Tag: Business – Decrypt

Minnesota is fighting Elon Musk’s xAI over the company’s attempt to block HF-1606, a first-of-its-kind state law targeting AI tools that generate realistic sexual images of identifiable people.

In a Friday court filing, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison argued that xAI is unlikely to succeed in its constitutional challenge and has failed to show that enforcing the law would cause irreparable harm.

“With Grok Imagine, X.AI has created an unparalleled marketplace for digital sexual violence that poses virtually no barrier to entry,” Ellison wrote. “That marketplace, coupled with the functional capabilities of Grok Imagine, would doom Minnesota from the start if it could not direct its laws to the technology that makes digital sexual victimization possible in the first place.”

The law, enacted in April and which took effect August 1, prohibits platforms and software developers from allowing users to create realistic images showing intimate body parts that did not appear in the original image of an identifiable person.

Ahead of the implementation of the law, in July, xAI sued Ellison to block the law, arguing it violates the First Amendment and could apply to protected images, including shirtless men, swimmers, and political satire. Violations carry penalties of up to $500,000 per image.

“There is no safe harbor for good-faith efforts of the provider of general-purpose AI creative tools to avoid harms,” xAI wrote in its complaint. “Liability attaches even if the depicted persons consented—or created the image themselves—and even if the image is never shared.”

Minnesota passed the measure 132-1 in the House and 65-0 in the Senate after lawmakers heard reports of a man who used social media photos to create sexual images of more than 80 women he knew.

“Today, we led the nation protecting women, children and everyone in public life from the harm caused by AI nudification technology,” Senator Maye Quade, who led the push, said in a statement at the time. “Companies that make this technology available for free online and in app stores will no longer be allowed to enable predators who abuse and victimize adults and children with the click of a button.

The case now centers on whether the law regulates speech or technology.

Grok has also faced scrutiny over sexually explicit deepfakes.

In January, a watchdog estimated Grok generated more than 23,000 sexualized images of children over 11 days, prompting investigations in several countries.

In March, three minors in California joined others in suing xAI, alleging Grok was used to turn their photos into AI-generated child sexual abuse material. xAI has said it suspended more than 50,000 accounts and filed more than 70,000 reports with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2026.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury proposed rules Monday defining which stablecoins can be issued or sold in the United States under the GENIUS Act.

The proposal implements Section 3 of the GENIUS Act, signed into law last summer. According to the proposal, beginning January 18, 2027, stablecoin issuers generally must obtain a federal or state license. Platforms can also sell foreign-issued stablecoins, but only if the foreign issuer complies with U.S. legal orders and agreements between the U.S. and the country where it is regulated.

“President Trump and Congress delivered the GENIUS Act, establishing a landmark framework and clear rules of the road for payment stablecoins, and Treasury is moving quickly to implement that framework,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote on X.

Starting July 18, 2028, broader restrictions would generally prevent crypto exchanges and other digital asset platforms from selling stablecoins to U.S. customers, “unless the payment stablecoin is issued by a permitted payment stablecoin issuer.”

Bessent said the regulations would provide businesses with regulatory certainty while helping “cement the role of the U.S. dollar,” and welcomed public input.

“Treasury welcomes input from stakeholders as we work to provide the regulatory certainty businesses need to innovate and grow in America, cement the role of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and keep America the crypto capital of the world,” Bessent wrote.

Violations of these rules could include directly soliciting U.S. buyers, advertising a stablecoin as available to them, agreeing to sell after an unsolicited inquiry, or helping buyers bypass location restrictions such as IP checks.

Public comments on the proposal are due by October 19, 2026, 60 days after its publication in the Federal Register.

The news comes as federal agencies continue to write the rules for implementing the GENIUS Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law in July 2025 to establish a federal framework for stablecoins in the U.S.

In February, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency proposed rules governing stablecoin issuance and oversight. The FDIC followed in April with proposed requirements for reserves, redemptions, capital, and risk management. That same month, the Treasury proposed anti-money laundering and sanctions rules requiring issuers to report suspicious activity and maintain the ability to block or freeze transactions.

Those proposed compliance rules have faced pushback from the crypto industry. In June, Paradigm and the Hyperliquid Policy Center warned that making issuers responsible for stablecoins after they enter secondary markets could drive them away from decentralized finance.

The crypto market is up 1.1% on a Monday that opened with Fear & Greed Index score at 39, meaning markets may still be fearful, but they’re not in panic mode anymore. Meanwhile, the Altcoin Season Index is at 44 out of 100, which typically means traders go to Bitcoin as a hedge against volatility and overly bearish movements. Bitcoin dominance remains high enough that most altcoins are treading water.

The native token of the Solana meme coin factory, Pump.fun, is not treading water. Pump’s token, which trades as PUMP, is the best-performing coin in the top 100 on the day, posting almost 9% of gains in today’s trading session. And the technical signals are finally backing up what the revenue numbers suggested weeks ago.

PUMP bottomed at $0.001491 in July and has since nearly doubled, touching $0.003000 intraday today before settling at $0.002933. The monthly gain sits at roughly 90%, per CoinMarketCap

The 50-day Exponential Moving Average, or EMA—which tracks short-term price momentum by weighting recent closes more heavily, is crossing above the slower and longer-term 200-day EMA, which represents the long-term trend baseline. That crossover, called a golden cross, signals a structural shift from a bearish trend to a bullish one.

It’s not a guarantee of continuation, but it is the first time since PUMP launched in mid-2025 that short-term momentum has overtaken the long-term average from below. After months in which the 200-day served as a ceiling, it’s now beginning to act as a floor.

The Average Directional Index, or ADX, measures trend strength independent of direction on a scale from 0 to 100. Anything above 25 is considered a trending market; anything above 40 is a strong one. PUMP’s ADX reads 45.3, with the positive directional indicator above the negative—meaning bulls are in control of a strengthening move. The Relative Strength Index, or RSI, sits at 51.4, above the 50 midline that separates bullish from bearish momentum territory, but far enough from 70 to leave room for continuation without an overbought red flag.

What’s driving the move

The chart isn’t operating in a vacuum. The protocol generated $11.52 million in seven-day revenue, per DefiLlama, of which $5.37 million flowed directly to PUMP token holders through the buyback-and-burn program—the mechanism that converts fee income into direct buy pressure on the token.

This means the float has seasoned, early distribution has largely cleared, and a consistent buyback gives the chart a fundamental bid that chart patterns alone don’t.

Also, Pump.fun’s new social trading features introduced to compete against trading app Fomo’s offerings to top traders appears to have restored confidence in the protocol’s positioning.

The derivatives market is also aligned. Open interest in PUMP perpetuals stands at $238.42 million, per Coinglass, up from roughly $189 million two weeks ago, when the token was still testing $0.0025.

The simultaneous rise in price and open interest suggests fresh capital is entering rather than short positions closing. Funding rates have flipped positive during the recovery, meaning leveraged longs are now paying shorts to hold their positions—a signal that the market is building conviction, though one that makes the setup more vulnerable to a sharp flush if price reverses.

More drama in Washington’s ongoing crypto policy debate unfolded Friday when the Securities and Exchange Commission abruptly canceled a meeting that would have kicked off the formal rulemaking process for a new framework governing crypto fundraising in the United States, known as Regulation Crypto Assets.

The meeting had been announced just three days earlier and was widely viewed as the securities regulator taking the initiative to lay the groundwork for clearer crypto rules while the industry’s marquee legislation, the Clarity Act, remains in limbo until lawmakers return from recess in mid-September.

An SEC spokesperson attributed the cancellation to an “unforeseen scheduling issue” but provided no further details.

Talk to enough people in crypto policy circles with their ears to the ground, however, and you’ll hear additional details involving the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) and the White House.

First, some backstory: Over the past year, SIFMA, which represents many of Wall Street’s leading broker-dealers, investment banks and asset managers, has repeatedly pushed back against broad regulatory relief for crypto and tokenized securities firms. In a June 2025 letter, the group urged the SEC not to make major changes to the rules governing tokenized securities and other parts of the securities markets through no-action letters or exemptions. Instead, it called for a public notice-and-comment process, warning that broad relief could create regulatory arbitrage, weaken investor protections and fracture market liquidity.

The SEC’s Crypto Task Force has been working for months on an innovation exemption that could give crypto firms more flexibility to trade tokenized securities without being subject to all the same rules governing traditional Wall Street firms. Bloomberg reported that the agency was considering unveiling details last Friday, potentially alongside its proposed framework for crypto fundraising. Unlike the fundraising proposal, the innovation exemption would rely on the SEC’s existing exemptive authority rather than go through formal rulemaking.

Multiple industry sources who spoke with Crypto In America say the White House asked the SEC to postpone Friday’s meeting over concerns that Reg Crypto Assets and, separately, the innovation exemption could complicate Clarity Act negotiations ahead of the Senate’s procedural vote in September. The bill addresses both crypto fundraising and tokenized securities.

But there may be another layer to the story.

According to two sources familiar with the matter, SIFMA discussed the possibility of legal action if it determined that the SEC had exceeded its statutory authority under federal securities laws, including through exemptions or no-action relief. The prospect of a legal challenge may have contributed to the White House’s decision to ask the SEC to stand down and cancel the meeting, the sources said.

Asked about the discussions around a potential legal challenge, a SIFMA spokesperson declined to address them, saying: “SIFMA does not comment on specious or hypothetical theories. In this situation in particular, it would be premature to comment on something that currently doesn’t exist.”

The White House and the SEC did not immediately respond to requests for comment on this reporting.

It remains unclear whether the SEC will reschedule the meeting before the Senate returns next month.

In the meantime, the White House and crypto’s top regulators are expected to keep the policy conversation going this week, with separate events on Wednesday and Thursday.

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins and CFTC Chairman Michael Selig will attend a White House event Wednesday alongside executives from across crypto, prediction markets and traditional finance, where President Trump is expected to deliver remarks.

Industry leaders expected to attend include Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, Gemini founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi, a16z crypto Managing Partner Chris Dixon, BitGo CEO Mike Belshe, Blockchain.com CEO Peter Smith, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour, Chainlink CEO Sergey Nazarov, Intercontinental Exchange CEO Jeff Sprecher and Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman, among others.

On Thursday, Selig will host the inaugural meeting of the CFTC’s Innovation Advisory Committee, whose 43 members include several of the executives listed above. Futures Industry Association President and CEO Walt Lukken will chair the committee. The agenda includes crypto regulation, the growing roles of artificial intelligence and agentic finance, and, of course, prediction markets.

Meanwhile, lawmakers and their staff are expected to continue negotiating the Clarity Act’s unresolved issues ahead of a cloture vote scheduled for the afternoon of September 15. DeFi and developer protections, provisions in the Senate Agriculture Committee’s portion of the bill, and ethics rules for government officials all remain outstanding.

Negotiators will also have to contend with continued lobbying from the banking industry for changes to the bill’s stablecoin yield provisions. Despite that push, some of the country’s biggest bank CEOs still support seeing the broader legislation pass, including Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and Citi CEO Jane Fraser.

“We have not given up on pushing to get some improvements made to the bill, but we would like to see a good bill go through,” Fraser told FOX Business in an interview last week. “I think it would be excellent for the system.”

Crypto in America is a newsletter written by Eleanor Terrett. Follow the link to read in full and subscribe.

Attackers have been exploiting a vulnerability in Apple’s macOS Screen Sharing feature to seize control of Macs and quietly install cryptocurrency miners, the Netherlands’ national cyber agency warned this week.

In an updated advisory, the Dutch National Cyber Security Center, or NCSC, said it received reports of active exploitation across multiple systems that had port 5900, used by Screen Sharing, exposed to the internet.

In each case, the attackers gained root access, the highest level of control over a machine, and planted a Monero mining program to harness the victim’s hardware. Monero is a so-called privacy coin, a type of cryptocurrency that cannot be easily traced, unlike transparent networks such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. The agency flagged that public proof-of-concept code for the flaw is now circulating, lowering the bar for would-be attackers.

The bug, tracked as CVE-2026-65400 and rated 7.1 out of 10 in severity, is an authentication flaw rooted in faulty state management during the login process. It let network-based attackers slip through without valid credentials, accepting authentication attempts that should have been rejected.

Apple has since patched the issue, tightening its validation checks in macOS Sequoia 15.7.9, Sonoma 14.8.9 and Tahoe 26.6.1. Users who haven’t updated, particularly anyone with Screen Sharing reachable from the open internet, remain exposed.

Monero has long been the coin of choice for so-called cryptojacking, in which hijacked machines mine crypto for an attacker who pockets the rewards while the victim absorbs the electricity costs and degraded performance. The token’s privacy features make the proceeds far harder to trace than Bitcoin.

The campaign is the latest in a steady stream of schemes turning other people’s devices into crypto profit.

Just this month, Bitdefender found pirated copies of “The Odyssey” laced with the wallet-draining Lumma Stealer. Decrypt has also reported on malware pushed through fake CAPTCHA pages routed via BNB Chain, the SparkKitty operation that hid wallet-stealing code in mobile apps, malicious “anime girl” wallpapers aimed at Steam gamers, and crypto-stealing code smuggled into a booby-trapped Python library.

The NCSC suggests users apply Apple’s updates promptly and avoid leaving Screen Sharing accessible from the internet, which gave attackers their opening in the first place.

Tudor Investment, the macro hedge fund founded by billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, added to its stake in BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF last quarter, reversing a year-long stretch of selling.

The Connecticut firm held 688,529 shares of the iShares Bitcoin Trust, or IBIT, valued at about $22.9 million as of June 30, according to a 13F filing submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Aug. 14.

That marks an 18.9% jump from the 579,083 shares it reported at the end of March, a net addition of 109,446 shares.

The increase is modest in the context of Tudor’s roughly $100 billion-plus in assets, amounting to a fraction of a percent of its reported 13F holdings, and it remains far below the firm’s late-2024 peak of more than 8 million IBIT shares, then worth around $427 million, which it whittled down through 2025.

Still, the reversal is being read as a notable signal from one of Wall Street’s most closely watched traders returning to accumulation.

The filing also showed Tudor reshaping how it holds that exposure. The firm slashed its reported call options tied to IBIT by about 85%, to the equivalent of 148,000 underlying shares from 998,000, while its put position held roughly steady. The shift from options toward direct shares suggests a move away from leveraged bets and toward straightforward spot exposure, though 13F filings don’t disclose strike prices or expirations, leaving the full strategy unclear.

Jones has long championed Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation, a thesis he first laid out in a 2020 market note and has reiterated since, framing the asset as a bet against currency debasement and, at times, as an option on geopolitical instability.

His firm’s buying arrives during a stretch of renewed institutional interest in the ETFs. The funds drew hundreds of millions in inflows over a recent five-day span as expectations for interest-rate hikes cooled. IBIT continues to dominate the category, commanding roughly 49% of U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF assets.

California is one step closer to barring AI chatbots from posing as therapists and making mental health decisions without human oversight.

Introduced on January 21, Senate Bill 903 cleared the Assembly Appropriations Committee in a 13-0 vote on Thursday and was ordered to a third reading. No date has been announced for the Assembly vote.

“AI algorithms are not fit to take over the job of human therapists, who have skills and training that AI is incapable of replicating,” bill author California State Senator Steve Padilla said in a statement when introducing the measure. “We must act and place guardrails that prevent AI algorithms from being deployed in a way that is potentially harmful to patients.”

Also known as the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act, SB 903 would limit AI in psychotherapy to support tasks, bar chatbots from posing as therapists and require clinician oversight and patient consent. It would also protect therapy data while exempting peer support, religious counseling, research and federally approved medical tools.

The Senate passed SB 903 by a 39-0 vote in May. It later cleared two Assembly policy committees by votes of 17-0 and 14-1. If the Assembly approves the amended bill, it would return to the Senate for concurrence before going to California Governor Gavin Newsom for signing.

Critics, including Robert Boykin, executive director of the technology industry group TechNet, said requiring clinician involvement could delay care as counties face shortages of behavioral healthcare workers.

“At a time when every county in California faces a shortage of behavioral healthcare workers, SB 903 still puts a clinician bottleneck in front of the intake and screening tools that help patients reach care faster,” Boykin told the non-profit news outlet CalMatters in a statement.

The news comes amid growing concern over AI’s mental health effects.

In June, an American Psychological Association survey found that 77% of psychologists had patients who used AI for mental health purposes, while researchers at King’s College London, the Protestant University of Applied Sciences and the City University of New York found that chatbots can reinforce delusions through excessive agreement and personalized responses.

“The tendency of AI chatbots to agree with user opinions has been likened to social media echo chambers and, in its most extreme form, to an ‘echo chamber of one,’ where the positive corrective influence of real-life social interactions is absent,” the researchers wrote.

Apple trained its own AI model for China with Alibaba’s help as it races to bring Apple Intelligence to Chinese customers, Reuters reported.

Citing three people familiar with the matter, Reuters said the Cyberspace Administration of China registered Apple’s generative AI service last month, clearing a key regulatory hurdle that has kept OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude unavailable in China.

Alibaba Chairman Joe Tsai confirmed the companies’ arrangement in February 2025.

“They talked to a number of companies in China,” Tsai reportedly said at the time. “In the end they chose to do business with us.”

According to Reuters, Apple plans to pair its model with Alibaba’s Qwen and technology from Baidu. It remains unclear what role each system will play; however, Apple Intelligence, the company’s branded artificial intelligence initiative, is expected to reach Chinese iPhones through an iOS update “in the coming months.”

The news comes after a difficult year for Apple’s AI business.

In January, the company said its next-generation Foundation Models would use Google’s Gemini, instead of a proprietary design, following delays and a weak reception for Apple Intelligence.

In May, Apple agreed to pay $250 million to settle claims that it misled iPhone buyers about AI features that were unavailable at launch. The delay has left Apple trailing Chinese rivals such as Huawei, which already sells phones with AI features.

In June, the company unveiled Siri AI, a rebuilt assistant that can hold conversations, analyze images, and use personal context. Apple said the assistant would enter beta later this year but remain unavailable in China while it worked through regulatory requirements.

Meta Platforms Technologies, the entity that holds Meta’s R&D and hardware intellectual property, published a patent for a camera system that identifies people by face and logs what they do.

The filing describes cameras feeding footage into an AI that tags individuals in frame, detects their actions, and bundles both into media clips served on demand to a phone or headset.

This isn’t a bolt-from-the-blue idea. Meta’s camera hardware has been on faces for years: the Ray-Ban smart glasses, now not so affectionately referred to as “pervert glasses” by much of the internet, built with EssilorLuxottica and first shipped in 2023, record first-person video and let the wearer ask an AI about what it sees.

The same Meta entity behind those frames and the Quest headsets owns this filing, and the drawings show a glasses wearer observing a room of people. Facial recognition would take that hardware from “records what I point at” to “knows and names who’s in the room.”

How the pipeline runs

The patent lays out a four-step loop. Cameras capture live or recorded footage and pass it to the system. A facial-recognition layer scans the frames to flag who is present—not just that a person is there, but which specific person.

A separate action-detection layer runs on top of that, reading movements like picking something up, leaving a room, or a group gathering. Finally, the system bundles its findings into individual media files, each tagged with a person, an action, or both.

What makes it more than a smart doorbell is the assistant layer. The filing frames retrieval as conversational: a connected device can request footage by query, and the system composes the answer from the tagged clips rather than making you scrub. The drawings map both server-side and on-device processing flows, with a natural-language understanding pipeline feeding the clip composer.

The part that draws fire is the capability itself—identifying and logging specific people by face without their active consent. That’s the exact worry Democratic senators raised when they pressed Meta over facial recognition in its smart glasses. As previously reported by Decrypt, the senators’ warned that real-time face ID could expose people to stalking and harassment.

Meta’s own hardware already sits at the center of that fight. Owners of the recently released Ray-Ban glasses from Meta were able to quietly record strangers in public and contractors reviewed private footage. A wearable camera that also names the strangers would widen the gap between Meta’s “helpful assistant” framing and what the tech can do—and the public is already building defenses.

It’s a patent, not a product. The status is “Ready for Examination,” with Patentlyze rating grant likelihood as medium. Meta has filed similar computer-vision work for glasses before, and publication means the idea is on the record, not that the feature is built or approved.

A hacker is selling a trove of French tax records that could expose more than 678,000 people and businesses, including Bitcoin holders, to phishing, identity theft, and targeted attacks.

According to a report by French cybersecurity outlet FrenchBreaches, a hacker is selling records allegedly stolen from France’s tax authority, the DGFiP, during a June breach for several thousand euros.

“More bad news for Bitcoiners living in the leading country for wrench attacks,” Chief Security Officer at Bitcoin security platform Casa Jameson Loop wrote on X. “The French tax authority has been hacked, and 678K records leaked.”

FrenchBreaches said the database contains records on 392,867 individuals and 285,570 professionals, including 26,805 people with reference tax income of at least $116,000, 386 above $1.16 million, and eight above $11.6 million; the hacker is reportedly offering the file for several thousand dollars.

FrenchBreaches said a sample of the leaked data included names, birth details, home and email addresses, phone numbers, income figures, withholding tax rates, family status, dependents, and tax-share information.

“There DGFiP officially confirms the intrusion in its information system,” FrenchBreaches wrote in an update. Stolen credentials were used in late June to access and extract taxpayer data, and the number of people affected remains under investigation, the firm added.

According to FrenchBreaches, the attacker used stolen VPN credentials and an internal search tool to extract names, contact details, tax identifiers, income figures, withholding rates, and family information before officials cut off access.

“A scammer with real tax information and knowing of the existence of an old approach to the DGFiP could, for example, construct a fraudulent message that is much more credible than a simple fake generic email,” FrenchBreaches wrote.

While the FrenchBreaches report focused on the data leak, it comes amid a rise in wrench attacks, in which criminals use violence or threats to steal cryptocurrency.

In July, CertiK reported 52 attacks worldwide during the first half of 2026, including 33 in France. Earlier this month, Chainalysis reported 46 attacks through June, including 30 in France, with more than $30 million stolen.

“Criminals have recognized that crypto holders are high-value targets because they possess wealth in an instantly and irreversibly transferable form,” Chainalysis wrote.