News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
Anthropic's lobbying spend jumps after Commerce Department pulled its flagship models offline - Cryptopolitan
The surge comes as Washington leans toward voluntary AI oversight, leaving critics worried that frontier model policy is being shaped more by lobbying than binding rules. Anthropic spent $1.97 million lobbying the federal government in the second quarter of 2026, a 26% jump from Q1 that pushed the company's spending past Nvidia and within reach of Oracle. The surge can be traced directly back to two weeks in June, when the Commerce Department took Anthropic's latest models offline. The company spent much of the quarter trying to get that order lifted. Commerce order pushed Anthropic deeper into lobbying As Cryptopolitan earlier reported, Commerce forced Anthropic to disable its two most capable models days after their launch, citing national security concerns the company couldn't limit to foreign users alone. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick issued the directive to CEO Dario Amodei at 5:21 p.m. on a Friday, and Anthropic disclosed later that the flaw in question had been detected not by any government official but by Amazon, which competes with the firm and has invested in it. Axios reports Anthropic's Q2 lobbying centered on export controls, cybersecurity, and AI safety standards as it worked to "smooth over tensions" with the administration, running an expanding in-house team alongside nine outside K Street firms. The controls stayed in force for about two weeks before Commerce lifted them. Anthropic outspent Nvidia as AI lobbying spiked Anthropic's $1.97 million topped Nvidia's spend and closed in on Oracle's roughly $2 million, according to CNBC. OpenAI logged $1.2 million, up nearly 18%. Together, the two labs spent $3.17 million. Adding self-driving firm Waymo, put combined AI-sector spending at a record $4.3 million for the quarter. Anthropic's first half of 2026 already tops $3.5 million, more than the company spent in all of 2025. Big Tech still dwarfs these numbers. The Magnificent Seven, including Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, and Tesla, spent $21.25 million combined, essentially flat against Q1. Meta led that group at $5.99 million despite a 15% drop from its own Q1 total, while Amazon held nearly steady at $4.36 million. Washington's AI compromise so far satisfies almost nobody Anthropic's spending comes against a backdrop where the White House is favoring a voluntary approach over a regulatory one. President Trump signed an executive order requesting AI developers to provide the government a 30-day preview of frontier models before public release. Rep. Don Beyer, co-chair of the Congressional AI caucus, said: This strategy follows the trend of the Trump administration to create a wild west environment. Anthropic has also put money into the midterms directly, donating $20 million to the bipartisan group Public First Action, while CEO Dario Amodei personally contributed $1 million. The donations are part of more than $321 million raised this cycle by AI- and crypto-backed super PACs, according to FEC filings.
xAI sues Grok user over AI-generated explicit imagery of minors - Cryptopolitan
he outcome could set a template for how the industry handles users who weaponize generative tools. Elon Musk's xAI has taken a South Carolina man to federal court in Texas, accusing him of using the Grok chatbot to create sexually explicit deepfakes of minors, marking the very first time an AI company will sue one of its own users over content generated using its platform. The defendant, Terry Harwood, was arrested in February on separate charges of sexually exploiting minors, according to Reuters. xAI's civil complaint was filed on Tuesday April 14, and will now be alongside whatever criminal case develops from that arrest. xAI's lawsuit The filing says that he opened several accounts under fake identities, and then fed the AI tool regular photographs of both adults and children before writing prompts meant to turn those images into sexual content. According to Al Jazeera, the subjects used in these acts had not consented and did not know their pictures were being used. xAI claims the system pushed back against the act. Grok refused the requests, flagging them as violations of its content rules. Harwood's response, according to the complaint, was to keep rewriting the prompts and trying again. "Defendant's actions were a calculated scheme to weaponize Plaintiff's tool for criminal ends, exposing real victims to profound and lasting harm," xAI wrote in the lawsuit, quoted by Reuters. The company also alleges he produced non-consensual sexual images of adults. The AI company requested two things from the court in the lawsuit filing. These include monetary damages with no particular figure attached, and an order that bars Harwood from ever using the Grok product again. xAI also used the filing to state the scale of its enforcement work against bad actors. The company said it suspended 52,222 accounts this year and sent 73,604 reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, referrals that led to at least 244 arrests in 2026. Grok remains under wider scrutiny xAI had already been under pressure over what Grok can produce before this case came up. Regulators in Europe have scrutinized the AI tool, while lawmakers in Washington have raised multiple concerns. Both Malaysia and Indonesia have banned the chatbot due to sexually explicit output, Al Jazeera reported. Elon Musk himself denied the underlying problem earlier this year. "I [am] not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero," he wrote on X in January. I not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero. Obviously, Grok does not spontaneously generate images, it does so only according to user requests. When asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal, as the operating principle... https://t.co/YBoqo7ZmEj -- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 14, 2026 A recently created legal pathway called the DEFIANCE Act has also led to an increase in these such cases. The act, signed in 2024, gives victims of non-consensual intimate deepfakes a way to sue, and several states have passed individual laws to this effect.
Anthropic gives Canadian researchers $10M in Claude credits - Cryptopolitan
The pledge comes as Anthropic says Canada ranks second globally in Claude use per working-age person, behind only the United States. According to the statement made by Anthropic on Tuesday, the firm is set to give eight research organizations in Canada $10 million CAD in Claude credits. These credits will provide free access to Claude for two universities, two hospitals, and Canada's three federal artificial intelligence institutes. This is significant for Canadian researchers since they get access to a state-of-the-art model, fully funded by Anthropic, without any cost. And for Ottawa, this is even a bigger deal, since the government sees the development of AI capability in Canada as a priority. Reports say that Anthropic will not steer research directions or claim ownership of findings, and said more partners are expected in the coming months. Canadian labs choose how to use Claude The recipient list includes the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, known as Amii, in Edmonton, Mila in Montréal, and Toronto's Vector Institute, plus CHEO, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Université Laval, the University of Toronto, and the University of Saskatchewan. The institutions have already mapped the credits to their own priorities. Mila, which Anthropic describes as home to the largest concentration of academic deep learning researchers anywhere, plans to build AI assistants that help its scientists find and vet research. CAMH's Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics will develop predictive models for mental health treatment and test psychiatric AI systems for fairness. At Université Laval, researchers will study how large language models handle Quebec French, Indigenous languages, and other low-resource dialects. Saskatchewan is directing its share toward agriculture, public health, and quantum computing. The University of Toronto's Data Sciences Institute will run a competitive, peer-reviewed process to distribute its Claude API credits. The University of Toronto Data Sciences Institute will go through a competitive procedure to have access to Claude API credits, whereby the scientific committee guarantees that these credits are allocated to high-caliber and impactful research projects. - Professor Gary Bader, Associate director for research and software. Anthropic ties the pledge to Canada's AI roots Anthropic linked the announcement to Canada's role in the history of modern AI. The company noted that the University of Toronto and the Université de Montréal continued working on neural networks when much of the field had moved away, while the University of Alberta advanced reinforcement learning. The institutions are linked to Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Richard Sutton, the three scientists who were most instrumental in the deep learning and reinforcement learning innovations that formed the backbone of the AI industry today. Chris Olah, an Anthropic co-founder who grew up in Canada and spent a year at the University of Toronto before leaving, said the issuance of credits to Canadian institutions is a continuation of that research culture. I was formed by that culture, and I'm proud Anthropic can support the next chapter. - Chris Anthropic will also add Amii, Mila, and Vector to its Anthropic for Startups program this summer. Hundreds of startups affiliated with the three institutes will each receive at least $5,000 USD in API credits. Canada ranks second globally in Claude use per worker Alongside the funding, Anthropic released its first Canadian country brief from the Anthropic Economic Index, its analysis of Claude usage based on anonymized conversation data. Canada accounts for 2.6% of global consumer use of Claude.ai, ranking eighth worldwide. Adjusted for working-age population, however, the country ranks second, behind only the United States. Canadians use Claude at more than four times the rate their population would predict, according to Anthropic's Canada brief. Usage inside Canada follows the structure of the local economy, according to the brief. British Columbia leads on a per-person basis, while Ontario records the most conversations overall. Translation requests are concentrated in provinces with large public sectors, which Anthropic linked to federal bilingualism rules requiring services in English and French. New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Québec rank highly in both government employment and translation-related Claude use. The pledge lands as Ottawa pushes its AI sovereignty agenda. Canada published the world's first national AI strategy in 2017 and launched AI for All, its new national AI strategy, in June. The plan reinforces Canada's three national AI institutes and commits to strengthening the country's AI safety work. The Canadian pledge also follows Anthropic's $200 million partnership with the Gates Foundation, announced in May, to support AI programs in global health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility.
MEXC Reports 7.1 Billion USDT in SpaceX Futures Volume as Q2 Closes the Gap to Wall Street - Cryptopolitan
Victoria, Seychelles, July 14, 2026 - MEXC, a pioneer in 0-fee digital asset trading, today released its Ecosystem & Growth Report for the second quarter of 2026. In Q1, users mostly bought gold and other hedges against macro risk. In Q2, their attention turned to AI projects and US stocks, and MEXC spent the quarter building products for exactly that demand. Users can now back a company before its IPO, trade stock futures on it, hold tokenized shares, and buy real US stocks and ETFs, all inside one MEXC account. Every piece of that path launched or grew during the quarter. SpaceX was still a private company when MEXC ran two SPACEX(PRE) subscription rounds. More than 74,000 entries put over 173 million USDT into them, and demand for the second round reached more than 30 times the amount on offer. That demand mirrors a wider market trend: CoinGecko reports that tokenized pre-IPO trading volume surged 1,060%, with SpaceX accounting for the largest share of activity. The company then completed the largest IPO on record on June 12. Users kept trading it on MEXC after the listing, and SpaceX perpetual futures collected more than 7.1 billion USDT in volume in the weeks that followed. One name went from private to public within a quarter, and users traded at every stage. RealStocks launched on June 1 and added the last piece, real shares. Eligible users buy actual US stocks and ETFs through a licensed securities broker partner, and the shelf covers more than 7,000 names. More than 120,000 users signed up in the first month, and over half of the new accounts moved on to a first deposit. By June 18, the product had settled dividends on 34 stocks and ETFs, the kind of payout only real share ownership carries. Micron's June earnings lifted trading volume in its MEXC futures by approximately 142% in a single day. The activity spilled into related AI memory names, SanDisk, SK hynix, and a DRAM ETF. One earnings report moved a whole supply chain on the platform, because users now trade US market news the moment it breaks. "My first quarter as CEO had one goal, and that was to move MEXC from a crypto exchange toward a gateway for every market users care about," said Vugar Usi, CEO of MEXC. "Q2 put real numbers behind the word gateway, from Pre-IPO demand to actual dividend payouts." The quarter's ten biggest new-token gainers averaged +4,956%, and six of the ten were AI agent projects. Only one meme coin made the list, a clear reversal of the first quarter, when memes ran the gain rankings. The AI winners build practical systems. They settle transactions between agents, place trades for retail users, and verify identities, so the money went to projects that already do that work. The most-traded list leaned the same way, with four AI and infrastructure names to three meme names. During the quarter, MEXC appointed Vugar Usi as Chief Executive Officer and marked its 8th anniversary with a brand upgrade built on two promises: 0 Fees and Infinite Opportunities. The upgrade marks the company's move from a traditional exchange toward a universal gateway for global markets. A partnership brought the USD1 stablecoin into MEXC's trading and product suite, and the first USD1 event drew more than 161,000 participants, with new users alone pushing $2.4 billion through futures. A TradingView integration now sends perpetual futures orders straight from the chart, so users move from analysis to execution without a tab change. The Prediction Market added a Combo feature on June 9, which folds several event predictions into a single position. Average daily volume in the Prediction Market grew more than 6,700% from early to late June, and daily users rose more than 3,200%. The June Proof of Reserves put the average reserve ratio at 156.5%, which means the platform holds more assets than users have deposited, with Bitcoin backed at 269%. Between May and June, the risk team identified 4,394 illicit networks; a separate intervention effort blocked roughly 303,000 USDT in suspected fraudulent transfers. The full Q2 report, with the complete token tables, product data, and community programs, is available here. About MEXC MEXC is the world's fastest-growing cryptocurrency exchange, trusted by more than 40 million users across 170+ markets. Built on a user-first philosophy, MEXC offers industry-leading 0-fee trading and access to over 3,000 digital assets. As the Gateway to Infinite Opportunities, MEXC provides a single platform where users can easily trade cryptocurrencies alongside tokenized assets, including stocks, ETFs, commodities, and precious metals. MEXC Official Website｜ X ｜ Telegram ｜How to Sign Up on MEXC For media inquiries, please contact MEXC PR team: [email protected]
Cursor poaches designer behind Anthropic's Claude
The hire highlights the growing competition for AI product talent, as companies increasingly compete on user experience -- not just model performance. Jenny Wen, the designer involved in creating Anthropic's Claude and the general-purpose AI agent Cowork, has joined Cursor as its new head of design. She will be leveraging her experience at one of the most established AI labs at a rapidly growing company that aims to develop more than coding tools. Wen disclosed the news on X on July 13, after leaving Anthropic to take the position at Cursor, where she would be able to lead "a team that cares so deeply about craft, quality, and building great tools." She chose to make this decision at a time when Cursor is developing its own AI agent aimed at helping in the workplace, which puts it in competition with the product that Wen was involved in at Anthropic. From Claude to Cursor During her time at Anthropic, Wen had the task of designing both Claude and Cowork, the latter being the name of the AI agent that was designed to handle complex workplace tasks. According to Wen's portfolio, in 2025 Wen was heavily involved in directing the roadmap of Cowork as well as contributing to the development of the product post-launch. Before Anthropic, Wen worked at Figma as its Director of Design, where she launched FigJam, and previously served as the design leader at Dropbox, Square, and Shopify. The uniqueness of Wen's experience lies in the integration of product strategy and product creation. With more AI companies competing to develop better models, it is worth remembering that the skill to create desirable products remains just as crucial as the technical part. Initially recognized as an AI coding assistant, Cursor now aspires to pursue more ambitious goals. According to The Information, the company is now working on the creation of an AI assistant called Sand, which can manage e-mails and spreadsheets and help with engineering tasks. If released successfully, it will compete with Cowork by Anthropic and the recently introduced ChatGPT Work by OpenAI. Cursor has not made any announcements regarding the project. Additionally, the company is gearing up for its next growth stage. SpaceX declared in June that it has intentions to take over Anysphere, the parent company of Cursor, in an all-stock transaction worth $60 billion expected to close later this year. The agreement will give Cursor more resources, thus enabling it to widen its scope beyond just developing software. Why this matters for Anthropic? It is interesting to note that the timing takes place at a time when Anthropic has expanded the capabilities and accessibility of Cowork. The company has updated the service for use on both mobile and the web, as well as added the cloud execution functionality, which enables tasks to continue even if the user has disconnected. Anthropic even states that, out of its analysis of about 1.2 million Cowork sessions, knowledge-work tasks make up almost half of all usage, suggesting the product is increasingly being used for more than software development. While Wen's leaving may not indicate difficult times ahead for Anthropic, it points to the intense competition among AI firms for talented people like product leaders. Now that emerging AI technologies are growing in sophistication, the challenge is not just about developing better technologies, but also about creating software that easily fits into the routines of end-users. This is where experienced design leaders can make a big difference. Creating an effective workplace AI agent involves more than just technical performance. In addition to this, it requires proper design of workflows, simple interfaces, and a lot of trust for users to delegate important tasks. Those are qualities which, if developed, can give a strong competitive advantage. A broader shift in the AI talent market This step by Wen is indicative of a bigger trend emerging within the competitive environment surrounding AI enterprises. Whereas back in the days of early generative AI, the battle for talent was mainly carried out between researchers and infrastructure engineers, now there is competition among businesses to secure experts who already have experience working on creating and deploying AI products. These experts will be able to share valuable information about consumer behavior and preferences, as well as features that actually work. In the case of Cursor, the recruitment of the designer of one of the first AI workplace assistants will allow the company to go beyond programming in terms of further steps in its development. In the case of Anthropic, the hiring shows how the market has developed, with competition, among other things, both for skilled workers and for the designers behind those who turn advanced AI into products.
SpaceX's AI empire is built on data centers, not satellites - Cryptopolitan
Analysts caution that the contracts carry termination clauses and that space computing is still 10 years or more away. SpaceX's AI returns over the next few years will not come from space. According to Wall Street analysts, the money is coming from Earth data centers rather than the orbital compute that Elon Musk has promised. This reframes SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) as primarily an infrastructure company. Space computing is a bet for the future, not now, for anyone considering SpaceX as an AI play. SpaceX already charges for computing. Reuters reported that the company signed enterprise deals for its Colossus supercomputer clusters with Anthropic, Alphabet's Google, and Reflection AI. Those contracts alone are expected to generate more than $28 billion annually. SpaceX's AI revenue in 2025 is ~$3.2 billion, which is significantly higher than the new deals. The compute contracts also outperformed SpaceX's earnings from rocket launches and Starlink, when counted separately. The contracts, however, include termination clauses, so analysts caution against reading them as recurring revenue. What SpaceX spent to get here SpaceX invested ~$18 billion in AI infrastructure and research in 2025. According to company filings, ~$12.7 billion was spent on capital expenditures and $5.1 billion on research and development. That expenditure outpaced spending on space and connectivity lines. Colossus and a second cluster, Colossus II, together provide ~1 gigawatt of AI compute. That makes SpaceX one of the world's largest compute operators. J.P. Morgan predicts that terrestrial capacity will reach ~9 gigawatts by 2029, which is equivalent to four times the output of the Hoover Dam. Brokerages cited by Reuters pointed to its $60 billion purchase of AI coding startup Cursor as a sign the company wants to sell AI applications, not just the machines that run them. The deal ties into Musk's model plans on the software side. A separate Cryptopolitan report said Musk's lab, now renamed SpaceXAI, built its Grok 4.5 model jointly with Cursor, and Musk has said SpaceX is buying the startup for that same $60 billion figure. Why orbit is still a distant bet Musk has proposed a future in which computers run in space. Analysts Reuters spoke with view this as a later chapter. "The narrative that (orbital) will fundamentally disrupt terrestrial data centers is a little bit overblown," said Anthony Milovantsev, a partner at consultancy Altman Solon, who estimated that any real displacement of ground-based data centers would take "ten years plus." The case is based on hardware that does not currently exist at scale. Orbital computing relies on SpaceX's Starship flying frequently and cheaply, lower launch costs, and better satellites, according to analysts. Ground clusters continue to run regardless of direction. BofA analysts were more blunt, calling the long term viability of orbital data centers "unproven and heavily reliant on key technological milestones that have yet to be realized." If the engineering is delivered, the appeal will be valid. Starships could eventually launch solar computing satellites into orbit, avoiding ground based costs such as energy, cooling, and land use. Analysts aren't asking if SpaceX can build and sell AI infrastructure. J.P. Morgan's estimate of ~9 gigawatts in 2029 remains the benchmark for establishing a business beyond Earth.
Kraken to rebuild mobile app around AI trading agents - Cryptopolitan
It puts Kraken alongside Gemini, Coinbase, Binance, and OKX in a race to increasingly merge AI into crypto trading. Crypto exchange Kraken has announced that it will relaunch its mobile app with autonomous AI agents integrated, giving retail traders software that can observe the markets and place orders on their behalf. The plan was announced in a company blog post and will involve a complete revamp of the existing app instead of a regular update to the existing one. "Unlike other trading platforms, this won't be an AI assistant or a copilot bolted onto the old version of the app," the post reads. "The financial intelligence is built into the fabric of Kraken itself. That's what will make it feel alive." Agentic AI gains more traction The agents will be able to track conditions across markets, recommend trades, and execute them without requiring a user to supervise or approve every single action. The bots can also act on user prompts and adjust based on how earlier decisions played out. The user sets a goal for the agents, and the app organizes itself around this goal, all while running in the background, Kraken explained. The exchange also emphasized that the user keeps the final say on each trade. The statement also mentioned in-built risk management features tied to a user's preset risk tolerance, a standard feature across the AI trading tools that are being released in recent days. The company noted that AI-generated recommendations for trading carry risk, which includes the loss of capital, and are not guaranteed to work for every individual. Kraken also stated that in the U.S., advice on crypto assets comes from Payward Interactive, Inc., while advice on securities comes from Kraken Adviser LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser. Kraken joins the AI agent industry race Kraken is joining up with other crypto institutions in leaning on AI agents. Gemini opened its platform and APIs to users' AI agent setups in April, while Coinbase used a June product event to preview Coinbase Advisor, an SEC-registered, AI-powered financial adviser. OKX and Binance have also added AI features of their own. However, Kraken is the first major exchange to place AI agents at the center of its application instead of simply as a feature. This shift could point to a new age where exchanges reposition themselves from simple buy-and-sell platforms into more extensive financial software. It comes with obvious risks, however, as autonomous systems can increase losses by a huge margin, and competing agents trading based off the same signals raise the odds of flash crashes in the market. Regulators continue to work out how existing rules apply when an AI agent is making the trading decisions. The app relaunch is coming during a busy stretch for Kraken. The exchange has rolled out crypto perpetual futures in the US and added Solana DEX trading through its main app. The company has also started preparations for a possible public listing since last year.
