FBI ties TraderTraitor to $6.3B Binance hack, OpenAI cuts target funding after tepid interest

TechmemeNov 2, 2026

Sun, Nov 1

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top news

The FBI attributes the $6.3B Binance hack to North Korea's elite hacking unit TraderTraitor, which the agency has also blamed for the $1.5B Bybit hack in 2025 (Kevin Whitelaw / Bloomberg)

@cz_binance: 12 hours after withdrawals resumed: 2.1% net outflow, with most occurring in the first couple of hours. Over $1 billion in flow, too. 98% choose to stay! Trust isn't earned by what you say in good times. It's earned by what you do in hard times. Thank you for your trust! 🙏🙏🙏🙏 [embedded post]

@rapidresponse47: .@POTUS on the Binance hack: “We're learning about it. We don't know if it's North Korea — but if it is, we'll talk to North Korea about it.”

@hrkrshnn: ...There's interest in bringing back ‘letters of marque and reprisal’ to counteract the cybercrime that North Korea is committing... The problem is that in a modern context, issuing this against a nation-state like North Korea will be seen as an act of war. A lot of the laundering operations are also heavily linked to gray markets inside China. Binance's deep ties in China and the scale will make these operations harder than usual to pull off.

Sources: OpenAI has secured ~$11B in commitments for its latest funding round, less than half its initial $30B target, and expects to raise more in coming weeks (Berber Jin / Wall Street Journal)

@edzitron: OpenAI is also telling investors that it will now try and raise from high net worth individuals and “targeted family offices,” which sounds like pension funds, private credit and venture capital has given all it can or wants.

@jason: Never a bad thing to have the market push back and say “show me more progress” and “can I get a discount?” These companies are legendary, and a little headwinds will only make them stronger Have seen this movie so many times... great founders and teams build through the chop 🌊

@conorsen: Decent chance the Anthropic IPO serves as a year-end liquidity clearing event but it's hard to feel great about them trying to raise up to $100 billion when OpenAI is looking in the couch cushions for money and a Q4 Fed hike looms: [image]

Sources: OpenAI now seeks ~$20B at a $1.25T valuation for its latest round, from $30B at a $1.4T valuation, as some investors cut commitments amid an AI selloff (Financial Times)

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OpenAI plans a post-midterms policy and PR blitz, pushing mandatory “speed limits” for powerful AI and rebranding its data centers as “AI compute campuses” (Axios)

@rob_flaherty: Well yes they tried to spend $100 million to take out Dems and have spent years undermining common sense AI regs all while cozying up to the most corrupt regime in American history. But they are betting that if they say pretty please and rename their data centers

@viacristiano: What happened to “super intelligence factories”?

@gregoryconti19: Love this. “AI compute campus” will clearly prove more unpopular than “data center.” People hate AI. And compute as a noun is a linguistic atrocity.

When talking about local inference, Sam Altman says supply-constrained DRAM is better used in data centers than sitting in PCs and “being used 5% of the time” (Andrew E. Freedman / Tom's Hardware)

DeepSeek open sources Super-Agent, a coding agent research prototype it says proactively monitors developer group chats for coding issues and suggests solutions (Debby Wu / Bloomberg)

Solve: the cost of insuring against debt defaults at hyperscalers Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Oracle has hit its highest level since 2021 (Gunjan Banerji / Wall Street Journal)

Google's data center energy head says space data centers cost up to 100x more than Earth-based ones, and US power supply is sufficient but permits are slow (Amir Efrati / The Information)

Sources: Meta built a prototype humanoid robot with Chinese firm Fourier in three months and is building a second; Meta says it has no plans to sell these units (Jyoti Mann / The Information)

S&P downgraded Meta's outlook from stable to negative, citing high capex and negative free cash flow; META fell 15% in October, its worst month in four years (Jonathan Vanian / CNBC)

John Ternus says Apple doesn't “want to ship AI for AI's sake” and that Tim Cook is “available to help wherever I ask” on policy; Ternus has yet to meet Trump (Steven Levy / Wired)

artificial intelligence

Anthropic says a malicious actor used access to Cursor's marketplace to publish a “tampered” copy of the Claude Code extension, which it didn't build or publish (Felix Rieseberg / @felixrieseberg)

Researchers are paid $5K for reporting a bug to OpenAI that would let attackers run code in logged-in sessions of all who opened the hacker's ChatGPT share link (Swati Khandelwal / The Hacker News)

Tests: chatbots rely on three obscure AI-built voter sites for US midterm answers; Copilot cited the error-prone Ballot Brief in 75% of tests and ChatGPT in 22% (Washington Post)

How AI detectors like Pangram are changing human writing: authors drop em dashes, “not X, but Y” phrasing, and words like “delve”, or add typos, to look human (Morgan Meaker / Bloomberg)

A profile of White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios, an ex-Peter Thiel aide who is among a handful of players steering the Trump administration's AI policy (Harry Lambert / Colossus)

As AI models commoditize, lasting wealth will accrue to those controlling chokepoints like distribution, payment rails, and a stablecoin dollar, not to the labs (The Commanding Heights)

data centers

A look at growing bipartisan opposition to AI data centers in drought-stricken Arizona, where TSMC's chip fabs were welcomed but newer projects face backlash (Gaby Del Valle / The Verge)

Analysis: candidates backing a data center moratorium could win up to 15 of 36 US governors' races on Tuesday, including in Texas, Ohio, Michigan, and New York (Shane Burke / The Information)

M&A

Saudi Aramco acquires a 49% stake in AI startup Humain, contributing ~$2.6B in cash in 2026 plus AI, compute, and digital assets; Saudi Arabia's PIF retains 51% (Dean Takahashi / GamesBeat)

Insurance software maker Guidewire agrees to acquire Hyperexponential, which makes AI-powered insurance underwriting and pricing software, for $1.7B+ in cash (Anzar Mehraj / Reuters)

ServiceNow confirms it acquired Israeli startup Sweep to speed up customers' migrations to its CRM, for an undisclosed price estimated at hundreds of millions (Allon Sinai / CTech)

Enterprise voice AI tools provider Deepgram acquires Daily, which has raised $62M+ and develops open-source voice AI framework Pipecat, for an undisclosed sum (Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch)

funding deals

Shanghai-based NeuroXess, which is developing BCI technology for movement support, speech decoding, and control of external devices, raised a ~$105M Series B (TechNode)

Lumaril, which develops AI software for optimizing industrial production by connecting to existing control systems, raised a $66M Series A at a $400M valuation (Sarah Klearman / Wall Street Journal)

more news

A look at VC-backed glossy magazine Colossus, whose glowing profiles of Zuckerberg and other tech titans win industry praise, while Kara Swisher says it is PR (Andrew Fedorov / The San Francisco Standard)

How IShowSpeed became YouTube's top livestreamer with 62M+ subscribers, as his 24/7 “IRL streams” that last days mingle childlike wonder with teenage mischief (Jon Caramanica / New York Times)

SPONSOR Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Sources: neoclouds CoreWeave, Nebius, and Nscale have effectively been shut out of the bond market in recent weeks as lenders and investors demand tougher terms (Wall Street Journal)

A look at a crude campaign of cyberattacks by Russia-linked hacktivist groups that have caused physical damage in NATO-aligned countries over the past two years (Ryan Gallagher / Bloomberg)

How “get-paid-to” apps like Freecash, briefly a top five App Store app in September, pay users small sums to play games and help publishers find big spenders (John Herrman / New York Magazine)

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