"A quarter of all iOS devices were vulnerable. You load a website and it breaks out of the browser, grabs your crypto keys off the secure enclave, pulls your photos. As models like Mythos become prevalent, we may see one of those every couple weeks." - Zach Herbert 🇺🇸

Senate passes 99-0 cloture vote on resolution to withhold senators’ pay during any government shutdown.

A Bitcoin holder (cprkrn) just used Claude to recover access to a wallet he'd been locked out of for over 11 years. He bought the bitcoin around 2014 when it was roughly $250 each. At some point he got stoned and changed his password, then could never get back in. He tried what he describes as "7 trillion passwords" over the years. Nothing worked. A few weeks ago he found an old mnemonic from before he changed the password. He thought he was still out of luck because the wallet file had been updated with the new password. As a last resort, he dumped his entire old college computer's files into Claude. Claude found an older version of the wallet file buried in the data. The original mnemonic successfully decrypted it. Claude identified a bug in how the wallet software concatenated the shared key and password, ran btcrecover with the correct algorithm, extracted the private keys, and converted them to WIF format. The address (14VJySbsKraEJbtwk9ivnr1fXs6QuofuE6) received a total of 16.95 BTC over its lifetime. At today's prices, that is worth over $1.7 million. The wallet has since been emptied, meaning he likely moved the funds to a new wallet he controls. He paid around $250 per coin. He recovered them at over $100,000 per coin. An AI model did in one session what 11 years of manual attempts could not.

Anthropic just passed OpenAI in business adoption for the first time. According to Ramp's AI Index, which tracks spending data across more than 50,000 companies, 34.4% of businesses are now paying for Anthropic compared to 32.3% paying for OpenAI. The shift happened fast. A year ago, only 9% of businesses were paying for Anthropic. That number nearly quadrupled in 12 months. OpenAI's share actually declined over the same period. OpenRouter's leaderboard tells a similar story. OpenAI hasn't ranked above Anthropic there since December 2025. Anthropic's strategy was straightforward: start with technical users, focus on execution, nail the developer experience, then expand outward through tools like Cowork. It worked. OpenAI still dominates consumer mindshare with ChatGPT. But in the business market where companies are actually spending money on AI infrastructure, the gap has closed and flipped. The first-mover advantage that seemed insurmountable a year ago is gone. Competition in AI is heating up and the incumbents are no longer guaranteed their position.

"We're dropping these AIs into monolithic operating systems built on top of code from 30 years ago. The attack surfaces are enormous. And the OS has no way to distinguish between a human user and an AI agent." - Zach Herbert 🇺🇸

King Charles: "My ministers will also proceed with the introduction of Digital ID."

"The entire approval layer is all fake. It's just trying to make us feel comfortable." - Zach Herbert 🇺🇸 Every AI permission you approve is theater. It already has full access the moment you connect it.

The (HRF) just announced 10 new grants from its AI for Individual Rights Fund, and some of these projects are exactly what the intersection of Bitcoin, AI, and freedom tech should look like. The Ark: An AI assistant in East Africa where users pay per query with bitcoin over Lightning. No credit cards, no Western bank accounts, no subscriptions. Just sats for service. Freedom Skills: A repository of pre-written code that teaches AI agents to use Bitcoin for uncensorable payments and Nostr for censorship-resistant communication. Giving dissidents agents that can transact and coordinate without centralized services. Open Anonymity Project: A VPN for AI inference. Users can query ChatGPT or Claude anonymously so authoritarian regimes can't compel providers to hand over their data. 0xSero: Compressing state-of-the-art LLMs to run locally on laptops and phones. Private, offline AI for people living under surveillance states. Maple AI: End-to-end encrypted AI assistant. No data stored, no data exposed. The Human Rights Foundation is supporting AI for sovereignty instead of surveillance. See the full list here:

Human Rights Foundation

HRF’s AI Fund Supports 10 Innovative Projects

NEW YORK (May 12, 2026) — The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) is pleased to announce 10 new grants from its AI for Individual Rights Fund. These gi...

CIA whistleblower James Erdman III testifies that Dr. Fauci inserted himself into the 2021 intelligence community review of COVID-19 origins, citing conflicts of interest over NIH-funded research at Wuhan.

A peer-reviewed paper published last year in the journal Bioethics by two professors at Western Michigan University School of Medicine argues that it is "morally obligatory" to genetically engineer ticks to spread alpha-gal syndrome, a permanent condition that makes you violently allergic to red meat. The paper is called "Beneficial Bloodsucking." Their argument: if eating meat is morally wrong, then preventing the spread of a disease that forces people to stop eating meat is also morally wrong. Scientists should gene-edit lone star ticks to enhance their ability to carry alpha-gal syndrome and expand their range into urban environments to infect more people. They call this a "moral bioenhancer." They frame releasing genetically modified disease-carrying ticks as a "vaccination" that only "infringes" on your bodily autonomy rather than "violating" it. The distinction, apparently, is that a tick bit you instead of a government official holding you down. Alpha-gal syndrome is not mild. The CDC estimates up to 450,000 Americans are already affected. Cases have surged 100-fold in the last decade. Symptoms include anaphylaxis. There is no cure. Alpha-gal cases are exploding across the United States. The lone star tick's range is expanding far beyond its historical territory. And two academics at a medical school published a paper arguing this is a good thing that should be accelerated. At what point do we stop treating papers like this as fringe academic exercises and start asking whether anyone is already acting on them?

Rand Paul: "CIA scientists from an early time…were concluding that a lab leak was the most likely hypothesis?" CIA whistleblower James Erdman III: "There were agencies within the IC circulating papers that said that all the conditions were present for a lab leak."

CIA whistleblower James Erdman III testifies that Dr. Fauci influenced the intelligence community’s assessment to downplay the COVID-19 lab-leak theory.

TFTC 745 w/ Zach Herbert 🇺🇸: The entire approval layer in AI right now is fake. It's asking permission for something it already has the capability to do, that's a huge problem." We discuss: ⚡ Fake AI permissions ⚡ Storing AI credentials ⚡ Bitcoin security

The Fraternal Order of Police, the American Bankers Association, former Utah AG Sean Reyes, and Senator Elizabeth Warren are all coordinating to kill Section 604 of the CLARITY Act before Thursday's Senate Banking Committee vote. Section 604 is one provision: if you build open-source software and don't have unilateral control over users' funds, you are not a money transmitter. That's it. Prosecutors can still go after money launderers, drug traffickers, and terror financiers. Chain analysis, block explorers, and subpoenas still work. Nothing changes for law enforcement except the ability to prosecute developers for what their users do, which is the same theory that put the Samourai Wallet developers behind bars. The FOP sent a letter claiming the provision would "strip prosecutors of the statutes used to track and take down criminals using digital assets." Reyes published an op-ed demanding BSA compliance for all crypto "platforms" without ever defining "platform." The ABA sent a letter to bank CEOs urging "immediate engagement" to fight the bill's stablecoin provisions. Over 100 amendments have been filed, including Warren's 40+ proposals and Senator Jack Reed's amendment to ban crypto as legal tender entirely. None of them will answer the obvious question: Is a car manufacturer liable when a drunk driver kills someone? Is a hammer company liable when someone uses their product as a weapon? The principle that tool makers are not liable for what users do with their tools is foundational to free society. It's why we have an open internet. It's why Linux exists. The real tell is the BSA itself. Law enforcement intercepts roughly 0.1% of global money laundering flows through KYC/AML compliance. The system was never designed to stop criminals. It was designed to build a surveillance infrastructure that monitors everyone while mandating the creation of honeypots containing your most sensitive financial data in a world where AI models are finding zero-day vulnerabilities at an exponentially growing clip. Code is speech. The Senate Banking Committee votes Thursday. Call your senator.

eBay rejected GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen's $56 billion offer to buy the company, calling it "neither credible nor attractive." GameStop's market cap is roughly a fraction of the bid it made. The proposal would have required massive leverage from a company that Wall Street analysts and Moody's both said lacked the financing to pull it off. Moody's called the deal "credit negative" for eBay due to the implied debt load. eBay's board listed six reasons for the rejection, with financing doubts at the top of the list.

The DOJ just forced PayPal into a $30 million settlement over its "Economic Opportunity Fund," a 2020 program that made $530 million in preferential loans available exclusively to minority-owned businesses. The problem is straightforward: the Equal Credit Protection Act says you can't discriminate on the basis of race when lending money. Doesn't matter if you call it DEI, economic opportunity, or social impact. Selecting who gets capital based on skin color is illegal. As part of the settlement, PayPal will waive processing fees on up to $1 billion in transactions for veteran-owned businesses and companies certified in farming, manufacturing, or technology. AAG Harmeet Dhillon's message to other companies still running these programs: "There's no finding of prior discrimination that would justify current discrimination against American small businesses or consumers." This is exactly why permissionless systems matter. When access to financial services is gated by intermediaries who decide which businesses "deserve" capital based on identity categories, the system is broken by design. Bitcoin doesn't care who you are, what you look like, or what box you check. The protocol treats every participant the same. No committee decides you're the wrong demographic for a loan. PayPal had to be sued to stop discriminating. Bitcoin never started.

US Undersecretary Caleb Orr met with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele to discuss how El Salvador's current investment landscape is creating opportunities for American companies to invest and compete in the country.

The Fraternal Order of Police, the largest law enforcement organization in the United States with over 382,000 members, is opposing a key provision of the CLARITY Act. In a letter to Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott and Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren, FOP National President Patrick Yoes said the organization "strongly opposes" Section 604 of the bill, which would exempt non-controlling developers and providers from being classified as money transmitting businesses. The FOP argues this change would "strip prosecutors and law enforcement of the statutes used to track and take down criminals using digital assets to commit crimes" and would make it "even easier" for criminal organizations to profit from illegal activity. This is exactly the provision that matters most for open-source developers. The same section the FOP wants removed is the one that would protect developers from being prosecuted for what their users do with their software. Without it, building privacy tools, non-custodial wallets, or mixing software could make a developer criminally liable under money transmission laws, regardless of whether they ever touched a user's funds. The FOP says it supports the right to trade digital assets. It just wants to make sure law enforcement keeps the ability to prosecute the people who build the tools those assets move through. That distinction is the entire fight.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at CMU 2026: “The answer is not to fear the future. The answer is to guide it wisely.”

Sam Altman took the stand today in the Musk v. OpenAI trial and described what he called a "particularly hair-raising moment" from the early days of the company. During board negotiations in 2017, Altman testified that he opposed Musk becoming CEO or majority stakeholder of any for-profit arm of OpenAI. When other co-founders asked Musk what would happen if he had majority control and then died, Musk responded: "I haven't thought about it a ton, but maybe control would pass to my children." Altman told the jury he believed that if Musk had gotten control of OpenAI, he never would have relinquished it. He said OpenAI did not create a for-profit arm while Musk was still involved. Musk left the board in 2018. Altman also testified that Musk told the team they had "a 0%, not 1% chance of success." After Musk stopped funding OpenAI, Altman said he found other donors including Reid Hoffman and Dustin Moskovitz. No donor besides Musk has ever complained that OpenAI deviated from its mission, according to Altman. Musk sued Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman in 2024, alleging they are enriching themselves at the expense of what was supposed to be a charity. Altman and Brockman say the lawsuit is harassment of a competitor after Musk launched xAI in 2023. Closing statements are scheduled for Thursday.