Crypto’s moment of CLARITY arrives
The CLARITY act heads for a crucial Senate vote on September 15, with Politico reporting that Democrat senators had been called to a meeting on Sunday by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to discuss their position.
While Polymarket puts the odds of CLARITY becoming law this year at just 24%, the odds of there being 60 votes in favor of the cloture vote on Tuesday are much higher as it would simply move the bill into the amendment and debate phase. That’s where the rubber will hit the road on issues that have drained support so far including ethics provisions for elected officials, stablecoin yield, and protections for decentralized developers.
The bill has now doubled in size to more than 630 pages since the first draft was released in May 2025 following a year’s worth of work put in by both Democrat and Republican senators. A new draft was released last week with 14 pages of new text directing the SEC and CFTC to determine whether people or groups controlling “non-decentralized finance trading protocols” must comply with securities, commodities and anti-money laundering (AML) requirements. However the latest version doesn’t include any of the big changes to the ethics provisions the Democrats have demanded as a red line for supporting the bill.
President Donald Trump reportedly met with advisors late last week to discuss whether he’d agree to further curbs on his multi billion dollar crypto empire. It’s not clear whether he’s prepared to concede anything on the ethics provisions just yet, but White House crypto advisor Patrick Witt posted on the weekend that it was a “bad day to be a Clarity Act doomer.”
Altcoin Daily claimed the combination of the CLARITY vote, the Federal Reserve’s interest rate decisions and other positive developments could make this “crypto’s biggest week ever.”
Carl Higbie from NewsMax predicted a sea change for crypto if the bill passes, claiming that “banks would shift trillions into this market overnight. Thousands of people, maybe even you if you hold a little bit of it, would become millionaires overnight.”
This is not a particularly likely scenario at this point in time, but it’s nice to dream.
Big AI bosses agree to a slowdown over agent swarm fears
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei put out a blog on the weekend calling for a slowdown in the speed of AI development that he believes is threatening to “outrun our ability to understand and control these systems.”
Amodei cited the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident in July, in which a swarm of agents broke out of containment and hacked another firm. He predicted that in just six to 12 months’ time, such a swarm might be capable of taking over the entire internet. Amodei is not alone in his anxieties with Elon Musk, head of SpaceXAI, posting on X that “Dario is right” and OpenAI boss Sam Altman agreeing. OpenAI has put plans for an IPO this year on ice.
Some are predicting that Monday could see a bloodbath in AI stocks, which now account for most of the US stock market’s performance. “AI stocks will drop 10%+ on Monday morning. Brace for impact folks,” said Jason Calacanis, entrepreneur and podcaster. However the after hours prices of SpaceX and Nvidia remained steady on the weekend.
Source: Jason Calacanis
The big AI companies may be considering the legal ramifications of developing technology that can autonomously hack or harm others. On Thursday Anthropic reported that Russian- and Chinese-speaking operators have been using Claude to automate cyberattacks. The question of who is legally liable when an AI agent goes rogue is not yet settled, but both developers and deployers could face expensive lawsuits.
In related news Anthropic is in talks with Nvidia about a potential $10 billion investment in what may still end up as the biggest IPO in history. Anthropic is seeking to raise as much as $100 billion in the offering, which could value the AI company at about $2 trillion.
Blockstream refuses to pay hacker bounty for 600 BTC ‘theft’
Bitcoin infrastructure company Blockstream has refused to pay a ransom to recover funds still held by the Liquid Network hackers.
“Taking assets without authorization and withholding their return is a crime, not responsible disclosure,” Blockstream said Friday. “It is not white-hat activity. It is theft.”
The company said it had engaged with the hackers in good faith to recover user funds but would not accept their demands.
Claiming to be “white hat hackers” the actors drained Liquid of 4000 Bitcoin last week, before returning 3,400 Bitcoin. They have since demanded that Blockstream pay a 10% bounty from its own funds.
The security bugs have now been patched and the Liquid Network has restarted. Calle from the Bitcoin Red Team, which used AI to audit hundreds of Bitcoin protocols following the Coldcard thefts, said Blockstream had not acted on the Red Team’s warnings about the vulnerabilities. Samson Mow denied…
cointelegraph.com