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According to TechCrunch, a hacker claiming to be from the "Department of Peace" has reportedly obtained a large amount of employee data from the Okta single sign-on system used by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was publicly released on Wednesday by the data transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) as the "Icepick" dataset. The leaked records exceed 40,000, accounting for about one-fifth of DHS's approximately 220,000 employees, involving names, positions, work emails, phone numbers, and office locations, along with information related to internal system permissions. Among these, approximately 21,000 records belong to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel, while about 10,000 records involve the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), with nearly 1,000 related to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).TechCrunch stated that it has verified the authenticity of some of the data, with timestamps indicating that the data was exported around mid-August. The hacker also provided the data to journalist and hacker maia arson crimew, who then forwarded it to DDoSecrets. Okta responded that its systems and data were not breached; a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security has not yet responded to requests for comment. The report indicates that this is the third incident of data leakage from the U.S. government that has drawn attention in the past month, following the theft of Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel files and Pentagon personnel data.

According to a report by Financial Associated Press, Microsoft announced on October 26 local time that it will offer a voluntary severance compensation plan to approximately 60,000 employees to reduce costs and adjust its workforce for the AI era. More than a quarter of the total employee count is eligible, marking the company's third round of workforce adjustments this year.A spokesperson stated that some vice presidents and below in the United States, Canada, India, and the United Kingdom are eligible to apply, and those who accept the plan will receive benefits similar to standard severance packages. According to informed sources, departments such as Xbox, Windows, Copilot, and finance will fully participate, while some employees in data centers, sales, marketing, cybersecurity, and quantum computing will not be eligible. Chief Human Resources Officer Amy Coleman mentioned in an internal letter that the plan provides an option for employees considering leaving to transition with the company's support, and it is another way for departments to adjust their teams. The spokesperson also noted that if top talent accepts the plan, the company will attempt to retain them in some cases.In April this year, Microsoft launched its first voluntary retirement program for about 8,750 eligible U.S. employees, with over 30% ultimately accepting; in July, it announced layoffs of approximately 4,800 people, accounting for about 2.1% of the total workforce. The spokesperson expects the number of acceptances this time to be far less than the voluntary retirement program. As of the end of June, Microsoft had a total of 223,000 employees. According to the financial report on July 29, capital expenditures for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2026 were $41 billion, a year-on-year increase of about 70%, and capital expenditures for the first quarter of fiscal year 2027 are expected to be about $50 billion.

As of September 30, Anthropic had approximately 5,300 employees. The company's total operating expenses for the first half of the year as of June 30 were $16.98 billion.

Reuters reported on October 23 that Elizabeth Barron, the Executive Director of the non-profit organization PHP Foundation, which supports the open-source language PHP, stated in an email interview on Friday that the foundation is severely underfunded. She mentioned that recent events indicate a high reliance on PHP by businesses and governments, and given this reliance, PHP's funding is clearly insufficient.Barron noted that the foundation currently has only one full-time employee, which is herself, along with 14 part-time contractors, with funding coming from donations and grants. The increase in coding related to artificial intelligence has roughly doubled the foundation's workload. The number of code change proposals received by the PHP project is nearly double that of a year ago, but the number of contributors has not doubled. She stated that reviewing code contributions and bug reports requires a significant amount of manual input and expertise.Reuters reported that two serious vulnerabilities in PHP were discovered this week, prompting urgent patches for websites worldwide, highlighting the critical importance of this nearly thirty-year-old open-source language to the internet. The article stated that PHP may support approximately 70% of websites globally, and there is currently no evidence that these vulnerabilities were exploited before their disclosure. The report was filed by journalist Toby Sterling from Amsterdam.

OpenAI announced that Uber will provide the ChatGPT Enterprise version to all employees and will use OpenAI's cutting-edge models through ChatGPT Work.

According to Microsoft's 10-K filing for fiscal year 2026, as of June 30, 2026, the company had approximately 223,000 full-time employees, down from 228,000 the previous year, a decrease of about 5,000, marking the first decline in ten years.Among them, there are 121,000 employees in the United States and 102,000 employees overseas; approximately 77,000 employees are in research and development, a decrease of about 4,000 from the peak in 2024. During the same period, Microsoft's revenue for fiscal year 2026 increased by 18% year-on-year, reaching $331.8 billion.The above employee statistics do not include the new round of approximately 4,800 job cuts in July 2026. Microsoft previously stated that the eliminated positions would not be directly replaced by AI.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman introduced three proposals for the safe development of super AI to employees last week. The first is to establish a global regulatory organization similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency, to inspect advanced models and audit safety measures. Insiders say Altman leans towards this route.The second proposal emulates the European Organization for Nuclear Research, merging major AI laboratories into one organization or collaborating through a unified agency for joint development, rather than continuing to race against each other. The third and most extreme, which he referred to as the "Eliezer Plan": an AI company achieves recursive self-improvement first, and then uses overwhelming economic power to control computing power, making it impossible for other developers to catch up. Altman described this idea as "melting down all other companies' GPUs," while stating that this plan is very bad and is only meant to illustrate the extreme possibility.The idea of "melting down GPUs" comes from AI safety researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky. He proposed a thought experiment in 2021, suggesting that super AI could create self-replicating nanomachines to melt down global GPUs, stating that this is merely an extreme example to illustrate the intensity of intervention, not a proposal to be executed. OpenAI proposed the establishment of an "AI version of the International Atomic Energy Agency" in 2023, and Google DeepMind head Hassabis has also advocated for the creation of an "AI version of CERN." Currently, OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic plan to establish a joint safety standards organization by the end of this year or early next year, but there are disagreements over the responsibility for model safety testing. Altman hopes to set speed limits for AI development while stating that OpenAI cannot currently cede its competitive advantage to rivals.

On October 15, Anthropic announced that it has begun providing employee-like access to a team from the nonprofit organization METR for the purpose of evaluating its models and safety practices. The company stated that last month it committed to strengthening independent third-party evaluations and signed the White House "Superintelligence Agreement," which includes a commitment to collaborate with independent external auditors or evaluators. Over the past year, Anthropic has worked with METR to review several risk reports, and METR will publish its risk assessment results.Anthropic has equipped six METR employees with company hardware, office space, and access to internal tools and systems roughly equivalent to those of its own risk assessment team. With a few explicitly defined categories such as client data, attorney-client privileged information, and model architecture information, employees are encouraged to share information as they would with colleagues working on alignment risk. METR may publish analyses of risk levels, events, or practices, which Anthropic cannot veto, but can request the removal of pre-defined narrow category information; METR may publicly state the circumstances of redaction and indicate whether it believes the redaction is reasonable without disclosing the content that was redacted. This arrangement is limited to small teams working under enforceable agreements, and other METR employees are isolated from working with this team.Anthropic is also collaborating with SecureBio and Accenture on assessments and is in early discussions with other organizations, including Hugging Face. SecureBio is reviewing the chemical and biological weapons section of the August 2026 risk report, having previously completed and published a pilot review of the previous risk report.

Ramp, the corporate expense management platform, co-founder and co-CEO Eric Glyman announced on October 13 the launch of the AI workspace Glass for the entire company. Glyman stated that providing the best models and the most tokens to every employee does not equate to becoming an AI-native company. He mentioned that in one week in May 2026, Ramp consumed $1.5 million in tokens, after which a small team transformed the environment built by the employees who were best at using AI into a work method available to all.Glass advocates starting from the existing knowledge of the company rather than from a blank conversation. As of the announcement, 323 employees have edited the content in Glass over 6,500 times. In terms of feature requests, there were about 300 entries that needed to be manually input into Salesforce each month; after a client manager stored prompts in Glass in May, they now capture about 20,000 entries per month and have sent out over 5,000 emails regarding the features requested by clients. The product supports integration with company knowledge from Linear, Notion, Google, Slack, Gong, etc., allowing multiple people to collaborate in the same session. After migrating its own work, Ramp's billing decreased by 30%, and it is currently opening up for the first batch of enterprises.

Market news reports that Netflix (NFLX.O) is undergoing a restructuring, which is expected to affect about 5% of employees, with the announcement possibly as early as next week.

ChainCatcher live report, at the Token2049 conference in Singapore, World Liberty Financial co-founder Eric Trump stated that the era of paying salaries with stablecoins has arrived. He revealed that his family business, as a "super employer," has tens of thousands of employees in global hotel assets and is "undoubtedly researching" salary payments in stablecoins. He pointed out that it has become common for athletes to request payment in Bitcoin for contracts, and the appreciation of underlying assets often far exceeds the contract amount; for ordinary employees, check clearing takes 24-36 hours, while people want money "immediately in their accounts."

According to Cointelegraph, the Russian Ministry of Finance stated on Friday that some employees have received their salaries for the first time in digital rubles. The payment of salaries in central bank digital currency is voluntary for Russian citizens and has been implemented since October 1 (Thursday). The ministry did not disclose the number of participants or the total amount of salary payments, nor did it specify the specific departments involved.According to the ministry's press release, approximately 16 million digital rubles (about $192,200) were disbursed in a pilot project for federal budget expenditures in 2025, and the Ministry of Finance has thus applied the verified channels to its own salary payment process. The integration of digital rubles into the budget process is being jointly promoted by the Central Bank of Russia and the Ministry of Finance.The development of digital rubles began in 2021. Cointelegraph reported on July 2 that Russia plans to launch this central bank digital currency on September 1, with major banks and retail businesses starting to support related transactions at that time. This currency is being introduced as a supplement to the fiat ruble, initially processed by financial and credit institutions. EU authorities announced restrictions on this currency in April.

Market news indicates that Apple originally planned to lay off 5,000 AppleCare employees, but later canceled this plan.

According to Decrypt, court documents unsealed in the lawsuit between The New York Times and OpenAI and Microsoft show that Microsoft employees discussed whether OpenAI's use of news articles to train its models constituted "the largest labor theft in human history," and could potentially trigger a "doom loop" that leads to a decline in model quality. A 2023 internal Microsoft memo warned that millions of people worldwide would soon view the large model's "consumption" of their works as "an unprecedented and astonishing theft," and stated that large AI models are "products that destroy their own supply chains."Microsoft stated in the documents that these memos were written by Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht and do not represent the company's views, as his role is to provide "different and asymmetric perspectives." Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that "any content behind a paywall should be authorized by those who wish to use it," and stated that if he had known in advance that OpenAI was using paid content for training, he would have exercised Microsoft's rights to demand that the model be retrained.Additionally, an OpenAI employee had mentioned to President Greg Brockman the construction of "hacker methods" to bypass The New York Times paywall, to which Brockman replied, "Nice." Both OpenAI and Microsoft argue that the relevant training falls under fair use. The case was initiated by The New York Times at the end of 2023, and 11 publishers have since joined the lawsuit.

Amazon announced that it will raise the minimum starting hourly wage for core operations employees in the U.S. (delivery drivers and fulfillment center employees) to $20, with an average hourly wage approaching $24, and a $1 increase for eligible employees.Udit Madan, Amazon's Senior Vice President, stated in the company blog: After accounting for the value of industry-leading benefits, the average total compensation exceeds $32 per hour. This pay raise investment exceeds $1.5 billion.New benefits include Day 1 Financial low-cost banking system, eligibility for First Tech Federal Credit Union membership, a 20% in-store discount at Whole Foods Market, and a 10% discount on Amazon grocery orders. Existing benefits include free Prime membership, prepaid education programs, and healthcare coverage.

On September 15, local time, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) announced that two Robinhood engineers, Hefu Chai and Huaisong Xiang (also known as Jerry Xiang), have been charged with commodity fraud and wire fraud for allegedly trading Hyperliquid perpetual contracts using non-public information from the company.SDNY stated that during their tenure at Robinhood, the two had access to confidential information regarding the launch of new tokens and their launch timelines from Robinhood Crypto. Between 2025 and 2026, they are accused of repeatedly purchasing Hyperliquid perpetual contracts for the corresponding tokens before the company publicly announced the launch of those tokens, profiting after the news broke, with each allegedly earning over $50,000. Prosecutors emphasized that although perpetual contracts are traded on blockchain derivative platforms, they still fall under accountable financial instruments.U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald stated that corporate insiders cannot evade relevant securities and commodities market laws by trading perpetual contracts, tokenized securities, or other similar financial products. The 36-year-old Chai will appear in court in the Northern District of California, while the 30-year-old Xiang will appear in federal court in the Southern District of New York. The maximum penalty for violations of the Commodity Exchange Act they face is 10 years in prison, and for wire fraud, up to 20 years in prison. SDNY emphasized that the contents of the indictment at this stage are merely allegations, and both defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty in court.

According to NBC, North Korea is utilizing remote IT workers from third countries such as Iran and Lebanon to assist in infiltrating American companies and obtaining funds to finance its weapons programs. Alerts issued by the U.S. and several foreign agencies in July indicated that North Korean IT workers "seek to sign contracts with the intention of remitting salaries back to relevant North Korean agencies," while also posing internal threats to companies, involving data leaks, cryptocurrency theft, and sensitive information theft.As governments like the United States increase countermeasures, North Korea is increasingly leveraging third-country IT workers to secure job interviews, and after obtaining work contracts, the relevant positions are typically taken over by North Korean agents. Reports indicate that these foreign IT workers are scouted on LinkedIn, with some earning about $500 per month in cryptocurrency to work part-time as "interview assistants."Cointelegraph reported in May, citing data from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, that state-affiliated North Korean hackers and threat actors caused cryptocurrency losses exceeding $2 billion in 2025, a 51% increase year-on-year. The Bank of Korea estimates that despite facing global sanctions, North Korea's GDP will still grow by 3.5% in 2025.

Micron Technology announced on Friday that its direct labor employees in Taiwan will receive a total bonus for the fiscal year 2026 equivalent to 35 to 68 months of salary, with a minimum cash compensation of 1.7 million New Taiwan Dollars (approximately 53,809.39 USD).Employees in Taiwan who joined before August 29, 2025, will receive a cash bonus of 1 million New Taiwan Dollars (approximately 31,652.58 USD) for the fiscal year 2026. This announcement comes after union members representing about two-thirds of Micron's employees in Taiwan generally supported a strike.

According to reports from the major factory, ByteDance recently held a briefing on Doubao stocks and introduced new policies for relevant employees: the price of Doubao stocks was adjusted from $14.85 per share in June to $17.02 per share, an increase of about 14.6%; the issuance of Doubao stocks was increased, with some employees reaching a total package of about 5%; employees can choose to convert a certain proportion of cash in their total package into Doubao stocks, with the proportion varying by job level.This adjustment mainly targets the large model departments under Seed (pre-training, multimodal, VLM, etc.) and the Doubao main APP team under Flow. From $13.08 in April of this year to $17.02 in August, the Doubao stock has increased by about 30.1% in less than half a year, which is about twice the increase of ByteDance options during the same period (approximately 14.5%).

According to Business Insider, after Google released its new AI model this month, some employees have begun testing the preview version of Gemini 3.8 Flash on the internal coding platform Jetski. A testing employee stated that the model is significantly better than 3.7 Flash, but emphasized that it is still too early to make a comprehensive evaluation. Google declined to comment on this.With 3.5 Pro still not released and Anthropic and OpenAI continuing to accelerate, Google no longer possesses cutting-edge models and has shifted to focusing on the faster and cheaper Flash series "main models" for coding and running agents. Gemini 3.6 Flash was launched in July, and 3.7 Flash followed just three weeks later. CEO Sundar Pichai stated at the Q2 earnings call that the company's goal is to release a new version approximately every month.The employee preview suggests that the public launch of Gemini 3.8 Flash may not be far off, but it is not guaranteed. Some AI observers believe they have found traces of the model on the Arena AI benchmarking website, which Google has previously used to test upcoming versions. Earlier this year, Google also launched the Gemini Spark agent.