“It was inevitable,” said Jake Ostrovskis, head of OTC trading at Wintermute, referring to the sell-off in digital asset treasury stocks. “It got to the point where there’s too many of them.”

Several companies have begun selling their crypto stockpiles in an effort to fund share buybacks and shore up their stock prices, in effect putting the crypto treasury model into reverse.

North Carolina-based ether holder FG Nexus sold about $41.5 million of its tokens recently to fund its share buyback program. Its market cap is $104 million, while the crypto it holds is worth $116 million. Florida-based life sciences company turned ether buyer ETHZilla recently sold about $40 million worth of its tokens, also to fund its share buyback program.

Sequans Communications, a French semiconductor company, sold about $100 million of its bitcoin this month in order to service its debt, in a sign of how some companies that borrowed to fund crypto purchases are now struggling. Sequans’ market capitalization is $87 million, while the bitcoin it holds is worth $198 million.

Georges Karam, chief executive of Sequans, said the sale was a “tactical decision aimed at unlocking shareholder value given current market conditions.”

While bitcoin and ether sellers can find buyers, companies with more niche tokens will find it more difficult to raise money from their holdings, according to Morgan McCarthy. “When you’ve got a medical device company buying some long-tail asset in crypto, a niche in a niche market, it is not going to end well,” he said, adding that 95 percent of digital asset treasuries “will go to zero.”

Strategy, meanwhile, has doubled down and bought even more bitcoin as the price of the token has fallen to $87,000, from $115,000 a month ago. The firm also faces the looming possibility of being cut from some major equity indices, which could heap even more selling pressure on the stock.

But Saylor has brushed off any concerns. “Volatility is Satoshi’s gift to the faithful,” he said this week, referring to the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin.

© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/11/crypto-hoarders-dump-tokens-as-shares-tumble/

“Our particular strengths as a country lie in areas like life sciences, financial services, the defense sector, and the creative sector. And where we will really lead the world is where we can use the power of AI in those sectors,” Kendall told the Financial Times.

The plans came as part of a wider AI package designed to upgrade Britain’s tech infrastructure and convince entrepreneurs and investors that Labour is backing the sector ahead of next week’s Budget, which is expected to raise taxes on the wealthy.

The UK has sought to attract investment from US AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

The government has signed several “strategic partnerships” with American groups in a bid to attract foreign investment in UK AI infrastructure and talent, in exchange for adopting their technology in the public sector.

Sue Daley, of lobby group TechUK, said the plan showed “real ambition” but warned: “Advanced market commitments of this kind must be designed carefully to avoid unintentionally distorting competition.”

The government also announced that James Wise, a venture capitalist at Balderton, would chair the government’s 500 million pound sovereign AI unit, which has been set up to back AI startups alongside the British Business Bank.

Additional reporting by Ivan Levingston.

© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/11/uk-government-will-buy-tech-to-boost-ai-sector-in-130m-growth-push/

One of the world’s premier security organizations has canceled the results of its annual leadership election after an official lost an encryption key needed to unlock results stored in a verifiable and privacy-preserving voting system.

The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) said Friday that the votes were submitted and tallied using Helios, an open source voting system that uses peer-reviewed cryptography to cast and count votes in a verifiable, confidential, and privacy-preserving way. Helios encrypts each vote in a way that assures each ballot is secret. Other cryptography used by Helios allows each voter to confirm their ballot was counted fairly.

An “honest but unfortunate human mistake”

Per the association’s bylaws, three members of the election committee act as independent trustees. To prevent two of them from colluding to cook the results, each trustee holds a third of the cryptographic key material needed to decrypt results.

“Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share,” the IACR said. “As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election.”

To prevent a similar incident, the IACR will adopt a new mechanism for managing private keys. Instead of requiring all three chunks of private key material, elections will now require only two. Moti Yung, the trustee who was unable to provide his third of the key material, has resigned. He’s being replaced by Michel Abdalla.

The IACR is a nonprofit scientific organization providing research in cryptology and related fields. Cryptology is the science and practice of designing computation and communication systems that remain secure in the presence of adversaries. The associate is holding a new election that started Friday and runs through December 20.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/11/cryptography-group-cancels-election-results-after-official-loses-secret-key/

Thousands of Asus routers have been hacked and are under the control of a suspected China-state group that has yet to reveal its intentions for the mass compromise, researchers said.

The hacking spree is either primarily or exclusively targeting seven models of Asus routers, all of which are no longer supported by the manufacturer, meaning they no longer receive security patches, researchers from SecurityScorecard said. So far, it’s unclear what the attackers do after gaining control of the devices. SecurityScorecard has named the operation WrtHug.

Staying off the radar

SecurityScorecard said it suspects the compromised devices are being used similarly to those found in ORB (operational relay box) networks, which hackers primarily use to conduct espionage to conceal their identity.

“Having this level of access may enable the threat actor to use any compromised router as they see fit,” SecurityScorecard said. “Our experience with ORB networks suggests compromised devices will commonly be used for covert operations and espionage, unlike DDoS attacks and other types of overt malicious activity typically observed from botnets.”

Compromised routers are concentrated in Taiwan, with smaller clusters in South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Russia, central Europe, and the United States.

A heat map of infected devices.

The Chinese government has been caught building massive ORB networks for years. In 2021, the French government warned national businesses and organizations that the APT31—one of China’s most active threat groups—was behind a massive attack campaign that used hacked routers to conduct reconnaissance. Last year, at least three similar China-operated campaigns came to light.

Russian-state hackers have been caught doing the same thing, although not as frequently. In 2018, Kremlin actors infected more than 500,000 small office and home routers with sophisticated malware tracked as VPNFilter. A Russian government group was also independently involved in an operation reported in one of the 2024 router hacks linked above.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/11/thousands-of-hacked-asus-routers-are-under-control-of-suspected-china-state-hackers/

While AI bubble talk fills the air these days, with fears of overinvestment that could pop at any time, something of a contradiction is brewing on the ground: Companies like Google and OpenAI can barely build infrastructure fast enough to fill their AI needs.

During an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Google’s AI infrastructure head Amin Vahdat told employees that the company must double its serving capacity every six months to meet demand for artificial intelligence services, reports CNBC. Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, presented slides showing the company needs to scale “the next 1000x in 4-5 years.”

While a thousandfold increase in compute capacity sounds ambitious by itself, Vahdat noted some key constraints: Google needs to be able to deliver this increase in capability, compute, and storage networking “for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level,” he told employees during the meeting. “It won’t be easy but through collaboration and co-design, we’re going to get there.”

It’s unclear how much of this “demand” Google mentioned represents organic user interest in AI capabilities versus the company integrating AI features into existing services like Search, Gmail, and Workspace. But whether users are using the features voluntarily or not, Google isn’t the only tech company struggling to keep up with a growing user base of customers using AI services.

Major tech companies are in a race to build out data centers. Google competitor OpenAI is planning to build six massive data centers across the US through its Stargate partnership project with SoftBank and Oracle, committing over $400 billion in the next three years to reach nearly 7 gigawatts of capacity. The company faces similar constraints serving its 800 million weekly ChatGPT users, with even paid subscribers regularly hitting usage limits for features like video synthesis and simulated reasoning models.

“The competition in AI infrastructure is the most critical and also the most expensive part of the AI race,” Vahdat said at the meeting, according to CNBC’s viewing of the presentation. The infrastructure executive explained that Google’s challenge goes beyond simply outspending competitors. “We’re going to spend a lot,” he said, but noted the real objective is building infrastructure that is “more reliable, more performant and more scalable than what’s available anywhere else.”

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/google-tells-employees-it-must-double-capacity-every-6-months-to-meet-ai-demand/

The OEMs disabling codec hardware also comes as associated costs for the international video compression standard are set to increase in January, as licensing administrator Access Advance announced in July. Per a breakdown from patent pool administration VIA Licensing Alliance, royalty rates for HEVC for over 100,001 units are increasing from $0.20 each to $0.24 each in the United States. To put that into perspective, in Q3 2025, HP sold 15,002,000 laptops and desktops, and Dell sold 10,166,000 laptops and desktops, per Gartner.

Last year, NAS company Synology announced that it was ending support for HEVC, as well as H.264/AVC and VCI, transcoding on its DiskStation Manager and BeeStation OS platforms, saying that “support for video codecs is widespread on end devices, such as smartphones, tablets, computers, and smart TVs.”

“This update reduces unnecessary resource usage on the server and significantly improves media processing efficiency. The optimization is particularly effective in high-user environments compared to traditional server-side processing,” the announcement said.

Despite the growing costs and complications with HEVC licenses and workarounds, breaking features that have been widely available for years will likely lead to confusion and frustration.

“This is pretty ridiculous, given these systems are $800+ a machine, are part of a ‘Pro’ line (jabs at branding names are warranted – HEVC is used professionally), and more applications these days outside of Netflix and streaming TV are getting around to adopting HEVC,” a Redditor wrote.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/hp-and-dell-disable-hevc-support-built-into-their-laptops-cpus/

On Tuesday, Microsoft and Nvidia announced plans to invest in Anthropic under a new partnership that includes a $30 billion commitment by the Claude maker to use Microsoft’s cloud services. Nvidia will commit up to $10 billion to Anthropic and Microsoft up to $5 billion, with both companies investing in Anthropic’s next funding round.

The deal brings together two companies that have backed OpenAI and connects them more closely to one of the ChatGPT maker’s main competitors. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a video that OpenAI “remains a critical partner,” while adding that the companies will increasingly be customers of each other.

“We will use Anthropic models, they will use our infrastructure, and we’ll go to market together,” Nadella said.

The move follows OpenAI’s recent restructuring that gave the company greater distance from its non-profit origins. OpenAI has since announced a $38 billion deal to buy cloud services from Amazon.com as the company becomes less dependent on Microsoft. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said the company plans to spend $1.4 trillion to develop 30 gigawatts of computing resources.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/tech-giants-pour-billions-into-anthropic-as-circular-ai-investments-roll-on/

As Kent Halliburton stood in a bathroom at the Rosewood Hotel in central Amsterdam, thousands of miles from home, running his fingers through an envelope filled with 10,000 euros in crisp banknotes, he started to wonder what he had gotten himself into.

Halliburton is the cofounder and CEO of Sazmining, a company that operates bitcoin mining hardware on behalf of clients—a model known as “mining-as-a-service.” Halliburton is based in Peru, but Sazmining runs mining hardware out of third-party data centers across Norway, Paraguay, Ethiopia, and the United States.

As Halliburton tells it, he had flown to Amsterdam the previous day, August 5, to meet Even and Maxim, two representatives of a wealthy Monaco-based family. The family office had offered to purchase hundreds of bitcoin mining rigs from Sazmining—around $4 million worth—which the company would install at a facility currently under construction in Ethiopia. Before finalizing the deal, the family office had asked to meet Halliburton in person.

When Halliburton arrived at the Rosewood Hotel, he found Even and Maxim perched in a booth. They struck him as playboy, high-roller types—particularly Maxim, who wore a tan three-piece suit and had a highly manicured look, his long dark hair parted down the middle. A Rolex protruded from the cuff of his sleeve.

Over a three-course lunch—ceviche with a roe garnish, Chilean sea bass, and cherry cake—they discussed the contours of the deal and traded details about their respective backgrounds. Even was talkative and jocular, telling stories about blowout parties in Marrakech. Maxim was aloof; he mostly stared at Halliburton, holding his gaze for long periods at a time as though sizing him up.

As a relationship-building exercise, Even proposed that Halliburton sell the family office around $3,000 in bitcoin. Halliburton was initially hesitant, but chalked it up as a peculiar dating ritual. One of the guys slid Halliburton the cash-filled envelope and told him to go to the bathroom, where he could count out the amount in private. “It felt like something out of a James Bond movie,” says Halliburton. “It was all very exotic to me.”

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/11/bonkers-bitcoin-heist-5-star-hotels-cash-filled-envelopes-vanishing-funds/

Market concerns and Google’s position

Alphabet’s recent market performance has been driven by investor confidence in the company’s ability to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, as well as its development of specialized chips for AI that can compete with Nvidia’s. Nvidia recently reached a world-first $5 trillion valuation due to making GPUs that can accelerate the matrix math at the heart of AI computations.

Despite acknowledging that no company would be immune to a potential AI bubble burst, Pichai argued that Google’s unique position gives it an advantage. He told the BBC that the company owns what he called a “full stack” of technologies, from chips to YouTube data to models and frontier science research. This integrated approach, he suggested, would help the company weather any market turbulence better than competitors.

Pichai also told the BBC that people should not “blindly trust” everything AI tools output. The company currently faces repeated accuracy concerns about some of its AI models. Pichai said that while AI tools are helpful “if you want to creatively write something,” people “have to learn to use these tools for what they’re good at and not blindly trust everything they say.”

In the BBC interview, the Google boss also addressed the “immense” energy needs of AI, acknowledging that the intensive energy requirements of expanding AI ventures have caused slippage on Alphabet’s climate targets. However, Pichai insisted that the company still wants to achieve net zero by 2030 through investments in new energy technologies. “The rate at which we were hoping to make progress will be impacted,” Pichai said, warning that constraining an economy based on energy “will have consequences.”

Even with the warnings about a potential AI bubble, Pichai did not miss his chance to promote the technology, albeit with a hint of danger regarding its widespread impact. Pichai described AI as “the most profound technology” humankind has worked on.

“We will have to work through societal disruptions,” he said, adding that the technology would “create new opportunities” and “evolve and transition certain jobs.” He said people who adapt to AI tools “will do better” in their professions, whatever field they work in.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/googles-sundar-pichai-warns-of-irrationality-in-trillion-dollar-ai-investment-boom/

Each defendant also helped the IT workers pass employer vetting procedures. Travis and Salazar, for example, appeared for drug testing on behalf of the workers.

Travis, an active-duty member of the US Army at the time, received at least $51,397 for his participation in the scheme. Phagnasay and Salazar earned at least $3,450 and $4,500, respectively. In all, the fraudulent jobs earned roughly $1.28 million in salary payments from the defrauded US companies, the vast majority of which were sent to the IT workers overseas.

The fifth defendant, Ukrainian national Oleksandr Didenko, pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated identity theft, in addition to wire fraud. He admitted to participating in a “years-long scheme that stole the identities of US citizens and sold them to overseas IT workers, including North Korean IT workers, so they could fraudulently gain employment at 40 US companies.” Didenko received hundreds of thousands of dollars from victim companies who hired the fraudulent applicants. As part of the plea agreement, Didenko is forfeiting more than $1.4 million, including more than $570,000 in fiat and virtual currency seized from him and his co-conspirators.

In 2022, the US Treasury Department said that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea employs thousands of skilled IT workers around the world to generate revenue for the country’s weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs.

“In many cases, DPRK IT workers represent themselves as US-based and/or non-North Korean teleworkers,” Treasury Department officials wrote. “The workers may further obfuscate their identities and/or location by sub-contracting work to non North Koreans. Although DPRK IT workers normally engage in IT work distinct from malicious cyber activity, they have used the privileged access gained as contractors to enable the DPRK’s malicious cyber intrusions. Additionally, there are likely instances where workers are subjected to forced labor.”

Other US government advisories posted in 2023 and 2024 concerning similar programs have been removed with no explanation.

In Friday’s release, the Justice Department also said it’s seeking the forfeiture of more than $15 million worth of USDT, a cryptocurrency stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, that the FBI seized in March from North APT38 actors. The seized funds were derived from four heists APT38 carried out, two in July 2023 against virtual currency payment processors in Estonia and Panama and two in November 2023 thefts from exchanges in Panama and Seychelles.

Justice Department attempts to locate, seize, and forfeit all the stolen assets remain ongoing because APT38 has laundered them through virtual currency bridges, mixers, exchanges, and over-the-counter traders, the Justice Department said.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/11/5-plead-guilty-to-laptop-farm-and-id-theft-scheme-to-land-north-koreans-us-it-jobs/