News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
Court order makes Discord add temporary child protections in Texas
The platform must change several default settings for Texas users. AUSTIN, Texas - The popular online messaging platform Discord is now temporarily required to add child protection features in Texas following a court decision. Discord restraining order The latest: The temporary restraining order (TRO) against Discord was secured after Texas AG Ken Paxton's office filed a lawsuit alleging "weak" safety settings and children being exposed to online predators. The new court order, announced by the AG's office on Friday, requires Discord to mmediately reconfigure four key default settings to their most protective state for all Texas accounts: * Blocking sensitive content rather than merely blurring it; * Disabling friend requests from "Everyone;" * Turning off direct-message social permissions; * And setting spam filtering to "Filter All." Discord is also required to change their language claiming safety, as well as suspend the automatic 90-day expiration of user violation records and preserve all enforcement and moderation data. It must also file a verified report within fourteen days disclosing its true default settings, the percentage of its workforce devoted to safety, and data on how easily banned users return. What's next: A hearing on the State's request for a temporary injunction is set for June 5, 2026, at 9:00 a.m. in Collin County District Court. What they're saying: "Discord designed a predator's paradise, switched off the safeguards by default, and looked Texas parents in the eye and called it safe. That is not negligence. That is evil dressed up as a safety policy," said Paxton in his Friday release. "A court ordered Discord to stop, and I will pursue this company with the full and unrelenting force of the law until every child in Texas is protected from the sick predators it invited in. Discord was warned again and again and did nothing. It will not get to ignore Texas." Texas vs Discord The backstory: Paxton's office filed the suit on Friday, May 22, following his office's investigation into the platform for "extremist" content after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. What they're saying: "Discord has allowed and invited all kinds of nihilistic violence and evil. My office is taking action to protect our nation's precious children from predators," said Paxton when announcing the litigation. "We live in a time where the dangers children face online have never been greater, and every parent in Texas deserves to know their child is protected." Paxton cited cases in which teens were allegedly assaulted or traumatized as a result of using the platform.
Google engineer charged in alleged $1.2mn Polymarket insider trading scheme
Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Betting on Polymarket is supposed to be a fun, low-intensity gamble whereby you buy 'yes' or 'no' shares for the outcome of a real-world event and hope to correctly predict how it resolves -- at which point your winning share pays out $1 and your losing one pays nothing. That is, unless you are an employee at Google and federal prosecutors allege you already know the answers -- in which case it could amount to insider trading, one of the most aggressively prosecuted white-collar offences on the books that can carry a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. According to the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Michele Spagnuolo, a staff software engineer at Google, allegedly used his employer's most confidential annual trend data compilation to pocket more than $1.2 million (€1.1mn) on Polymarket. His alias was known as "AlphaRaccoon." Spagnuolo has now been charged with commodities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering by federal prosecutors in New York. The Spagnuolo case is the second high-profile prosecution for insider trading on a prediction market in just over a month, part of a largely unexplored legal frontier as prosecutors grapple with how existing fraud and commodities law applies to platforms like Polymarket, which operate nothing like a traditional stock exchange. How Google's 'Year in Search' became a trading tip Every December, Google publishes its "Year in Search" -- a splashy, carefully choreographed reveal of the year's top trending searches. It drives traffic, generates significant media coverage and, as the filing notes, serves as a "high-profile vehicle" through which Google demonstrates its reach to advertisers. The whole point, commercially speaking, is the surprise. Google guards the underlying data closely and even internally, access is restricted to a limited number of employees. Spagnuolo, who has worked at Google since around 2014, allegedly had access to an internal software tool bearing a banner reading "Google Confidential" that gave him sight of the Year in Search results before anyone outside the company did. Enter AlphaRaccoon On the prediction market platform Polymarket, users can bet on the outcome of real-world events such as elections, sports results, and cultural moments using cryptocurrency. In October 2025, Polymarket began offering markets on who would be Google's most-searched person of the year. Around the same time, a Polymarket account called "AlphaRaccoon" started placing bets. Between October and December 2025, FBI Special Agent Brandon Racz alleges, Spagnuolo accessed Google's confidential Year in Search data and then, sometimes within hours, placed wagers on Polymarket that reflected exactly what he had seen. On or about 15 October 2025, Spagnuolo allegedly accessed the internal tool. The following day, the AlphaRaccoon account wagered approximately $403 (€373) on Kendrick Lamar being the number one searched person of 2025 at the implied odds of just 3% and roughly $10,807 (€10,022) against Pope Leo XIV taking the top spot. He allegedly knew this, according to prosecutors, because the internal data already told him so. Betting against the crowd What makes the alleged scheme particularly striking is how it worked in practice. Because Spagnuolo allegedly knew who would not top the rankings, he could bet heavily against the crowd's favourites and collected winnings when popular picks failed to materialise. The AlphaRaccoon account wagered approximately $937,688 (€869,083) on the "no" side of the question of whether Bianca Censori would be the number one searched person at a time when the market put her odds at around 85%. It bet roughly $613,587 (€568,628) against Pope Leo XIV at 56% implied probability, and approximately $509,149 (€471,741) against Donald Trump at around 90%. In total, across roughly 25 bets on Year in Search outcomes, AlphaRaccoon risked approximately $2.75mn (€2.55mn). When Google published its results on 4 December 2025, confirming its global top five trending people as d4vd, Kendrick Lamar, Jimmy Kimmel, Tyler Robinson and Pope Leo XIV, the account walked away with approximately $1.2mn (€1.11m) in profit. The cover-up Once the markets resolved, roughly $3.9mn (€3.6mn) in USDC.e -- a cryptocurrency tied to the value of the US dollar -- was released to the AlphaRaccoon account. On 10 December, the account transferred approximately $5mn (€4.6mn) to a linked cryptocurrency wallet. Polymarket used USDC.e as its main payment currency for trading and settlements on the Polygon blockchain network. From there, according to the complaint, the funds passed through at least two cryptocurrency swaps before being moved into a service that prosecutors say was designed to make the transactions harder to trace. Meanwhile, online communities on Discord and X had already begun speculating that AlphaRaccoon was a Google insider. Shortly afterwards, the username was quietly removed from the account, reverting it to an anonymous alphanumeric string. The FBI traced the wallet anyway. Prosecutors allege cryptocurrency records linked the AlphaRaccoon account to a wallet that had sent approximately $149,980 (€138,916) to a payment processor account registered in the name of Michele Spagnuolo using an Italian government identification card. The charges Spagnuolo faces three charges. The first is commodities fraud, based on allegations that he used material nonpublic information to execute trades on Polymarket, which prosecutors are treating as a platform offering commodity-linked contracts. The second is wire fraud, relating to the alleged misuse of Google's confidential commercial information for personal gain. The third is money laundering, tied to prosecutors' claims that he took steps after December 2025 to conceal the source and ownership of the proceeds. The complaint was sworn before US Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn in the Southern District of New York. The case follows that of US Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who was charged in April with allegedly using classified information about a US military operation targeting Nicolás Maduro to place winning bets on Polymarket. Prosecutors say Van Dyke turned roughly $33,000 in wagers into more than $400,000 in profit. He has pleaded not guilty.
Google engineer charged with using inside information to win $1.2M on Polymarket
A software engineer at Google unlawfully used confidential company information to make a series of bets that won him about $1.2 million on the online prediction market Polymarket, the Justice Department alleged in a criminal complaint Wednesday. Software engineer Michele Spagnuolo used internal data about search activity to place roughly $2.7 million in bets on which public figures would be announced as among the most searched for in 2025, according to the federal complaint. The 36-year-old Italian citizen used an account called AlphaRaccoon to place bets late last year on whether and how figures including singer D4vd and Pope Leo XIV would appear in rankings released by Google in its Year in Search report last December, according to the complaint and a Justice Department news release. "Unlike the counterparties to his trades, Spagnuolo knew the outcome of these wagers before the trading public did because he had accessed Google's confidential, commercially valuable internal data," the complaint alleged. Spagnuolo, a resident of Switzerland, appeared before a U.S. magistrate judge in New York on Wednesday, the Justice Department said. He was charged with commodities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering. The case appears to be the second time the Justice Department has charged a prediction market user with a form of insider trading. In April, a Special Forces soldier involved in the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was charged with using classified information about the operation to win roughly $400,000 through a series of bets of Polymarket. Polymarket and its rival prediction market platform Kalshi have soared in popularity over the past two years as the start-ups have won over users willing to bet money against each other on stock trading-style markets for events including federal elections, government actions, sports and celebrity marriages. The platforms have also attracted scrutiny from Congress over the incentives they might create for people in business or public office to use their influence or inside information to tilt the odds of prediction market wagers. Senators voted last month to unanimously to ban themselves from participating in prediction markets. U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement released Wednesday that the charges against Spagnuolo showed that cheating on prediction markets would not be tolerated. "Today's charges reinforce a decades-old message: corporate insiders cannot use confidential business information to turn a profit in our markets," he said. "As alleged, Spagnuolo violated the duties he owed to his employer and used Google's confidential business information to make more than $1.2 million in trading profits on Polymarket. Insider trading compromises the integrity of our markets, and the American people want this greed-driven conduct investigated and prosecuted." Spagnuolo used an internal software tool with a banner that read "Google Confidential" in red text to access search data before the company publicly released its annual report on search trends, according to the complaint. Using his AlphaRaccoon account Spagnuolo placed bets on Google's Year in Search data between October and December last year, according to the complaint. He removed the name from the account after his streak of successful wagers led other Polymarket users to speculate on Discord and X that the account belonged to a Google insider, the complaint said. Polymarket deputy chief legal officer Olivia Chalos said in a statement that the company worked closely with the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates prediction markets. "We are committed to maintaining accurate, fair, and transparent markets as well as enforcing our rules and working with our regulators and law enforcement," the statement said. Polymarket also posted a statement on its X account Wednesday that appeared to credit an internal team at the company with first identifying the allegedly fraudulent behavior. "Proud to announce Polymarket's market integrity infrastructure flagged another trader who was arrested this morning in New York for insider trading," it said. "With 2 out of 2 arrests in this industry resulting from our criminal referrals, Polymarket has emerged as the enforcement leader," the statement said, apparently referring to the earlier charges against the Special Forces soldier.
Google engineer charged over $1.2mn Polymarket bets
A Google engineer has been arrested for allegedly using his employer's secret search trend data to win $1.2mn on Polymarket as landmark case tests whether prediction markets are subject to the same rules as Wall Street. Betting on Polymarket is supposed to be a fun, low-intensity gamble whereby you buy 'yes' or 'no' shares for the outcome of a real-world event and hope to correctly predict how it resolves -- at which point your winning share pays out $1 and your losing one pays nothing. That is, unless you are an employee at Google and federal prosecutors allege you already know the answers -- in which case it could amount to insider trading, one of the most aggressively prosecuted white-collar offences on the books that can carry a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. According to the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Michele Spagnuolo, a staff software engineer at Google, allegedly used his employer's most confidential annual trend data compilation to pocket more than $1.2 million (€1.1mn) on Polymarket. His alias was known as "AlphaRaccoon." Spagnuolo has now been charged with commodities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering by federal prosecutors in New York. The Spagnuolo case is the second high-profile prosecution for insider trading on a prediction market in just over a month, part of a largely unexplored legal frontier as prosecutors grapple with how existing fraud and commodities law applies to platforms like Polymarket, which operate nothing like a traditional stock exchange. How Google's 'Year in Search' became a trading tip Every December, Google publishes its "Year in Search" -- a splashy, carefully choreographed reveal of the year's top trending searches. It drives traffic, generates significant media coverage and, as the filing notes, serves as a "high-profile vehicle" through which Google demonstrates its reach to advertisers. The whole point, commercially speaking, is the surprise. Google guards the underlying data closely and even internally, access is restricted to a limited number of employees. Spagnuolo, who has worked at Google since around 2014, allegedly had access to an internal software tool bearing a banner reading "Google Confidential" that gave him sight of the Year in Search results before anyone outside the company did. Enter AlphaRaccoon On the prediction market platform Polymarket, users can bet on the outcome of real-world events such as elections, sports results, and cultural moments using cryptocurrency. In October 2025, Polymarket began offering markets on who would be Google's most-searched person of the year. Around the same time, a Polymarket account called "AlphaRaccoon" started placing bets. Between October and December 2025, FBI Special Agent Brandon Racz alleges, Spagnuolo accessed Google's confidential Year in Search data and then, sometimes within hours, placed wagers on Polymarket that reflected exactly what he had seen. On or about 15 October 2025, Spagnuolo allegedly accessed the internal tool. The following day, the AlphaRaccoon account wagered approximately $403 (€373) on Kendrick Lamar being the number one searched person of 2025 at the implied odds of just 3% and roughly $10,807 (€10,022) against Pope Leo XIV taking the top spot. He allegedly knew this, according to prosecutors, because the internal data already told him so. Betting against the crowd What makes the alleged scheme particularly striking is how it worked in practice. Because Spagnuolo allegedly knew who would not top the rankings, he could bet heavily against the crowd's favourites and collected winnings when popular picks failed to materialise. The AlphaRaccoon account wagered approximately $937,688 (€869,083) on the "no" side of the question of whether Bianca Censori would be the number one searched person at a time when the market put her odds at around 85%. It bet roughly $613,587 (€568,628) against Pope Leo XIV at 56% implied probability, and approximately $509,149 (€471,741) against Donald Trump at around 90%. In total, across roughly 25 bets on Year in Search outcomes, AlphaRaccoon risked approximately $2.75mn (€2.55mn). When Google published its results on 4 December 2025, confirming its global top five trending people as d4vd, Kendrick Lamar, Jimmy Kimmel, Tyler Robinson and Pope Leo XIV, the account walked away with approximately $1.2mn (€1.11m) in profit. The cover-up Once the markets resolved, roughly $3.9mn (€3.6mn) in USDC.e -- a cryptocurrency tied to the value of the US dollar -- was released to the AlphaRaccoon account. On 10 December, the account transferred approximately $5mn (€4.6mn) to a linked cryptocurrency wallet. Polymarket used USDC.e as its main payment currency for trading and settlements on the Polygon blockchain network. From there, according to the complaint, the funds passed through at least two cryptocurrency swaps before being moved into a service that prosecutors say was designed to make the transactions harder to trace. Meanwhile, online communities on Discord and X had already begun speculating that AlphaRaccoon was a Google insider. Shortly afterwards, the username was quietly removed from the account, reverting it to an anonymous alphanumeric string. The FBI traced the wallet anyway. Prosecutors allege cryptocurrency records linked the AlphaRaccoon account to a wallet that had sent approximately $149,980 (€138,916) to a payment processor account registered in the name of Michele Spagnuolo using an Italian government identification card. The charges Spagnuolo faces three charges. The first is commodities fraud, based on allegations that he used material nonpublic information to execute trades on Polymarket, which prosecutors are treating as a platform offering commodity-linked contracts. The second is wire fraud, relating to the alleged misuse of Google's confidential commercial information for personal gain. The third is money laundering, tied to prosecutors' claims that he took steps after December 2025 to conceal the source and ownership of the proceeds. The complaint was sworn before US Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn in the Southern District of New York. The case follows that of US Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who was charged in April with allegedly using classified information about a US military operation targeting Nicolás Maduro to place winning bets on Polymarket. Prosecutors say Van Dyke turned roughly $33,000 in wagers into more than $400,000 in profit. He has pleaded not guilty.
Google engineer charged with insider trading on Polymarket
By clicking submit, I authorize Arcamax and its affiliates to: (1) use, sell, and share my information for marketing purposes, including cross-context behavioral advertising, as described in our Privacy Policy , (2) add to information that I provide with other information like interests inferred from web page views, or data lawfully obtained from data brokers, such as past purchase or location data, or publicly available data, (3) contact me or enable others to contact me by email or other means with offers for different types of goods and services, and (4) retain my information while I am engaging with marketing messages that I receive and for a reasonable amount of time thereafter. I understand I can opt out at any time through an email that I receive, or by clicking here A Google software engineer was charged with insider trading on Polymarket, where he allegedly made more than $1 million betting on one of last year's most popular Internet searches. Michele Spagnuolo was charged in a complaint unsealed Wednesday in federal court in New York. Spagnuolo, 36, appeared before a federal magistrate and was released on a $2.25 million bond. Mike Ferrara, a lawyer for Spagnuolo, declined to comment on the charges. The case comes amid growing concern about insider trading on prediction markets. The charges against Spagnuolo come just a little more than a month after a U.S. Army Special Forces master sergeant was charged with using classified information about the operation to capture then-Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to make $400,000 betting on Polymarket. According to the complaint, Spagnuolo, an Italian citizen who joined Alphabet Inc.'s Google in 2014, had access to company data that tracked user searches when he bet that Google's most-searched person in 2025 would be the singer D4vd. Last month, D4vd, whose real name is David Anthony Burke, was charged with murdering a 14-year-old girl. He has pleaded not guilty. At the time, Polymarket assigned a "near-zero probability" that D4vd would be the top-ranked search over figures like Pope Leo XIV and Kendrick Lamar, prosecutors said. When D4vd was publicly announced as the top-searched person in December, Spagnuolo allegedly made around $1.2 million. "We're working with law enforcement on their investigation," a Google spokesperson said in a statement. "The employee accessed our marketing material using a tool available to all employees, but using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of our policies. We've placed the employee on leave and will take the appropriate action." Prosecutors said Spagnuolo, who traded on Polymarket under the username "AlphaRaccoon," also sought to cover up his bets with a service that adds privacy protection to cryptocurrency transactions, according to the complaint. His account vanished from the market after users on X and Discord speculated that it had been used by a Google insider to trade ahead of the search results announcement, prosecutors said. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, the Army sergeant charged with insider trading on the Maduro ouster, has pleaded not guilty. Polymarket has said it is bolstering efforts against insider trading as the company aims to expand its U.S. presence. In March, the company updated its rules to clarify that certain kinds of wagers are prohibited, such as acting on stolen confidential information or betting if customers are in a position to influence the outcome of an event. Polymarket is partnering with blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis Inc. on insider-trading detection tools. The firm is also working with Palantir and TWG AI to identify and report suspicious activity on sports wagers on its U.S. exchange. Polymarket worked with authorities on the case of Van Dyke and said they flagged another trader who was arrested on Wednesday in New York. "With 2 out of 2 arrests in this industry resulting from our criminal referrals, Polymarket has emerged as the enforcement leader," the company said in a post on X. Polymarket's main business operates offshore, outside the oversight of U.S. regulators, and it sometimes allows customers to register without identity checks. While Polymarket's terms of service bar U.S. customers, traders have spoken publicly about circumventing the company's restrictions by using a virtual private network. The case is is U.S. v. Spagnuolo, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York. (With assistance from Ava Benny-Morrison, Nathaniel Popper and Denitsa Tsekova.)
Texas AG Sues Discord For Deceiving Parents, Endangering Children
Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against communications app Discord, alleging that the platform allows child predators to exploit children while falsely claiming child safety to parents. "Discord presents itself to the world as a platform built on community, connection, and safety. It is not," the lawsuit, filed on May 22 in the District Court of Collin County, Texas, said. "Behind the safety pages and transparency pages, Discord built and maintains one of the internet's most efficient hunting grounds for manipulation, grooming, and predatory behavior towards children. Discord did so knowingly, deliberately, and profitably." The design choices implemented on the communications platform make it easy for bad actors to locate vulnerable users, build trust quickly, and operate away from public view, the complaint said. According to a Discord webpage, safety is at the "core of everything" the company does. In another post, the company claims safety considerations are "fully integrated into our design process." Discord also says that it has a "zero-tolerance policy" against individuals who engage in sexual grooming or exploitation of minors. Such promises made to consumers, parents, and regulators were false, the lawsuit alleges. Discord makes safety an "opt-in rather than default," the complaint states. "It chose to leave private servers invisible. It chose to staff its most critical safety function with unpaid volunteers. It chose to expire violations after 90 days. It chose to bury the block button. Discord chose profits and growth over the safety of children," it states. A 45-year-old can create a Discord account as a 13-year-old, and the platform has no reliable mechanism to detect or prevent such actions, according to the lawsuit. While Discord allows channels to be age-restricted if a moderator wishes, this protection depends entirely on the self-reported birthdate entered when a user creates an account. The platform basically created an age-verification system "that a child can defeat in seconds," the complaint said. The lawsuit highlights multiple cases of minors being harmed by predators on Discord, including a 13-year-old boy who committed suicide in 2022 after being targeted by the 764 extremist network on the platform. In another case, a 15-year-old boy committed suicide after he was groomed by a predator on Discord and Roblox to send sexually explicit images and videos, according to the lawsuit. The complaint noted that Discord has made it into the "Dirty Dozen" list set up by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation for five straight years. "Sexual abusers return to Discord again and again, thanks to this company's reputation for lax rule enforcement and dangerous design," the center said. "Even registered sex offenders have been charged for targeting kids on Discord." The lawsuit asks the court to declare Discord's actions as "unlawful, deceptive, misleading, and unfair" and order the company to implement age verification requirements. In an emailed statement to The Epoch Times, a Discord spokesperson said the lawsuit's "characterization of Discord does not reflect the platform we have built or the investments we have made in user safety." According to the spokesperson, unlike social media platforms, Discord does not have any algorithmic feeds, infinite scroll, or public "likes" that push content to mass audiences. "Our safety systems combine advanced technology and human-led investigations, alongside user reports to help identify accounts or spaces engaged in harmful activity, including sharing exploitative and child sexual abuse materials," the spokesperson said. "We provide teen users and their parents and guardians with important privacy and safety tools, including Teen Safety Assist and our Family Center. We look forward to collaborating with policymakers in working toward a safer online experience for all users on Discord and across the internet." On Feb. 9, Discord announced it planned to roll out teen safety features globally to ensure a "safer and more inclusive experience" for users aged 13 and older. This involves an "age assurance process" in which users must submit identification or agree to use facial age estimation technology. However, only in a minority of cases will age assurance be required, according to Discord. As part of the update, users will have "teen-appropriate experience, with updated communication settings, restricted access to age-gated spaces, and content filtering that preserves the privacy and meaningful connections that define Discord," the company said. The updates were scheduled to take effect in March. But on Feb. 24, Discord said that the rollout had been extended to the second half of this year. Meanwhile, Discord was one of the companies targeted by a recent letter from Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson, who asked the platform to comply with the Take It Down Act by May 19. The Act requires platforms to set up a process that enables individuals, including children, to request the removal of intimate photos or videos shared without their consent. Platforms must make it easy for victims to submit such removal requests. The FTC warned that it would "vigorously" enforce the Act, with each violation potentially resulting in civil penalties of $53,088.
Doj Charges Google Staffer Over Polymarket Trades Netting $1.2 Million
A Google package technologist has been charged pinch utilizing confidential institution accusation to make $1.2 cardinal connected Polymarket, successful the 2nd known national criminal lawsuit connected to lucrative trades connected a prediction marketplace site. Michele Spagnuolo, 36, an Italian national who lives successful Switzerland, was arrested connected Wednesday and charged pinch commodities fraud, ligament fraud, money laundering and different counts for allegedly placing bets connected hunt trends based connected soul Google information that tracked personification searches. "Unlike the counterparties to his trades, Spagnuolo knew the result of these wagers earlier the trading nationalist did because he had accessed Google's confidential, commercially valuable soul data," according to the federal indictment, which authorities unsealed connected Wednesday. Prosecutors opportunity Spagnuolo, operating nether the username AlphaRaccoon, placed a wager that Google's most-searched personification successful 2025 would beryllium the rapper known arsenic D4vd, conscionable erstwhile about Polymarket traders "assigned near-zero probability" to the singer, who has been charged pinch murder, being the No. 1 most-Googled personification past year. The charging documents opportunity erstwhile Spagnuolo transferred his winnings retired of his cryptocurrency wallet, he removed the sanction AlphaRaccoon from his Polymarket account. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission brought a abstracted civilian lawsuit against Spagnuolo for allegedly violating commodities law. Spagnuolo did not return a petition for comment. Google said successful a connection that the institution cooperated successful the national government's investigation into Spagnuolo, who has been placed connected leave. "The worker accessed our trading worldly utilizing a instrumentality disposable to each employees, but utilizing specified confidential accusation to spot bets is simply a superior breach of our policies," said Google spokesperson Jaclyn Vazquez. While the laws that use to the prediction marketplace manufacture are little strict than banal marketplace rules, what's commonly understood arsenic "insider trading," aliases abusing non-public confidential accusation for profit, is forbidden nether national law. But successful prediction marketplace forums connected messaging sites specified arsenic Discord, users scour markets for large, different trades and promote others to travel those bets pinch their ain wagers. "AlphaRaccoon has alpha," said 1 personification connected Discord, utilizing the slang term for immoderate accusation that gives you an separator connected prediction markets, pointing to Spagnuolo's ample bets connected the most-Googled personification of the twelvemonth earlier Google had released it. "Check AlphaRaccoon account" said different personification erstwhile asked really they should stake connected the market. Prediction markets sites specified arsenic Kalshi and Polymarket person erupted successful fame successful President Trump's 2nd term, allowing anyone to stake connected institution announcements, geopolitical events, the result of creation auctions, elections and a seemingly endless array of different topics. And arsenic much and much group activity profits successful each facet of modern life, online sleuths person progressively identified wagers that look excessively bully to beryllium true, suspiciously assured long-shot bets that person netted prediction marketplace traders six- aliases seven-figure profits. In 1 specified lawsuit past month, a maestro sergeant pinch the U.S. Army Special Forces was charged pinch using classified information about the seizure of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro to rake successful much than $400,000 connected Polymarket. The Spagnuolo indictment was unsealed a time aft President Trump vowed connected Truth Social to let the prediction marketplace manufacture to "thrive" by asserting national regulators' "exclusive authority" complete the arguable betting sites. For months, management officials person been fighting authorities officials successful tribunal complete who should constabulary the prediction marketplace industry. State officials opportunity the platforms are fundamentally gambling operations and should beryllium taxable to authorities gambling rules, whereas the Trump management views Polymarket and Kalshi arsenic offering a type of "futures contract" that falls nether the umbrella of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which has historically overseen markets connected things for illustration atom futures, crude lipid and precious metals. Polymarket's about celebrated platform, which is based successful Panama, is technically inaccessible to American users. It was forced to unopen down its U.S. cognition in 2022 arsenic portion of a colony pinch national regulators who said the tract was operating without a trading speech license. Two years later, the FBI raided the flat of the company's founder, Shayne Coplan, arsenic portion of a probe into whether Polymarket was violating that agreement. The Trump management dropped that investigation. Trump officials moreover invited Coplan to the White House for a acme connected cryptocurrency. The president's oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., is an advisor to Polymarket and Kalshi, and a partner successful 1789 Capital, which is simply a awesome investor successful Polymarket.
DOJ charges Google staffer over Polymarket trades netting $1.2 million
A Google software engineer has been charged with using confidential company information to make $1.2 million on Polymarket, in the second known federal criminal case connected to lucrative trades on a prediction market site. Michele Spagnuolo, 36, an Italian citizen who lives in Switzerland, was arrested on Wednesday and charged with commodities fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and other counts for allegedly placing bets on search trends based on internal Google data that tracked user searches. "Unlike the counterparties to his trades, Spagnuolo knew the outcome of these wagers before the trading public did because he had accessed Google's confidential, commercially valuable internal data," according to the federal indictment, which authorities unsealed on Wednesday. Prosecutors say Spagnuolo, operating under the username AlphaRaccoon, placed a wager that Google's most-searched person in 2025 would be the rapper known as D4vd, just when most Polymarket traders "assigned near-zero probability" to the singer, who has been charged with murder, being the No. 1 most-Googled person last year. The charging documents say once Spagnuolo transferred his winnings out of his cryptocurrency wallet, he removed the name AlphaRaccoon from his Polymarket account. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission brought a separate civil case against Spagnuolo for allegedly violating commodities law. Spagnuolo did not return a request for comment. Google said in a statement that the company cooperated in the federal government's investigation into Spagnuolo, who has been placed on leave. "The employee accessed our marketing material using a tool available to all employees, but using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of our policies," said Google spokesperson Jaclyn Vazquez. Olivia Chalos, Polymarket's chief legal officer, said in a statement that it "is the only prediction platform to date whose cooperation has led to insider trading charges in the United States," adding that, since users on the site use crypto to trade, it is "transparent, traceable and bad actors leave footprints." While the laws that apply to the prediction market industry are less strict than stock market rules, what's commonly understood as "insider trading," or abusing non-public confidential information for profit, is illegal under federal law. But in prediction market forums on messaging sites such as Discord, users scour markets for large, unusual trades and encourage others to follow those bets with their own wagers. "AlphaRaccoon has alpha," said one user on Discord, using the slang term for any information that gives you an edge on prediction markets, pointing to Spagnuolo's large bets on the most-Googled person of the year before Google had released it. "Check AlphaRaccoon account" said another user when asked how they should bet on the market. Prediction markets sites such as Kalshi and Polymarket have erupted in popularity in President Trump's second term, allowing anyone to bet on company announcements, geopolitical events, the outcome of art auctions, elections and a seemingly endless array of other topics. And as more and more people seek profits in every facet of modern life, online sleuths have increasingly identified wagers that appear too good to be true, suspiciously confident long-shot bets that have netted prediction market traders six- or seven-figure profits. In one such instance last month, a master sergeant with the U.S. Army Special Forces was charged with using classified information about the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro to rake in more than $400,000 on Polymarket. The Spagnuolo indictment was unsealed a day after President Trump vowed on Truth Social to allow the prediction market industry to "thrive" by asserting federal regulators' "exclusive authority" over the controversial betting sites. For months, administration officials have been fighting state officials in court over who should police the prediction market industry. State officials say the platforms are essentially gambling operations and should be subject to state gambling rules, whereas the Trump administration views Polymarket and Kalshi as offering a type of "futures contract" that falls under the umbrella of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which has historically overseen markets on things like grain futures, crude oil and precious metals. Polymarket's most popular platform, which is based in Panama, is technically inaccessible to American users. It was forced to shut down its U.S. operation in 2022 as part of a settlement with federal regulators who said the site was operating without a trading exchange license. Two years later, the FBI raided the apartment of the company's founder, Shayne Coplan, as part of a probe into whether Polymarket was violating that agreement. The Trump administration dropped that investigation. Trump officials even invited Coplan to the White House for a summit on cryptocurrency. The president's oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., is an advisor to Polymarket and Kalshi, and a partner in 1789 Capital, which is a major investor in Polymarket.
DOJ charges Google staffer over Polymarket trades netting $1.2 million
Updated May 27, 2026 at 7:03 PM CDT A Google software engineer has been charged with using confidential company information to make $1.2 million on Polymarket, in the second known federal criminal case connected to lucrative trades on a prediction market site. Michele Spagnuolo, 36, an Italian citizen who lives in Switzerland, was arrested on Wednesday and charged with commodities fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and other counts for allegedly placing bets on search trends based on internal Google data that tracked user searches. "Unlike the counterparties to his trades, Spagnuolo knew the outcome of these wagers before the trading public did because he had accessed Google's confidential, commercially valuable internal data," according to the federal indictment, which authorities unsealed on Wednesday. Prosecutors say Spagnuolo, operating under the username AlphaRaccoon, placed a wager that Google's most-searched person in 2025 would be the rapper known as D4vd, just when most Polymarket traders "assigned near-zero probability" to the singer, who has been charged with murder, being the No. 1 most-Googled person last year. The charging documents say once Spagnuolo transferred his winnings out of his cryptocurrency wallet, he removed the name AlphaRaccoon from his Polymarket account. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission brought a separate civil case against Spagnuolo for allegedly violating commodities law. Spagnuolo did not return a request for comment. Google said in a statement that the company cooperated in the federal government's investigation into Spagnuolo, who has been placed on leave. "The employee accessed our marketing material using a tool available to all employees, but using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of our policies," said Google spokesperson Jaclyn Vazquez. Olivia Chalos, Polymarket's chief legal officer, said in a statement that it "is the only prediction platform to date whose cooperation has led to insider trading charges in the United States," adding that, since users on the site use crypto to trade, it is "transparent, traceable and bad actors leave footprints." While the laws that apply to the prediction market industry are less strict than stock market rules, what's commonly understood as "insider trading," or abusing non-public confidential information for profit, is illegal under federal law. But in prediction market forums on messaging sites such as Discord, users scour markets for large, unusual trades and encourage others to follow those bets with their own wagers. "AlphaRaccoon has alpha," said one user on Discord, using the slang term for any information that gives you an edge on prediction markets, pointing to Spagnuolo's large bets on the most-Googled person of the year before Google had released it. "Check AlphaRaccoon account" said another user when asked how they should bet on the market. Prediction markets sites such as Kalshi and Polymarket have erupted in popularity in President Trump's second term, allowing anyone to bet on company announcements, geopolitical events, the outcome of art auctions, elections and a seemingly endless array of other topics. And as more and more people seek profits in every facet of modern life, online sleuths have increasingly identified wagers that appear too good to be true, suspiciously confident long-shot bets that have netted prediction market traders six- or seven-figure profits. In one such instance last month, a master sergeant with the U.S. Army Special Forces was charged with using classified information about the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro to rake in more than $400,000 on Polymarket. The Spagnuolo indictment was unsealed a day after President Trump vowed on Truth Social to allow the prediction market industry to "thrive" by asserting federal regulators' "exclusive authority" over the controversial betting sites. For months, administration officials have been fighting state officials in court over who should police the prediction market industry. State officials say the platforms are essentially gambling operations and should be subject to state gambling rules, whereas the Trump administration views Polymarket and Kalshi as offering a type of "futures contract" that falls under the umbrella of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which has historically overseen markets on things like grain futures, crude oil and precious metals. Polymarket's most popular platform, which is based in Panama, is technically inaccessible to American users. It was forced to shut down its U.S. operation in 2022 as part of a settlement with federal regulators who said the site was operating without a trading exchange license. Two years later, the FBI raided the apartment of the company's founder, Shayne Coplan, as part of a probe into whether Polymarket was violating that agreement. The Trump administration dropped that investigation. Trump officials even invited Coplan to the White House for a summit on cryptocurrency. The president's oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., is an advisor to Polymarket and Kalshi, and a partner in 1789 Capital, which is a major investor in Polymarket.
DOJ charges Google staffer over Polymarket trades netting $1.2 million
A Google software engineer has been charged with using confidential company information to make $1.2 million on Polymarket, in the second known federal criminal case connected to lucrative trades on a prediction market site. Michele Spagnuolo, 36, an Italian citizen who lives in Switzerland, was arrested on Wednesday and charged with commodities fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and other counts for allegedly placing bets on search trends based on internal Google data that tracked user searches. "Unlike the counterparties to his trades, Spagnuolo knew the outcome of these wagers before the trading public did because he had accessed Google's confidential, commercially valuable internal data," according to the federal indictment, which authorities unsealed on Wednesday. Prosecutors say Spagnuolo, operating under the username AlphaRaccoon, placed a wager that Google's most-searched person in 2025 would be the rapper known as D4vd, just when most Polymarket traders "assigned near-zero probability" to the singer, who has been charged with murder, being the No. 1 most-Googled person last year. The charging documents say once Spagnuolo transferred his winnings out of his cryptocurrency wallet, he removed the name AlphaRaccoon from his Polymarket account. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission brought a separate civil case against Spagnuolo for allegedly violating commodities law. Spagnuolo did not return a request for comment. Google said in a statement that the company cooperated in the federal government's investigation into Spagnuolo, who has been placed on leave. "The employee accessed our marketing material using a tool available to all employees, but using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of our policies," said Google spokesperson Jaclyn Vazquez. While the laws that apply to the prediction market industry are less strict than stock market rules, what's commonly understood as "insider trading," or abusing non-public confidential information for profit, is illegal under federal law. But in prediction market forums on messaging sites such as Discord, users scour markets for large, unusual trades and encourage others to follow those bets with their own wagers. "AlphaRaccoon has alpha," said one user on Discord, using the slang term for any information that gives you an edge on prediction markets, pointing to Spagnuolo's large bets on the most-Googled person of the year before Google had released it. "Check AlphaRaccoon account" said another user when asked how they should bet on the market. Prediction markets sites such as Kalshi and Polymarket have erupted in popularity in President Trump's second term, allowing anyone to bet on company announcements, geopolitical events, the outcome of art auctions, elections and a seemingly endless array of other topics. And as more and more people seek profits in every facet of modern life, online sleuths have increasingly identified wagers that appear too good to be true, suspiciously confident long-shot bets that have netted prediction market traders six- or seven-figure profits. In one such instance last month, a master sergeant with the U.S. Army Special Forces was charged with using classified information about the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro to rake in more than $400,000 on Polymarket. The Spagnuolo indictment was unsealed a day after President Trump vowed on Truth Social to allow the prediction market industry to "thrive" by asserting federal regulators' "exclusive authority" over the controversial betting sites. For months, administration officials have been fighting state officials in court over who should police the prediction market industry. State officials say the platforms are essentially gambling operations and should be subject to state gambling rules, whereas the Trump administration views Polymarket and Kalshi as offering a type of "futures contract" that falls under the umbrella of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which has historically overseen markets on things like grain futures, crude oil and precious metals. Polymarket's most popular platform, which is based in Panama, is technically inaccessible to American users. It was forced to shut down its U.S. operation in 2022 as part of a settlement with federal regulators who said the site was operating without a trading exchange license. Two years later, the FBI raided the apartment of the company's founder, Shayne Coplan, as part of a probe into whether Polymarket was violating that agreement. The Trump administration dropped that investigation. Trump officials even invited Coplan to the White House for a summit on cryptocurrency. The president's oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., is an advisor to Polymarket and Kalshi, and a partner in 1789 Capital, which is a major investor in Polymarket.
Discord's Quiet Native ARM64 Release Transforms Experience on Snapdragon Windows Laptops
Discord has slipped a native ARM64 build of its desktop client onto its download page without fanfare. The move arrives at a moment when Windows on Arm devices from Qualcomm have gained real traction among professionals and gamers who value long battery life. And the difference feels immediate. Users on Snapdragon X Elite or X Plus machines no longer need to accept the translation tax imposed by Microsoft's Prism emulator. That layer worked. But it carried costs. Startup took longer. CPU usage climbed during voice calls or screen sharing. Battery drained faster than it should on hardware designed for efficiency. The new build sidesteps all of that. Neowin first noted the availability on May 25, 2026. The official Discord download page now presents a clear choice: x64 or ARM64 when selecting the Windows installer. No announcement accompanied the addition. No press release explained the timing. Yet the option sits there, ready for anyone to grab. This marks the end of a wait that stretched nearly two years. About a year earlier, Discord had confirmed development of the native client. The company followed through after watching the Snapdragon X series gain momentum and after Microsoft spent years coaxing developers to compile for ARM64. The result lands at a point when more hardware vendors prepare Snapdragon X2 machines and new Surface models. Performance gains appear across routine tasks. Scrolling through servers feels snappier. Voice channels launch without the slight hesitation that plagued the emulated version. Battery impact drops because the app no longer runs translated instructions. One early tester who used the x86 client on a Snapdragon X Elite device described constant sluggishness and lag before switching to an unofficial client out of frustration. The native option eliminates that pain. MakeUseOf highlighted the practical upgrades. The web version of Discord offered an alternative but sacrificed features. Global hotkeys for push-to-talk refused to work when the browser tab lost focus. Screen sharing behaved unpredictably. Notifications sometimes failed to appear. Game activity status simply did not register. The native ARM64 app restores every capability without compromise. But the story runs deeper than one application. Windows on Arm spent years fighting an uphill battle for app support. Early Surface Pro X devices suffered from spotty compatibility. Emulation improved with Prism, yet many background tools like Discord stayed stuck in x86 form. That created a persistent drag on what should have been class-leading efficiency. Discord's decision signals broader acceptance. Other holdouts now face pressure to follow. Claudia Fellerman, a Discord spokesperson, told The Verge in 2025 that the company had begun work on the ARM64 client. At the time the project remained in early stages. An experimental build already showed promise. One reviewer who installed a Canary preview reported behavior indistinguishable from the Intel version. "There is no lag navigating around and the performance is a lot better," the tester observed. The public stable release has now caught up to those early experiments. Installation remains straightforward. Visit discord.com/download, select Windows, then choose the ARM64 option. The Microsoft Store listing still lacks explicit ARM64 labeling, so the direct download serves as the reliable path. After installation, users may want to clear the existing cache to avoid any residual data from the previous version. The app itself looks and functions exactly as before. Only the underlying architecture has changed. Battery life stands out as the most tangible benefit on laptops. Voice calls that once pushed fans into audible spin now run cooler and quieter. Streaming or screen sharing sessions consume fewer resources. For professionals who keep Discord open all day in the background, the efficiency gain accumulates. Less heat. Longer unplugged sessions. Fewer complaints about sluggishness during meetings. The timing aligns with maturing Windows on Arm hardware. Qualcomm's Snapdragon X series delivered strong initial results. Successive generations promise even better performance. Microsoft has expanded native app support across its own products. Developers have responded. Discord joins a growing list that includes major productivity tools and creative applications. The platform no longer feels like an afterthought on Arm machines. Unofficial clients had filled the gap for impatient users. Some offered ARM64 builds ahead of the official release and gained popularity precisely because the emulated Discord felt inadequate. Their existence underscored the demand. Now the official client matches or exceeds those workarounds while delivering full feature parity, security updates, and Nitro benefits without question. Task Manager provides an easy way to verify the change. Switch to the Details tab and examine the Architecture column. Native ARM64 processes display clearly. Microsoft continues to refine this visibility, but the information already helps users confirm they run the optimized version. So what comes next? More apps will likely shed their emulation layer in coming months. The success of Copilot+ PCs and the steady improvement in Prism have created conditions where native development delivers clear returns. Discord's silent rollout sets a quiet precedent. No marketing blitz. Just a better product made available to users who need it. Early reactions on X reflect relief. One user noted the elimination of random lag, reduced CPU spikes, and noticeably better battery during long sessions. Another pointed out that the hardware was never the limitation. The software simply had not caught up. That gap has narrowed. Discord did not comment publicly on the release timing. The company has focused instead on features like improved audio, video, and server tools. Yet this architectural update may matter more to a segment of its user base than any flashy new interface change. For owners of ARM-based Windows laptops, the chat app that once felt like a burden now fades into the background where it belongs. The shift also carries implications for developers watching the platform. When a service as widely used as Discord makes the investment in native ARM64 support, it validates the architecture for broader adoption. Gamers who rely on Discord overlay during play on Snapdragon handhelds or laptops stand to benefit. Professionals who manage multiple voice channels during work calls gain smoother operation. The entire experience moves closer to what users on traditional x86 systems have taken for granted. Expect further refinement. Future updates will likely optimize additional subsystems for ARM64. Yet the foundation now exists. The app runs natively. Performance and efficiency improve as a direct result. And the long wait has ended.
Inside The Murky Market Selling Pre-IPO SpaceX And OpenAI Shares
Ordinary investors can now buy private shares of OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX -- they think they can, anyway. But between them and IPO riches lies an opaque network of shadowy middlemen, each eager to take their cut, some selling nothing but air. the summer of 2020, former Morgan Stanley trader Adam Crawley was wandering through Indonesia, Thailand and Australia, perfecting his qigong with a man called Master YanG, when a cold message on LinkedIn jerked him back to reality. The sender was Noel Moldvai, a crypto enthusiast with a fondness for early-2000s Canadian rock and a pitch about the hottest corner of the private markets. Crawley had no intention of going back into finance, but Moldvai sold him on a market in which access was scarce and demand was feral: pre-IPO shares in the largest and hottest startups on the planet. The ones planning trillion-dollar public offerings: Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI. The kinds of shares almost no retail investor is supposed to be able to buy. The kind everyone wants. In February 2022, the pair founded Austin, Texas-based Augment, a firm built to locate and package those shares for sale to institutional and retail investors who couldn't otherwise buy them. Crawley claims Augment's assets -- almost entirely pre-IPO shares in private tech companies -- have ballooned from under $200 million to more than $1 billion over the last 12 months, driven largely by Anthropic's skyrocketing value. Augment isn't charting a new path here. People have been trading private-company paper since well before Facebook's 2012 IPO. But the AI boom seems to be turning the side door into more of a front entrance. The reason is simple: Hot tech companies are staying private longer and VCs are pocketing much more of the value. Buying Apple at its IPO price and waiting a few decades was once a viable retirement plan. Buying a $1 trillion company at IPO and waiting for it to triple is not. The biggest gains now happen years before the prospectus is filed. One reason: The SEC changed the rules back in 2012. Before then, companies with $10 million in assets or 500 shareholders had to go public (that's partly why Facebook did so); now the limit is 2,000 shareholders. SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are all hoping to go public at valuations of $1 trillion or more, leaving little room for further exponential growth. Enter the special-purpose vehicle, or SPV: a fund built to pool money from many parties into a single asset. Sometimes the asset is the shares. Sometimes it is an interest in another SPV that holds the shares. Sometimes it is an interest in an SPV that holds an interest in a third SPV that holds the shares. Each layer is its own legal entity. And each layer charges fees. The SPV is a regulatory workaround that helps companies stay private longer without disclosing any financials, because hundreds of people can aggregate their shareholding into a single vehicle on the cap table. And, importantly, the SPV marketplace allows for company insiders -- including their billionaire founders -- to cash out secretly without spooking the market. Everyone along the way takes a cut: There are management fees, carried interest and sometimes access or introduction fees. Fueled by FOMO and the fact that private stock can be difficult to transfer, the SPV ecosystem has become a booming toll-road business for the companies and brokers that run it. Sim Desai, CEO of the SPV brokerage Hiive, estimates that SPVs hold "hundreds of billions" in private venture-backed companies. It's a major step toward a worthy goal: democratizing private-company ownership. The more people can share in private markets' gargantuan economic gains, the better. But without consistent rules and active regulators, the market for pre-IPO shares risks turning into a playground for scammers. Everyone is trying to get a piece of the market. That includes 20-something-year-old founders, former lawyers, mid-tier VCs and venerable institutions like Morgan Stanley and Charles Schwab, which peddle SPV investments to high-net-worth clients. There are even SPV shills on Instagram, WhatsApp and Telegram. On one end, there's a shadow network of individual brokers, some of whom may be unlicensed. On the other, there are "traditional" venture capitalists using SPVs as an investment strategy. Early-stage rounds are getting larger and less accessible to anyone without deep pockets. Later-stage rounds are being sliced into deals where investors can pick the single company they want and pay for the privilege. Billionaire Antonio Gracias' (No. 32 on this year's Midas List) Valor Equity Partners holds an estimated $30 billion in SpaceX shares via single-investment vehicles; investor Alex Davis, owner of Dallas-based investment firm Disruptive, oversees some $10 billion in assets thanks largely to SPVs in companies such as Groq, Palantir and Shield AI. In between are firms like Augment and Hiive, which was last valued at $650 million, projects $120 million in 2026 revenue and says it's profitable. Morgan Stanley bought EquityZen, a New York-based SPV broker, in January. AngelList, which helps people set up and sell SPV interests, is estimated to have pulled about $200 million in fees from SPV formation. Sydecar, a Houston-based SPV administrator, has seen its assets increase from $3.5 billion six months ago to $5.5 billion now. All these firms help fill rounds, run secondary transactions and build the financial plumbing around the high-growth companies that landed America's top VCs on Forbes' 2026 Midas List. "We're blowing through our projections," says Sydecar cofounder and CEO Nik Talreja. He thinks Sydecar could double its assets under administration again to $10 billion in the next 12 months. Individual investors need to be careful. Over the next few years, many of them will learn that "exposure" to a private company through an SPV can be much more expensive than owning the shares outright. Some will have paid compounding fees through stacked vehicles. Others will have paid upfront access fees that range from less than 5% to as much as 18%. Those fees are on top of the typical "2 and 20" (2% of assets, 20% of profits) common in venture capital, though not all SPVs charge management fees. Sydecar says its SPVs take an average of 12% of profits. The math gets ugly fast. Say an investor buys a $2 million slice of a three-layer SPV where each layer takes a 2% management fee and 20% carried interest. If that stake is worth $10 million when the company goes public two years later, nearly $5 million would go to the middlemen. And that's before paying taxes. There is also transfer risk: Private companies, including Anthropic, Anduril and OpenAI, restrict transfers of their stock. That means SPV investors may never own the shares directly, muddying the path to cashing out. Finally, there's fraud and incompetence: SPVs that lied about having access to the shares or ones that were never properly formed. Lawsuits are already wending their way through the system. Expect many more. In some ways, SPVs are the SPACs of 2026: a boom market in access, with enough legitimate promise to attract serious money but where those raising the capital can get an easy score at the expense of the retail investor -- and keep litigators busy later. The resemblance is more than coincidental: A SPAC, or Special Purpose Acquisition Company, is just a subspecies of an SPV. Back at Augment, Crawley and Moldvai started by nabbing $35 million in Anthropic shares -- with the company's approval -- at the 2024 fire-sale auction of now-defunct cryptocurrency platform FTX (Sam Bankman-Fried, the imprisoned cofounder of FTX, was one of Anthropic's earliest investors). They've since used a combination of equity and debt to fund purchases of other in-demand private-company stock, mostly from VC firms, package it into an SPV and sell that to investors, Crawley says. The firm, which he says is profitable, generally charges a 5% transaction fee. Revenue is still modest but rising quickly: $12 million in 2025, a projected $40 million this year and $100 million next year. Crawley sees FTX as the model, which is one of those comparisons that explains more than it intends to. "You have a precedent [in crypto] for bringing liquidity to a private asset," he says. "FTX was winning the strategy before they blew up. . . . FTX figured this out." Of course, FTX also showed what can happen when financial engineering outruns trust. Matt Grimm, who cofounded military drone maker Anduril with Palmer Luckey and three others, painted a darker picture on a recent podcast. "How many investors in America think they own a chunk of SpaceX when they're actually funding their ex-roommate's boyfriend's coke habit in Miami?" April, venture capitalist Jeff Weinstein of New York City-based FJ Labs received a WhatsApp message from a firm he'd never heard of offering to sell him up to $2 billion in Anthropic shares. The price valued Anthropic between $800 billion and $1 trillion, or nearly triple the valuation of the AI firm's then-latest funding round. The deal also came with a 10% upfront fee. When Weinstein asked for more information, the seller told him it was a single-layer SPV -- meaning the vehicle would hold the shares directly. Then came a letter of intent asking him to sign and provide proof of funds by the end of that same day. Anthropic does not allow SPVs to acquire its stock without permission, and the company holds that unauthorized transfers are void. So Weinstein asked for the name of the direct investor and evidence of the allocation in Anthropic's upcoming funding round. He did not get an answer. Unclear about what he was buying, he declined. "What I found most gross about this was the bald-faced lying," says Weinstein, who worries that retail investors who are under time pressure might not give proposals like this the proper scrutiny. The episode illustrates a basic danger: SPV investors cannot usually tell who owns the underlying shares. Ellen Tang, who runs an investing YouTube channel and tried to invest in Groq through a Hiive SPV in November, recalls asking exactly that. "I remember it was something they couldn't reveal," she says. Potential SPV investors should ask a simple question, Weinstein says. "Is the person you're dealing with just trying to intermediate themselves into the transaction and take a cut?" He suspects many are. "Half the people involved in this ecosystem, maybe more than half, are not registered broker-dealers," he says. "This entire grifting process is illegal." The clearest cautionary tale so far is Linqto. Founded in 2010, the Bay Area company grew to manage more than half a billion in private pre-IPO company assets, much of it tied to crypto company Ripple. Linqto marketed something that seemed too good to be true: for as little as $1,000, access to buying shares of more than 100 private companies including SpaceX, Anthropic and Ripple -- with no management fees or carried interest. Meanwhile, Linqto was contending with multiple lawsuits, including a class action against its former CEO, Bill Sarris, and a whistleblower suit from former chief revenue officer Geno Zawrotny, who now works with Crawley at Augment. Linqto is also under investigation by the SEC, DOJ and Finra. Among the allegations against prior management: telling investors they were buying shares directly in pre-IPO companies while selling interests in an SPV that was not properly formed; charging excessive and undisclosed markups of more than 150% while advertising "no hidden fees or costs"; and using paid influencers to create FOMO around supposedly scarce private-company access. Last year, new management came in and quickly realized the business could not continue as it was and put Linqto into bankruptcy protection. It was, says Dan Siciliano, Linqto's new CEO, "a nontransparent picking of the pocket of the customer right from the start." Siciliano stopped trading and moved Linqto's creditors' assets to Charles Schwab-owned secondary trading platform Forge and global asset manager VanEck. In February, a judge approved Linqto's plan to emerge from bankruptcy; that will likely happen in a few weeks. Rainmaker Securities, a Finra-registered broker named alongside Linqto in the class-action lawsuit, remains a major player in SPV markets. Rainmaker rejects all allegations of wrongdoing and plans to file for dismissal. The firm has previously paid Finra fines, without admitting wrongdoing, over allegedly making misleading statements to the public and failing to record evidence of sufficient due diligence. Rainmaker insists it's one of the good guys, emphasizing that it has never had investor complaints on Finra. Says a company spokesperson, "Not all private securities SPV transactions are conducted through regulated broker-dealers [like Rainmaker] and therefore may not be subject to the same compliance, diligence, supervisory or record-keeping standards." Last month, Anthropic published a list of eight SPV brokers it says are not authorized to buy or sell its shares, including major players Hiive and Sydecar, and emphasized that SPVs are not allowed to acquire Anthropic stock. Still, Hiive appears to hold more than a quarter of its SPV assets, worth more than $150 million, in Anthropic shares. Sydecar has registered 44 SPVs with "Anthropic" in the name. "We only facilitate share transfers with company approval," Hiive's Desai wrote on X in response, emphasizing that the company's mission is to "bring transparency and standardization to the private market in order to address precisely the concerns that they raise." Sydecar says that because it is an administrator, it does not buy or sell securities. OpenAI and Anduril also ban secondary transactions without express company approval. Yet these shares do trade: Hiive doesn't have shares in either company in its SPVs but appears to run an active market (it takes up to 6.8% off the top) for trading shares of Anduril and OpenAI. At least half a dozen syndicates on AngelList publicly claim to have access to OpenAI shares. Ahead of its IPO, SpaceX has been kicking SPV investors off its cap table -- including Chinese money that went into the company through a Delaware SPV run by Tomales Bay Capital. This means investors may have put money into vehicles they believed would deliver exposure to these companies, only to find that the companies themselves refuse to recognize the transfers. Maybe the original shareholder sells at IPO and passes the proceeds down the SPV chain. Maybe they don't. Or maybe the company declares the transfer void, investors lose the shares they thought they were buying and the fight moves to Delaware Chancery Court. Some SPV peddlers have already run into legal trouble. In January, three SPV brokers in New York City pleaded guilty to conspiracy and fraud charges. They allegedly pocketed millions of dollars in fees -- from hidden markups on SPV shares in pre-IPO companies -- while raising $185 million from more than 1,000 investors. A month prior, the Department of Justice charged a New York man with fraud -- for selling SPV interests in Anduril shares that he did not have access to. In 2023, a federal judge convicted a Manhattan man for using investors' SPV money to buy private jet charters and a Corvette. or now, the SPV bazaar is accepting new entrants from seemingly every zip code. From his office in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Max Avery tells the story of how he got here: childhood computer nerd; arms dealer in Ploiești, Romania; struggling construction entrepreneur; and, finally, purveyor of SPVs. The 40-year-old, who legally changed his name to Maximus Tyrannus Avery after the protagonist in Gladiator, claims he once sold a rare semiautomatic pistol to Elon Musk. Now he is in private markets. Avery runs a crypto wealth-management platform and a 15,000-member Discord community where investors trade notes on SPV opportunities. He has written a book about how anyone can raise or invest in SPVs. He's taking his own advice, raising about $10 million so far. He plans to charge the usual private-market toll: 2% a year and 20% of the profits. The SpaceX IPO set for June will be the first big test for true SPV believers like Avery. If investors in layered SPVs can sell and collect, they will look smart and the market inevitable. But if a thousand lawsuits blossom and middlemen pocket nearly all the profits, there will be howls of outrage and cries for more regulation. Either way, the current patchwork -- where each company invents its own SPV policy, eligibility rules and transfer restrictions, without clear enforcement -- is messy, inconsistent and ripe for abuse. Avery and a chorus of SPV hypesters think tokenizing SPV interests could help by letting investors sell blockchain-backed tokens tied to SPV ownership even when the underlying shares cannot transfer. Some Anthropic-linked crypto tokens are already trading at implied valuations above $1 trillion. It's a buzzy idea, and likely backed by good intentions, but given crypto's fraught history of fraud, theft and essentially nonexistent controls, it will almost undoubtedly make things worse. You don't get sane by adding crazy to crazy. Crypto and tokenization to the rescue? Good grief.
I manage my entire home lab using Telegram and Discord and it's the coolest thing ever
Ask anyone running a home lab, and they'll tell you that it is a constant cycle of excitement around discovering cool new services, and eventually, maintenance fatigue. It starts simply enough with a single service, but before you know it, your Synology NAS is running dozens of Docker containers handling everything from media servers to network-wide ad blockers. The real challenge is not setting these services up; it is keeping them running smoothly without spending every weekend staring at a management console or container logs.
Proton-CachyOS adds low latency layer and Discord rich presence support
Proton-CachyOS version 11.0-20260519 has released bringing support for the new open source low_latency_layer, along with Discord rich presence. Anyone can run their own fork of Valve's Proton as it's open source. Check out the GamingOnLinux Guide to all the different Proton versions. Proton-CachyOS includes a lot of extras on top of Valve's Proton, based on their testing code and various patches (so in some ways it can be more unstable). The main changes for this release include: Source: GitHub To use it you can follow all the same steps as in the GE-Proton guide here on GamingOnLinux, you just pick Proton-CachyOS instead.
Discord is now available natively on Windows on ARM
At long last, Discord has a native client for Windows PCs powered by ARM processors. About a year ago, Discord confirmed that a native client for Windows on ARM was in the works. With the success of the Snapdragon X1 lineup and the upcoming X2, Windows on ARM became much more popular, especially after Microsoft convinced more developers to release ARM-native apps. Now, after two years of waiting, Discord has finally launched its native app for Windows on ARM. While the company has yet to announce the release, the official website already lets you download Discord for Windows on ARM. Upon clicking the "Download for Windows" button, Discord's website lets you choose an x86 or ARM64 version. If you are unsure that the apps on your PC are ARM-native, launch Task Manager, go to the Details tab, and check the Architecture column (Microsoft is also working on some NPU-related improvements for Task Manager). While modern ARM processors for Windows are pretty good at emulating x86 software, allowing you to run most apps with some exceptions, having a native app brings some notable benefits, such as better performance and lower energy consumption. Although Discord is primarily targeted at gamers (you can get Game Pass with Discord Nitro, by the way), many people use the platform for communication outside gaming. It is a very popular service, and having it as a native app on ARM-powered Windows PCs will make the latter more attractive, especially with the upcoming Snapdragon X2 devices. Microsoft recently announced new Surface PCs with Intel's Core Ultra 300 Series and confirmed that consumer-facing Surface with Snapdragon X2 chips would follow soon. You can download Discord for Windows from the official website. It is also available in the Microsoft Store, but the current listing and its hardware requirements do not mention ARM64 support.
Claude AI Review 2026: Is Anthropic's AI Worth $20/Month? - Memeburn
Despite its strict usage limits, Claude is a valuable AI assistant for writers, researchers, businesses, developers, marketers, and content creators. Claude AI's growth is impossible to ignore, with more than 823.5 million visits and over 11.3 million daily active users. In April 2026 alone, its web traffic increased by 34.18%, while mobile downloads surged by 55% week-on-week in early March. With an estimated user base between 18 and 30 million, Claude has emerged as one of the fastest-growing AI platforms globally. Here is a Claude AI review exploring whether it truly lives up to these numbers and competes with leading AI assistants. Claude AI at a Glance What Is Claude AI? Claude is a generative AI and agentic AI assistant designed to support a wide range of complex and everyday tasks. These include writing, coding, research, summarization, data analysis, and workflow automation. Generative AI is a subset of artificial intelligence that can create original content based on user prompts. Conversely, agentic AI can achieve specific goals and perform certain tasks independently with minimal human intervention. In simple terms, Claude can generate fresh content from your inputs as well as handle many tasks autonomously. Who Is Behind Claude? Claude is developed by Anthropic, an AI safety and research organization based in the United States of America (USA). It is powered by the Claude family of large language models (LLMs), which includes Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku. LLMs are advanced AI systems capable of understanding, interpreting, and producing human-like outputs in natural languages. Originally launched as an AI chatbot, Claude's capabilities now extend beyond back-and-forth conversations. It can handle complex cognitive tasks, including deeper reasoning, strategic thinking, and problem-solving with ease. Opus 4.7 is Claude's latest model, designed specifically for challenging software engineering tasks. Sonnet 4.6 serves as the default chat model for both Free and Claude Pro users. How We Tested Claude AI? Testing Methodology and Criteria We tested Claude using the free plan, focusing primarily on real-world, everyday tasks. From creating blogs and marketing campaigns to building price prediction models, we assigned a diverse range of tasks to the tool. This helped us assess its output quality, research and reasoning abilities, coding and debugging skills, and overall usability for day-to-day workflows. How Did Claude Compare to ChatGPT & Gemini in Our Tests? In our tests, Claude outperformed Gemini and ChatGPT in both long-form and short-form content creation, complex reasoning, research, and coding tasks. It also demonstrated a lower tendency to hallucinate or produce inaccurate information. However, it fell short in creative writing, storytelling, and social media marketing tasks. Claude AI Pricing and Plans * Free ($0/month): Starting with the free plan, you can chat on Claude's web, desktop, iOS, and Android applications. You can also generate code, visualize data, create content, search the web, and connect to Google Workspace or Slack services. If needed, you can integrate the chatbot with external tools using remote model context protocols (MCPs). Remote MCPs are cloud-based servers that connect Claude's LLMs with external systems to fetch live data. * Pro ($17/month): Upgrading to the Claude Pro plan unlocks higher usage limits and access to Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and more Claude models. It also offers a larger context window and facilitates in-depth research. * Max ($100/month): The Max plan is designed for power users. It provides up to 20x higher usage limits than Pro. You'll also enjoy priority access during peak traffic hours and early access to new Claude features. * Team ($20/seat/month): This plan is built for teams ranging between 5 and 50 members. The standard seat costs $20/seat/month, while the premium seat is priced at $100/seat/month, billed annually. Both options include a 200K context window, single sign-on, administration controls for local and remote connectors, central billing, and more. * Enterprise ($20/seat): Designed for large firms, this plan offers a variety of enterprise-specific features. These include advanced security, audit logs, Google Docs cataloging, and a 500K context window. Claude AI Performance: Writing and Content Before diving into performance, it's worth noting one of Claude's core strengths: its context window. A context window refers to the maximum amount of information an LLM can process during a single conversation. This includes prompts, outputs, chat history, and uploaded files. As of May 2026, Claude can process up to 200K tokens, approximately 500 pages of text, in one interaction. It also compresses lengthy chats to retain context when users resume a conversation. To test content quality, we asked Claude to produce a 1,500-word blog on "How AI Tools Will Transform Digital Marketing." The output was phenomenal and very human-like. Claude's writing style felt more engaging and nuanced than ChatGPT's. The content included the latest developments in AI marketing while establishing topical depth and entity authority. In digital marketing, entity authority refers to the degree to which search engines and AI systems recognize a brand as credible. Additionally, Claude integrated search engine optimization (SEO) elements naturally into the content. SEO is the process of improving a website's visibility on search engines like Google to increase online traffic. Claude covered the most-searched AI marketing subtopics and dedicated a separate section to each. It also structured the Heading 2s (H2s) around high-intent search queries. That said, some sentences were too long, complex, and jargon-heavy. Readers with limited knowledge of the topic may find the content harder to understand. While the output was not particularly beginner-friendly, it included relevant trends and statistics, making it a compelling read. Claude AI Performance: Coding For developers, Claude offers a dedicated AI coding assistant called Claude Code. It can run in your terminal, desktop application, or web browser. It also runs natively on supported integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Visual Studio Code and JetBrains. IDEs are software applications that combine code editors, compilers, and debuggers into a unified interface. Claude demonstrates strong programming capabilities across multiple languages, including Python, JavaScript, C#, SQL, and Rust. This supports polyglot development, which involves building applications using multiple programming languages. From analyzing codebases and automating repetitive tasks to fixing bugs and building features, Claude Code streamlines the entire development process. To test these capabilities, we asked Claude to write a Python program that predicts house prices in New York. Within a few minutes, it generated a 494-line program and provided clear explanations for each step. When we encountered an error while running the program in Jupyter Notebook, Claude effectively debugged the issue. It also explained the cause of the bug. Claude AI Performance: Reasoning and Research We evaluated Claude's performance using a series of prompts designed to test both simple and complex reasoning. These included number pattern continuation tasks, constraint-based scheduling puzzles, and resource allocation optimization challenges. Claude performed well across all of them. Claude's Opus model comes with extended thinking. Before responding, it spends adequate time on complex reasoning and deep analysis. This works particularly well for strategy-heavy prompts and multi-step tasks where accuracy matters most. However, we couldn't test it as Anthropic restricts the Opus model to paying customers only. For research tasks, though Claude introduced the Deep Research feature later than its competitors, it outperformed them in terms of quality. To evaluate this, we asked Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini to each write a 500-word article on the integration between AI and Web3. ChatGPT sourced information from 13 websites, Claude from 9, and Gemini from 3. However, the sheer number of sources doesn't necessarily reflect research quality. Claude's output was the strongest. It highlighted both the merits and pitfalls of AI-Web3 integration. Rather than ending with a bland, generic conclusion, the article explored the strategic implications of this convergence for individuals and businesses. In comparison, ChatGPT and Gemini's outputs offered a less comprehensive perspective on the topic. Claude AI Performance: Real-World Use Cases 1. Best for Writers and Content Teams Claude stands out among its rivals in content creation. Whether you're creating marketing materials, blogs, reusable templates, or technical documents, Claude's outputs are consistently superior. Its ability to adapt tone is another key strength. To test this, we asked Claude to write two 800-word review blogs for the MEXC cryptocurrency exchange. One used a neutral tone, while the other adopted a casual style. Claude handled both tasks effectively. The first version sounded formal and educational. The second was more conversational and subtly promotional, featuring stronger H2s to encourage sign-ups. It's also worth highlighting Claude's Artifacts feature. It allows you to create standalone content, including documents, games, data visualizations, productivity tools, and quizzes. Claude displays these formatted outputs in a separate panel alongside the chat. You can view, edit, download, and build upon them effortlessly. Overall, this feature transforms Claude from a conversational AI assistant into a complete productivity workspace. Next, we asked Claude to create a science fiction and a marketing campaign for a fictitious product. Claude delivered satisfactory outputs across the board. However, the sci-fi story wasn't lifelike, making it hard to visualize characters or situations. Meanwhile, the social media posts and promotional emails lacked strong hooks and catchiness. Hence, we needed to refine each piece to improve engagement and better connect with the target audience. Besides, Claude has limited multimodal capabilities, meaning it can't natively generate images, videos, and music from user prompts. Overall, Claude is better at creating human-like text, maintaining the right tone, and developing content strategies. Its content has a natural flow and sounds less robotic. But its creative writing, especially emotional depth and storytelling, is subpar compared to ChatGPT. Moreover, Claude tends to become verbose, monotonous, or overly cautious at times. 2. Best for Developers Claude Code runs directly in a terminal, making it ideal for building software development and engineering workflows. From debugging programs and recording existing codebases to building features, developers can put Claude to work across various tasks. It also refines code structures, improving their readability. It adds automated tests to check code accuracy and corrects layout or formatting issues regularly. Claude Code isn't just for developers. Even non-coders can easily build simple tools, games, and apps in any supported programming language. 3. Best for Business and Knowledge Workers For businesses, Claude handles time-consuming tasks such as answering customer queries, summarizing lengthy reports, structuring information, and drafting emails. It completes these tasks instantly, freeing employees to focus on more valuable, core business tasks. With Claude, planning business projects is a breeze. Since it supports vibe coding, building or revamping a website becomes much more straightforward. You just need to explain your company's core business, objectives, and key offerings. Based on your natural language prompts, Claude quickly generates a step-by-step website development plan. Once you approve the plan, Claude executes tasks sequentially. It starts by preparing a to-do list, then shows changes, identifies errors, and resolves issues. Within an hour or two, your company's official website will be up. For knowledge workers such as engineers, researchers, lawyers, doctors, and analysts, Claude acts as a skilled and well-informed thinking partner. It can sift through large files, extract key insights, recommend suitable courses of action, and structure ideas clearly. For more challenging tasks, Claude uses its extended thinking capability to analyze problems like a human expert before delivering solutions. Its Deep Research feature independently processes vast amounts of data, connects the dots across multiple sources, and generates well-researched responses. This can save knowledge workers several hours of manual research. 4. Not Ideal For: Customer Support Automation Claude Code can run in your terminal, engage with web interfaces, and negotiate with customers in real time. It is designed to dispute bills and unexpected charges, process refund requests, and offer retention discounts before cancelling a subscription. Despite its strong coding abilities, Claude is less optimized for customer support automation. It's fewer mature integrations, coupled with its strict usage controls, pose cost and scalability challenges for high-volume support operations. Claude AI Features Deep Dive 1. Projects and Memory Projects is a unique feature of Claude that lets you build dedicated workspaces around specific goals. Inside every project, you can upload relevant materials, including documents, PDFs, and spreadsheets that Claude references across conversations. Therefore, you don't need to re-explain the context every time you start a new chat, saving time and resources. This feature is helpful when writing novels, conducting extensive research, or handling recurring workflows. Memory enables Claude to retain key facts about your past conversations, sessions, preferences, and communication style. Together, these features impart a personalized touch to your interactions and make Claude work more like a tailor-made assistant. 2. Claude Code and Claude Code Ultra Claude Code goes beyond an AI tool's standard programming capabilities by working autonomously. It serves as your agentic AI assistant, independently analyzing codebases, installing dependencies, debugging, and executing every step of the process. It is also Anthropic's command line interface (CLI) tool, helping you integrate Claude's intelligence into your IDE or terminal. Moreover, Claude Code seamlessly connects with Slack, facilitating collaborative AI coding workflows. Its contextual awareness and deep thinking make it apt for real-world software engineering. Contextual awareness refers to an AI model's ability to understand the situation surrounding a user's question. For larger organizations or teams that perform demanding engineering tasks, Claude Code Ultra is more suitable. It is optimized for multi-file refactors, large-scale codebases, and in-depth architectural reasoning. It can handle thousands of files, maintaining accuracy and coherence over multiple sequential steps. It is best-suited for developers who need production-quality outputs and applications that deploy easily. In short, Claude Code Ultra unlocks the full potential of Claude's coding capabilities. 3. Claude Cowork -- Desktop Automation Claude Cowork is built around a persistent context. Uploading key files, instructions, and relevant materials is a one-time activity. When you reopen a project, Claude already loads the context, eliminating the need to re-explain everything. Beyond context, you can schedule repetitive tasks to run at a specified time, such as every evening at 6 PM or each Friday. Claude also smoothly connects to tools you use daily, including Slack, Gmail, Discord, and Google Drive. Claude Desktop Agent is part of Cowork. It connects directly to your desktop, both Mac and Windows, enabling you to automate various tasks. These include organizing screenshots, categorizing files, scanning documents, and freeing up space. It can also automate browser activities, like filling online forms, managing your calendar, and building spreadsheet reports. Additionally, Cowork supports multi-tasking. For instance, it will organize your local folders while you browse the web. From a safety standpoint, it only accesses the folders you approve. Anthropic doesn't use your file data for training the model. Overall, Claude Cowork is a great tool for desktop organization, workflow automation, functional output generation, data analysis, and information synthesis. It also supports financial management and budgeting. It can classify your receipts, format expense reports, and prepare spreadsheets for tax calculation purposes. However, Claude Cowork has some limitations. It is resource-heavy, meaning it depletes tokens quickly. Thus, you may hit usage limits faster than anticipated. Subscribing to Pro for Cowork is worthwhile only if your workflow is clearly defined. If it is ambiguous, Cowork may not produce the desired results. Lastly, Cowork is still in the beta (testing) phase. It lacks institutional-grade security controls or guardrails. Think twice before granting it access to confidential files, repositories, or documents. 4. MCP Connectors and Integrations MCP connectors extend Claude's reach beyond its chat interface. Through these integrations, Claude can interact with hundreds of tools you use for everyday tasks. By connecting with services like Asana, Google Drive, and Microsoft Outlook, Claude can read your documents and perform the necessary actions. These include checking your calendar, scheduling emails, or organizing your tasks. Rather than operating as a standalone chatbot, MCPs allow Claude to penetrate your digital ecosystem. Furthermore, developers can build customized MCP servers that link Claude to proprietary systems or workflows. 5. Claude in Chrome -- Browser Extension Installing Claude's Chrome extension turns your browser into an AI-powered environment. While navigating any website, you can chat with Claude in the sidebar. It can summarize, translate, explain, or rephrase any piece of content instantly. From extracting information and executing multi-step processes across multiple tabs to recording browser workflows, Claude handles it all. For communication purposes, it can organize your email inbox and calendar while helping you craft careful replies. It also reduces your workload by automating repetitive data entry tasks. For research, you can ask Claude to synthesize information, break down complex concepts, and connect fragments of data. You can ask follow-up questions in context and brainstorm ideas. 6. Claude API for Developers The Claude API lets developers embed advanced AI intelligence into their applications, systems, workflows, and products. Anthropic's commercial customers also get access to a feature called computer use. This enables developers to instruct Claude to use computers like humans. For example, Claude can move the cursor, click icons, enter text, or analyze screen content. To simplify integration, Claude offers software development kits (SDKs) for Python, TypeScript, Java, Go, and Ruby. SDKs are sets of software development tools, including code libraries, debuggers, compilers, and documentation, for a specific platform. The pre-built code packages in Python and TypeScript SDKs provide ready-made building blocks. Therefore, developers don't need to write complex connection code to link the Claude API to their applications. Using the API, developers can customize how Claude behaves and connects to external systems. The API also processes documents, images, and large volumes of requests efficiently. These capabilities make it easier to build customer support bots, document analysis tools, and coding assistants. Claude AI Rate Limits One of the biggest roadblocks users encounter is Claude's AI rate or usage limits. AI rate limits cap the number of requests you can make to Claude or its API within a specified timeframe. Free users hit these limits quickly and must wait up to 5 hours for a reset. In some cases, resets happen weekly, meaning you need to wait 7 days to resume work on a project. Overall, these limits can be particularly annoying for users working on complex tasks involving advanced reasoning, autonomous workflows, and long files. For the Claude API, rate limits depend on requests per minute (RPM), input tokens per minute (ITPM), and output tokens per minute (OTPM). They are present for every usage tier. Exceeding them triggers a 429, or "Too Many Requests" error. Claude AI Pros & Cons Pros * Human-like writing: Claude's natural language flow is more human-like than most AI assistants. Its tone is less robotic. It also minimally uses words like "landscape," "delve," and "redefine," which have become synonymous with an AI voice. This makes it conducive for long-form writing and business communication. * Logical flow and strong reasoning: Claude handles long, complex prompts by breaking them into multiple steps. It also excels at structured thinking, organizing ideas and opinions across longer conversations. * Easy to use: Whether working on simple or advanced tasks, Claude's interface is responsive, intuitive, and user-friendly. Its workflows never get overwhelming. * Large context window: Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4 have a context window of 100,000 tokens (≈750,000 English words). Claude Haiku 4.5 has a 200,000 token context window. This robust context handling lets Claude recall earlier inputs, including minute details, maintaining continuity across chats. It can also process long documents seamlessly. * Powerful coding: Claude Code is an agentic AI tool that helps developers write, edit, and refine programs across multiple coding languages. Its coding and debugging abilities are a notch higher than many other AI tools. Cons * Limited multimodal capabilities: Claude lacks a multimodal structure. It can't natively produce images, videos, or music. Its focal points are complex reasoning, structured outputs, and long-form content creation, not visual creativity. However, Claude can generate custom visuals, including graphs, charts, and diagrams, using HTML and SVG directly in your chat. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and is used to create web pages. SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics, a file format used for two-dimensional illustrations and graphics. * Overly cautious outputs: Claude doesn't hallucinate or present inaccurate facts frequently. It also doesn't present extreme viewpoints on sensitive topics. But its responses can be too measured, which is a major turn-off when testing edge cases. In software development, edge cases refer to rare, unexpected situations your application must handle efficiently. * Fewer native integrations: Unlike Gemini, which is tightly integrated within the Google ecosystem, Claude primarily relies on MCPs for extensibility. Tools such as Claude for Microsoft 365 work inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, but don't integrate natively. * Slow response time: Claude may generate slower responses for large context windows, intensive workflows, and advanced reasoning tasks. Performance also varies based on task complexity. * Strict usage limits: Each plan has a predetermined usage cap. Heavy utilization of Claude Cowork depletes tokens faster. Sessions may stop midway on large projects. Moreover, there is also no clarity on the exact usage limits across free and paid plans. Hence, upgrading to a paid plan doesn't eliminate the frustration. What Real Users Say About Claude AI? After going through multiple Claude reviews and Reddit threads, we found the user feedback on Claude to be mixed. Many users appreciated its strong writing ability, reasoning skills, and versatility across tasks. Others reported restrictive limits, performance drops after subscribing, freezing, lag, and context loss during longer tasks. Some also expressed dissatisfaction with the unclear pricing structure, perceived lack of transparency in limits, and poor customer support. Overall, opinions vary significantly. Some users view it as highly capable, while others feel the reliability and value for money don't consistently meet expectations. Who Should Use Claude AI -- and Who Shouldn't? * Writers and researchers: Claude is exceptionally good at drafting long-form content, white papers, newsletters, blogs, and research articles. It conducts thorough research and synthesizes complex ideas, simplifying topics for laypersons while maintaining an expert, human-like tone. It also excels at tone shifting, turning dry academic research papers into engaging blog posts. * Content strategists and marketers: Claude can build content strategies for every stage of the marketing funnel, develop advertising pipelines, and design buyer personas. It ensures all your marketing materials, including landing pages, social media posts, and campaign narratives, carry a consistent brand voice. You can also use Claude to create frameworks and templates for content briefs, editorial standards, and messaging hierarchies. * Small businesses, communication specialists, and public relations professionals: Claude can mimic your communication style, tonality, sentence length, and level of detail. It can turn emotionally-charged emails into professional messages while keeping authority intact. It also provides structural feedback, identifying inconsistencies, errors, and redundancies in your messages and content. Besides, solopreneurs, consultants, product managers, and small businesses will find Claude very useful. Its agentic AI and context handling capabilities make it a valuable tool for many workflows. * Developers and non-developers: Claude supports both vibe and agentic coding, enabling anyone to build their own website or interactive tools. It refactors large codebases, fixes bugs, works directly in the terminal, and facilitates feature engineering from natural language prompts. It also explains technical processes, codebases, and system workings in simple language for non-technical audiences. * Visual and auditory content creators: Claude cannot natively generate images, videos, music, or audio. Therefore, it is unsuitable for graphic designers, video editors, sound engineers, or professionals who work extensively with visual and audio content. Marketers must also rely on other AI tools or Claude Code integrations as workarounds to incorporate visual creativity into their campaigns. Our Verdict: Is Claude AI Worth It in 2026? Claude AI is absolutely worth using in 2026, especially for writing, coding, research, and advanced reasoning tasks. Compared to other AI chatbots, Claude offers powerful features like Artifacts, Claude Cowork, and Claude Code. It is highly effective for long-form analysis, structured reasoning, desktop automation, deep research, and long-context tasks. While Claude still lacks image, music, and video generation capabilities, its text content quality and agentic AI performance are unparalleled. For the best experience, use Claude alongside AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini that offer stronger multimodal capabilities. FAQs Is Claude AI free to use in 2026? Yes, Claude AI offers a free plan. However, free users get lower usage limits. Advanced features like extended thinking are not completely locked behind a paywall, but you can access them in a throttled form. You can also ask Claude to write simple programs directly in the chat interface. However, complex programming tasks require Claude Code, which is only available with a paid plan. Is Claude better than ChatGPT? Both Claude and ChatGPT deliver high-quality text responses with a natural flow. But Claude has an edge in human-like writing. Its articles are less robotic and devoid of the typical AI voice. Its deep research, coding, and debugging capabilities are comparable, and sometimes better. ChatGPT, on the other hand, excels at creative writing, storytelling, copywriting, and image generation. Does Claude AI have image generation? No. Unlike ChatGPT and Google Gemini, Claude AI can't generate images based on user prompts. Can I trust Claude AI with my data? Claude AI doesn't have potent, enterprise-grade security features yet. Many of its features are still in the beta phase. Hence, you should refrain from granting Claude access to critical folders containing sensitive data. Is there any AI better than Claude? Claude excels at human-like content generation, deep research, structured thinking, contextual awareness, and coding. However, it can't create videos, audio, or images. For image generation, ChatGPT is a good alternative. If you're seeking a truly multimodal, all-in-one AI assistant that handles text, code, videos, images, and music, Gemini is worth exploring. Its Google Workspace integration makes it the go-to choice for users working extensively with Google apps and workflows.
Claude Code Plugins Get Official Directory: Anthropic Flags Unverified MCP Risks
The 20,000-star repository ships two-tier plugin verification and a one-command install path. Anthropic has formalized its Claude Code plugin ecosystem with an official, company-managed directory on GitHub -- giving the tool's fast-growing developer community a single vetted source for extensions, while issuing an explicit warning that even listed plugins may load unverified third-party software. The repository, anthropics/claude-plugins-official, launched May 22 and has accumulated over 20,000 stars as developers seek a reliable alternative to the scattered community marketplaces that preceded it. The directory organizes two classes of plugins. An internal /plugins folder contains extensions built and maintained by Anthropic's own team, covering 12-language language server protocol support, pull-request review tooling, git workflow automation, output formatting, and code quality checks. A separate /external_plugins folder holds third-party contributions from partners including GitHub, GitLab, Linear, Asana, Firebase, Playwright, Terraform, and Discord. Third-party submissions must pass quality and security screening before inclusion and can be submitted via a form at clau.de/plugin-directory-submission. Before this week's launch, Claude Code's extension landscape was fragmented. Useful plugins existed, but locating and evaluating them required digging through independent GitHub repositories, community forums, and informal word-of-mouth recommendations. The new official directory changes that by giving developers a single, authoritative starting point. The structural shift mirrors what happened to other developer platforms when centralized marketplaces arrived. When the Visual Studio Code marketplace consolidated extensions in one place, adoption of the editor accelerated substantially. The official claude-plugins-official repository now functions as that consolidation point for Claude Code -- a curated index rather than an unfiltered firehose. Installation is a single terminal command: /plugin install {plugin-name}@claude-plugins-official. Developers who already have Claude Code running will find the official marketplace pre-registered by default -- no additional setup is required before browsing. The full plugin catalog is also viewable at claude.com/plugins. Anthropic applies two levels of scrutiny to plugins in the directory. All submissions go through basic automated screening before inclusion. Plugins that pass a stricter, additional review earn an "Anthropic Verified" badge, which signals higher confidence in both quality and safety. Plugins without that badge have cleared automated checks only. This distinction matters, and Anthropic says so directly. The official plugin page states: community plugins "may install unverified, third party software that could be malicious or result in unintended behavior." Users are advised to review each plugin's linked source code before installing. That caveat has real-world precedent. Research published in January 2026 by SentinelOne documented a class of attack in which a malicious Claude Code marketplace plugin redirects a developer's dependency installation to an attacker-controlled source, embedding trojanized code that persists silently across sessions. In the same period, security firm PromptArmor demonstrated how an injected plugin could steer Claude Code into performing unauthorized actions without triggering standard security tooling. Earlier still, in December 2025, Cato Networks researcher Inga Cherny showed that a modified Claude Code skill plugin could download and execute ransomware -- specifically the MedusaLocker variant -- by inserting a single seemingly benign function into an otherwise legitimate extension. A February 2026 security audit by Snyk of the broader Claude Code agent-skills ecosystem found that 13 percent of agent-skills packages contained critical security flaws. These findings do not implicate the official directory specifically -- none of the documented attacks involved claude-plugins-official listings. They do establish that plugin installation is a supply-chain decision, not a convenience one, and that the official directory's curation reduces but does not eliminate risk. A Claude Code plugin is a packaging format, not a single type of extension. Each plugin can bundle any combination of four components: slash commands (custom shortcuts for recurring operations), agents (purpose-built subagents for specialized tasks), Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers (connections to external tools and data sources), and hooks (automated behaviors that fire at specific points in the coding workflow, such as after a file edit or before a commit). The plugin system was first introduced as a public beta in October 2025 via an Anthropic announcement. The official directory now centralizes the best-vetted examples of that system in action. Developers who want to understand the plugin format in detail can consult the official plugin documentation. Because plugins execute with the installing user's system permissions, they can read and write files, access environment variables, and connect to external network services. This is what makes them powerful -- and what makes permission review essential before installation. Anthropic's official security documentation recommends reviewing what permissions a plugin requests before installation and verifying that those permissions are proportionate to the plugin's stated function. A plugin that formats commit messages has no legitimate reason to request broad filesystem access or network connectivity. A plugin that connects to a cloud infrastructure provider will, by definition, need both -- and the source code should make clear exactly where those connections go. For plugins listed in the official directory, each entry links directly to its source repository, making code review straightforward. For community-sourced plugins from outside the official directory, the due-diligence bar is higher, because automated screening is not guaranteed. The "Anthropic Verified" badge is the most reliable signal currently available within the directory. It does not guarantee that a plugin is free of all risk -- Anthropic's own language stops short of that claim -- but it does indicate the plugin has passed a human review stage that automated scanning alone does not cover. How do I install Claude Code plugins from the official directory? Open Claude Code and run /plugin install {plugin-name}@claude-plugins-official in the terminal, replacing {plugin-name} with the name of the plugin you want. The official marketplace is pre-registered in all current Claude Code installations, so no additional setup is required before browsing. You can also view all available plugins at claude.com/plugins. Are Claude Code plugins in the official directory safe to install? Anthropic applies automated security screening to all directory submissions and awards an "Anthropic Verified" badge to plugins that pass additional human review. However, Anthropic explicitly states it cannot verify all software that a plugin may install or connect to, particularly third-party MCP servers bundled by external plugins. Users should review each plugin's source code, check what permissions it requests, and install only from developers they trust. What is the Anthropic plugin directory and how is it different from community marketplaces? The anthropics/claude-plugins-official GitHub repository is Anthropic's curated, company-maintained index of Claude Code plugins. Every listing has passed at minimum an automated security review before inclusion, and Anthropic-built internal plugins appear alongside vetted third-party submissions. Community marketplaces exist outside this directory and may or may not apply consistent review standards. How does a Claude Code plugin differ from a Claude Code skill? A plugin is a distribution and packaging format; a skill is a specific type of content a plugin can contain. Installing a plugin gives you everything bundled inside it -- which may include skills (instruction sets Claude applies automatically to relevant tasks), slash commands, agents, MCP server configurations, and hooks. Skills are the reusable instruction sets; plugins are how those sets get installed and managed.
TX sues Discord, arguing online messaging platform endangered children
The state's spot review found Texas public colleges were not using diversity, equity and inclusion efforts on campuses. Discord is an online messaging service generally used by people to communicate while playing video games. It also includes chat functions and the ability for users to create topic-based servers. Paxton has sued other video game and social media platforms, like Snapchat, Tiktok and Roblox, in recent months over similar concerns that they are violating users' data privacy and allowing their platforms to be used to exploit children.
Texas sues Discord, arguing online messaging platform endangered children, misled users
Close up on the hands of young woman using computer, tablet and smart phone - business, technology, multitasking concept Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing online messaging platform Discord, accusing the tech company of exposing children to predators using the service and deceiving users about the safety of the platform. Paxton filed the lawsuit Friday in a Collin County state district court, the latest in a recent flurry of lawsuits by Paxton's office against tech companies and other businesses ahead of his U.S. Senate GOP runoff against incumbent John Cornyn on Tuesday. Texas joins Nevada, Indiana and New Jersey as states that have recently sued Discord. Florida announced its investigation of the company in March. Many private lawsuits have been filed in recent months, as well, largely from families accusing the messaging service of allowing children to be sexually abused or exploited while using Discord. Paxton first opened an investigation into the messaging platform in 2024, along with several other tech companies, all broadly focused on user data privacy. Paxton announced last October, following the killing of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, that he would expand the investigation of Discord to include a focus on the sexual exploitation of minors and extremist content on the platform. Discord is an online messaging service generally used by people to communicate while playing video games. It also includes chat functions and the ability for users to create topic-based servers. Paxton has sued other video game and social media platforms, like Snapchat, Tiktok and Roblox, in recent months over similar concerns that they are violating users' data privacy and allowing their platforms to be used to exploit children. "Discord has allowed and invited all kinds of nihilistic violence and evil," Paxton said. "We live in a time where the dangers children face online have never been greater, and every parent in Texas deserves to know their child is protected." A Discord spokesperson said the platform has robust safety features for teenage users and is continuously working to improve existing safety features. The spokesperson noted roughly 80% of Discord's users are adults and the service requires its users to be at least 13. "The lawsuit's characterization of Discord does not reflect the platform we have built or the investments we have made in user safety," a Discord spokesperson wrote in a statement. "We look forward to collaborating with policymakers in working toward a safer online experience for all users on Discord and across the internet." In 2023, Texas lawmakers strengthened laws requiring social media platforms to protect minors from inappropriate content online. That legislation, called Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act, is still fighting its way through the courts and parts have been blocked for being unconstitutionally vague. Paxton has used the remaining provisions of the SCOPE Act to bring lawsuits against Discord and the other tech companies. The lawsuit asks the courts to require Discord to implement age verification for all users under that law, the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act. The lawsuit also seeks for Discord to pay fines under the state Deceptive Trade Practices Act, arguing the company has misled users about the safety of the platform. Paxton cited a 2025 lawsuit filed by the family of a 13-year-old girl who says she was groomed on Roblox, then later Discord, before being sexually assaulted in her home. The family's lawsuit argues the companies failed to protect the girl. This week, Paxton also sued WhatsApp and its parent company Meta, alleging the platform can access users' private messages. This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
Texas sues Discord, arguing online messaging platform endangered children, misled users
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing online messaging platform Discord, accusing the tech company of exposing children to predators using the service and deceiving users about the safety of the platform. Paxton filed the lawsuit Friday in a Collin County state district court, the latest in a recent flurry of lawsuits by Paxton's office against tech companies and other businesses ahead of his U.S. Senate GOP runoff against incumbent John Cornyn on Tuesday. Texas joins Nevada, Indiana, and New Jersey as states that have recently sued Discord. Florida announced its investigation of the company in March. Many private lawsuits have been filed in recent months, as well, largely from families accusing the messaging service of allowing children to be sexually abused or exploited while using Discord. Paxton first opened an investigation into the messaging platform in 2024, along with several other tech companies, all broadly focused on user data privacy. Paxton announced last October, following the killing of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, that he would expand the investigation of Discord to include a focus on the sexual exploitation of minors and extremist content on the platform. Discord is an online messaging service generally used by people to communicate while playing video games. It also includes chat functions and the ability for users to create topic-based servers. Paxton has sued other video game and social media platforms, like Snapchat, TikTok, and Roblox, in recent months over similar concerns that they are violating users' data privacy and allowing their platforms to be used to exploit children. "Discord has allowed and invited all kinds of nihilistic violence and evil," Paxton said. "We live in a time where the dangers children face online have never been greater, and every parent in Texas deserves to know their child is protected." A Discord spokesperson said the platform has robust safety features for teenage users and is continuously working to improve existing safety features. The spokesperson noted roughly 80% of Discord's users are adults, and the service requires its users to be at least 13. "The lawsuit's characterization of Discord does not reflect the platform we have built or the investments we have made in user safety," a Discord spokesperson wrote in a statement. "We look forward to collaborating with policymakers in working toward a safer online experience for all users on Discord and across the internet." In 2023, Texas lawmakers strengthened laws requiring social media platforms to protect minors from inappropriate content online. That legislation, called the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act, is still fighting its way through the courts, and parts have been blocked for being unconstitutionally vague. Paxton has used the remaining provisions of the SCOPE Act to bring lawsuits against Discord and the other tech companies. The lawsuit asks the courts to require Discord to implement age verification for all users under that law, the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act. The lawsuit also seeks for Discord to pay fines under the state Deceptive Trade Practices Act, arguing the company has misled users about the safety of the platform. Paxton cited a 2025 lawsuit filed by the family of a 13-year-old girl who says she was groomed on Roblox, then later Discord, before being sexually assaulted in her home. The family's lawsuit argues the companies failed to protect the girl. This week, Paxton also sued WhatsApp and its parent company Meta, alleging the platform can access users' private messages.
