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We all woke up on Friday to the news of a heist. Cryptocurrency firm Binancegot knocked over to the tune of $6.3 billion in an attack linked to North Korea.
As someone steeped in Hollywood heist genre movies, I cleared my schedule. This is the biggest heist in human history as far as we can tell so far, and certainly the biggest crypto heist.
The company says it will cover the losses and is working with law enforcement to get into the details of a very well-coordinated and complex attack. Around $3 billion has been frozen safe, but a solid chunk of Binance’s balance sheet may be gone forever.
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It’s a news story that brings so many hot-button issues into focus: Crypto regulation. General banking regulation and security in the advancing AI era. Are models like Anthropic’s Mythos truly too dangerous for eventual public release, if they could enable a hack like this? Is this a prelude to a new series of weekly smash-and-grabs by AI-powered hackers? Will Paramount Skydance buy the rights to Binance’s story for a thriller series?
But first, we need answers to the most critical question: What was the role of AI here?
If it played a big role, is the insurance industry that backstops corporate risk about to get smashed and grabbed too? What does this mean for banks? We all want to know.
I thought about this and looked at the adjacent tab in my browser: a column published Thursday from The Globe and Mail entitled,“‘The action is the juice’: Why we’re living in the golden age of Michael Mann’s Heat.” (It’s not just me who loves heist culture.)
The “how did this happen” will be fascinating.
But juxtaposing this crypto bank job with a real bank job is a stark reminder of how dramatically the world is shifting — and how fast. (And potentially how much people miss that era.)
Especially given the other big news of the week: Google Search’s influence is on the decline, eaten by its own AI tools.
Add it to the list of changes and goodbyes: manual transmission, steering wheels, typing over 60 wpm, evaluating information sources, reading comprehension, and more.
And now heists are fully online, done from a country far away, and potentially done entirely by a computer, powered by the AI productivity machine. I can’t help but think, “We used to have real heists in this country.”
You can see whysociety loves the poetry of an art theft.
I’ll cauterize my brief elegy to the past with the simple forward-looking thought: AI-powered or not, this bitcoin heist and Google’s AI cannibalization may both turn out to be parts of the same larger transformation, both representative events for a moment of change.
Ethan Wolff-Mann edits Yahoo Finance’s Morning Brief newsletter.Sign up here.
