Dario Amodei's wife sought funding from Jeffrey Epstein. Cami Clark, who holds no formal title at Anthropic but serves as the CEO's closest adviser, co-founded a porn company in 2009 and pitched Epstein directly in 2011 to invest. She sent him the film script, followed up a year later for another round, and maintained correspondence with him for two years. Epstein declined. Clark then connected with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who she had previously dated, and brought him in as one of Anthropic's earliest investors. Today she attends Davos and Sun Valley at Amodei's side, meets with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, and helps shape the company's political relationships. Her online presence has been deliberately scrubbed. Anthropic is preparing a $2 trillion IPO. The person with the most influence over its CEO has no title, no accountability, and a past that includes seeking money from a convicted sex offender.

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan says turning down Palantir for a Microsoft promotion was a "$2 to $4 billion mistake." His Stanford fraternity brothers flew him down to meet Peter Thiel, who handed him a $70K check on the spot. Tan's response? "Thank you very much, Mr. Thiel, but I might get promoted to level 60 this year."

The first European Bitcoin Business Report from (bringinxyz) is out and it's a sobering read. When MiCA's transitional period closed on July 1, 92% of European crypto firms lost the right to operate. Only 244 out of roughly 3,167 pre-MiCA firms hold authorization today. The report calls it "the single most useful thing any European business can do this quarter is check whether its provider is on the ESMA register." The leveraged treasury model also took a hit. Strategy sold Bitcoin for the first time since December 2022 and the report concludes "leverage rather than Bitcoin was the variable that broke." Companies that borrowed to buy and owed cash on a schedule got hurt. Operating businesses that earned Bitcoin and kept what they could afford were fine. Meanwhile European investors were quietly buying the drawdown while American investors sold, until geopolitical risk broke the pattern in late May. The report's through-line is that "Bitcoin in Europe is moving from a question of whether to a question of structure" and "the speculative layer had a difficult half; the infrastructure layer had its most consequential half yet."

White House expected to host gathering next Wednesday for cryptocurrency and prediction market officials, POLITICO reports. Traditional finance execs may attend. Unclear if President Trump will join.

Tether just completed its first full financial audit, conducted by KPMG U.S., receiving an unqualified (clean) opinion on its 2025 financial statements. Tether calls it "the largest inaugural financial audit in history." KPMG "physically counted and inspected every individual gold bar held by Tether" rather than relying on custodian reports. The audit covered the full balance sheet, income statement, equity changes, and cash flows. Audited financials show reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion. CEO Paolo Ardoino called it a direct answer to years of doubt. "For years, some detractors said an audit of Tether could not be completed. They said the Company refused to subject itself to the most rigorous scrutiny. We have once again proven them wrong." CFO Simon McWilliams added "we subjected our financial statements to the scrutiny of a Big Four audit" and "we hold ourselves to the standards seen at the world's leading companies." Over 650 million users across emerging markets rely on Tether daily.

Tether Completes the Largest Inaugural Financial Audit in History - Tether.io

KPMG U.S. issues unqualified audit opinion on Tether’s 2025 financial statements – the most positive form of opinion an independent auditor...

MSCI has proposed new index rules that would screen out "non-operating companies" from its Global Investable Market Indexes. Strategy ($MSTR) is one of only three companies that would be deleted under a May 2026 simulation, alongside Metaplanet and Yellow Cake. The proposed methodology screens companies on operating assets, expenses, cash flow, non-operating fair-value changes, and dependence on raising capital to accumulate assets. A company becomes ineligible by failing four out of five tests. Strategy lands in the deletion column of the simulation. This is not final. Consultation closes September 30 with a decision expected October 16. If approved, removal would happen during the November 2026 Index Review. Earlier JPMorgan analysis estimated MSCI-related passive fund outflows of roughly $2.8 billion in forced $MSTR selling, though current market cap levels could put the number lower. Worth noting that MSCI previously tried to create rules specifically targeting "Digital Asset Treasury Companies" and backed off. Now they're back with a broader framework that happens to catch the same companies.

DeepSeek is raising prices on its flagship V4 models by up to 4x, effective August 16. V4-Flash output goes from $0.28 to $1.32/M tokens at peak hours. V4-Pro output jumps from $0.87 to $3.96. Bloomberg reports the price hike comes "ahead of a potential initial public offering." The company faces what SCMP called "challenges to maintain its aggressively low prices amid fierce competition," with AI developer Michael Guo arguing that "new American models including Meta's Muse Spark and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna were competitive with DeepSeek models in both capabilities and price."

CFTC releases topics for its Aug. 20 Innovation Advisory Committee meeting. Agenda focuses on "crypto’s regulatory evolution," efforts for greater clarity, modernizing rules, and frameworks that support innovation while protecting market integrity.

UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank, discloses $83.2 million holding in BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF.

Franklin Templeton just signed on to Matthew Boyer's "Defenders Need the Frontier" open letter, which calls on frontier AI labs to give full-access intelligence to open-source defenders. Ties directly into the Bitcoin Red Team findings. The threat is real and the coalition is growing.

Trezor just disclosed that one of its shipping providers suffered a data breach exposing names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails for ~13,700 customers across 7 countries. Devices and systems are unaffected, but expect a wave of phishing attempts targeting these users.

Trump just signed a memo authorizing private U.S. companies to conduct offensive cyber operations against foreign criminal organizations, under federal oversight. Cyber Letters of Marque, essentially. The U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8) has always allowed Congress to issue letters of marque and reprisal, commissioning private actors to fight enemies on behalf of the state. That 18th century naval warfare concept just got a 21st century upgrade. Vetted companies can now conduct "Cyber Surveillance Operations" and "Cyber Effects Operations" (disruption, degradation, destruction of criminal infrastructure) against transnational criminal orgs. The era of purely defensive cybersecurity is over.

The White House is preparing to bring open-source AI models under its prerelease safety testing framework. Once open models reach frontier capabilities, they'd face a potential 30-day government testing period before public release. The catch: officials know that excluding open models creates a government-approved advantage for closed labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. But including them could slow US open-model development and hand China an edge. The framework is technically voluntary for now, but the competitive pressure to get a government seal of approval could make it mandatory in practice.

Sergey Brin is pushing Google DeepMind toward recursive self-improvement, the point at which AI can improve itself without human intervention. Per Reuters, Brin has been using his influence as co-founder to redirect resources and urge staff to catch up to the frontier after Gemini fell behind Anthropic and OpenAI. The leadership reshuffle last week moved Demis Hassabis to chairman and elevated his deputy Koray Kavukcuoglu to run the lab. The AI race isn't slowing down. It's accelerating.

Goldman Sachs just acquired a $1B bitcoin premium income ETF through its NEOS deal. "Better to leapfrog BlackRock's $BITA vs me too." - Eric Balchunas

The momentum behind giving open-source defenders access to frontier AI models continues to grow. Matthew Boyer's "Defenders Need the Frontier" coalition keeps adding signatories calling on AI labs to stop restricting the people trying to protect critical infrastructure.

Fidelity Digital Assets: 30-day realized volatility near multi-year lows. Spot BTC ETP inflows reaccelerating. Valuation metrics remain constructive. "These periods of compression don't tend to last forever. The key question for investors isn't whether volatility returns, but what happens when it does."

xAI just dropped Grok 4.6.

TFTC 782 w/ (whiteoakpasture): "A pound of that supermarket meat could contain the DNA of thousands of animals from all over the world. That's what you get when you buy industrial ground beef." We discuss: ⚡ Big beef ⚡ Industrial farming ⚡ Farming with low time preference