John BrΞnnan

Introducing Project Glasswing: an urgent initiative to help secure the world’s most critical software. It’s powered by our newest frontier model, Claude Mythos Preview, which can find software vulnerabilities better than all but the most skilled humans. anthropic.com/glasswing

TODAY 🚨: The Commission issued an interpretation that clarifies the application of federal securities laws to crypto assets. This is a major step to provide greater clarity regarding the Commission’s treatment of crypto assets. Read the release here: ow.ly/XhhV50YvxvO

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company. #### today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone. first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay. we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly. i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures. a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers. we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold. to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward. to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow. jack

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I used to wave away quantum computing (QC) risks to Bitcoin as far-fetched. I don’t anymore. The usual pushback goes like this: QC isn’t a threat for years, and if it is, then the whole financial system is in trouble anyway. That line of nihilistic thinking may be comforting to some, but it misses the point. Big banks aren’t sitting idle. They’re already investing in quantum research, building internal teams, partnering with QC developers, and thinking about how to harden their systems over time. They’re not “quantum-safe” today — but they’re not starting from scratch either. Bitcoin is different. It can upgrade, technically. But doing so requires slow, messy coordination across a decentralised network. There’s no risk committee, no mandate, no one who can just say “we’re switching now.” So this isn’t about panic or pretending I know the precise timelines. Maybe QC is five years away. Maybe it’s fifteen. The problem is that quantum risk is low-probability but massive-impact — and those are exactly the risks decentralised systems struggle to deal with early. Add AI into the mix, and it’s at least plausible that timelines compress rather than extend. What’s interesting is the growing gap between developer confidence and institutional behaviour. Even if developers think there’s a zero percent chance of a quantum threat in the next five years, some institutions are clearly pricing it higher. The recent decision by CLSA strategist Chris Wood to remove BTC from his widely followed portfolio due to QC risk may look like “paper hands,” but it matters. It signals that quantum risk is entering institutional risk frameworks — even if views differ widely. And those views do differ. There’s plenty of counter-evidence. Harvard’s reported decision to increase its exposure by roughly 280% shows institutional support for Bitcoin isn’t disappearing. What’s changing isn’t demand, but dispersion — my guess is that institutional alignment on how to price tail risks diverges further as the QC threat rises. It’s also plausible that Harvard’s decision had nothing to do with quantum risk at all. Falling volatility alone, consistent with their asset-allocation framework, would justify a higher weighting. There’s nuance and a lot of in-depth technical understanding, which I’m still working through. But asking these questions is reasonable. @caprioleio has been pushing on this for a while, and he’s right to challenge the shrug-it-off attitude. What is unreasonable is pretending that JPMorgan and Bitcoin face the same problem. One can prepare in advance and mandate change. The other has to convince everyone, in advance, that a future threat is worth acting on. Which brings me to the incentive problem. As Bitcoin’s price rises, confidence rises — and the willingness to push through disruptive, precautionary upgrades falls. The system feels safest exactly when it is least incentivised to prepare. Quantum risk doesn’t move with price, but the gap does.