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Elon Musk’s xAI Sues OpenAI Again, This Time Over Alleged Trade Secret Theft

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In brief

  • Elon Musk’s xAI has sued OpenAI, alleging it induced former employees to steal source code and data center deployment strategies.
  • The AI company alleges OpenAI targeted employees with knowledge of its “secret sauce” data center operations, with one executive refusing to sign confidentiality documents after leaving for OpenAI.
  • One engineer allegedly admitted in a “handwritten confession” to misappropriating code after encrypted communications with an OpenAI recruiter.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday against OpenAI, accusing its rival of orchestrating a “coordinated, unfair, and unlawful campaign” to steal proprietary technology through targeted employee poaching.

The complaint, filed in California, alleges OpenAI “by hook or by crook” induced former xAI employees to misappropriate the company’s entire source code, training methods, and data center deployment strategies.

Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI alongside Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Illya Sutskever, and others in 2015, stepped down from the board in 2018, citing conflicts of interest with his company, Tesla, and its self-driving cars. Since then, the tech billionaire has assumed a combative stance against OpenAI, including filing a separate lawsuit last month.



OpenAI recruiter Tifa Chen simultaneously targeted multiple xAI employees, offering multi-million dollar packages to engineers who then stole source code and uploaded it to personal devices within hours of their communications, the lawsuit alleges.

Xuechen Li, an early xAI engineer, allegedly “uploaded the entire xAI source code base to a personal cloud account” in July 2025, and later “admitted in a handwritten confession” that he misappropriated xAI’s code and presentation materials on training techniques.

The lawsuit details timestamps showing Li’s code theft occurred within hours of encrypted Signal messages with Chen, who allegedly responded “no way!” after Li copied the files, before OpenAI extended its multi-million dollar offer.

Jimmy Fraiture, another early xAI engineer, allegedly “used the AirDrop feature to transfer” confidential source code “at least five times” after signing with OpenAI, stealing “the majority of xAI’s code” he oversaw, plus experimental folders from four co-founders.

An unnamed senior finance executive who left for OpenAI allegedly called these operations xAI’s “secret sauce,” saying, “The data center team. Their speed and precision blew me away. I would NEVER want to compete against them.”

The executive then took a lesser role at OpenAI, focused on data center spending strategy even though he had no prior AI experience, and when confronted about confidentiality obligations, allegedly “responded with crude sexual expletives” and refused to sign termination documents.

Navodaya Singh Rajpurohit, legal partner at Coinque Consulting, told Decrypt  the case “leans heavily on employee poaching,” noting that whether it crosses from aggressive recruiting to unlawful misappropriation “will depend on evidence not included in the filing,” and that “hiring alone is rarely enough to prove trade-secret misuse.”

Ishita Sharma, managing partner at Fathom Legal, told Decrypt that xAI must define its “secret sauce” broadly, grouping GPU racking, vendor contracts, pricing curves, and orchestration playbooks, which, she noted, can be described “by the results they deliver — like faster deployment or cheaper scaling,  without putting the exact technical diagrams or formulas on the record.”

Sharma said “the recruiter angle is trickier,” since liability depends on whether recruiters acted as agents of OpenAI with the company’s knowledge. 

For OpenAI’s defense, she explained, the strongest approach would be to show independent creation through “time-stamped records: internal Git commits, R&D notes, supplier invoices, and emails,” with earlier documentation providing the most credibility.

xAI seeks damages, restitution, and injunctions requiring OpenAI to purge xAI material from its systems and even destroy models built with it.

The lawsuit adds to Musk’s ongoing legal battle with OpenAI, as last month, his companies filed an antitrust suit against Apple and OpenAI, claiming their exclusive iPhone integration creates unfair market dominance.

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Feds Charge Brothers in Alleged $8 Million Crypto Kidnapping of Minnesota Family

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In brief

  • Two brothers have been charged with kidnapping after allegedly holding a family hostage in a plot to steal $8 million in crypto.
  • The brothers allegedly forced their way into the family’s home at gun point.
  • The local school district canceled a homecoming football game as police searched for the brothers.

U.S. federal prosecutors in Minnesota charged two Texas brothers with violently kidnapping a Minnesota family and stealing $8 million in crypto, according to a filing on Thursday by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The U.S. Attorney Office, Minnesota district accused Raymond Christian Garcia, 23, and Isiah Angelo Garcia, 24 of using an AR-15-style rifle and a shotgun to force their way into the family’s Grant, Minnesota home, where they bound a man, his wife and their son, and held them hostage until he transferred the amount to their digital wallets. The DOJ did not reveal which digital coins specifically were stolen. 

The ordeal led to the cancellation of a homecoming football game. Grant is in the Eastern part of the state about 45 minutes from Minneapolis. 

“A violent kidnapping that stole $8 million and silenced a homecoming game is not just a crime.  It is a blow to the sense of safety of everyone in Minnesota,” Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson said. 

He added: “This is not normal. Minnesotans should not accept wild violence and thievery as normal.  Every Minnesotan deserves to live in peace and a life unaffected by rampant crime.”

Mahtomedi High School canceled its September 22 game against Bloomington Kennedy for the “safety of its community,” as police searched for the alleged kidnappers.

Investigators allege that the Garcia brothers restrained the family for nine hours starting on September 19. At one point, Isiah Garcia forced the father at gunpoint to drive three hours away to a family cabin to access a portion of the crypto holdings, while Angelo remained with the wife and son.

According to the DOJ report, the son managed to call 911 when Angelo left the home. Police arrived to witness the son and mother still zip-tied and Angelo fleeing the home. They later found a suitcase that held a disassembled rifle, ammunition, clothing and beverages.

Investigators tracked a rented Chevrolet white Malibu to the brothers’ home in Waller, Texas, where they were arrested. Isiah Garcia has confessed to the kidnapping, according to the DOJ report. 

The DOJ charged them with kidnapping. The defendants made their initial appearances in federal court on Thursday.

The brothers also face three counts of kidnapping with a firearm, one count of first-degree aggravated robbery, and three counts of first-degree burglary, according to a complaint in Washington County, Minnesota. 

Crypto-fueled kidnappings—dubbed “wrench attacks”—are on the rise worldwide. In France, a total of 25 suspects were arrested this year after a series of crypto-driven attacks and kidnapping attempts, including the failed abduction of the pregnant daughter of Pierre Noizat, co-founder and CEO of French crypto exchange Paymium.

And Ledger co-founder David Balland and his wife were kidnapped in France and held for ransom back in January, with Balland’s finger reportedly cut off and sent to associates. Police liberated the couple after about 24 hours of captivity.

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Alleged Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra fight video shows Black Panther having an Angry Cat moment in a bar
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Alleged Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra fight video shows Black Panther having an Angry Cat moment in a bar

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Development footage of what appears to be upcoming superhero action game Marvel 1943: Rise Of Hydra has exploded upon the internet like Black Panther clawing his way into a seedy Parisian bar and flinging himself at alt-fascist soldiers in a whirlwind of kicked chairs and bursting bottles. This also being the content of said video.


Assuming the leaked goods are the Real McCoy, they suggest that the game will be a fast and furious brawler with a fair amount of environment destruction, which is probably what you’re expecting from a game with Azzuri and Steve Rogers on the poster.


The footage comes to us via MP1st, who attribute it to “a developer who worked on the game”, and say it was created between 2022 and 2023, but do not link to the portfolio that originally contained it.


They’ve also found a selection of images that show various possible Marvel 1943 environments, including a plush lamp-lit hallway, a vast cavern entrance with dangling stalactites, a bunch of building-top areas with glass conservatory roofs, and a hazy nocturnal view of searchlights over what is presumably Paris.


Assuming it’s the Genuine MacGyver, the leaked Black Panther video is very clearly WIP. The fixed camera perspective suggests that it’s an internal test, knocked together to illustrate the flow of a typical Marvel 1943 fight scene. As such, we should be careful about reading too much into it. But I have to say, I do enjoy the 5am cat energy here.


If you live with a younger feline, you’ll be familiar with that time of day when they Catch The Crazy and start zipping about, striking amateur ninjitsu poses and climbing every nearby human bodypart/piece of furniture. I’d love it if Black Panther had a Zoomies mode that caused him to spontaneously sit on Captain America’s face. I’d love it if he had a special terrain execution that consisted of hiding under the sofa and slashing people’s feet off. “D’awww,” the abbreviated sturmtruppen of Hydra would coo, clutching their bloody stumps. “What on Earth is going through his ickle head.”


Developed by Skydance New Media and published by Plaion, with former Naughty Dog scribe Amy Hennig on-board to produce and co-write, Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra is the story of Captain America and the Panther fighting Hydra in occupied France, though part of it is set in Wakanda. It’s inspired by the comicbook series Captain America/Black Panther: Flags of Our Fathers.

Announced in 2024, the game is slated to land in early 2026. Which is not that far away, and Plaion have shown us little of the game beyond a couple of ‘cinematic’ trailers. I’ll ask them if they have any comment on this footage, and when we can see more of the game.



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CEOs of online platforms appear in a Congressional tweet.
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Alleged Shooter’s Discord Chats Cut Against Rush To Blame Online Games And Memes

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The race to define what the brutal murder of right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk last week means and why it happened has led a lot of people to say a lot of things. Some of those things, like blaming the sci-fi shooter Halo for fomenting class warfare, or suggesting the alleged shooter was radicalized by the “meme-ification” of the internet, look increasingly like absurd, knee-jerk, and ill-informed reactions, as a recent report about the actual contents of one of the gaming Discord servers the suspect was active on suggests none of that.

On Monday, The Washington Post reported that alleged gunman Tyler Robinson had admitted to the crime in a Discord message to friends last week. Yesterday, independent reporter Ken Klippenstein shared actual screenshots of messages allegedly posted on the server, alongside an interview with some of its other members. According to his report, the Discord hangout was far from the hotbed of political radicalization some politicians and pundits have claimed it would be.

According to Klippenstein, there were only a couple of mentions of either President Donald Trump or former President Joe Biden in the chat logs, and those were apolitical mentions of recent news events. “Cat memes, weather updates, home improvement and the odd Garfield reference populate Robinson’s posts,” Klippenstein writes.

“Obviously he’s okay with gay and trans people having a right to exist, but also believes in the Second Amendment,” an apparent childhood friend of Robinson’s told Klippenstein. “To all of us he just seemed like a simple guy who liked playing games like Sea of Thieves, Deep Rock Galactic, and Helldivers 2, loved to fish and loved to camp…it really did seem like that’s all he was about.”

🚨 BREAKING NEWS: CEOs of Discord, Steam, Twitch, and Reddit have been called to testify in front of Congress.

They will answer to the American people how their platforms have been used by RADICALS to advance POLITICAL VIOLENCE, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk. pic.twitter.com/bNbgqSLeNq

— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) September 17, 2025

This lack of an easily applicable, ready-made narrative about Kirk’s alleged murderer that would paint him has a politically aggrieved radical comes as those leading the national conversation, like FBI Director Kash Patel, rush to ascribe motives. “[Gaming] can desensitize to the point where that person involved in these games looks at other people…and they’re not even human beings, they’re simply avatars,” former FBI profiler Dr. Mary Ellen O’Toole told Fox News this week.

According to charging documents filed by Utah County prosecutors on Tuesday, Robinson told his roommate in text messages that he allegedly killed Kirk because “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” The prosecution’s evidence suggests Robinson may have targeted Kirk specifically over transphobic comments he made in the past. But it also didn’t allude to any political radicalization fomented by online platforms like Discord and Reddit. That hasn’t stopped at least one high-profile politician from calling on the executives of those companies to testify before Congress about “the radicalization of online forum users.”

“The politically motivated assassination of Charlie Kirk claimed the life of a husband, father, and American patriot. In the wake of this tragedy, and amid other acts of politically motivated violence, Congress has a duty to oversee the online platforms that radicals have used to advance political violence,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) announced on Wednesday. “To prevent future radicalization and violence, the CEOs of Discord, Steam, Twitch, and Reddit must appear before the Oversight Committee and explain what actions they will take to ensure their platforms are not exploited for nefarious purposes.”

The hearing is set to take place on October 8, 2025 and is the first time Discord in particular will have been called on to testify. Members of Tiktok, X, and Meta were grilled last year about online child safety concerns. A spokesperson for Discord has previously said there was “no evidence that the suspect planned this incident or promoted violence on Discord.”





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Ubisoft workers raised concerns over alleged deal with Saudi Arabia, says new report
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Ubisoft workers raised concerns over alleged deal with Saudi Arabia, says new report

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Ubisoft staff raised concerns with management over the company’s alleged dealings with Saudi Arabia.

According to a report by Game File’s Stephen Totilo, published on September 10, 2025, some Ubisoft staff internally questioned the company’s alleged dealings with Saudi Arabia earlier this year, following a report that Ubisoft leaders, including CEO Yves Guillemot, accompanied French president Emmanuel Macron to the country to meet with Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) and other Saudi leaders in 2024.

Game File reported that a representative from Ubisoft’s social and Economic Committee (CSE) directly questioned company management about whether “seeking a contract with a person accused of crimes against humanity for ordering the assassination (including his dismemberment and dissolution in acid) of a journalist, could contribute to the Ubi-bashing the company is currently suffering?”

“Yves Guillemot’s participation in the President of the Republic’s trip, as CEO of a renowned French company in the field of culture and technology, is a contribution by Ubisoft to the development of France’s ‘soft power’,” Ubisoft management allegedly responded, before saying: “We do not comment on rumours.”

Ubisoft management reportedly went on to clarify that it sees a difference between MBS, who the US government found to have directly approved the assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, and the Public Investment Fund (PIF), Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.

According to the report, Ubisoft management stated that it did not see the PIF’s money as MBS’s money and that “talking with partners who do not share our democratic values does not mean abandoning them.”

In response, the CSE reportedly called management’s attitude “naive” and noted they didn’t respond to the question regarding the impact that dealings with Saudi Arabia could have on the company’s image.

In January 2025, a month after Guillemot’s trip to Saudi Arabia, French publication Les Echos reported that, according to its sources, Ubisoft had entered into a partnership with Savvy Games Group, owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.

This deal allegedly involved the creation of DLC for Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which Ubisoft developers said in a 2024 AMA (via Rock Paper Shotgun) had been “designed as a standalone experience without any DLC plans.”

While Ubisoft hasn’t confirmed a deal with the Savvy Games Group or Saudi Arabia generally, the company announced on August 23, 2025, that Assassin’s Creed Mirage will receive free DLC later this year, which will be set in ninth-century AlUla (a city in Saudi Arabia).

The DLC was first announced by Guillemot on stage in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, during the New Global Sport Conference.

When asked whether Mirage’s new DLC is funded by the PIF, a Ubisoft spokesperson told Game File:

“This title update to Assassin’s Creed Mirage was made possible thanks to the support of local and international organizations, through access to experts, historians, and resources to ensure the creation of an authentic and accurate setting.”

Update: GamesIndustry.biz reached out to Ubisoft for comment on this story. A spokesperson provided the same response given to Game File. The statement reads:

“For now, we’re not sharing more details beyond that fact that this title update to Assassin’s Creed Mirage was made possible thanks to the support of local and international organizations, through access to experts, historians and resources to ensure the creation of an authentic and accurate setting.”



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French Lara Croft actor starts lawsuit over alleged AI-generated voice lines in Aspyr's Tomb Raider remasters
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French Lara Croft actor starts lawsuit over alleged AI-generated voice lines in Aspyr’s Tomb Raider remasters

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Françoise Cadol, the long-time French voice actor for Lara Croft, has reportedly launched legal action against Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered publishers Aspyr over alleged use of generative AI to replicate her voice for lines in the game. Cadol claims Aspyr didn’t contact her to ask for permission, and it appears the voice of Croft in at least one other dub of the remasters may have been put in a similar position.

According to a report from French publication Le Parisien, spotted by TheGamer, Cadol has issued a cease and desist to Aspyr over the matter.

We’ve reached out to Aspyr for comment.

It looks like the alleged AI-generated lines may have been added to the game by Patch 2 in mid-August. The notes for that patch include one that reads: “Restored missing or incorrect voiceover lines in various languages (especially Brazilian Portuguese)”.

Cadol told Le Parisien she’d been alerted to the possible use of genAI to mimic her lines in the remaster by Tomb Raider fans, who’ve circulated what they believe to be examples of it happening on social media. Some of the lines supposedly using genAI in the remaster look to be tutorial instructions telling you how to do things like climb, with the comparison below featuring some different wording in the Remastered versions of some lines. The apparent genAI lines have a more robotic edge to them, in contrast to the natural inflections Cadol speaks with in the original.

🇫🇷 ALERTE INFO — Le patch des remasters de Tomb Raider IV, V et VI par @AspyrMedia vient de sortir…

Mauvaise surprise pour les fans français de Lara Croft, certaines répliques de Françoise Cadol dans le tutoriel ont été refaites avec l’IA et ça s’entend ! pic.twitter.com/YRbZsY669H

— Bastien D. Fry  (@BastienDruker) August 15, 2025

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The French version isn’t the only dub of the game to have allegedly done this. Lene Bastos, Croft’s Brazilian Portuguese actor, has posted a video to Instagram stating that Tomb Raider fans have informed her that some of voice lines appear to have been subject to AI generation in the remasters. Bastos claims to have recieved a message from Aspyr about it, with the publishers putting the blame at the feet of an external development partner and telling her the lines will soon be removed in the game’s next patch.

Voice actors fighting for protections against the possibility of companies using generative AI to mimic their voices was a key element of the SAG-AFTRA strike that concluded a few months ago. “Basically you have to get our consent to make a digital replica of us,” Horizon and Borderlands voice actor Ashly Burch told the BBC when the strike was suspended. “You have to tell us how you’re going to use it, and then you have to compensate us fairly.”





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Hong Kong Police Arrest Two Over Alleged Crypto Mining in Care Homes

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In brief

  • Two technicians were arrested for allegedly setting up eight illicit crypto mining rigs.
  • Running the hidden mining rigs inflated monthly electricity bills for care homes.
  • Illegal crypto mining has become a growing problem globally.

Hong Kong police have detained two men on suspicion of diverting electricity from care homes for the disabled to power cryptocurrency mining machines.

Police allege the pair, aged 32 and 33, used their access during renovation work to install eight devices in the suspended ceilings of two offices. The machines ran around the clock, adding as much as $1,153 (HK$9,000) to monthly power bills.

Inspector Ng Tsz-wing from Sham Shui Po’s technology and financial crime squad said the case came to light after one home noticed repeated slowdowns in its internet service. Its IT staff uncovered unauthorised equipment concealed above the office ceiling, and similar devices were later discovered in another home in Sau Mau Ping.

Police arrested the suspects last Friday in Mong Kok and Sham Shui Po on charges of “abstracting electricity.” Investigators believe the men acted alone rather than as part of a larger syndicate.



Ng urged organisations to keep close watch over contractors during renovations and to monitor electricity bills for sudden increases. He warned that concealed equipment can remain hidden for months. Under Hong Kong’s Theft Ordinance, illegally using electricity carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

“The public should also pay more attention to electricity bills or network usage and make relevant checks and notify police in case they find some suspicious circumstances,” Ng said, according to the South China Morning Post.

Illegal crypto mining is “power theft and a safety risk,” Shanon Squires, Chief Mining Officer at Compass Mining, told Decrypt. He added that, “This activity goes against core tenets for many Bitcoiners, such as private property rights and not harming others. Engaging in electricity theft is directly taking someone’s property without permission and causing them harm by sticking them with the bill.”

Squires pointed out that the mining rigs shown by Hong Kong police “do not appear to be Bitcoin miners,” noting that, “At smaller scales, it’s possible that illegal mining is more common than generally perceived, especially for altcoin mining rather than Bitcoin, unless it’s a larger-scale operation.”

Crypto mining and energy consumption

Cryptocurrency mining, the process of using specialized computers to solve complex mathematical problems in exchange for coins, is notoriously energy-hungry.

Research by Digiconomist estimates that Bitcoin mining alone generates an annual carbon footprint of more than 105 million tonnes of CO2, comparable to Belgium’s total emissions. Its electricity use is similar to Thailand’s, and its freshwater demand mirrors Switzerland’s.

The Hong Kong case is far from isolated. In Thailand earlier this year, police raided three abandoned houses in Pathum Thani province and seized 63 mining machines that were illegally connected to utility poles.

In the UK, officers in West Yorkshire uncovered an operation in Bradford where miners were running off an illicit electricity supply.

And in Central Asia, officials have also reported widespread abuse of energy grids. Tajikistan’s attorney general said illegal mining drained more than US$3.5 million worth of electricity in the first half of 2025 alone, while in neighbouring Kazakhstan, authorities discovered miners tapping into enough power to supply a city of 70,000.

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Apple faces lawsuit over alleged use of pirated books for AI training

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Two authors have filed a lawsuit against Apple, accusing the company of infringing on their copyright by using their books to train its artificial intelligence model without their consent. The plaintiffs, Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, claimed that Apple used a dataset of pirated copyrighted books that include their works for AI training. They said in their complaint that Applebot, the company’s scraper, can “reach ‘shadow libraries'” made up of unlicensed copyrighted books, including (on information) their own. The lawsuit is currently seeking class action status, due to the sheer number of books and authors found in shadow libraries.

The main plaintiffs for the lawsuit are Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, both of whom have multiple books under their names. They said that Apple, one of the biggest companies in the world, did not attempt to pay them for “their contributions to [the] potentially lucrative venture.” Apple has “copied the copyrighted works” of the plaintiffs “to train AI models whose outputs compete with and dilute the market for those very works — works without which Apple Intelligence would have far less commercial value,” they wrote in their filing. “This conduct has deprived Plaintiffs and the Class of control over their work, undermined the economic value of their labor, and positioned Apple to achieve massive commercial success through unlawful means.”

This is but one of the many lawsuits filed against companies developing generative AI technologies. OpenAI is facing a few, including lawsuits from The New York Times and the oldest nonprofit newsroom in the US. Notably, Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, recently agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action piracy complaint also brought by authors. Similar to this case, the writers also accused the company of taking pirated books from online libraries to train its AI technology. The 500,000 authors involved in the case will reportedly get $3,000 per work.



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Shein Accidentally Casts Alleged CEO Assassin Luigi Mangione as Its AI Model
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Shein Accidentally Casts Alleged CEO Assassin Luigi Mangione as Its AI Model

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In brief

  • An AI-generated clothing model on Shein’s site bore an uncanny resemblance to alleged murderer Luigi Mangione, confirmed by facial recognition tools.
  • The shirt sold out before Shein pulled the listing, blaming a third-party vendor for the fiasco.
  • The incident adds to a growing list of AI-generated ad disasters, from deepfake influencers to celebrity likeness lawsuits.

The marketing team at Shein probably thought they’d found the perfect model: chiseled jawline, brooding eyes, the kind of face that could sell low-quality shirts to anyone scrolling at 2 a.m. There was just one problem—their AI-generated hunk was Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged with killing UnitedHealthcare’s CEO last December.

The shirt, a basic cotton one, appeared on Shein’s website with what AI researcher Henk van Ess identified as a likely Midjourney creation. Facial recognition tools confirmed the match. Within hours of going viral, the listing vanished faster than Shein’s return policy fine print.

“We are aware of the product and have removed it from our site,” a Shein spokesperson told TMZ. The company blamed an third-party vendor, shirking blame without identifying the supplier in question. The shirt reportedly sold out before anyone at Shein noticed their new model’s resemblance to the most wanted man in America last week.

But of course, you can access the advertisement if you visit the Wayback Machine.



Shein promised “appropriate action” against the vendor, which probably means finding a supplier who can generate fake models that don’t accidentally replicate people on FBI watchlists.

The incident sparked the usual X pile-on, with users torn between horror and grudging admiration for whatever algorithm thought “alleged CEO killer” was the right aesthetic for budget casualwear.

the fact that your face can be used, without consent, to promote products that you’ve never even touched thanks to genAI…

add in the fact that they’re using the image of an incarcerated individual who has already lost all autonomy.

— Bag chaser 🧌 (@deadbynextweek) September 3, 2025

First, he gets framed for murder, now this.

— 🥀_ Imposter_🥀 (@Imposter_Edits) September 3, 2025

Not the first, won’t be the last

Shein’s algorithmic face-plant joins a growing gallery of AI mishaps, including Scarlett Johansson, who practically made herself the fake face of the anti-deepfake movement.

The famed actress threatened to sue OpenAI over a suspiciously familiar voice assistant. She then sued Lisa AI for making an AI companion using her image. And later, her likeness was included without her consent in a fully AI-generated campaign featuring different Jewish artists wearing a t-shirt giving Kanye West the middle finger.

An AI-generated version of Scarlett Johansson featured in the viral video decrying Kanye West’s antisemitism. Image: Instagram

Just reecently, gaming company Nexon got caught using AI influencers in TikTok ads for The First Descendant.

“These AI ads make me sad and worried for the future of the game,” one Redditor wrote. “The worst part of this all is that whoever is in control of the Official TFD TikTok accounts is aware of the backlash against the AI ads and has gone out of their way to ignore and hide it. They have been deleting and reuploading the AI videos whenever they get too much backlash in the comments.”

Regulators are scrambling to catch up, but so far, regulation is crawling while AI sprints.

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Kevin Spacey Reveals Film Created With Alleged Crypto Ponzi Schemer

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In brief

  • Kevin Spacey has returned to directing with “Holiguards Saga—The Portal of Force,” a sci-fi film written by Russian entrepreneur Vladimir “Lado” Okhotnikov.
  • Okhotnikov, co-founder of Ethereum DeFi app Forsage, faces U.S. fraud charges tied to an alleged $300 million crypto Ponzi scheme.
  • The film, which is inspired by Okhotnikov’s libertarian principles, is the first chapter in a planned trilogy.

Kevin Spacey unveiled his latest comeback project at the Venice Film Festival this weekend—an intricate sci-fi film starring, produced, and written by a Russian man accused by the U.S. government of running a crypto Ponzi scheme.  

The film, “Holigaurds Saga—The Portal of Force,” was directed by Spacey, from a script written by Vladimir “Lado” Okhotnikov, a co-founder of Ethereum decentralized finance app Forsage.

In 2022, the SEC sued Forsage’s founders, including Okhotnikov, for engaging in a scheme to defraud investors of over $300 million, among other charges. Variety first reported the connection.

The following year, the Department of Justice charged Okhotnikov and his partners for running a “global Ponzi and pyramid scheme”, which federal prosecutors touted, at the time, as the first criminal fraud case in U.S. history “involving a DeFi Ponzi scheme.”



The DOJ has alleged that while Forsage promoted itself as a complex and lucrative decentralized matrix project, the project instead hinged on smart contracts on Ethereum, Tron, and BNB Chain that would automatically divert funds from new Forsage investors to earlier Forsage investors. 

The DOJ said over 80% of investors lost money investing in the project. Okhotnikov has repeatedly denied claims that Forsage intentionally defrauded its customers. 

In a YouTube video posted shortly after the SEC announced its charges against him, Okhotnikov said Forsage was not a scam because “real scams can never win people’s hearts.”

No court date has yet been set for Okhotnikov’s criminal case. The tech founder resides in Dubai, where he remains outside of U.S. jurisdiction.

This past weekend, the cast and crew of “The Portal of Force” gathered in Venice for an elaborate gala unveiling the film’s trailer. The evening featured a speech from Spacey, an opera singer, and a costumed troupe of two dozen Georgian dancers, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Here’s the trailer shown in Venice for Kevin Spacey’s Holiguards Saga – The Portal of Force starring him with Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts and Tyrese, all seen in this 2-minute clip. pic.twitter.com/5pXXkjMyWe

— Chris Gardner (@chrissgardner) August 31, 2025

“The Portal of Force” is intended to be the first of a trilogy of films depicting an epic conflict between two ancient supernatural species, the Holiguards and the Statiguards, which is upended when one side uses a cosmic portal to contact an ancient force known as the Prime. The film stars Spacey alongside Dolph Lundgren, Tyrese Gibson, and Eric Roberts.

The movie marks the first Spacey has directed since 2004. It is one of a number of projects the Oscar-winning actor, who withdrew from filmmaking after facing allegations of sexual misconduct in 2017, has embarked on since being acquitted on sexual assault charges by a London jury in 2023.

In a recent interview with the Jerusalem Post, Okhotnikov said he wrote the film in part to reflect his libertarian worldview, and examine the eternal struggle between conformity and freedom. 

The entrepreneur is currently focused on a metaverse wellness startup, Holiverse, which promises to one day virtually simulate users’ bodies by integrating “various products, biohacking, genetics, creativity, and self-development,” and, by doing so, potentially extend human lifespans.

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