🧶 Colluding Bots

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🔦 Spotlight

🧵 North Korea’s AI-Powered Job Scam Boom. Over the past year, North Korean IT workers infiltrated 320+ companies by faking identities, deepfaking interviews, and using generative AI to ace job applications, ace Slack threads, and juggle multiple remote gigs. The regime pockets up to $600 million annually, funding nukes with U.S. and EU paychecks. As U.S. laptop farms shut down, the fraud is spreading across Europe. AI’s making them harder to spot, and even harder to stop. (More)

🧵 AI Bots Are Learning to Rig Markets. In simulations, trading bots powered by reinforcement learning started fixing prices on their own, no instructions, just instinct. Even with basic programming, they formed cartels, hoarded profits, and sidelined competition. The kicker? In noisy markets, they got dumber and more cooperative. Regulators now face a bizarre new threat: collusion without communication, intent, or even smarts. Sometimes AI doesn’t need to outthink us. Just out-hustle us. (More)

🧵 BP Hits Big in Brazilian Waters. BP just struck its largest oil and gas find in 25 years, off Brazil’s coast, in a field five times the size of Manhattan. The Bumerangue site adds serious muscle to BP’s pivot back toward fossil fuels, with the company holding full rights and promising profits on sweet terms. CO₂ levels might complicate extraction, but the message is clear: green ambitions are cooling, and the drills are heating up. (More)

👀 Next Up

🧵 The Internet Might Break in 4 Days. A six-year-old bug in HTTP/1.1 still haunts millions of websites, letting attackers sneak in rogue requests. It’s called request smuggling, and on August 6, researchers will unveil new attack methods that breach major CDNs. It’s not a drill, one-third of the web is built on brittle, aging code. (More)

🧵 Microsoft Let China Maintain U.S. Systems. After Chinese hackers breached SharePoint, it emerged that Microsoft had long relied on China-based engineers to maintain the same software, even for U.S. agencies. While Microsoft denies they were involved in the hack, lawmakers are pressing for answers. Support is now being relocated, but the damage may already be done. (More)

🧵 Asia Races to Rein In Stablecoins. Trump’s pro-stablecoin stance in the U.S. is jolting Asian regulators into action. South Korea, Hong Kong, and others are fast-tracking local rules as firms like Ant Group eye issuer status. But worries over capital flight and currency control loom large, especially as stablecoins go from fringe to financial infrastructure. (More)

🧵 Xiaomi’s Voice AI Joins the Fray. Xiaomi launched MiDashengLM-7B, an open-source voice model built with Alibaba’s tech for use in cars and smart homes. It’s part of China’s broader push to open-source AI tools and compete globally in speech, vision, and multimodal models beyond just text. (More)

🧵 Trump’s Tariffs Are Paying Off, Literally. U.S. tariff revenue has doubled this year, hitting $152B, even before Trump’s latest hikes land August 7. The cash haul is tempting both parties, but economists warn it’s a regressive tax on consumers. Still, $2T over a decade might be too sweet for D.C. to ditch. (More)

🎭 Backstage

🧵 SAP Hires Big with SmartRecruiters Deal. SAP is buying AI hiring platform SmartRecruiters to beef up its SuccessFactors suite. The goal: smarter, faster recruiting for big enterprise clients like Amazon and Visa. (More)

🧵 Neogov Sold for $3B in PE Shuffle. EQT and CPP Investments are acquiring public-sector HR platform Neogov for $3 billion. The deal highlights a rising trend in private equity: sponsor-to-sponsor sales now outpace corporate buyouts. (More)

🧵 Open AI or Lose the Race. Hugging Face’s CEO warns the U.S. risks falling behind as China surges ahead with open-source AI leadership. (More)

🧵 Apple Plots Its Own ChatGPT Rival. Apple’s building an in-house AI answer engine, possibly to replace Google and reduce reliance on ChatGPT. Siri might finally get smarter. (More)

🧵 Young Shoppers Lean Hard on BNPL. As credit cards get harder to access, young Americans are piling on “buy now, pay later” loans, for groceries, Botox, and Harry Styles tickets alike. (More)

🧵 Taiwan Courts Teens to Save Chips. Facing a birthrate slump and rising chip job vacancies, Taiwan is hosting summer camps to spark global student interest in semiconductors. (More)

🧵 ChatGPT Chats Leaked, Indexed, Archived. Over 100,000 shared ChatGPT convos, some with sensitive info, were indexed by Google and archived forever. OpenAI fixed the SEO glitch, but didn’t ask Archive.org to delete them. (More)