THE RUNDOWN

Estimates suggest hackers may have stolen billions from Binance during a cyberattack on Thursday, sending shockwaves through the crypto world. The platform suspended withdrawals while it investigated the breach, though the full extent of losses is still being confirmed. If the numbers hold up, it'd rank among the largest crypto heists ever — and it's a serious reminder that no exchange, however dominant, is untouchable. If you're keeping crypto on a centralised platform, this is the week to rethink that.

General Motors has agreed to a $220 million settlement after it was found to have illegally sold driver and location data to data brokers — without telling customers. As part of the deal, GM must now get drivers' explicit consent before collecting or sharing any driving behaviour information. It's a significant win for privacy advocates, and a warning shot to any automaker treating the data generated by your car as a revenue stream. The car industry's data problem isn't going away — it's just getting more expensive to ignore.

Reddit's freewheeling days of anonymous browsing are numbered. The platform announced it's moving to a logged-in-only experience, meaning you'll need an account to see anything at all. CEO Steve Huffman confirmed the shift during an earnings call, noting that search traffic 'was down meaningfully' last quarter — in large part because Google's AI Mode surfaces Reddit content without sending anyone back to the site. This connects directly to a broader panic in the online publishing world about AI search eating traffic, and Reddit is betting that a walled experience will force both users and advertisers to engage on its own terms.

On that same earnings call, Huffman made it plain: Google's AI-powered search modes 'do not drive traffic' to Reddit. It's something many content sites have quietly suffered through, but having a CEO say it publicly in an earnings call is a different thing entirely. Google has also been quietly expanding AI Mode ads to more countries this week, trying to make the feature commercially viable — but the tension between making AI search profitable and keeping the open web functional is only going to intensify.

Google's Gemini AI assistant got a genuinely useful upgrade: you can now generate, preview, and edit Google Docs, Sheets, slide decks, PDFs, Markdown files, and more directly inside a Gemini chat window. No more bouncing between tabs to paste AI output into your documents. It's the kind of practical AI integration that actually changes daily workflows for people who live in Google's ecosystem — and a direct shot at Microsoft's Copilot, which has been pushing similar document-level AI for months.

Amazon reported strong AWS revenue this week, with CEO Andy Jassy declaring it's on a path to becoming a $1 trillion business — the first in history. But the company missed broader earnings expectations, posting a negative free cash flow of $2.4 billion as it pours money into AI infrastructure and data centres. Jassy also flagged that Prime Video is on track to earn 'tens of billions of dollars,' partly off the back of hits like Project Hail Mary. The strategy is clear: spend enormously now to own AI cloud computing later.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan told investors this week that demand for the company's budget-focused Wildcat Lake chips is 'outstripping supply.' That's a meaningful signal — it tells you that the mid-range and affordable laptop market is still very much alive and growing, even as premium AI-powered devices get all the headlines. For anyone selling or buying devices in Africa's price-sensitive markets, this supply crunch could affect availability and pricing of affordable laptops over the next few quarters.

Worth underlining separately from the fine itself: the GM settlement requires the company to actively obtain drivers' consent before any data collection begins. That structural requirement — not just paying a fine and moving on — could set a template for how regulators approach connected vehicle data globally. With more African cities investing in smart transport infrastructure, how that data gets collected and shared matters more than most people realise.

Archive of Our Own, the beloved fan fiction platform used by millions of writers and readers worldwide, has gone offline after a security incident — and the site's admins say recovery could take up to four weeks. The site's status update attracted millions of views within hours, which tells you everything about how deeply people care about it. Data is reportedly intact, but the cause of the outage is still unknown. It's a painful lesson about the vulnerability of community-driven platforms that run on volunteer infrastructure.

In a move that's part trade policy, part culture war, President Trump has ordered trade talks on foreign-made factory robots and threatened tariffs, declaring their import a national security threat. The order is aimed squarely at Chinese robotics manufacturers, who've been undercutting American and European competitors on price. Whether this reshapes global manufacturing supply chains or just raises costs for US factories depends entirely on how fast domestic alternatives can scale — and right now, they can't match the price.

It's a lot to absorb for one Thursday, but the thread running through today's news is pretty clear: the gap between who controls your data and who benefits from it keeps widening — and the companies and regulators trying to close it are just getting started.