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Arthur Hayes: AI "Safety First" is essentially a destruction of computing power demand; the U.S. government's ultimate choice in all scenarios is to print money, which ultimately benefits Bitcoin

Arthur Hayes published a new long article titled "Safety First," with the core argument that the claims of "safety first" by Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX, which lead to a slowdown in AGI development, are not out of concern for human welfare but rather due to economic realities. The market does not want AI; it wants AI at "Chinese prices," meaning it needs intelligence that is 100 times cheaper than what is currently available. Hayes points out that "safety first" essentially destroys the demand for computing power. If the spending on training new models decreases and laboratories shift towards efficiency optimization, customers will spend less on computing power. The three major AI laboratories do not generate any profits, and their demand for computing power supports over $10 trillion in investment-grade debt and hundreds of billions in low-quality debt, which rely on profitable tech companies like Nvidia, Broadcom, Google, and Microsoft for off-balance-sheet endorsements. The real backstop is the holders of insurance policies in the United States.Hayes cites an analysis by Nick Nameth that reveals a "self-insurance scam": private equity giants (such as Apollo, KKR, Brookfield, etc.) acquire insurance companies, stuffing AI data center debt and SaaS private credit impacted by AI into insurance assets, and then provide false endorsements with minimal capital through affiliated self-insurance reinsurance companies. Nameth estimates that the total amount of these false reinsurance assets reaches $1.54 trillion. Once the AI data center debt is downgraded by rating agencies due to insufficient demand for computing power, insurance companies will be forced to add capital, while the affiliated reinsurance companies will be unable to pay, leading to insolvency for the insurance companies. In most states in the U.S., the insurance protection limit is only $250,000 to $300,000, and existing insurance companies only pay into the protection fund afterward, which encourages all parties involved to maximize risk-taking. When AIG was bailed out in 2008, TARP funds ultimately flowed to Goldman Sachs and led to record bonuses, while the general public only received foreclosure notices; Hayes believes this scenario will repeat itself.For cryptocurrency investors, the conclusion is a win-win situation. If the U.S. government chooses to become the "last buyer of computing power," it will print money in the name of national security to fund unproductive economic goods, driving up financial speculation and Bitcoin prices; if the government chooses to bail out insolvent insurance companies, it will also need to print money to cover bad AI debts, increasing the money supply and pushing up Bitcoin. Hayes specifically points out that the Federal Reserve voted unanimously last week to raise interest rates by 25 basis points, and RMP bond purchases have stopped since August 14, but commercial banks have taken over to create over $100 billion in currency, and the interest rate hike allows banks to earn an additional $7.5 billion in excess reserve interest each year. This money will be used to expand loans and market speculation, and the net effect remains stimulative. The fluctuations in the cryptocurrency market, which saw a slight increase at the end of August, are about to end, the supply of dollars will continue to grow, and Bitcoin and some selected altcoins will rise. Hayes also described this situation as "incredibly wonderful," stating that the government will not allow the free market to stop building AI data centers, there will be an oversupply of spot computing power, the usage of AI agents will increase, and the surge in money printing will drive investors to chase cryptocurrency assets.

first_img Fake AI trading robot tutorial deceives 224 victims into deploying malicious contracts

On September 14, blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs released a report revealing that fake YouTube tutorials lured 224 victims into deploying and funding malicious smart contracts under the guise of building AI-based crypto arbitrage bots, resulting in the theft of 274.6 ETH. TRM identified a total of 234 contracts deployed by the victims, with funds ultimately flowing into six collection addresses controlled by the operators. The stolen ETH was worth approximately $517,000 at the time of the transfer, with a median loss of 1 ETH per incident.Unlike common wallet theft attacks, this scam did not involve phishing links, spoofed domains, or malicious authorization prompts. Victims chose the tutorials themselves, copied the code, deployed the contracts, and funded them from their own wallets, with each step authorized by the victims themselves. As a result, wallet security warnings and phishing blacklists could not be triggered. TRM discovered nine nearly identical YouTube tutorials disguised as different creators, using AI-generated virtual hosts and voiceovers, promising to build fully automated crypto trading bots with Claude, and guiding victims to a compiler website controlled by the operators, some of which mimicked the commonly used Remix development environment.In one variant analyzed by TRM, a backend script would discard the source code pasted by the victims and retrieve another contract from the operator's server, with the clean code displayed on the screen never being on-chain. The replaced contract accepted deposits and transferred any balance over 0.05 ETH to the operators when the victims pressed Start or Withdraw, with no arbitrage logic or AI functionality included in the contract.

first_img King Charles convenes executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA, and others to discuss AI safety

On September 17, King Charles III of the United Kingdom convened executives from Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind for an AI safety summit at Dumfries House in East Ayrshire, Scotland, calling for artificial intelligence to be "firmly placed on the track of serving humanity." The summit was jointly organized by the Ditchley Foundation and three of the King's charitable organizations, with UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan also in attendance. Buckingham Palace stated that the representatives discussed whether the industry and government could reach a consensus on a set of common guiding principles for AI development, but no binding agreements were announced.A few days before the summit, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a lengthy article titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," advocating that the industry should deliberately slow down the pace of model capability enhancement. OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk both publicly expressed their agreement within a day. In the article, Amodei pointed out that AI systems are increasingly capable of improving their own successors and mentioned an incident involving an OpenAI agent escape. OpenAI President Greg Brockman confirmed that the incident had forced the company to delay multiple releases and restructure its model development and monitoring processes, while advocating that the slowdown should only apply to laboratories building the most powerful frontier systems. On the first trading day after the news was released, Nvidia briefly fell by 3%, Intel dropped over 5%, and AMD declined by about 6%.

first_img Security personnel at California technology company plan to strike this week

According to Business Insider, security staff providing services to tech companies such as Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI in California plan to strike this week, which may lead some tech companies to close their offices and require employees to work from home. On Tuesday morning local time, security personnel submitted a 72-hour strike notice to the relevant companies, planning to refuse to participate in work shifts starting from 4:30 AM on Friday.The United Service Workers West Union stated that the security personnel who may participate in the strike are responsible for guarding the offices of companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Nvidia. Currently, tech companies in the Bay Area have not announced any office closures due to the strike. This labor dispute involves several security service companies, including Allied Universal, Securitas, and GardaWorld, with the union representing approximately 14,000 security personnel in California. Negotiations over a new labor contract have been ongoing for several months.Security personnel are demanding higher wages, improved healthcare benefits, and better job training. A union spokesperson stated that both parties will continue negotiations on Wednesday and Thursday of this week, and as of Tuesday, the strike has not been finalized. The union plans to organize a march for security personnel in downtown San Francisco on Tuesday, ending at the Salesforce Tower, where Salesforce's headquarters is located. On September 3, security personnel voted to authorize the strike at a rally in San Francisco.

Analyst: The AI competition in the United States is difficult to "slow down," and safety regulations may instead reinforce the advantages of leading laboratories

Analyst Jukan from Citrini forwarded a research report from Tianfeng Securities and stated that the U.S. government needs to maintain its leading position in the AI field, making it difficult to truly stop once it enters the AI race. Jukan believes that the recent calls from Anthropic and OpenAI to slow down AI development should not be viewed solely as safety initiatives; there may also be multiple considerations behind it, such as the inability to slow down competition and consolidating leading advantages through safety regulation.Jukan further pointed out that the related "AI slowdown" calls seemingly stem from the challenges of safety testing, operational monitoring, and third-party validation keeping pace with the speed of model iteration. In the short term, this may suppress market sentiment in the AI sector and lower market expectations for the next generation of models; another possibility is that the industry remains optimistic about AI in the long term but wishes to delay the next round of significant R&D investment, prioritizing the commercialization of existing products and reducing infrastructure and capital expenditure pressures. He believes that the AI race is essentially similar to a "prisoner's dilemma," where all parties wish to slow down, but no one dares to be the first to stop, or they may lose technological, customer, and financing advantages.Jukan also mentioned that Anthropic and OpenAI have recently emphasized recursive self-improvement (RSI), which is related to AI already assisting in the development of the next generation of AI and the acceleration of model iteration speed; at the same time, it has been reported that during internal testing at OpenAI, incidents occurred where agents collaborated to escape the sandbox and intrude into Hugging Face's production servers. Jukan believes that as the release of models incurs expensive evaluation, certification, and ongoing audit costs, large laboratories are better able to bear these fixed costs, while smaller teams may face higher entry barriers as a result; if leading laboratories further participate in the formulation of evaluation standards, industry barriers may continue to rise.

first_img Cronos rolled back the blockchain to recover 111 million USD in stolen funds

Cronos confirmed in a post-mortem report that the attack on the lending platform Tectonic on August 30 involved $120.4 million in borrowing activities. The validators made the "difficult decision" to roll back the on-chain history, successfully recovering approximately $111.2 million (about 92% of the affected funds), while about $9.19 million flowed out before the network was paused and could not be recovered. The attacker leveraged weak DEX liquidity to inflate the price of Tectonic token TONIC by about 100 times within minutes and borrowed $120.4 million through a single transaction across nine markets. The validators paused the network about two hours later, restoring the chain to the last block before the suspicious activity, with block production resuming approximately 11 hours after the attack. The rollback involved reversing 1 hour and 54 minutes of on-chain history, totaling 10,961 blocks, with all transactions within that window being canceled, regardless of whether they were involved in the attack. Cronos stated that the alternative would have been to restart the network without restoring the previous state, which would have left the stolen assets in the hands of the attacker. This rollback closely followed Harmony's announcement of a similar plan, while Flow abandoned its rollback proposal last December due to community opposition. The validator cap for Cronos is 100, which facilitated quick coordination for the pause and restart, but also indicated that the network's finality in emergencies depends on validator consensus.
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