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Tarleton State coach Billy Gillispie on leave amid inquiry
Esports

Tarleton State coach Billy Gillispie on leave amid inquiry

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Tarleton State coach Billy Gillispie has been placed on temporary administrative leave as the university investigates an anonymous complaint, the school announced Friday.

No details of the nature of the complaint were immediately available, and there is no timeline on how long the investigation may take. Associate head coach Glynn Cyprien has taken over as acting head coach.

The school said it would not comment further.

Gillispie faced allegations of player mistreatment while he was the coach at Texas Tech in 2011 and 2012. He resigned as the Red Raiders coach — citing health concerns — in September 2012. The resignation came about a month after the school said it was investigating the claims, which stemmed from Texas Tech players expressing concerns about the way they were being treated by Gillispie.

Questions about Gillispie’s coaching style also were made during his time at Kentucky, including the treatment of players and staff in the athletic department. He was fired in 2009, with Kentucky athletic director saying Gillispie “wasn’t the right fit for the program.” A $3 million settlement over his firing was reached later that year.

Gillispie, 65, is in his sixth season at Tarleton State, the longest of his five Division I head coaching stints, which also include time at UTEP and Texas A&M.

He is 78-74 at Tarleton State, including a 25-10 record in 2023-24 and a CIT appearance. He has gone 226-182 in 13 seasons as a head coach with four NCAA tournament appearances.

Cyprien is a longtime college assistant with stops that include UNLV, Oklahoma State, Arkansas, Kentucky, Memphis and Texas Tech.



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Lost Texts Spur Oversight Inquiry Into Former SEC Chair Gary Gensler

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In brief

  • House Republicans have informed current SEC Chair Paul Atkins that they’re investigating the loss of nearly a year of text messages from former Chair Gary Gensler’s smartphone.
  • Last month, the Office of the Inspector General report found IT staff failures and poor policies led to the permanent deletion of messages from October 2022 through September 2023.
  • Coinbase CLO Paul Grewal tweeted that a district court has ordered all parties to appear on October 8 to address the deletion of the texts.

Nearly a year of text messages from former Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler were permanently deleted due to agency errors, prompting House Republicans to launch an oversight investigation into regulatory lapses.

Four Republican committee chairs, including House Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill, informed current SEC Chair Paul Atkins that Congress is investigating the loss of Gensler’s communications from October 2022 through September 2023, spanning the agency’s most aggressive enforcement push against crypto firms, in a letter sent Tuesday.

“It appears that former Chair Gensler held companies to a standard that his own agency did not meet,” the letter says, noting the SEC collected over $400 million in fiscal year 2023 alone from firms for recordkeeping violations.

Gensler’s smartphone stopped syncing with the agency’s device management system on July 6, 2023, though it “otherwise functioned normally and was used regularly, according to the Office of the Inspector General report released last month.

Despite repeated warnings flagging the device as inactive every two weeks, IT staff took no action for 62 days, the lawmakers’ letter pointed out.

The House letter notes that while former Chair Gensler’s staff claimed he “usually texted for administrative reasons,” the IG review found “multiple instances of substantive, mission-related communications between Gensler, his staff, his fellow Commissioners, and other senior officials.

“The district court just ordered everyone to appear on October 8 to address the destruction of documents by the Gensler @SECGov as detailed by its own inspector general,” Coinbase CLO Paul Grewal tweeted on Tuesday. “We appreciate the Court’s attention to this matter.”

The district court just ordered everyone to appear on October 8 to address the destruction of documents by the Gensler @SECGov as detailed by its own inspector general. We appreciate the Court’s attention to this matter. pic.twitter.com/g5J1i8VLjq

— paulgrewal.eth (@iampaulgrewal) September 30, 2025

Gensler’s crypto crackdown

The missing communications span a period when Gensler launched an industry-wide regulatory assault following FTX’s November 2022 collapse.

Under his leadership, the SEC insisted the crypto industry’s business model was “built on non-compliance,” with Gensler declaring in a June 2023 CNBC interview, “we don’t need more digital currency” beyond the U.S. dollar.

He compared the crypto sector to “the 1920s before federal securities laws were put in place,” calling participants “hucksters, fraudsters, scam artists” running “Ponzi schemes.”

The agency authorized over 100 enforcement actions against crypto firms during this period, targeting major exchanges including Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance.

Last month, through a third-party research firm, History Associates, Coinbase requested sanctions against the SEC, calling the agency’s “destroy-and-delay approach to records” cause for “irreparable harm.”

In 2013, while Gensler served as Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, that agency’s Inspector General criticized him for conducting official business through his personal email account, the letter pointed out.

Republicans are now coordinating with the Inspector General to examine whether other senior officials’ communications were similarly lost and whether the agency’s internal controls adequately protect federal records.

The SEC has undergone a transformation under the Donald Trump administration, with the President appointing Paul Atkins, a crypto advocate and former SEC commissioner, to replace Gensler.

Atkins was confirmed in April and has launched “Project Crypto,” a sweeping initiative to relax regulations on digital assets.

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Republicans Launch Inquiry Into Gary Gensler’s Lost Sec Texts
GameFi Guides

Republicans Launch Inquiry into Gary Gensler’s Lost SEC Texts

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House Republicans have formally notified US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Paul Atkins that they are investigating the loss of text messages from former SEC Chair Gary Gensler during his tenure, amid concerns over the handling of official records.

In the official letter sent by the Republicans on September 30, 2025, they said that they are working with the SEC’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) to learn more about the deleted text messages of former SEC Chair Gary Gensler.

Earlier on September 3, the SEC’s  OIG had released a report titled “Special Review: Avoidable Errors Led to the Loss of Former SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s Text Message”. According to the report, on July 6, 2023, former Chair Gensler’s “smartphone stopped communicating with the SEC’s mobile device management system.” 

Even though the phone “worked normally and was used often, the SEC’s mobile device management system thought the phone was “inactive” for 62 days. The problem was brought up many times, but OIT staff did nothing to look into or fix it.

OIT instituted a “new policy of remotely wiping any SEC mobile device that did not

communicate with the mobile device management system for at least 45 days.”

Gensler’s phone was eventually wiped on September 6, 2023, well past the policy’s 45-day threshold.

Since there had been no backup since October 18, 2022, the factory reset erased all data, including text messages. The OIG attempted to recover the messages using forensic methods but was unable to retrieve everything. To partially restore the records, SEC staff compiled a list of 34 internal contacts they believed Gensler had communicated with.

However, this list did not include other commissioners, and Gensler staff were not involved in making it. Many think that the deleted messages contained important conversations between Gensler, commissioners, senior officials, and staff that went beyond just coordinating administrative tasks.

Crypto giants vocalize criticism 

This incident has raised fresh concerns about the way agencies deal with sensitive information, especially records of high-ranking officials. Critics have also alleged that the SEC has a double standard because it has punished outside groups for breaking recordkeeping rules, but hasn’t done anything to protect its own leaders’ digital communications.

Earlier, on September 11, Coinbase had also asked a federal court in Washington to punish the regulator. The exchange said this after the OIG released its report on September 3. 

Further, Tyler Winklevoss, Co-Founder of Gemini, criticized Gary Gensler following his September 18 interview on CNBC. In the interview, Gensler highlighted that the SEC handled nearly 100 fraud cases during his tenure and emphasized his strict approach to cryptocurrency, aimed at protecting investors. Winklevoss argued that Gensler’s methods have made it more difficult for the crypto industry to grow and innovate.

Also Read: SEC Meets NYSE and ICE to Discuss Rules and Tokenized Stocks



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AI Giants Face FTC Inquiry Into Chatbot Safety and Child Protections

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In brief

  • The FTC has issued orders to seven companies requiring detailed disclosure of safety protocols and monetization strategies within 45 days.
  • The probe comes amid growing concerns about AI chatbots’ impact on children, with safety advocates calling for stronger protections.
  • Companies must reveal user data handling by age group and safeguards preventing inappropriate interactions with minors.

The Federal Trade Commission issued compulsory orders Thursday to seven major technology companies, demanding detailed information about how their artificial intelligence chatbots protect children and teenagers from potential harm.

The investigation targets OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, xAI, Snap, Character Technologies, and Instagram, requiring them to disclose within 45 days how they monetize user engagement, develop AI characters, and safeguard minors from dangerous content.

Recent research by advocacy groups documented 669 harmful interactions with children in just 50 hours of testing, including bots proposing sexual livestreaming, drug use, and romantic relationships to users aged between 12 and 15.

“Protecting kids online is a top priority for the Trump-Vance FTC, and so is fostering innovation in critical sectors of our economy,” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a statement.

The filing requires companies to provide monthly data on user engagement, revenue, and safety incidents, broken down by age groups—Children (under 13), Teens (13–17), Minors (under 18), Young Adults (18–24), and users 25 and older.

The FTC says that the information will help the Commission study “how companies offering artificial intelligence companions monetize user engagement; impose and enforce age-based restrictions; process user inputs; generate outputs; measure, test, and monitor for negative impacts before and after deployment; develop and approve characters, whether company- or user-created.”

Building AI guardrails

“It’s a positive step, but the problem is bigger than just putting some guardrails,” Taranjeet Singh, Head of AI at SearchUnify, told Decrypt.

The first approach, he said, is to build guardrails at the prompt or post-generation stage “to make sure nothing inappropriate is being served to children,” though “as the context grows, the AI becomes prone to not following instructions and slipping into grey areas where they otherwise shouldn’t.”

“The second way is to address it in LLM training; if models are aligned with values during data curation, they’re more likely to avoid harmful conversations,” Singh added.

Even moderated systems, he noted, can “play a bigger role in society,” with education as a prime case where AI could “improve learning and cut costs.”



Safety concerns around AI interactions with users have been highlighted by several cases, including a wrongful death lawsuit brought against Character.AI after 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III died by suicide in February 2024 following an obsessive relationship with an AI bot.

Following the lawsuit, Character.AI “improved detection, response and intervention related to user inputs that violate our Terms or Community Guidelines,” as well as a time-spent notification, a company spokesperson told Decrypt at the time.

Last month, the National Association of Attorneys General sent letters to 13 AI companies demanding stronger child protections.

The group warned that “exposing children to sexualized content is indefensible” and that “conduct that would be unlawful—or even criminal—if done by humans is not excusable simply because it is done by a machine.”

Decrypt has contacted all seven companies named in the FTC order for additional comment and will update this story if they respond.

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