility in Lompoc, California—roughly 3,000 miles away from the courtroom where he was sentenced in 2024 to 25 years in prison.

In the letter received by Kaplan on Tuesday, Bankman-Fried acknowledged that he shared drafts of the Rule 33 Motion with his parents, Barbara Fried and Joe Bankman. They made editorial suggestions, he stated, some of which were incorporated into the motion. 

Additionally, Bankman-Fried stated that his parents helped him print the document.

Bankman-Fried had filed a so-called Rule 33 Motion in February, seeking a do-over after being convicted of orchestrating a multi-billion-dollar fraud scheme in 2023. The motion claimed that he was indicted on false allegations, such as plundering customer funds from his exchange.

Notably, Sam Bankman-Fried filed the motion pro se, indicating that he was representing himself as his own attorney. Kaplan shot back with a court order, demanding input on whether the one-time wunderkind had received help with the request from other attorneys. Kaplan noted that Bankman-Fried risked perjury with his ensuing response.

The request for a new trial was accompanied by a letter written by his mother, a professor at Stanford Law School. Fried stated that she had been authorized by Bankman-Fried to file the proceeding, citing her son’s ongoing incarceration.

“They had no significant input into the ultimate motion,” Bankman-Fried stated to the judge. “I am the ultimate author of the documents and wrote the bulk of them myself, but can’t comment on how you will ultimately interpret the standard in practice.”

Bankman-Fried also told Kaplan that he is withdrawing his pro se motion because he believes that he won’t “get a fair hearing on this topic in front of you.” His appellate lawyer had previously claimed that he was “presumed guilty” at trial by Kaplan, among others.

Again, Bankman-Fried stated that he did not have assistance with the motion from his appellate attorney, Alexandra Shapiro, nor others who assisted with his criminal trial in 2023.

President Donald Trump has pardoned several crypto entrepreneurs since his second term began, including Bankman-Fried’s one-time nemesis, Binance founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao, who had pleaded guilty to anti-money laundering violations.

The president indicated in January, however, that Bankman-Fried isn’t expected to receive similar treatment, per The New York Times. His parents have tried to curry favor with Trump, seeking lawyers who have the president’s ear, per Bloomberg.

The White House warned Thursday that “foreign entities” are allegedly carrying out “industrial-scale” campaigns to copy the capabilities of American-based artificial intelligence models, using tactics including jailbreaking and networks of fake accounts to extract proprietary information and replicate their performance.

In a memorandum titled “Adversarial Distillation of American AI Models,” Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios said the U.S. government has information indicating coordinated efforts to distill U.S. frontier AI systems.

“The U.S. has evidence that foreign entities, primarily in China, are running industrial-scale distillation campaigns to steal American AI,” Kratsios wrote on X. “We will be taking action to protect American innovation.”

According to President Donald Trump’s administration, the campaigns are using “tens of thousands of proxy accounts” to evade detection and exploit jailbreak techniques to systematically extract capabilities, in what is known as a distillation attack.

A distillation attack is a method of training a smaller AI model to learn from the outputs of a larger one. The issue has become a growing concern among U.S. AI companies. In February, Anthropic accused Chinese AI labs DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of extracting millions of Claude responses—using roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts—to train competing systems.

Models developed through unauthorized distillation campaigns may not match the full performance of the originals. Still, they can appear comparable on select benchmarks at a fraction of the cost.

The administration warned that distillation attacks could also remove security safeguards and other controls designed to keep AI systems “ideologically neutral and truth-seeking.”

The Trump administration said federal agencies will work with U.S. AI companies to strengthen protections around frontier models, coordinate with private industry to develop defenses against large-scale distillation campaigns, and explore ways to hold foreign actors accountable.

While the memo acknowledged that lawful distillation can help create smaller, more efficient open-source and open-weight models, it said unauthorized efforts to copy American AI systems cross the line.

“There is nothing innovative about systematically extracting and copying the innovations of American industry,” the memo said.

The Office of Science and Technology did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Decrypt.

Artificial intelligence is expanding the government’s ability to analyze Americans’ digital records. A new bill aims to require a warrant before federal agencies can access that data.

Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie and Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert introduced the Surveillance Accountability Act on Thursday. If passed, the legislation would amend Title 18 of the U.S. Code to codify a broad warrant requirement for government searches, close what supporters describe as the “third-party doctrine” loophole, and give individuals the right to sue the government for Fourth Amendment violations.

Naomi Brockwell, founder of the privacy-focused nonprofit Ludlow Institute, helped draft the bill in coordination with Massie’s office. In an interview with Decrypt, Brockwell said AI has significantly changed the nature of surveillance.

“Now that we have AI, that idea of limitation is completely out the window,” Brockwell said. “AI can sort people, rank them, adjust credit scores, and use all of this data to paint intimate profiles and preemptively conduct law enforcement.”

The bill targets the third-party doctrine, a legal precedent from the 1970s stemming from Supreme Court interpretations of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people against unreasonable searches and seizures and generally requires warrants supported by probable cause.

The third-party doctrine emerged from two cases—United States v. Miller and Smith v. Maryland—which held that Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy for information voluntarily shared with third parties, such as banks or phone companies. Brockwell said those cases involved narrow circumstances long before the internet existed, and have since been applied far more broadly.

“Fast forward to 2026, every single thing we do has a third-party involved,” Brockwell said. “The entire internet relies on third-parties, and governments have decided that when they want to search someone, they no longer have to get approval from a judge.”

The bill also addresses biometric surveillance and automated license plate readers. Brockwell pointed to the “mosaic theory” of privacy, a legal framework some courts have used when evaluating bulk data collection.

“If your car is in public and I take a snapshot of it, you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy,” she said. “But what if I took 10,000 snapshots of your car while it’s driving, and matched your exact location to track you? That’s a different question. That’s what automatic license plate readers are doing now.”

While the legislation aims to protect the privacy of citizens, circumventing that privacy is a lucrative business, with companies like Palantir and Clearview AI selling AI-driven tools used by law enforcement to analyze images, location data, and other records.

The issue came to a head earlier this year when Anthropic clashed with President Donald Trump’s administration over whether the U.S. Government could use its AI systems for mass surveillance and unrestricted military use.

Brockwell said the bill has received bipartisan interest and sees it as complementary to U.S. Representatives Warren Davidson (R-OH) and Oregon Senator Ron Wyden’s effort to reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which authorizes certain warrantless surveillance activities.

While critics argue that warrant requirements can slow investigations, Brockwell said the proposal restores judicial oversight.

“What it does is stop abuses of power,” she said. “If law enforcement wants to go after someone, they can absolutely do that. They just need a warrant.”

The office of Representative Massie did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Decrypt.