Columbia Crackdown, Binance, and the World's Newest Currency

Columbia University Crackdown

Dozens of New York City police officers entered Columbia University's campus last night after student protesters overtook an administrative building earlier in the day. The students, who were arrested and led out of the building by police, are expected to face charges, including trespassing and criminal mischief. The development marks an escalation in campus tensions over the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

A group of protesters at Columbia seized Hamilton Hall early Tuesday (see photos), breaking windows and symbolically renaming the building as "Hind's Hall" for a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza. The blockade at Hamilton Hall, which has a history of student takeovers, came a day after Columbia began suspending student protesters for ignoring an ultimatum to disband a two-week-long encampment. Officials also threatened to expel students blocking Hamilton Hall. The protesters' demands include the university divesting from companies with business ties to Israel—a shared demand across US campus demonstrations. 

Elsewhere, Portland State University closed its campus after student protesters broke into a school library, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill canceled its classes. Arrests across universities continued; over 1,000 people have been arrested so far. See all updates here.

Binance Founder Sentenced

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison yesterday for violating US money laundering laws and federal sanctions at the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. The sentence is less than the three years prosecutors had sought and the 12- to 18-month sentencing guidelines for the crime.

Zhao, a UAE and Canada dual citizen, pleaded guilty in November. He agreed to resign as CEO and pay a $50M fine for failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program, which resulted in sanctions violations linked to users in Iran, Cuba, Syria, and Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine. Binance also agreed to pay $4.3B in fines and forfeiture (see 101). The news comes a month after former FTX executive Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years for fraud tied to his crypto company.

Under the plea agreement, Zhao waived the right to appeal any sentence up to 18 months. Zhao has an estimated $43B fortune, including his Binance ownership, and will become the richest person ever to serve time in US federal prison.

Newspapers Sue OpenAI

Eight regional daily newspapers sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement yesterday, the latest in an industrywide reckoning with the rise of content-dependent artificial intelligence. The outlets, including the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, are owned by hedge fund Alden Global Capital, the nation's second-largest newspaper operator. 

AI firms develop chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT by running billions of sentences from the internet through so-called large language models, training them on sentence patterns to effectively predict answers to queries (how it works). News publishers like The New York Times have sued OpenAI for using their journalism to train its models, arguing repackaging original journalism is not a fair use. Publishers also cite instances of AI falsely attributing errors to their reporting. 

Other media companies are opting to sign deals with AI companies to pay to license their content, including The Associated Press, Reuters, and the UK's Financial Times (see list). Reports indicate OpenAI is paying individual publishers $1M to $5M annually for such access. 

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