employees

According to sources, Google co-founder Sergey Brin has urged employees in recent months to focus on bringing the Gemini model back to the forefront of artificial intelligence.

According to a report by businesswire, Strategy announced its participation in the "Invest in America Commitment" program, which will contribute $250 annually to the Trump account (i.e., 530A account) for each eligible American employee's minor child, regardless of the child's birth year.For children born on or after January 1, 2025, there will also be an additional one-time matching contribution of $1,000 in seed funding provided by the U.S. government.Phong Le, President and CEO of Strategy, stated, "The Trump account and the Invest in America initiative can build a stronger financial future for American children. The company will match the government's initial $1,000 contribution and provide additional annual contributions for eligible employees' children.These accounts can encourage financial education, long-term thinking, and the cultivation of a savings and investment culture from a young age—these goals are highly consistent with Strategy's values and optimistic vision for the future."The Trump account is a tax-deferred investment account for minors under the age of 18, with investment targets being low-fee U.S. index funds. Children born between 2025 and 2028 can receive a one-time $1,000 seed funding from the U.S. Treasury upon registration. Strategy's program will launch after the Treasury issues final guidance and the employer contribution infrastructure is online. The company has announced the plan to employees during internal quarterly meetings and will share registration details with eligible employees before the launch.

According to Jinshi reports, Apple is opening a lottery registration for U.S. retail employees who wish to participate in the offline launch event, which is expected to take place in the first half of September. Internal memos indicate that participating employees will assist in organizing queues, registering visitors, welcoming attendees, and supporting the security team.Historically, Apple's iPhone launch events are usually scheduled for the second Tuesday or Wednesday of the month.

According to The New York Times, OpenAI founders and employees collectively hold 48.93% of the company's shares, which is currently valued at $852 billion.

According to Axios, despite AI labs offering huge salaries, top titles, and abundant computing resources to compete for top talent, the issue of talent loss remains prominent. Data shows that over 400 former Apple employees are currently working at OpenAI, and Apple has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing it of using Apple's internal code names to extract confidential information obtained from potential applicants.The latest case is that Lilian Weng, co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab, returned to OpenAI just days after leaving, where she will be responsible for recursive self-improvement research. She is the fourth co-founder to leave the lab in the past year. Meanwhile, Google has also seen two well-known researchers switch jobs recently—Noam Shazeer returned to OpenAI, and Nobel Prize-winning chemist John Jumper joined Anthropic. Meta is also facing the issue of high-priced talent rapidly leaving. Reports cite insiders saying that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has expressed concerns about the new trend of hiring talent "for money rather than mission."

According to Jinshi reports, Apple (AAPL.O) has applied to a U.S. judge for a preliminary injunction to prohibit two former employees and OpenAI from accessing, obtaining, using, or disclosing so-called confidential information, while the company continues to advance its lawsuit regarding trade secrets.Apple sued OpenAI and two former employees currently working at OpenAI last month, accusing them of stealing Apple's trade secrets to assist OpenAI in entering the consumer hardware market.

According to Bits Media, Russian law enforcement conducted a series of searches at a cryptocurrency exchange office located in the Federal Eastern Tower of the Moscow City Business Center. The police stated that the searches are related to a theft case involving 144 million rubles, with the funds suspected to have been circulated through related exchanges. They are currently tracking the transactions and investigating whether the office staff are involved.During the investigation, dozens of employees were detained, and a Moscow court has ordered pre-trial detention for eight of the defendants, while the procedural status of the remaining detainees has not been disclosed. The office temporarily ceased operations during the searches.

According to Sandmark, documents and recordings obtained show that Pump.fun laid off employees two months before the unlocking of employee tokens, causing at least one former employee to miss out on a PUMP token allocation valued in the seven figures at current prices.The layoffs occurred in early April, while the affected employees were supposed to start receiving token unlocks two months later (in June). Employees had signed a token agreement in June 2025, with a quarter of the allocation set to unlock a year later. Co-founder Noah Tweedale stated in an internal meeting recording that the reason for the layoffs was the company's "rapid expansion."Former employees reported a second round of layoffs in mid-July, with the company having laid off over 40 people in the past two months. One employee claimed they were laid off the day before the token unlock, but Sandmark could not independently verify these claims.Pump.fun operates in the UK under the name Baton Corporation Ltd, although it has blocked UK users since December 2024 (following a warning from the UK FCA that it may be providing financial services without a license) and is still on the regulatory warning list. In 2024, the company experienced an employee embezzlement incident involving the misappropriation of approximately $2 million, with the involved party sentenced to six years in prison. According to Companies House data, the company's latest annual report is overdue.

According to Cointelegraph, Binance's Chief Security Officer Jimmy Su stated that Binance conducts red team testing internally every month to assess the overall security awareness of employees.Testing scenarios include impersonating recruiters, sending free meeting invitations, and enticing employees to submit personal information. Employees who fail the test must undergo corrective training, and the test results will also be included in performance evaluations; if an employee fails severely multiple times, they may face termination.

According to Business Insider, Alphabet's total number of employees increased from 187,103 to 198,933 in the year ending June 30, 2026, with a net increase of 11,830 people. Among them, the increase in Q2 2026 alone exceeded 4,000 people, accounting for more than one-third of the total net increase over the past year, marking the largest quarterly increase in recent years. The company's revenue during the same period was $119.8 billion, a year-on-year increase of 24%.Previously, Google laid off 12,000 employees in a one-time action in 2023, followed by several rounds of small-scale adjustments. Last week, about 4,500 employees jointly submitted a petition to CEO Sundar Pichai, requesting stronger layoff protections. Alphabet stated that it will prioritize the long-term development of AI and has raised its capital expenditure expectations for 2026 to $195 billion to $205 billion, citing that the demand for AI infrastructure continues to exceed available capacity.

According to Cointelegraph, Rob Witoff, head of the Coinbase platform, stated in an interview that currently 95% to 100% of the company's code is assisted by AI or large language models, a significant increase from 40% in February of this year.Witoff pointed out that the company has achieved daily use of AI by all employees, and each engineer is running an average of 5 to 10 AI agents simultaneously, with the overall work efficiency equivalent to about 1,200 full-time developers.This transformation has driven organizational adjustments at Coinbase, forming smaller, more streamlined, and experienced teams; projects that previously required more than 10 people can now be completed by just 2 to 3 people. This has also become one of the core reasons for Coinbase's 14% layoffs in May of this year. Coinbase predicts that by 2030, the workload of AI agents is expected to reach the equivalent of 100,000 employees.

The economic laboratory of the fintech company Ramp has released a new version of the Ramp AI Adoption Index report. Based on spending data analysis from over 70,000 U.S. enterprise customers, the adoption rate of enterprise-level AI for Anthropic increased by 2.5 percentage points to 41%, officially surpassing OpenAI, which slightly decreased to 39.5%, establishing a leading position in the field of commercial applications.The report focuses on analyzing the spending trends of top enterprises that "deeply adopt AI." Data shows that the top 1% of enterprises spend as much as $7,449 per employee per month on AI, with this figure still achieving a 14.1% increase last month; in contrast, the top 10% of enterprises have an average monthly spending of $611 per employee, while the median enterprise spends only $11.38 (approximately equal to the cost of a single basic subscription).Additionally, the research points out that enterprises that deeply apply AI do not experience "vendor lock-in" and generally adopt multiple cutting-edge large models, open-source platforms, and vertical AI solutions simultaneously. Although enterprises are beginning to experiment with more cost-effective models (such as DeepSeek) in the face of cost pressures, overall AI spending remains on an upward trend.

According to the Financial Times, informed sources revealed that JPMorgan Chase has stopped its Hong Kong employees from accessing Anthropic's AI models. Currently, the bank's Hong Kong employees can no longer call models like Claude from the internally approved large language model dropdown list.It is reported that this decision is primarily based on the specific wording of the usage terms in the licensing agreement between JPMorgan Chase and Anthropic. According to the relevant terms, the usage scope of Anthropic's models excludes the Greater China region (including Hong Kong). Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs also implemented similar access restrictions for its Hong Kong employees based on a strict interpretation of these terms.Although international institutions previously could usually circumvent regional restrictions by signing global contracts and hosting data overseas, compliance actions among Wall Street banks are tightening as the U.S. government and regulatory agencies increasingly scrutinize the overseas use of AI technology. Anthropic has previously made it clear that its Claude model has never been officially "supported" in Hong Kong.

ChainCatcher, regarding the incident of OKX employees leaving to join Binance, OKX founder Star tweeted that over the past few years, many excellent OKX colleagues have joined other companies in the industry, including Yuki. We are proud of them for gaining recognition and favor from competitors, and we sincerely wish them success in their future development.OKX has hundreds of former employees from BN, including regional CEOs, product leaders, technical leaders, and many outstanding business and functional colleagues. They have brought valuable experience, perspectives, and input to OKX and have made significant contributions to the company's development. More importantly, they have deeply integrated with the OKX team and become part of OKX's culture and success. We have never treated this matter as marketing material to hype up.Talent mobility within the industry is a normal phenomenon and a sign of industry maturity. What truly matters is not where people come from, but whether they can continuously create value. Of course, for the very few who violate laws, business integrity, and professional ethics, we will take resolute measures and legally protect the company's legitimate rights and interests."A company that constantly talks about its vision, where the founder even in writing a book does not forget to heavily belittle former employees including the former CFO and former Asia head, is often the one with the least vision," Star said.Previously, according to RootData, former VIP account manager of OKX Yuki left to join Binance as a key account manager, sparking discussions among many crypto KOLs such as KuaiDong.

Alliance co-founder Imran Khan posted on X: "There is a project team within Alliance composed of former team members from Anthropic, exploring a very interesting entry point that focuses on the intersection of cryptocurrency, trading, and AI. The imaginative space and potential market in this direction are much larger than they appear on the surface. We will share more details soon, stay tuned."

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen posted on platform X that Bitget has purchased enterprise-level Claude access for all employees, available for everyone, covering 2,167 employees, with a cost of $200 per person per month.Gracy Chen stated, "This move is not due to external demands, but based on observations of productivity improvements after employees actually use AI tools, aiming to ensure that team members do not fall behind in the wave of AI applications."

According to Bloomberg, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has canceled its planned headquarters relocation and will renew its lease at the current location for five years to accommodate up to 100 new employees in response to industry growth and regulatory demands. The CFTC is striving to become the primary regulatory body for prediction markets, and if the Clarity Act is passed, establishing its status as the main regulator of the cryptocurrency industry, the workload is expected to increase further.Meanwhile, the CFTC recently offered a deferred resignation plan to about 50 employees and has provided buyouts to some long-term employees. Data from the Federal Personnel Management Agency shows that the agency's workforce has decreased by nearly 25% since 2024, leaving only 553 employees as of April. The CFTC is seeking to increase its total number of employees to 650 in its budget request for fiscal year 2027. Additionally, under a White House executive order, 25 positions (including policy advisors and senior legal advisors) have been reclassified, removing civil service protections, allowing these employees to be dismissed at any time.

According to Cryptonomist, Standard Chartered announced a large-scale restructuring plan on Tuesday, aiming to cut more than 7,000 jobs by 2030, which accounts for 15% of the total workforce in the company's functional departments.Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters described the layoffs as a technology-driven long-term transformation, focusing on replacing low-value-added jobs with automation and artificial intelligence, rather than merely reducing costs. The report states that the plan primarily affects back-office support departments in locations such as Chennai and Bangalore in India, Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, and Poland.