Mistral AI, the French company behind AI assistant Le Chat and several foundational models, is officially regarded as one of France’s most promising tech startups and is arguably the only European company that could compete with OpenAI. But compared to its $6 billion valuation, its global market share is still relatively low. However, the recent […]
Read more This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Meet Cathy Tie, Bride of “China’s Frankenstein”
Since the Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui was released from prison in 2022, he has sought to make a scientific comeback and to repair his reputation after a three-year incarceration for illegally creating the world’s first gene-edited children.
One area of visible success on his come-back trail has been his X.com account. Over the past few years, his account has evolved from sharing mundane images of his daily life to spreading outrageous, antagonistic messages. This has left observers unsure what to take seriously.
Last month, in reply to MIT Technology Review’s questions about who was responsible for the account’s transformation into a font of clever memes, He emailed us back: “It’s thanks to Cathy Tie.”
Tie is no stranger to the public spotlight. A former Thiel fellow, she is a partner in a project which promised to create glow-in-the-dark pets. Over the past several weeks, though, the Canadian entrepreneur has started to get more and more attention as the new wife to He Jiankui. Read the full story.
—Caiwei Chen & Antonio Regalado
Anthropic’s new hybrid AI model can work on tasks autonomously for hours at a time
Anthropic has announced two new AI models that it claims represent a major step toward making AI agents truly useful.
AI agents trained on Claude Opus 4, the company’s most powerful model to date, raise the bar for what such systems are capable of by tackling difficult tasks over extended periods of time and responding more usefully to user instructions, the company says.
They’ve achieved some impressive results: Opus 4 created a guide for the video game Pokémon Red while playing it for more than 24 hours straight. The company’s previously most powerful model was capable of playing for just 45 minutes. Read the full story.
—Rhiannon Williams
The FDA plans to limit access to covid vaccines. Here’s why that’s not all bad.
This week, two new leaders at the US Food and Drug Administration announced plans to limit access to covid vaccines, arguing that there is not much evidence to support the value of annual shots in healthy people. New vaccines will be made available only to the people who are most vulnerable—namely, those over 65 and others with conditions that make them more susceptible to severe disease.
The plans have been met with fear and anger in some quarters. But they weren’t all that shocking to me. In the UK, where I live, covid boosters have been offered only to vulnerable groups for a while now. And the immunologists I spoke to agree: The plans make sense. Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Thousands of Americans are facing extreme weather
But help from the federal government may never arrive. (Slate $)
+ States struck by tornadoes and floods are begging the Trump administration for aid. (Scientific American $)
2 Spain’s grid operator has accused power plants of not doing their job
It claims they failed to control the system’s voltage shortly before the blackout. (FT $)
+ Did solar power cause Spain’s blackout? (MIT Technology Review)
3 Google is facing a DoJ probe over its AI chatbot deal
It will probe whether Google’s deal with Character.AI gives it an unfair advantage. (Bloomberg $)
+ It may not lead to enforcement action, though. (Reuters)
4 DOGE isn’t bad news for everyone
These smaller US government IT contractors say it’s good for business—for now. (WSJ $)
+ It appears that DOGE used a Meta AI model to review staff emails, not Grok. (Wired $)
+ Can AI help DOGE slash government budgets? It’s complex. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Google’s new shopping tool adds breasts to minors
Try it On distorts uploaded photos to clothing models’ proportions, even when they’re children. (The Atlantic $)
+ It feels like this could have easily been avoided. (Axios)
+ An AI companion site is hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Apple is reportedly planning a smart glasses product launch
By the end of next year. (Bloomberg $)
+ It’s playing catchup with Meta and Google, among others. (Engadget)
+ What’s next for smart glasses. (MIT Technology Review)
7 What it’s like to live in Elon Musk’s corner of Texas
Complete with an ugly bust and furious locals. (The Guardian)
+ West Lake Hills residents are pushing back against his giant fences. (Architectural Digest $)
8 Our solar system may contain a hidden ninth planet
A possible dwarf planet has been spotted orbiting beyond Neptune. (New Scientist $)
9 Wikipedia does swag now
How else will you let everyone know you love the open web? (Fast Company $)
10 One of the last good apps is shutting down
Mozilla is closing Pocket, its article-saving app, and the internet is worse for it. (404 Media)
+ Parent company Mozilla said the way people use the web has changed. (The Verge)
Quote of the day
“This is like the Mount Everest of corruption.”
—Senator Jeff Merkley protests outside Donald Trump’s exclusive dinner for the highest-paying customers of his personal cryptocurrency, the New York Times reports.
One more thing
The iPad was meant to revolutionize accessibility. What happened?
On April 3, 2010, Steve Jobs debuted the iPad. What for most people was basically a more convenient form factor was something far more consequential for non-speakers: a life-changing revolution in access to a portable, powerful communication device for just a few hundred dollars.
But a piece of hardware, however impressively designed and engineered, is only as valuable as what a person can do with it. After the iPad’s release, the flood of new, easy-to-use augmentative and alternative communication apps that users were in desperate need of never came.
Today, there are only around half a dozen apps, each retailing for $200 to $300, that ask users to select from menus of crudely drawn icons to produce text and synthesized speech. It’s a depressingly slow pace of development for such an essential human function. Read the full story.
—Julie Kim
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ Dive into the physics behind the delicate frills of Tête de Moine cheese shavings.
+ Our capacity to feel moved by music is at least partly inherited, apparently.
+ Kermit the frog has delivered a moving commencement address at the University of Maryland.
+ It’s a question as old as time: are clowns sexy? 
This week, two new leaders at the US Food and Drug Administration announced plans to limit access to covid vaccines, arguing that there is not much evidence to support the value of annual shots in healthy people. New vaccines will be made available only to the people who are most vulnerable—namely, those over 65 and others with conditions that make them more susceptible to severe disease.
Anyone else will have to wait. Covid vaccines will soon be required to go through more rigorous trials to ensure that they really are beneficial for people who aren’t at high risk.
The plans have been met with fear and anger in some quarters. But they weren’t all that shocking to me. In the UK, where I live, covid boosters have been offered only to vulnerable groups for a while now. And the immunologists I spoke to agree: The plans make sense.
They are still controversial. Covid hasn’t gone away. And while most people are thought to have some level of immunity to the virus, some of us still stand to get very sick if infected. The threat of long covid lingers, too. Given that people respond differently to both the virus and the vaccine, perhaps individuals should be able to choose whether they get a vaccine or not.
I should start by saying that covid vaccines have been a remarkable success story. The drugs were developed at record-breaking speed—they were given to people in clinical trials just 69 days after the virus had been identified. They are, on the whole, very safe. And they work remarkably well. They have saved millions of lives. And they rescued many of us from lockdowns.
But while many of us have benefited hugely from covid vaccinations in the past, there are questions over how useful continuing annual booster doses might be. That’s the argument being made by FDA head Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad, director of the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.
Both men have been critical of the FDA in the past. Makary has long been accused of downplaying the benefits of covid vaccines. He made incorrect assumptions about the coronavirus responsible for covid-19 and predicted that the disease would be “mostly gone” by April 2021. Most recently, he also testified in Congress that the theory that the virus came from a lab in China was a “no-brainer.” (The strongest evidence suggests the virus jumped from animals to humans in a market in Wuhan.)
Prasad has said “the FDA is a failure” and has called annual covid boosters “a public health disaster the likes of which we’ve never seen before,” because of a perceived lack of clinical evidence to support their use.
Makary and Prasad’s plans, which were outlined in the New England Journal of Medicine on Tuesday, don’t include such inflammatory language or unfounded claims, thankfully. In fact, they seem pretty measured: Annual covid booster shots will continue to be approved for vulnerable people but will have to be shown to benefit others before people outside the approved groups can access them.
There are still concerns being raised, though. Let’s address a few of the biggest ones.
Shouldn’t I get an annual covid booster alongside my flu vaccine?
At the moment, a lot of people in the US opt to get a covid vaccination around the time they get their annual flu jab. Each year, a flu vaccine is developed to protect against what scientists predict will be the dominant strain of virus circulating come flu season, which tends to run from October through March.
But covid doesn’t seem to stick to the same seasonal patterns, says Susanna Dunachie, a clinical doctor and professor of infectious diseases at the University of Oxford in the UK. “We seem to be getting waves of covid year-round,” she says.
And an annual shot might not offer the best protection against covid anyway, says Fikadu Tafesse, an immunologist and virologist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. His own research suggests that leaving more than a year between booster doses could enhance their effectiveness. “One year is really a random time,” he says. It might be better to wait five or 10 years between doses instead, he adds.
“If you are at risk [of a serious covid infection] you may actually need [a dose] every six months,” says Tafesse. “But for healthy individuals, it’s a very different conversation.”
What about children—shouldn’t we be protecting them?
There are reports that pediatricians are concerned about the impact on children, some of whom can develop serious cases of covid. “If we have safe and effective vaccines that prevent illness, we think they should be available,” James Campbell, vice chair of the committee on infectious diseases at the American Academy of Pediatrics, told STAT.
This question has been on my mind for a while. My two young children, who were born in the UK, have never been eligible for a covid vaccine in this country. I found this incredibly distressing when the virus started tearing through child-care centers—especially given that at the time, the US was vaccinating babies from the age of six months.
My kids were eventually offered a vaccine in the US, when we temporarily moved there a couple of years ago. But by that point, the equation had changed. They’d both had covid by then. I had a better idea of the general risks of the virus to children. I turned it down.
I was relieved to hear that Tafesse had made the same decision for his own children. “There are always exceptions, but in general, [covid] is not severe in kids,” he says. The UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunology found that the benefits of vaccination are much smaller for children than they are for adults.
“Of course there are children with health problems who should definitely have it,” says Dunachie. “But for healthy children in healthy households, the benefits probably are quite marginal.”
Shouldn’t healthy people get vaccinated to help protect more vulnerable members of society?
It’s a good argument, says Tafesse. Research suggests that people who are vaccinated against covid-19 are less likely to end up transmitting the infection to the people around them. The degree of protection is not entirely clear, particularly with less-studied—and more contagious—variants of the virus and targeted vaccines. The safest approach is to encourage those at high risk to get the vaccine themselves, says Tafesse.
If the vaccines are safe, shouldn’t I be able to choose to get one?
Tafesse doesn’t buy this argument. “I know they are safe, but even if they’re safe, why do I need to get one?” People should know if they are likely to benefit from a drug they are taking, he says.
Having said that, the cost-benefit calculation will differ between individuals. Even a “mild” covid infection can leave some people bed-bound for a week. For them, it might make total sense to get the vaccine.
Dunachie thinks people should be able to make their own decisions. “Giving people a top-up whether they need it or not is a safe thing to do,” she says.
It is still not entirely clear who will be able to access covid vaccinations under the new plans, and how. Makary and Prasad’s piece includes a list of “medical conditions that increase a person’s risk of severe covid-19,” which includes several disorders, pregnancy, and “physical inactivity.” It covers a lot of people; research suggests that around 25% of Americans are physically inactive.
But I find myself agreeing with Dunachie. Yes, we need up-to-date evidence to support the use of any drugs. But taking vaccines away from people who have experience with them and feel they could benefit from them doesn’t feel like the ideal way to go about it.
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
Since the Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui was released from prison in 2022, he has sought to make a scientific comeback and to repair his reputation after a three-year incarceration for illegally creating the world’s first gene-edited children.
While he has bounced between cities, jobs, and meetings with investors, one area of visible success on his comeback trail has been his X.com account, @Jiankui_He, which has become his main way of spreading his ideas to the world. Starting in September 2022, when he joined the platform, the account stuck to the scientist’s main themes, including promising a more careful approach to his dream of creating more gene-edited children. “I will do it, only after society has accepted it,” he posted in August 2024. He also shared mundane images of his daily life, including golf games and his family.
But over time, it evolved and started to go viral. First came a series of selfies accompanied by grandiose statements (“Every pioneer or prophet must suffer”). Then, in April of this year, it became particularly outrageous and even troll-like, blasting out bizarre messages (“Good morning bitches. How many embryos have you gene edited today?”). This has left observers unsure what to take seriously.
Last month, in reply to MIT Technology Review’s questions about who was responsible for the account’s transformation into a font of clever memes, He emailed us back: “It’s thanks to Cathy Tie.”
You may not be familiar with Tie, but she’s no stranger to the public spotlight. A former Thiel fellow, she is a partner in the attention-grabbing Los Angeles Project, which promised to create glow-in-the-dark pets. Over the past several weeks, though, the 29-year-old Canadian entrepreneur has started to get more and more attention as the new wife to (and apparent social media mastermind behind) He Jiankui. On April 15, He announced a new venture, Cathy Medicine, that would take up his mission of editing human embryos to create people resistant to diseases like Alzheimer’s or cancer. Just a few days later, on April 18, He and Tie announced that they had married, posting pictures of themselves in traditional Chinese wedding attire.
But now Tie says that just a month after she married “the most controversial scientist in the world,” her plans to relocate from Los Angeles to Beijing to be with He are in disarray; she says she’s been denied entry to China and the two “may never see each other again,” as He’s passport is being held by Chinese authorities and he can’t leave the country.
Reached by phone in Manila, Tie said authorities in the Philippines had intercepted her during a layover on May 17 and told her she couldn’t board a plane to China, where she was born and where she says she has a valid 10-year visa. She claims they didn’t say why but told her she is likely “on a watch list.” (MIT Technology Review could not independently confirm Tie’s account.)
“While I’m concerned about my marriage, I am more concerned about what this means for humanity and the future of science,” Tie posted to her own X account.
A match made in gene-editing heaven
The romance between He and Tie has been playing out in public over the past several weeks through a series of reveals on He’s X feed, which had already started going viral late last year thanks to his style of posting awkward selfies alongside maxims about the untapped potential of heritable gene editing, which involves changing people’s DNA when they’re just embryos in an IVF dish.
“Human [sic] will no longer be controlled by Darwin’s evolution,” He wrote in March. That post, which showed him standing in an empty lab, gazing into the distance, garnered 9.7 million views. And then, a week later, he collected 13.3 million for this one: “Ethics is holding back scientific innovation and progress.”
In April, the feed started to change even more drastically.
He’s posts became increasingly provocative, with better English and a unique sensibility reflecting online culture. “Stop asking for cat girls. I’m trying to cure disease,” the account posted on April 15. Two days later, it followed up: “I literally went to prison for this shit.”
This shift coincided with the development of his romance with Tie. Tie told us she has visited China three times this year, including a three-week stint in April when she and He got married after a whirlwind romance. She bought him a silver wedding ring made up of intertwined DNA strands.
The odd behavior on He’s X feed and the sudden marriage have left followers wondering if they are watching a love story, a new kind of business venture, or performance art. It might be all three.
A wedding photo posted by Tie on the Chinese social media platform Rednote shows the couple sitting at a table in a banquet hall, with a small number of guests. MIT Technology Review has been able to identify several people who attended: Cai Xilei, He’s criminal attorney; Liu Haiyan, an investor and former business partner of He; and Darren Zhu, an artist and Thiel fellow who is making a “speculative” documentary about the biophysicist that will blur the boundaries of fiction and reality.
In the phone interview, Tie declined to say if she and He are legally married. She also confirmed she celebrated a wedding less than one year ago with someone else in California, in July of 2024, but said they broke up after a few months; she also declined to describe the legal status of that marriage. In the phone call, Tie emphasized that her relationship with He is genuine: “I wouldn’t marry him if I wasn’t in love with him.”
An up-and-comer
Years before Tie got into a relationship with He, she was getting plenty of attention in her own right. She became a Thiel fellow in 2015, when she was just 18. That program, started by the billionaire Peter Thiel, gave her a grant of $100,000 to drop out of the University of Toronto and start a gene testing company, Ranomics.
Soon, she began appearing on the entrepreneur circuit as a “wunderkind” who was featured on a Forbes “30 Under 30” list in 2018 and presented as an up-and-coming venture capitalist on CNN that same year. In 2020, she started her second company, Locke Bio, which focuses on online telemedicine.
Like Thiel, Tie has staked out contrarian positions. She’s called mainstream genomics a scam and described entrepreneurship as a way to escape the hidebound practices of academia and bioethics. “Starting companies is my preferred form of art,” she posted in 2022, linking to an interview on CNBC.
By February 2025, Tie was ready to announce another new venture: the Los Angeles Project, a stealth company she had incorporated in 2023 under her legal name, Cheng Cheng Tie. The company, started with the Texas-based biohacker and artist Josie Zayner, says it will try to modify animal embryos; one goal is to make fluorescent glow-in-the-dark rabbits as pets.
The Los Angeles Project revels in explicitly transgressive aims for embryo editing, including a plan to add horn genes to horse embryos to make a unicorn. That’s consistent with Zayner’s past stunts, which include injecting herself with CRISPR during a livestream. “This is a company that should not exist,” Zayner said in announcing the newly public project.
Although the Los Angeles Project has only a tiny staff with uncertain qualifications, it did raise $1 million from the 1517 Fund, a venture group that supports “dropouts” and whose managers previously ran the Thiel Fellowship.
Asked for his assessment of Tie, Michael Gibson, a 1517 partner, said in an email that he thinks Tie is “not just exceptional, but profoundly exceptional.” He sent along a list of observations he’d jotted down about Tie before funding her company, which approvingly noted her “hyper-fluent competence” and “low need for social approval,” adding: “Thoughts & actions routinely unconventional.”
A comeback story
He first gained notoriety in 2018, when he and coworkers at the Southern University of Science & Technology in Shenzhen injected the CRISPR gene editor into several viable human embryos and then transferred these into volunteers, leading to the birth of three girls who he claimed would be resistant to HIV. A subsequent Chinese investigation found he’d practiced medicine illegally while “pursuing fame and fortune.” A court later sentenced him to three years in prison.
He has never apologized for his experiments, except to say he acted “too quickly” and to express regret for the trouble he’d caused his former wife and two daughters. (According to a leaked WeChat post by his ex-wife, she divorced him in 2024 “because of a major fault on his side.”)
Since his release from prison, He has sought to restart his research and convince people that he should be recognized as the “Chinese Darwin,” not “China’s Frankenstein,” as the press once dubbed him.
But his comeback has been bumpy. He lost a position at Wuchang University of Technology, a small private university in Hubei province, after some negative press. In February 2024, He posted that his application for funding from the Muscular Dystrophy Association was rejected. Last September, he even posted pictures of his torn shirt—which he said was the result of an assault by jealous rivals.
One area of clear success, though, was the growing reach of his X profile, which today has ballooned to more than 130,000 followers. And as his public profile rose, some started encouraging He to find ways to cash in. Andrew Hessel, a futurist and synthetic biologist active in US ethics debates, says he tried to get He invited to give a TED Talk. “His story is unique, and I wanted to see his story get more widespread attention, if only as a cautionary tale,” Hessel says. “I think he is a lightning rod for a generation of people working in life sciences.”
Later, Hessel says, he sent him information on how to join X’s revenue-sharing program. “I said, ‘You have a powerful voice. Have you looked into monetization?’” Hessel says.
By last fall, He was also welcoming visitors to what he called a new lab in Beijing. One person who took him up on the offer was Steve Hsu, a Michigan State physics professor who has started several genetics companies and was visiting Beijing.
They ended up talking for hours. Hsu says that He expressed a desire to move to the US and start a company, and that he shared his idea for conducting a clinical trial of embryo editing in South Africa, possibly for the prevention of HIV.
Hsu says he later arranged an invitation for He to give a lecture in the United States. “You are a little radioactive, but things are opening up,” Hsu told him. But He declined the offer because the Chinese government is holding his passport—a common tactic it uses to restrict the movement of sensitive or high-profile figures—and won’t return it to him. “He doesn’t even know why. He literally doesn’t know,” says Hsu. “According to the law, they should give it back to him.”
A curious triangle
Despite any plans by He and Tie to advance the idea, creating designer babies is currently illegal in most of the world, including China and the US. Some experts, however, fret that forbidding the technology will only drive it underground and make it attractive to biohackers or scientists outside the mainstream.
That’s one reason Tie’s simultaneous connection to two notable biotech renegades—He and Zayner—is worth watching. “There is clearly a triangle forming in some way,” says Hessel.
With Tie stuck outside China and He being kept inside the country, their new gene-editing venture, Cathy Medicine, faces an uncertain future. Tie posted previously on Rednote that she was “helping Dr. He open up the U.S. market” and was planning to return to the US with him for scientific research. But when we spoke on the phone, she declined to disclose their next steps and said their predicament means the project is “out of the window now.”
Even as the couple remain separated, their social media game is stronger than ever. As she waited in Manila, Tie sought help from friends, followers, and the entire internet. She blasted out a tweet to “crypto people,” calling them “too pussy to stand up for things when it matters.” Within hours, someone had created a memecoin called $GENE as a way for the public to support the couple.
On May 20, Tie posted on X claiming that the amount donated to them is now worth almost $2 million. “I may need to retract my last statement about crypto,” she wrote.
He’s X account also retweeted to express support: “I only want to reunite with my wife @CathyTie, and continue my gene editing research.” He added the hashtag $GENE.
Crypto perpetual futures contracts could receive regulatory approval in the US “very soon,” says outgoing Commodities and Futures Trading Commission Commissioner Summer Mersinger.
Perpetual crypto futures “can come to market now,” Mersinger told Bloomberg TV on May 22.
“We’re seeing some applications, and I believe we’ll see some of those products trading live very soon,” she said, adding it would be “great to get that trading back onshore in the United States.”
Mersinger, who will leave the CFTC at the end of May, said having crypto derivatives trading and regulated in the US would be a “really good thing for these markets and would be really beneficial to the industry broadly.”
Crypto perpetual futures are derivative contracts that allow traders to speculate on the price of cryptocurrencies without actually owning them. Unlike traditional futures contracts that have expiration dates, perpetual futures can be held indefinitely. They can also be traded with high leverage.
Crypto perpetuals are not currently permitted in the US and are traded on large offshore centralized exchanges, such as Binance, OKX, and Bybit.
Binance is the largest with almost $95 billion in perpetual trading volume per day, according to CoinGecko. It offers over 500 crypto perpetual pairs with up to 125x leverage.
Related: BitMEX CEO explains how perpetual swaps test altcoin value
Mersinger said that the recent procedural vote to move forward the GENIUS stablecoin bill signifies “this asset class is clearly here to stay.”
“We really are going to make the United States the forefront of economic power that we can see from these tokens and this asset class.”
Mersinger leaving the CFTC
At the end of May, Mersinger will leave the CFTC to work at the Blockchain Association, a trade group with over 100 members that represents the crypto industry and economy.
On May 14, the Blockchain Association announced that its current CEO, Kristin Smith, would step down and Mersinger would assume the role on June 2.
“We have a very strong incoming [CFTC] chairman who has a great voice for the crypto industry and will be a real advocate for the industry and the agency at large,” she said, adding that she hopes to contribute more to the crypto industry through her new position.
Magazine: Crypto scam hub expose stunt goes viral, Kakao detects 70K scam apps: Asia Express
A US man operating what prosecutors called a “no questions asked” cash-to-Bitcoin conversion service has been sentenced to six years behind bars and was ordered to hand over millions of dollars.
Boston federal court Judge Richard Stearns sentenced Trung Nguyen, from Danvers, Massachusetts, to six years in prison followed by three years of supervised release, and ordered him to forfeit $1.5 million, the Boston US Attorney’s Office said on May 22.
Prosecutors said Nguyen ran an unlicensed money-transmitting business called National Vending between September 2017 and October 2020, which used various techniques he learned in an online course to evade authorities.
As part of the course, Nguyen was taught how to conceal his actual business from banks, crypto exchanges and state authorities by masquerading as a vending machine company that accepted cash deposits, had a list of fictional suppliers, and generally avoided using the phrase “Bitcoin” where possible.
According to prosecutors, among Nguyen’s customer base were several scam victims who were tricked into converting cash into Bitcoin (BTC) by con artists overseas, as well as a drug dealer who sent $250,000 in cash across 10 transactions in 2018.
The Justice Department said Nguyen converted more than $1 million to Bitcoin and “purposely failed” to register with the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) despite being required to do so under federal Anti-Money Laundering regulations.
Nguyen also “failed to file Suspicious Activity Reports or Currency Transaction Reports on any of these transactions, including cash transactions of more than $10,000,” according to prosecutors.
Undercover cops sting Nguyen
Nguyen would often meet his clients in person to accept large sums of cash, which is how he was caught, prosecutors said.
A May 2023 indictment said that during several meetings with undercover law enforcement officers, he accepted cash and sent Bitcoin in return, taking just over 5% in commission.
Related: Crypto use in money laundering ‘far below’ cash — US Treasury
The indictment said Nguyen used encrypted messaging apps and “technologies that made it more difficult” to trace his Bitcoin transactions and broke up the cash deposits into smaller sums over consecutive days and at different branches of the same bank to evade notice by authorities.
Nguyen was charged with operating an unlicensed money transmitting business and two counts of money laundering. He pleaded not guilty to all charges in June 2023.
A jury convicted him in November on the unlicensed money-transmitting business charge and on just one of the money laundering charges, finding him not guilty of a separate money laundering charge.
Magazine: Lazarus Group’s favorite exploit revealed — Crypto hacks analysis
Michigan lawmakers have introduced four crypto-related bills covering crypto mining, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and crypto in state retirement funds.
Republican state Representative Bill Schuette introduced House Bill 4510 on May 21, which would amend Michigan’s Public Employee Retirement System Investment Act to allow the state treasurer, currently Rachael Eubanks, to invest in cryptocurrencies that have averaged a market cap above $250 million over the last calendar year.
Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) are the only cryptocurrencies that currently meet that threshold. The bill adds that any cryptocurrencies must be held in the form of an exchange-traded product issued by a registered investment company.
A similar bill was introduced in February, permitting the state treasurer to allocate up to 10% of Michigan’s Budget Stabilization Fund into crypto.
Republican Representative Bryan Posthumus led the introduction of the second bipartisan crypto bill on May 21, HB 4511, which would prohibit Michigan from banning crypto or imposing licensing requirements on crypto holders. It would also prohibit state officials from advocating or supporting a proposed CBDC from the federal government.
The bill defines advocating or supporting a CBDC to involve issuing a memorandum or official statement endorsing a CBDC proposal related to its testing, adoption or implementation.
Michigan to consider two crypto mining bills
HB 4512, the third crypto bill introduced by a bipartisan group led by Democratic Representative Mike McFall, would create a Bitcoin mining program allowing operators to set up at abandoned oil and gas sites.
A supervisor would be assigned to determine how much oil or gas could reasonably be expected to be produced from the site, who the last operator of the site was and how long it has been left unused.
Related: US Senate moves forward with GENIUS stablecoin bill
Those seeking to participate in the program would need to submit legal documents outlining their organizational structure, demonstrate their ability to operate as a Bitcoin mining entity and provide estimates of the breakeven price for a profitable venture.
The fourth bill, HB 4513 — also filed by a McFall-led bipartisan group — would amend Michigan’s income tax laws to include income obtained from the proposed Bitcoin mining program.
Magazine: Crypto wanted to overthrow banks, now it’s becoming them in stablecoin fight
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes today’s AI models hallucinate, or make things up and present them as if they’re true, at a lower rate than humans do, he said during a press briefing at Anthropic’s first developer event, Code with Claude, in San Francisco on Thursday. Amodei said all this in the midst of a […]
Read more Hinge Health, a digital physical therapy company, closed its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday at $37.56, up about 17% over the $32 IPO price it set the previous day. That’s a good first-day result. But even with the pop, Hinge’s public valuation is significantly less than its last […]
Read more Hours after Sam Altman and Jony Ive announced on Wednesday that OpenAI was buying Ive’s company, io, in an all-stock transaction valued at $6.5 billion, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski posted a surprising message on X. Siemiatkowski’s family investment office, Flat Capital, had bought shares in io six months earlier, he said. Since this is an […]
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