Exploring today's frontier topics through the perspective of industry insiders @HadickM, @rleshner, @tarunchitra & @tomhschmidt! 🤝 Streaming @Unchained_pod

Joined October 2022
Supply chain attacks are getting more sophisticated. Plus espionage at OpenAI, 1000x leverage on Papertrade, and the death of moats. Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:37 TOKEN2049: zero Lambos + nightclub index 09:18 Ledger supply chain hack 21:46 OpenAI employee with a listening device 24:58 Choke points built for a high-trust society 29:03 Papertrade: 1000x leverage + tokens by losing 37:42 Are technical moats dead? 45:35 Which moats AI actually killed 51:37 The incumbents have AI too 54:56 Why AI can't write an investment memo 🔥Stay updated with all the latest hot takes by following and subscribing to @_ChoppingBlock and @unchained_pod! 🎥 YouTube: youtu.be/QIsBwmijDUA 🎧 Spotify: bit.ly/3wiIOyy 🍎 Apple: bit.ly/3w9HQ7J 🎙 Podcast Home: choppingblock.xyz
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part of the trade deal was Rob had to shave his head
Replying to @_choppingblock
Is he gonna be bald for the show
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You know how Yano feels about my trade to @_choppingblock by the picture of @hosseeb that he used
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I took over @theempirepod this week! We talk through: * The cyberpocalypse * Will the AI labs get nationalized? * The $2.5B Visa - Fireblocks deal * Is anything still investible? Give it a listen 👇
NEW POD @hosseeb and @zmanian join to break down the wave of attacks across the internet this week We cover: – AI-found PHP exploit – Is the next 6-12 months cyber chaos? – Will the AI labs get nationalized? – Where AI's irrational exuberance lives – Visa's rumored $2.5B Fireblocks deal – Why nothing feels investible & more! TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 From the B-List to the A-List: Haseeb & Zaki Join 01:21 Is AI Breaking Cybersecurity? 10:22 Where Are The AI-Powered Cyberattacks? 15:44 Can AI Defend Against Itself? 20:34 Ads (Fidelity, DAS London) 21:45 Should The Government Control AI Labs? 28:42 Will AI Labs Become Nationalized? 32:55 Ads (Fidelity, DAS London) 34:11 Is The AI Boom Overvalued? 38:38 Who Is Actually Winning In AI? 43:16 Does The World Need More AI Labs? 46:27 Is Crypto Custody Consolidating? 53:53 Crypto's Next Wave Of M&A 57:56 What Is The Market Telling Us? 01:01:22 Content Of The Week
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it's Thursday Night™
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Back in August, Haseeb and Robert were talking about this on The Chopping Block: "The economics of AI and of cybersecurity are making everything really change." "Open source, in a way, is protection against a nefarious developer, but it's not protection against a nefarious third party." @rleshner: "I think open source in general is going to go full circle… every agent out there will analyze it in 0.01 seconds of it being created and prove that it's safe or prove that it's unsafe." "I like to say, don't trust any code before 2026." @hosseeb: "I think within a year, you're going to see best practices change dramatically…"
OpenAI models helped researchers—operating as part of our Patch the Planet initiative—discover critical security flaws in PHP, an open-source programming language used to run an estimated 70% of websites. Over the past two months, we led a coalition of maintainers, researchers, and security providers to prepare fixes and protections ahead of disclosure. This duration was necessary because the fix was quite intricate and required a major change to the PHP engine. Every site using PHP can now safely upgrade their version to stay secure, in addition to applying mitigations from various security vendors. Due to the severity of these flaws and PHP’s widespread use, we consider this bug to be one of the most impactful vulnerabilities in recent memory. It also marks a new phase, where AI can find security bugs with internet-scale impact. This is an example of the Defender’s Window in action: to our knowledge, frontier AI was able to find this vulnerability ahead of attackers, giving defenders time to prepare. openai.com/index/coordinated…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
‪OpenAI may claim a role in the coordinated response and patching process. But the initial discovery and exploit development, however, occurred several months earlier by an independent researcher.‬ ‪x.com/lcfr_hax/statu…‬
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Hey @_choppingblock , found your boy. Aztec called and they need him back for goblin recursion but Feynman won’t let go of his Plonck
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This was the real hub of diplomacy
🇺🇸 New York City might not be the capital city of the United States, but it for sure is still a hub for diplomacy. No less than 190 diplomatic missions reside in the city, which also hosts the United Nations headquarters.
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I was wrong. Agents don't need crypto. It's us humans who do. I break down what the industry got wrong in my @token2049 talk, Agents + Crypto: What's Real and What's Cope 👇
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Haseeb says the AI disruption we were promised is nowhere to be found: “the incumbents have AI too motherf*cker” "We talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and they're like, 'oh, our moat's over. How should I internalize this?' My answer is, almost not at all. I think this is a fake story. This is bullsh*t." "We have not seen any major companies that have had their moats eroded by a post-AI company. There are no examples." "Nobody could come up with any examples to give me other than some very obscure companies that build compilers. I'm like what f*cking company is that that builds compilers, and that was their moat?" "Think about browsers. There was all these examples of Opus 4.8 one-shotting browsers. Obviously these were great tech demos. Nobody uses any f*cking vibe coded browsers because they're sh*t, because they suck. They're very good at the first 10 seconds." Tom: "It's not that people write their own software. It's that the model just eats the software. The thing that is competitive with Photoshop is not vibe coded Photoshop. It's just the image models have gotten so good that why would I ever open Figma or Photoshop? Because I can just prompt the model and generate the thing that I want." Haseeb: “It is very easy and compelling to say everything has changed. Businesses are now being turned on their head. Moats are eroding. Nothing is ever going to be the same. So far that call has aged incredibly poorly.” “We are three years post-ChatGPT. We're a full year post Opus 4.5. Where's all the disruption? You can always say 'oh, it's coming, it hasn't happened, you just have to give it time'. But I think actually the thing you have to appreciate, and Jane Street's a perfect example of this, the incumbents have AI too motherfuckers.” “They have bigger budgets than you do. They have more token spend than you do. And to the extent that they will be pulling farther ahead and their software will be more robust."
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Tarun explains how Paper Trade's entire house of cards depends on one token Haseeb: "This feels to me like it's got echoes of basecoin or basis, where it's kind of like okay, well if it works, it's going to be so big and it's going to be enormous. But it's kind of hard to not face any of the various Scyllas and Charybdis's that are flanking it, you know." Tarun: "It's hard for me to imagine this thing works if paper, the coin, doesn't do well. If I look at the house of cards of dependency diagram of all the strategies people claim this is useful for, there is one kind of main villain horcrux or whatever that exists. And that's the paper token." "All these strategies where people are like I'm willing to lose money to get the paper token. How long are they going to do that? If you look at coins that have fair launch but done well, like HYPE, they built a cult pretty quickly." "A paper trades cult is like around losing money to earn more paper. It doesn't have the same house of all finance thing. There's not some long term thing. Everything is like how can I make money quickly off a thousand X. It feels like the paper token price is going to be too dependent on that." "Paper, paper hands causing the paper trade to die."
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New late night Chopping Block coming at you: > Token2049 nightclub index at ATL > Ledger supply chain attack! (plus OpenAI spy infiltration) > @papertrade_xyz: 1000x leveraged farming?? > Are technical moats really dead, or have rumors of their death been greatly exaggerated 👇
Supply chain attacks are getting more sophisticated. Plus espionage at OpenAI, 1000x leverage on Papertrade, and the death of moats. Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:37 TOKEN2049: zero Lambos + nightclub index 09:18 Ledger supply chain hack 21:46 OpenAI employee with a listening device 24:58 Choke points built for a high-trust society 29:03 Papertrade: 1000x leverage + tokens by losing 37:42 Are technical moats dead? 45:35 Which moats AI actually killed 51:37 The incumbents have AI too 54:56 Why AI can't write an investment memo 🔥Stay updated with all the latest hot takes by following and subscribing to @_ChoppingBlock and @unchained_pod! 🎥 YouTube: youtu.be/QIsBwmijDUA 🎧 Spotify: bit.ly/3wiIOyy 🍎 Apple: bit.ly/3w9HQ7J 🎙 Podcast Home: choppingblock.xyz
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Tarun says papertrade is too dependent on $PAPER, and it's hard to imagine the platform doing well if the token doesn't: "It's hard for me to imagine this thing works if PAPER, the coin, doesn't do well." "If I look at the house of cards, the dependency diagram of all the strategies people claim this is useful for, there's one main villain, horcrux, whatever, and that's the PAPER token." "At some level, all these strategies are people like, I'm willing to lose money to get the PAPER token. How long are they going to do that?" "If you look at coins that have fair launch but done well, like HYPE, they built a cult pretty quickly. Papertrade's cult is around losing money to earn more PAPER." "Everything is like, how can I make money quickly off 1000x."
Supply chain attacks are getting more sophisticated. Plus espionage at OpenAI, 1000x leverage on Papertrade, and the death of moats. Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:37 TOKEN2049: zero Lambos + nightclub index 09:18 Ledger supply chain hack 21:46 OpenAI employee with a listening device 24:58 Choke points built for a high-trust society 29:03 Papertrade: 1000x leverage + tokens by losing 37:42 Are technical moats dead? 45:35 Which moats AI actually killed 51:37 The incumbents have AI too 54:56 Why AI can't write an investment memo 🔥Stay updated with all the latest hot takes by following and subscribing to @_ChoppingBlock and @unchained_pod! 🎥 YouTube: youtu.be/QIsBwmijDUA 🎧 Spotify: bit.ly/3wiIOyy 🍎 Apple: bit.ly/3w9HQ7J 🎙 Podcast Home: choppingblock.xyz
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Haseeb on why models write investment memos like growth investors Haseeb: "It's hard for these things to get encapsulated in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards." "we don't know how to put product taste into the models." "when you get a model to write an investment memo, it gets a lot of the details right" "It's so scared and conservative and it like … It's, it's like a growth investor, you know?" "in real investing, like, things are not perfect and you have to take risks, and the models, they do not know how to do that." Robert: "the venture funds don't make their investment memos accessible to the internet." Haseeb: "the memos that you do release are the ones that you're not afraid of the world seeing."
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Robert on why the CryptoBilis attack is a new playbook Robert: "I think it's indicative of how risky supply chains are for sensitive keys and anything, right?" "this is the physical manifestation of that, right?" "I think that all types of supply chain attacks are gonna get more sophisticated over time." "this one is really spooky in that somebody has essentially prototyped buying a vendor" "I could see someone saying, 'Ah, you know, just buy a vendor. What else is for sale?'" "how do you protect a supply chain? This is a glaring example of it." "people would try to make a paper wallet for their Bitcoin, and they'd go to a website and how could you trust the paper wallet generator?"
Incident Update - Oct 13th, 2026 Ledger is asking resellers and distributors in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong to suspend sales of Ledger devices while the investigation is ongoing. This includes taking products off the shelves. Specifically the countries are: Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. To be clear, as the investigation continues, the only confirmed incidents remain contained to Southeast Asia. We have not verified a drain linked to a device bought elsewhere. The investigation is ongoing to determine who tampered with these devices and where in the distribution chain it happened. The Ledger Donjon will analyze the devices it receives, and Ledger Customer Support will provide guidance to users who reach out through our official channel: support.ledger.com. We understand this is concerning, and will continue to provide updates from the Ledger Donjon as the investigation progresses. Stay vigilant. We have no indication that Ledger's infrastructure, systems or services or direct sales channel have been compromised.
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Tarun says AI leaves game studios with no technical moat Tarun: "on the pure software side it's like kind of hard to argue that the, the moat is software in the long run." "the moat on the security side might actually be much better." "What moat is there for a game studio? There's like not really any." "Everything becomes like a liquidity game like DeFi and like less like a long-term brand." Haseeb: "transpiling a game from one architecture to another architecture is like a very small part of game development" "you do not want to see the AI-generated GTA VI." Tarun: "the idea has to be separate from the implementation." Haseeb: "since when was that Rockstar's moat technical? You know? It's not like, wow, they have such an amazing game engine." "I would guess like a rounding error. They're probably reusing the same engine they've used in previous games."
Technical moats are mostly over at this point. If you’re building something that is meant to be durable, the only moats now are: • Proprietary data • Network effects • A physical component
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Tom on how you would actually steal a frontier model Tom: "I assume most large tech companies have, foreign spies." "ultimately they have to be in clear text somewhere running on a GPU somewhere." "why would you even bother trying to distill, which is Anthropic's whole beef, when you can just, like, get the weights themselves?" Haseeb: "I do think exfiltrating the weights of one of these models is much harder than anything else" Tom: "take an electron microscope and go do it?" Haseeb: "if you find one ant in your kitchen, there's almost certainly more than one ant." "we found the one crappy Saudi spy. There's probably a lot more spies" "if you found the really bad one, probably the really good ones are still in hiding."
We discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices. We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier. We referred the matter to the FBI, and we’re grateful to the agents and prosecutors who moved quickly to make an arrest. The FBI’s investigation is ongoing and we will continue to support their work. At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data. The employee was terminated. We take protecting our technology, data, and people seriously, and as a matter of national importance. Our security program is designed to protect against a wide range of threat actors, from insider risks to cybercriminals to nation states, and this case is an example of how AI can help address these sophisticated security threats.
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We discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices. We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier. We referred the matter to the FBI, and we’re grateful to the agents and prosecutors who moved quickly to make an arrest. The FBI’s investigation is ongoing and we will continue to support their work. At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data. The employee was terminated. We take protecting our technology, data, and people seriously, and as a matter of national importance. Our security program is designed to protect against a wide range of threat actors, from insider risks to cybercriminals to nation states, and this case is an example of how AI can help address these sophisticated security threats.
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Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Important context needed: Trump previously promised 2 dividends and never followed through. In early 2025, Trump publicly backed a roughly $5,000 “DOGE dividend” In November 2025, he promised a $2,000 “tariff dividend” newsweek.com/every-dividend…
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