OCC published its final GENIUS Act stablecoin rule, effective Jan. 18, dropping a proposed presumption on third-party rewards arrangements
NY AG Letitia James secured up to $35M from ex-Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky and a permanent ban from the securities and crypto industries
The White House is weighing two proposed rules from the CFTC tied to prediction markets as the agency seeks to assert its jurisdiction
FinCEN is withdrawing a proposal that would've designated crypto mixing a "primary money laundering concern" under the PATRIOT Act
Google is unveiling its long-awaited next-generation AI model, Gemini 4 Argon, to a small group of cybersecurity partners, the company said Wednesday. Why it matters: Gemini 4 arrives after a long gap at the top of Google's model lineup, in which the company kept rolling out smaller, cheaper Flash models while rivals OpenAI and Anthropic sprinted forward. State of play: Google says Gemini 4 Argon is built to handle complex, long-running tasks in software engineering, finance, legal work and cybersecurity. Google said the new model is state of the art on certain coding and knowledge work benchmarks, outperforming competing OpenAI frontier model GPT-6 Astra on several.The company is rolling the model out only to a group of trusted cybersecurity defenders and is participating in the U.S. government's voluntary pre-release process.Google says it will expand access after additional testing, with paying subscribers first in line. What they're saying: "Argon is a well-rounded model that has frontier capabilities across several domains," Tulsee Doshi, head of Gemini products at Google DeepMind, told Axios. "We've seen strong performance up close as Googlers have put the model through its paces in recent weeks, with many relying on it for their hardest coding and research problems." Flashback: Gemini 4 comes out nearly a year after the previous flagship model generation, Gemini 3. In May, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company's next major model release would come in June. That model, widely expected to be Gemini 3.5 Pro, never came out. In July, Axios reported that poor morale among Google DeepMind employees was part of the reason for the delay. Zoom in: Google's additional time investment may not be viewed as negatively in the context of the AI safety debate that has embroiled companies and users. OpenAI has had issues with agents going rogue, and recently said it is scrapping GPT-6.1 Astra due to security issues.Top AI developers OpenAI and Anthropic are investigating
Nvidia is deploying a new tool that it says can be used to prevent and contain rogue and potentially dangerous AI agents. Why it matters: The world's largest chip company has resisted calls to slow AI development over safety fears — arguing now that technological guardrails can keep rogue AI agents under control. Driving the news: Nvidia debuted the Nvidia Open Agent Safety Platform, which includes its OpenShell open source software system and its Sentry agent monitoring system. The system "traces all actions" by agents running on Nvidia Vera CPUs, promising to "quarantine agents that attempt to move outside their boundaries in milliseconds."AI's "full promise can only be realized when people have confidence that AI is being built to be safe and deployed with wisdom and responsibility," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote on X. "Safety is how trust is earned." State of play: OpenAI, Anthropic and security researchers are investigating tens of thousands of incidents in which their frontier models took steps that outside evaluators would consider problematic, sources told Axios' Madison Mills last week. The episodes include bypassing guardrails, creating message boards, escaping sandboxes, website hijacking, self-prompting or seeking to bypass monitors."Some of the agents even misreported what they did," Nvidia noted in a blog post Monday announcing its new platform. The intrigue: We're moving into a new era in which AI will be monitoring AI. And that will create more demand for chips — including the type that Nvidia sells — plus the data centers that use them and the power that's needed to run them."If security agents or validation models are running alongside production agents, that creates another inference workload that did not previously exist," writes Brad Gastwirth, global head of research and market intel, at Circular Technology. Zoom out: The Nvidia tool rollout comes amid a feverish debate over whether rogue AI could destroy humanity. Anthropic researcher Jacob Co
The central bank opened two proposals for comment under the GENIUS Act, requiring issuers it supervises to back tokens fully with safe assets and creating an application process for banks seeking to issue stablecoins
The 25 basis-point hike is the first raise in three years and comes before critical midterm elections in the US