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Thanks for reading The Briefing, our nightly column where we break down the day’s news. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe to our reporting here.
Greetings! Welcome to the official start of crypto’s regulatory vacuum. That’s the state we’re in now that the Securities and Exchange Commission has decided to drop its long-running lawsuit against Coinbase (according to Coinbase, at least—we’ll have to wait until the SEC confirms the news after a commission vote). It seems the top financial cop is pressing the pause button on enforcing decade-old securities rules as they relate to crypto, as it awaits new rules Congress has yet to figure out—if any pass at all. And those congressional deliberations are likely to take a while. Essentially, crypto companies are being promised regulatory amnesty while Trump’s crypto task force tries to figure out what’s next for the industry. As promising as all this sounds for the crypto sector, things aren’t all rosy. We got a reminder of some of the risks facing crypto today, when just two hours after Coinbase’s happy news, Bybit, the third largest global crypto exchange, confirmed it had suffered a hack of more than $1 billion, the largest hack in crypto history. When hacks like that happen, there’s a risk that panicky investors will withdraw their funds en masse, which could prove fatal for an exchange if it doesn’t have enough funds to cover the withdrawal request. For now, Bybit CEO Ben Zhou said the exchange has more than enough capital to cover the hacked amount and is still processing withdrawals normally. Still, bitcoin and ether prices fell, and Coinbase stock—which had risen on news of the SEC action—was trading down 8% this afternoon. It will likely take days or weeks for the situation to play out and for any cascading effects to surface. What the hack does, apart from illustrating the risks inherent in crypto, is demonstrate that the guardrails still in place for the traditional financial firms of the world shield them from exposure to crypto risks. That’s some consolation for those firms—banks and traditional securities exchanges—which remain heavily regulated by the SEC and federal bank regulators. Those firms have been arguing that the crypto industry now has an unfair advantage on the regulation front. Nasdaq, for one, met with the task force earlier this month to complain, asking the SEC to set firm deadlines for how long the free-for-all will last for crypto exchanges. The exchange operator giant has previously said it wants to launch crypto businesses. Banks also want in on launching crypto services for big traders and investors, presumably to avoid losing their crypto-curious clients to crypto exchanges and trading firms. But they still need to get banking regulators’ signoffs to do that. This week, a heavy-hitter coalition of bank lobbying groups asked the Trump administration to find ways to make sure they don’t miss out on the game. Apple’s unveiling of its new iPhone 16e smartphone this week was significant primarily because it is the first iPhone to include an Apple-designed modem, rather than the Qualcomm modems present in existing iPhones. That’s a big deal: Apple has invested a fortune in developing its own modem as a way of reducing the money it pays Qualcomm. And with perfect timing, Wayne Ma provides this inside story of the tempestuous Apple-Qualcomm relationship, and how Apple has been maneuvering to become more self-reliant regarding this all-important phone component. Google's YouTube said this week that it was testing a cheaper version of its ad-free subscription service, YouTube Premium, which lets people watch the streaming giant without those pesky ads. The current plan is $13.99, which may be a little pricey for most people. It’s not clear why YouTube is testing this—its ad business is ginormous and there are risks, given the potential of an ad-free subscription to skim off part of the audience that would particularly interest advertisers. Spotify knows that issue all too well, as Cathy Perloff detailed in this deep dive from earlier this week.… …In another angle on Google, check out Erin Woo’s great story on the internal dramas that have played out within the tech giant over its various artificial intelligence products. Smaller companies don’t have the resources of a Google, but they have the freedom to move faster. Then there’s the talent piece: Sought-after AI researchers have their pick of where to work, and Google’s bureaucracy can be a negative. On that front, we broke the news this week that an AI veteran at Google had jumped to TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, now a leader of AI in China.… …Still, ByteDance can’t afford to be complacent. Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek is weighing whether to raise outside money to fuel its growth, we revealed this week. One potential investor, we noted, was Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant that has also set its sights on AI leadership.… …Alibaba made clear the depth of its AI ambitions this week when it revealed its plans to release a new AI reasoning model. Last week we broke the news that Apple was working with Alibaba on AI features for iPhones sold in China, fueling a rally in Alibaba’s long-depressed stock. Alibaba shares got another lift on Thursday when The Wall Street Journal broke news that e-commerce mogul Ryan Cohen had accumulated a billion-dollar stake in the company. Meanwhile, high-priced fundraising continues in the AI sector. We broke the news that Field AI, which makes AI models to power robots, is raising money at a $2 billion valuation, four times the level at which it raised funds last summer. Cory Weinberg’s Dealmaker column looked at Greenoaks Capital, the investor expected to lead Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence fundraising at a $30 billion valuation—even though it doesn’t yet have a product.… …Cory, along with Jon Victor and Anissa Gardizy, also revealed what OpenAI, as it prepares to raise more money, is telling investors about its long-term financial expectations. And our AI Agenda writer, Stephanie Palazzolo, also looked at investors’ continuing faith in the sector here. Natasha Mascarenhas looked at investors’ use of special purpose vehicles to invest in the biggest AI deals. On another front in AI—how big companies are dealing with it—we interviewed Salesforce’s chief engineering officer on the company’s plans to move its applications onto a greater range of public cloud providers. Salesforce wants more computing capacity to handle its AI products. Finally, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement last month that he wants to revive Facebook’s cool factor prompted us to ask how he intends to pull that off. The answer is with a little help from creators, as we revealed in this story. • Apple is withdrawing its iCloud security feature, Advanced Data Protection, from the U.K. market rather than comply with the U.K. government’s demands that the company build a “back door” in the system so the government can bypass Apple’s encryption to see user data. • Disney’s ESPN will stop showing MLB games, effective with the 2026 season, under a deal announced with the baseball league, another sign that traditional TV companies are having to be choosier about which expensive sports rights they pursue as cable TV revenues continue to decline. • Amazon paid around $1 billion to secure creative control of the James Bond franchise, according to a person familiar with the matter. 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