Billions leave Binance after hack; fake Claude Code tries planting backdoors

Morning, humans.

Binance, Cursor and OpenAI have three different ways of asking for our trust.

Binance lost about $6.3 billion to attackers on Oct. 29 and began reopening withdrawals on Sunday. The first nine and a half hours already have a tally, tucked just below.

Cursor says a tampered Claude Code extension affected up to 5,000 users on Oct. 29. It arrived through a marketplace where extensions update automatically.

OpenAI wants to call data centers "AI compute campuses" after Tuesday's midterms. Pike County gets a mention in the pitch, with thousands of promised jobs and a new noun for the building.

Stay curious,

Marcus Schuler

Binance saw, by its own count, about $3.64 billion more leave than arrive in the first nine and a half hours after it began restoring withdrawals on Sunday, Nov. 1.

Attackers drained about $6.3 billion from Binance's hot wallets on Oct. 29. The FBI attributed the theft to North Korea's TraderTraitor group on Oct. 31.

Binance puts the outflow at 2.1% of its $171 billion in assets, using its own Oct. 28 proof-of-reserves data. At 11:22 a.m. ET Sunday, withdrawals remained suspended for 531 of 552 listed coins.

Why This Matters:

• SQS Trading's planned reduction would leave less of its trading capital exposed to Binance, where it held about a quarter.
• With 531 of 552 coins still suspended Sunday morning, the early count covers only part of what customers could move.

A tampered Claude Code extension reached Cursor's marketplace on Oct. 29, affecting up to 5,000 users by Cursor's count.

Cursor says a key step would have failed on most machines, while its notice says the extension added the attacker's key and installed persistence. A coding agent's extension runs with the developer's privileges on the developer's machine, and this one arrived through default automatic updates.

WIRED follows a biotech team as it gives an AI agent direct control over a live-animal experiment.

After a veterinary surgeon performed the craniotomy, the agent selected a gene therapy, chose the brain region and injection coordinates, and controlled the robotic arms, needle, volume and speed. One Claude model refused to guide the needle and another agreed to proceed.

• Apple Intelligence will run on Qwen in China, with developer beta testing from Nov. 4 and release with iOS 27.3 in December, Alibaba says.
• OpenAI cut its funding target to $20 billion from $30 billion, with about $11 billion secured so far, according to reports published Oct. 30 and 31.
• Guidewire agreed Oct. 27 to buy Hyperexponential for $1.7 billion in cash, plus up to $400 million tied to recurring revenue targets.
• Lumaril raised a $66 million Series A at a $400 million valuation, led by Elad Gil, to connect AI software to factories' existing control systems.
• Alphabet shares fell 13% on Oct. 29, erasing roughly $500 billion in market value after quarterly cash flow hit minus $9.1 billion.
• Reddit shares fell 30.44% Oct. 30; CEO Steve Huffman said "The AI mode does not drive traffic, not for us and not to anybody as far as I know."

Stress-test an interview scorecard.

Use an LLM to catch vague criteria that let bias enter a senior-hire decision before interviews begin.

Your raw input:

The prompt:

Why this works:

The prompt forces the model to tie criticism to exact wording and replace weak criteria with observable evidence. The cap on criteria keeps the final scorecard usable during a live interview.

What to use:

Use Claude or ChatGPT with the source documents attached. A smaller model is adequate if the role description and scorecard fit in one prompt.

OpenAI plans a policy and PR blitz after the Nov. 3 midterms, including the data center rename, according to an Axios scoop.

Our take: OpenAI has three words for a data center: "AI compute campuses." Perhaps the neighbors were waiting for a quad full of sophomores. Pike County is promised thousands of jobs; the sales pitch apparently needs a college costume before anyone can discuss what the building does.

Chris Lehane said: "We think the conversation is good and healthy. It's democracy in action." Amazon and Microsoft already say they will no longer use NDAs in talks with local governments. For the campus brochure, that counts as an amenity: you can talk about the building.

Marcus Schuler

San Francisco

Editor-in-Chief and founder of Implicator.ai. Former ARD correspondent and senior broadcast journalist with 10+ years covering tech. Writes daily briefings on policy and market developments. Based in San Francisco. E-mail: editor@implicator.ai