Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Mortal Kombat, DC, restructuration, jeux vidéo, innovations, studios de développement, avenir du jeu vidéo, franchises de divertissement ## Introduction La magie des jeux vidéo s'apprête à entrer dans une étape fascinante ! Warner Bros. Games, connu pour ses franchises emblématiques, a récemment restructuré son équipe afin de se concentrer davantage sur ses...

Few roles evolve as quickly as that of the modern CIO. A great way to prepare for a future that is largely unknown is to build your adaptability skills through diverse work experiences, says Bhavik Rao, CIO for the Americas at Vertiv. Learn from your wins and your losses and carry on. Stay free of comfort zones and run towards the chaos. Leaders are born of challenges and not from comfort.Bhavik shares what he’s facing now, how he’s navigating it, and the hard-won lessons that helped shape his approach to IT leadership.Here’s what he had to say:What has your career path looked like so far? I actually started my career as a techno-functional consultant working with the public sector. That early experience gave me a solid grounding in both the technical and process side of enterprise systems. From there, I moved into consulting, which really opened up my world. I had the opportunity to work across multiple industries, leading everything from mobile app development and eCommerce deployments to omnichannel initiatives, data platforms, ERP rollouts, and ultimately large-scale digital transformation and IT strategy programs. It was fast paced, challenging, and incredibly rewarding.  That diversity shaped the way I think today. I learned how to adapt quickly, connect dots across domains, and communicate with everyone from developers to CXOs. Eventually, that path led me to Vertiv, where I now serve as the CIO for the Americas, in addition to leading a couple of global towers, such as data/AI and engineering systems, for example. I’ve been fortunate to lead initiatives that drive operational efficiency, scale GenAI adoption, and turn technology into a true business enabler.   Related:What are the highlights along your career path? There have been several defining moments, both wins and challenges, that have shaped how I lead today. One of the most pivotal chapters has been my time at Vertiv. I joined when the company was still owned by private equity. It was an intense, roll-up-your-sleeves kind of environment. Then, in 2020, we went public -- a huge milestone. But just as we were ramping up our digital transformation, COVID hit, and with it came massive supply chain disruptions. In the middle of all that chaos, I was asked to take over a large-scale transformation program that was struggling. bhBhavik RaoIt wasn’t easy. There were legacy challenges, resistance to change, and real execution pressure. But we rallied, restructured the program, and launched it. That experience taught me a lot about leading under pressure, aligning teams around outcomes, and staying focused even when everything feels like it’s shifting. Related:Another major learning moment was earlier in my career when I lost a large national account I’d spent over seven years building. That was a tough one, but it taught me resilience. I learned not to attach my identity to any one outcome and to keep moving forward with purpose. Then, there are the moments of creation, like launching VeGA, our internal GenAI platform at Vertiv. Seeing it go from idea to impact, with thousands of users and 100+ applications, has been incredibly energizing. It reminded me how powerful it is when innovation meets execution. I’ve also learned the power of being a “player-coach.” I don’t believe in leading from a distance. I get involved, understand the challenges on the ground, and then help teams move forward together.  What’s your vision for the future of sovereign AI? For me, sovereign AI isn’t just a regulatory checkbox; it’s about strategic autonomy. At our company, we are trying to be very intentional about how we scale AI responsibly across our global footprint. So, when I think about sovereign AI, I define it as the ability to control how, where, and why AI is built and deployed with full alignment to your business needs, risk posture, and data boundaries. Related:I’ve seen firsthand how AI becomes a competitive advantage only when you have governance, infrastructure flexibility, and contextual intelligence built in. Our work with VeGA, for example, has shown that employees adopt AI much faster when it’s embedded into secure, business-aligned workflows and not just bolted on from the outside. For CIOs, the shift to sovereign AI means: Designing AI infrastructure that can flex whether it’s hosted internally, cloud-based, or hybrid Building internal AI fluency so your teams aren't fully reliant on black-box solutions Creating a framework for trust and explainability, especially as AI touches regulated and legal processes It’s not about doing everything in-house, but it is about knowing what’s mission-critical to control. In my view, sovereign AI is less about isolation and more about intentional ownership. What do you do for fun or to relax? Golf is my go-to. It keeps me grounded and humble! It’s one of those games that’s as much about mindset as it is about mechanics. I try to work out regularly when I am not traveling for work.  I also enjoy traveling with my family and listening to podcasts.   What advice would you give to young people considering a leadership path in IT? Be curious, stay hands-on, don’t rush the title, and focus on impact. Learn the business, not just the tech. Some of the best technologists I’ve worked with are the ones who understand how a supply chain works or how a sale actually closes. Also, don’t be afraid to take on messy, undefined problems. Run toward the chaos. That’s where leadership is born. And finally, surround yourself with people smarter than you. Build teams that challenge you. That’s where real growth happens. 

Scottish mobile developer Outplay Entertainment cuts 15% of staff to "align operations with current business realities" "This was not a decision we took lightly," CEO says Image credit: Outplay Entertainment News by Vikki Blake Contributor Published on June 5, 2025 Outplay Entertainment has cut more than 20 jobs to "align [its] operations with current business realities." The Dundee, Scotland-based studio, self-described as "the largest independent mobile game developer in the UK," states on its website that it employs 135 staff, although it's unclear if this figure includes the 21 roles that have been laid off. That's around 15% of its headcount. In a statement to MobileGamer, CEO Douglas Hare said: "Earlier this week, Outplay made the difficult decision to restructure parts of the business, which has affected as many as 21 team members across several departments. "This step was taken to align our operations with current business realities and to support a strategic shift toward partnering with publishers for future game releases. "This was not a decision we took lightly," Hare concluded. "We are incredibly grateful to the talented individuals affected, many of whom have made lasting contributions to our games and culture. We are doing everything we can to support them through this transition." Outplay develops a number of licensed mobile games, including Gordon Ramsay's Chef Blast, Angry Birds Pop!, and Subway Surfers Blast. Over 2200 developers have lost their jobs in 2025 so far, with cuts and closures at Freejam, Splash Damage, Piranha Games, Jar of Sparks, Ubisoft, ProbablyMonsters, Iron Galaxy, Sumo Group, Liquid Sword, NetEase Games, Toast Interactive, Night School Studio, Striking Distance, Ballistic Moon, Eidos Montréal, PlaySide, AppLovin, Nerial, Reality Labs, and, most recently, there have been multiple cuts at EA, including Respawn, as well as People Can Fly and Jagex.

Once again, Sam Altman wants to show you the future. The CEO of OpenAI is standing on a sparse stage in San Francisco, preparing to reveal his next move to an attentive crowd. “We needed some way for identifying, authenticating humans in the age of AGI,” Altman explains, referring to artificial general intelligence. “We wanted a way to make sure that humans stayed special and central.” The solution Altman came up with is looming behind him. It’s a white sphere about the size of a beach ball, with a camera at its center. The company that makes it, known as Tools for Humanity, calls this mysterious device the Orb. Stare into the heart of the plastic-and-silicon globe and it will map the unique furrows and ciliary zones of your iris. Seconds later, you’ll receive inviolable proof of your humanity: a 12,800-digit binary number, known as an iris code, sent to an app on your phone. At the same time, a packet of cryptocurrency called Worldcoin, worth approximately $42, will be transferred to your digital wallet—your reward for becoming a “verified human.” Altman co-founded Tools for Humanity in 2019 as part of a suite of companies he believed would reshape the world. Once the tech he was developing at OpenAI passed a certain level of intelligence, he reasoned, it would mark the end of one era on the Internet and the beginning of another, in which AI became so advanced, so human-like, that you would no longer be able to tell whether what you read, saw, or heard online came from a real person. When that happened, Altman imagined, we would need a new kind of online infrastructure: a human-verification layer for the Internet, to distinguish real people from the proliferating number of bots and AI “agents.”And so Tools for Humanity set out to build a global “proof-of-humanity” network. It aims to verify 50 million people by the end of 2025; ultimately its goal is to sign up every single human being on the planet. The free crypto serves as both an incentive for users to sign up, and also an entry point into what the company hopes will become the world’s largest financial network, through which it believes “double-digit percentages of the global economy” will eventually flow. Even for Altman, these missions are audacious. “If this really works, it’s like a fundamental piece of infrastructure for the world,” Altman tells TIME in a video interview from the passenger seat of a car a few days before his April 30 keynote address.Internal hardware of the Orb in mid-assembly in March. Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe project’s goal is to solve a problem partly of Altman’s own making. In the near future, he and other tech leaders say, advanced AIs will be imbued with agency: the ability to not just respond to human prompting, but to take actions independently in the world. This will enable the creation of AI coworkers that can drop into your company and begin solving problems; AI tutors that can adapt their teaching style to students’ preferences; even AI doctors that can diagnose routine cases and handle scheduling or logistics. The arrival of these virtual agents, their venture capitalist backers predict, will turbocharge our productivity and unleash an age of material abundance.But AI agents will also have cascading consequences for the human experience online. “As AI systems become harder to distinguish from people, websites may face difficult trade-offs,” says a recent paper by researchers from 25 different universities, nonprofits, and tech companies, including OpenAI. “There is a significant risk that digital institutions will be unprepared for a time when AI-powered agents, including those leveraged by malicious actors, overwhelm other activity online.” On social-media platforms like X and Facebook, bot-driven accounts are amassing billions of views on AI-generated content. In April, the foundation that runs Wikipedia disclosed that AI bots scraping their site were making the encyclopedia too costly to sustainably run. Later the same month, researchers from the University of Zurich found that AI-generated comments on the subreddit /r/ChangeMyView were up to six times more successful than human-written ones at persuading unknowing users to change their minds.  Photograph by Davide Monteleone for TIMEBuy a copy of the Orb issue hereThe arrival of agents won’t only threaten our ability to distinguish between authentic and AI content online. It will also challenge the Internet’s core business model, online advertising, which relies on the assumption that ads are being viewed by humans. “The Internet will change very drastically sometime in the next 12 to 24 months,” says Tools for Humanity CEO Alex Blania. “So we have to succeed, or I’m not sure what else would happen.”For four years, Blania’s team has been testing the Orb’s hardware abroad. Now the U.S. rollout has arrived. Over the next 12 months, 7,500 Orbs will be arriving in dozens of American cities, in locations like gas stations, bodegas, and flagship stores in Los Angeles, Austin, and Miami. The project’s founders and fans hope the Orb’s U.S. debut will kickstart a new phase of growth. The San Francisco keynote was titled: “At Last.” It’s not clear the public appetite matches the exultant branding. Tools for Humanity has “verified” just 12 million humans since mid 2023, a pace Blania concedes is well behind schedule. Few online platforms currently support the so-called “World ID” that the Orb bestows upon its visitors, leaving little to entice users to give up their biometrics beyond the lure of free crypto. Even Altman isn’t sure whether the whole thing can work. “I can see [how] this becomes a fairly mainstream thing in a few years,” he says. “Or I can see that it’s still only used by a small subset of people who think about the world in a certain way.” Blania (left) and Altman debut the Orb at World’s U.S. launch in San Francisco on April 30, 2025. Jason Henry—The New York Times/ReduxYet as the Internet becomes overrun with AI, the creators of this strange new piece of hardware are betting that everybody in the world will soon want—or need—to visit an Orb. The biometric code it creates, they predict, will become a new type of digital passport, without which you might be denied passage to the Internet of the future, from dating apps to government services. In a best-case scenario, World ID could be a privacy-preserving way to fortify the Internet against an AI-driven deluge of fake or deceptive content. It could also enable the distribution of universal basic income (UBI)—a policy that Altman has previously touted—as AI automation transforms the global economy. To examine what this new technology might mean, I reported from three continents, interviewed 10 Tools for Humanity executives and investors, reviewed hundreds of pages of company documents, and “verified” my own humanity. The Internet will inevitably need some kind of proof-of-humanity system in the near future, says Divya Siddarth, founder of the nonprofit Collective Intelligence Project. The real question, she argues, is whether such a system will be centralized—“a big security nightmare that enables a lot of surveillance”—or privacy-preserving, as the Orb claims to be. Questions remain about Tools for Humanity’s corporate structure, its yoking to an unstable cryptocurrency, and what power it would concentrate in the hands of its owners if successful. Yet it’s also one of the only attempts to solve what many see as an increasingly urgent problem. “There are some issues with it,” Siddarth says of World ID. “But you can’t preserve the Internet in amber. Something in this direction is necessary.”In March, I met Blania at Tools for Humanity’s San Francisco headquarters, where a large screen displays the number of weekly “Orb verifications” by country. A few days earlier, the CEO had attended a $1 million-per-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago with President Donald Trump, whom he credits with clearing the way for the company’s U.S. launch by relaxing crypto regulations. “Given Sam is a very high profile target,” Blania says, “we just decided that we would let other companies fight that fight, and enter the U.S. once the air is clear.” As a kid growing up in Germany, Blania was a little different than his peers. “Other kids were, like, drinking a lot, or doing a lot of parties, and I was just building a lot of things that could potentially blow up,” he recalls. At the California Institute of Technology, where he was pursuing research for a masters degree, he spent many evenings reading the blogs of startup gurus like Paul Graham and Altman. Then, in 2019, Blania received an email from Max Novendstern, an entrepreneur who had been kicking around a concept with Altman to build a global cryptocurrency network. They were looking for technical minds to help with the project. Over cappuccinos, Altman told Blania he was certain about three things. First, smarter-than-human AI was not only possible, but inevitable—and it would soon mean you could no longer assume that anything you read, saw, or heard on the Internet was human-created. Second, cryptocurrency and other decentralized technologies would be a massive force for change in the world. And third, scale was essential to any crypto network’s value. The Orb is tested on a calibration rig, surrounded by checkerboard targets to ensure precision in iris detection. Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe goal of Worldcoin, as the project was initially called, was to combine those three insights. Altman took a lesson from PayPal, the company co-founded by his mentor Peter Thiel. Of its initial funding, PayPal spent less than $10 million actually building its app—but pumped an additional $70 million or so into a referral program, whereby new users and the person who invited them would each receive $10 in credit. The referral program helped make PayPal a leading payment platform. Altman thought a version of that strategy would propel Worldcoin to similar heights. He wanted to create a new cryptocurrency and give it to users as a reward for signing up. The more people who joined the system, the higher the token’s value would theoretically rise. Since 2019, the project has raised $244 million from investors like Coinbase and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. That money paid for the $50 million cost of designing the Orb, plus maintaining the software it runs on. The total market value of all Worldcoins in existence, however, is far higher—around $12 billion. That number is a bit misleading: most of those coins are not in circulation and Worldcoin’s price has fluctuated wildly. Still, it allows the company to reward users for signing up at no cost to itself. The main lure for investors is the crypto upside. Some 75% of all Worldcoins are set aside for humans to claim when they sign up, or as referral bonuses. The remaining 25% are split between Tools for Humanity’s backers and staff, including Blania and Altman. “I’m really excited to make a lot of money,” ” Blania says.From the beginning, Altman was thinking about the consequences of the AI revolution he intended to unleash. (On May 21, he announced plans to team up with famed former Apple designer Jony Ive on a new AI personal device.) A future in which advanced AI could perform most tasks more effectively than humans would bring a wave of unemployment and economic dislocation, he reasoned. Some kind of wealth redistribution might be necessary. In 2016, he partially funded a study of basic income, which gave $1,000 per-month handouts to low-income individuals in Illinois and Texas. But there was no single financial system that would allow money to be sent to everybody in the world. Nor was there a way to stop an individual human from claiming their share twice—or to identify a sophisticated AI pretending to be human and pocketing some cash of its own. In 2023, Tools for Humanity raised the possibility of using the network to redistribute the profits of AI labs that were able to automate human labor. “As AI advances,” it said, “fairly distributing access and some of the created value through UBI will play an increasingly vital role in counteracting the concentration of economic power.”Blania was taken by the pitch, and agreed to join the project as a co-founder. “Most people told us we were very stupid or crazy or insane, including Silicon Valley investors,” Blania says. At least until ChatGPT came out in 2022, transforming OpenAI into one of the world’s most famous tech companies and kickstarting a market bull-run. “Things suddenly started to make more and more sense to the external world,” Blania says of the vision to develop a global “proof-of-humanity” network. “You have to imagine a world in which you will have very smart and competent systems somehow flying through the Internet with different goals and ideas of what they want to do, and us having no idea anymore what we’re dealing with.”After our interview, Blania’s head of communications ushers me over to a circular wooden structure where eight Orbs face one another. The scene feels like a cross between an Apple Store and a ceremonial altar. “Do you want to get verified?” she asks. Putting aside my reservations for the purposes of research, I download the World App and follow its prompts. I flash a QR code at the Orb, then gaze into it. A minute or so later, my phone buzzes with confirmation: I’ve been issued my own personal World ID and some Worldcoin.The first thing the Orb does is check if you’re human, using a neural network that takes input from various sensors, including an infrared camera and a thermometer. Davide Monteleone for TIMEWhile I stared into the Orb, several complex procedures had taken place at once. A neural network took inputs from multiple sensors—an infrared camera, a thermometer—to confirm I was a living human. Simultaneously, a telephoto lens zoomed in on my iris, capturing the physical traits within that distinguish me from every other human on Earth. It then converted that image into an iris code: a numerical abstraction of my unique biometric data. Then the Orb checked to see if my iris code matched any it had seen before, using a technique allowing encrypted data to be compared without revealing the underlying information. Before the Orb deleted my data, it turned my iris code into several derivative codes—none of which on its own can be linked back to the original—encrypted them, deleted the only copies of the decryption keys, and sent each one to a different secure server, so that future users’ iris codes can be checked for uniqueness against mine. If I were to use my World ID to access a website, that site would learn nothing about me except that I’m human. The Orb is open-source, so outside experts can examine its code and verify the company’s privacy claims. “I did a colonoscopy on this company and these technologies before I agreed to join,” says Trevor Traina, a Trump donor and former U.S. ambassador to Austria who now serves as Tools for Humanity’s chief business officer. “It is the most privacy-preserving technology on the planet.”Only weeks later, when researching what would happen if I wanted to delete my data, do I discover that Tools for Humanity’s privacy claims rest on what feels like a sleight of hand. The company argues that in modifying your iris code, it has “effectively anonymized” your biometric data. If you ask Tools for Humanity to delete your iris codes, they will delete the one stored on your phone, but not the derivatives. Those, they argue, are no longer your personal data at all. But if I were to return to an Orb after deleting my data, it would still recognize those codes as uniquely mine. Once you look into the Orb, a piece of your identity remains in the system forever. If users could truly delete that data, the premise of one ID per human would collapse, Tools for Humanity’s chief privacy officer Damien Kieran tells me when I call seeking an explanation. People could delete and sign up for new World IDs after being suspended from a platform. Or claim their Worldcoin tokens, sell them, delete their data, and cash in again. This argument fell flat with European Union regulators in Germany, who recently declared that the Orb posed “fundamental data protection issues” and ordered the company to allow European users to fully delete even their anonymized data. (Tools for Humanity has appealed; the regulator is now reassessing the decision.) “Just like any other technology service, users cannot delete data that is not personal data,” Kieran said in a statement. “If a person could delete anonymized data that can’t be linked to them by World or any third party, it would allow bad actors to circumvent the security and safety that World ID is working to bring to every human.”On a balmy afternoon this spring, I climb a flight of stairs up to a room above a restaurant in an outer suburb of Seoul. Five elderly South Koreans tap on their phones as they wait to be “verified” by the two Orbs in the center of the room. “We don’t really know how to distinguish between AI and humans anymore,” an attendant in a company t-shirt explains in Korean, gesturing toward the spheres. “We need a way to verify that we’re human and not AI. So how do we do that? Well, humans have irises, but AI doesn’t.”The attendant ushers an elderly woman over to an Orb. It bleeps. “Open your eyes,” a disembodied voice says in English. The woman stares into the camera. Seconds later, she checks her phone and sees that a packet of Worldcoin worth 75,000 Korean won (about $54) has landed in her digital wallet. Congratulations, the app tells her. You are now a verified human.A visitor views the Orbs in Seoul on April 14, 2025. Taemin Ha for TIMETools for Humanity aims to “verify” 1 million Koreans over the next year. Taemin Ha for TIMEA couple dozen Orbs have been available in South Korea since 2023, verifying roughly 55,000 people. Now Tools for Humanity is redoubling its efforts there. At an event in a traditional wooden hanok house in central Seoul, an executive announces that 250 Orbs will soon be dispersed around the country—with the aim of verifying 1 million Koreans in the next 12 months. South Korea has high levels of smartphone usage, crypto and AI adoption, and Internet access, while average wages are modest enough for the free Worldcoin on offer to still be an enticing draw—all of which makes it fertile testing ground for the company’s ambitious global expansion. Yet things seem off to a slow start. In a retail space I visited in central Seoul, Tools for Humanity had constructed a wooden structure with eight Orbs facing each other. Locals and tourists wander past looking bemused; few volunteer themselves up. Most who do tell me they are crypto enthusiasts who came intentionally, driven more by the spirit of early adoption than the free coins. The next day, I visit a coffee shop in central Seoul where a chrome Orb sits unassumingly in one corner. Wu Ruijun, a 20-year-old student from China, strikes up a conversation with the barista, who doubles as the Orb’s operator. Wu was invited here by a friend who said both could claim free cryptocurrency if he signed up. The barista speeds him through the process. Wu accepts the privacy disclosure without reading it, and widens his eyes for the Orb. Soon he’s verified. “I wasn’t told anything about the privacy policy,” he says on his way out. “I just came for the money.”As Altman’s car winds through San Francisco, I ask about the vision he laid out in 2019: that AI would make it harder for us to trust each other online. To my surprise, he rejects the framing. “I’m much more [about] like: what is the good we can create, rather than the bad we can stop?” he says. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to avoid the bot overrun’ or whatever. It’s just that we can do a lot of special things for humans.” It’s an answer that may reflect how his role has changed over the years. Altman is now the chief public cheerleader of a $300 billion company that’s touting the transformative utility of AI agents. The rise of agents, he and others say, will be a boon for our quality of life—like having an assistant on hand who can answer your most pressing questions, carry out mundane tasks, and help you develop new skills. It’s an optimistic vision that may well pan out. But it doesn’t quite fit with the prophecies of AI-enabled infopocalypse that Tools for Humanity was founded upon.Altman waves away a question about the influence he and other investors stand to gain if their vision is realized. Most holders, he assumes, will have already started selling their tokens—too early, he adds. “What I think would be bad is if an early crew had a lot of control over the protocol,” he says, “and that’s where I think the commitment to decentralization is so cool.” Altman is referring to the World Protocol, the underlying technology upon which the Orb, Worldcoin, and World ID all rely. Tools for Humanity is developing it, but has committed to giving control to its users over time—a process they say will prevent power from being concentrated in the hands of a few executives or investors. Tools for Humanity would remain a for-profit company, and could levy fees on platforms that use World ID, but other companies would be able to compete for customers by building alternative apps—or even alternative Orbs. The plan draws on ideas that animated the crypto ecosystem in the late 2010s and early 2020s, when evangelists for emerging blockchain technologies argued that the centralization of power—especially in large so-called “Web 2.0” tech companies—was responsible for many of the problems plaguing the modern Internet. Just as decentralized cryptocurrencies could reform a financial system controlled by economic elites, so too would it be possible to create decentralized organizations, run by their members instead of CEOs. How such a system might work in practice remains unclear. “Building a community-based governance system,” Tools for Humanity says in a 2023 white paper, “represents perhaps the most formidable challenge of the entire project.”Altman has a pattern of making idealistic promises that shift over time. He founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, with a mission to develop AGI safely and for the benefit of all humanity. To raise money, OpenAI restructured itself as a for-profit company in 2019, but with overall control still in the hands of its nonprofit board. Last year, Altman proposed yet another restructure—one which would dilute the board’s control and allow more profits to flow to shareholders. Why, I ask, should the public trust Tools for Humanity’s commitment to freely surrender influence and power? “I think you will just see the continued decentralization via the protocol,” he says. “The value here is going to live in the network, and the network will be owned and governed by a lot of people.” Altman talks less about universal basic income these days. He recently mused about an alternative, which he called “universal basic compute.” Instead of AI companies redistributing their profits, he seemed to suggest, they could instead give everyone in the world fair access to super-powerful AI. Blania tells me he recently “made the decision to stop talking” about UBI at Tools for Humanity. “UBI is one potential answer,” he says. “Just giving [people] access to the latest [AI] models and having them learn faster and better is another.” Says Altman: “I still don’t know what the right answer is. I believe we should do a better job of distribution of resources than we currently do.” When I probe the question of why people should trust him, Altman gets irritated. “I understand that you hate AI, and that’s fine,” he says. “If you want to frame it as the downside of AI is that there’s going to be a proliferation of very convincing AI systems that are pretending to be human, and we need ways to know what is really human-authorized versus not, then yeah, I think you can call that a downside of AI. It’s not how I would naturally frame it.” The phrase human-authorized hints at a tension between World ID and OpenAI’s plans for AI agents. An Internet where a World ID is required to access most services might impede the usefulness of the agents that OpenAI and others are developing. So Tools for Humanity is building a system that would allow users to delegate their World ID to an agent, allowing the bot to take actions online on their behalf, according to Tiago Sada, the company’s chief product officer. “We’ve built everything in a way that can be very easily delegatable to an agent,” Sada says. It’s a measure that would allow humans to be held accountable for the actions of their AIs. But it suggests that Tools for Humanity’s mission may be shifting beyond simply proving humanity, and toward becoming the infrastructure that enables AI agents to proliferate with human authorization. World ID doesn’t tell you whether a piece of content is AI-generated or human-generated; all it tells you is whether the account that posted it is a human or a bot. Even in a world where everybody had a World ID, our online spaces might still be filled with AI-generated text, images, and videos.As I say goodbye to Altman, I’m left feeling conflicted about his project. If the Internet is going to be transformed by AI agents, then some kind of proof-of-humanity system will almost certainly be necessary. Yet if the Orb becomes a piece of Internet infrastructure, it could give Altman—a beneficiary of the proliferation of AI content—significant influence over a leading defense mechanism against it. People might have no choice but to participate in the network in order to access social media or online services.I thought of an encounter I witnessed in Seoul. In the room above the restaurant, Cho Jeong-yeon, 75, watched her friend get verified by an Orb. Cho had been invited to do the same, but demurred. The reward wasn’t enough for her to surrender a part of her identity. “Your iris is uniquely yours, and we don’t really know how it might be used,” she says. “Seeing the machine made me think: are we becoming machines instead of humans now? Everything is changing, and we don’t know how it’ll all turn out.”—With reporting by Stephen Kim/Seoul. This story was supported by Tarbell Grants.Correction, May 30The original version of this story misstated the market capitalization of Worldcoin if all coins were in circulation. It is $12 billion, not $1.2 billion.

Let’s get this out of the way: We constantly live in uncertain times. Periods of tranquility are actually an aberration, if not an illusion. The relationship between marketing budgets and economic volatility has always been complex. What we’re witnessing isn’t just the usual ebb and flow of consumer confidence or standard market corrections. It’s an unprecedented convergence of tariff confusion, inflationary pressures, supply chain disruptions, and debt refinancing challenges. As I talk to CMOs and marketing leaders across industries, one word keeps surfacing: paralysis. Decision makers find themselves frozen, unsure whether to commit to long-term advertising contracts, unable to accurately forecast costs, and struggling to craft messaging that resonates in a consumer landscape where spending power is increasingly unpredictable. The historical perspective: Who thrives in downturns? When I look back at previous economic contractions—particularly 2008 and 2020—a clear pattern emerges that separates survivors from thrivers. In 2008, as financial markets collapsed, brands like Amazon, Netflix, and Hyundai didn’t retreat. They advanced. Netflix invested heavily in its streaming service during the financial crisis, laying the groundwork for its eventual dominance. Hyundai introduced its ground-breaking “Assurance Program,” allowing customers to return newly purchased vehicles if they lost their jobs—a true masterstroke that increased Hyundai’s market share while competitors were seeing double-digit sales declines. The 2020 pandemic presented similar divergent paths. While many brands slashed marketing budgets in panic, companies like Zoom and DoorDash significantly increased their marketing investments, recognizing the unique moment to capture market share when consumers were rapidly forming new habits. The common thread? These companies didn’t view marketing as a discretionary expense to be cut during uncertainty. They saw it as a strategic lever, one that should be pulled harder during hard times. 4 strategic approaches for the uncertainty-conscious marketer Here’s what the most forward-thinking marketers are doing now to navigate the choppy waters ahead: They’re embracing flexibility in all media contracts. The days of rigid, long-term commitments are giving way to more agile arrangements that allow for budget reallocation as economic conditions shift. This means negotiating pause clauses, shorter commitment windows, and performance-based terms that protect all contracted parties. Budgets are shifting toward measurable, adaptable channels. While social media and traditional media face the deepest anticipated cuts (41% and 43% respectively), digital advertising continues to gain market share despite economic concerns. Digital is projected to encompass up to 79% of total ad spend by 2030, up from its current 67%. Message content is being entirely rethought. In the face of economic anxiety, brands need messaging that acknowledges reality while providing genuine value. We’re seeing this play out in automotive advertising, where some manufacturers are emphasizing their American manufacturing credentials. Ford’s “From America, For America” campaign represents a strategic positioning that resonates in an era of tariff concerns. As Hyundai, in 2008, these advertisers are using the moment to emphasize their particular brand’s appeal. AI is being leveraged not just for cost cutting but for scenario planning. The most sophisticated marketing teams are using AI to model multiple economic outcomes and prepare messaging, budget allocations, and channel strategies for each scenario. The creative reset: How agencies have already adapted It’s worth noting that the industry isn’t starting from scratch in facing these challenges. Client behavior on creative development has undergone a dramatic transformation over the past several years. The best independent agencies have already restructured their operations in response. Gone are the days of lengthy creative development cycles and rigid campaign frameworks. Anticipating these changes years ago, independent shops have largely embraced agile methodologies that align perfectly with today’s economic realities. In many ways, the independent agency sector has already prepared for exactly this kind of destabilizing environment. They’ve built their businesses around speed and adaptability rather than scale and standardization. As such, they’re uniquely positioned to help steer brands through bumps ahead without sacrificing creative impact or market presence. Brand versus performance in uncertain times Perhaps the most critical strategic question facing marketers is how to balance brand building against performance marketing when budgets contract. Historical data consistently shows that brands maintaining or increasing their share of voice during downturns emerge in stronger positions when markets recover. Yet short-term revenue pressures make performance marketing irresistibly tempting when every dollar must be justified. The smart play here isn’t choosing one over the other but reimagining how all of these factors work together. Performance marketing can be designed to build brand equity simultaneously. Brand marketing can incorporate more direct response elements. The artificial wall between these disciplines must come down to survive economic headwinds. Opportunity within adversity The brands that will emerge strongest from this period of uncertainty won’t be those with the largest budgets, but those with the clearest strategic vision, the most agile execution, and the courage to maintain presence when competitors retreat. Economic uncertainty doesn’t change the fundamental truth that share of voice leads to share of market. It simply raises the stakes and rewards those who can maintain their voice when others fall silent. Looking at the latter half of 2025, the marketing leaders who view this period not as a time to hide but as a rare opportunity to stand out will be the ones writing the success stories we’ll be studying for years to come. Tim Ringel is global CEO of Meet The People.

Jesse Armstrong loves to pull fictional stories out of reality. His universally acclaimed TV show Succession, for instance, was inspired by real-life media dynasties like the Murdochs and the Hearsts. Similarly, his newest film Mountainhead centers upon characters that share key traits with the tech world’s most powerful leaders: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and others.Mountainhead, which releases on HBO on May 31 at 8 p.m. ET, portrays four top tech executives who retreat to a Utah hideaway as the AI deepfake tools newly released by one of their companies wreak havoc across the world. As the believable deepfakes inflame hatred on social media and real-world violence, the comfortably-appointed quartet mulls a global governmental takeover, intergalactic conquest and immortality, before interpersonal conflict derails their plans.Armstrong tells TIME in a Zoom interview that he first became interested in writing a story about tech titans after reading books like Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite (about Sam Bankman-Fried) and Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, as well as journalistic profiles of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and others. He then built the story around the interplay between four character archetypes—the father, the dynamo, the usurper, and the hanger-on—and conducted extensive research so that his fictional executives reflected real ones. His characters, he says, aren’t one-to-one matches, but “Frankenstein monsters with limbs sewn together.” These characters are deeply flawed and destructive, to say the least. Armstrong says he did not intend for the film to be a wholly negative depiction of tech leaders and AI development. “I do try to take myself out of it, but obviously my sense of what this tech does and could do infuses the piece. Maybe I do have some anxieties,” he says. Armstrong contends that the film is more so channeling fears that AI leaders themselves have warned about. “If somebody who knows the technology better than anyone in the world thinks there's a 1/5th chance that it's going to wipe out humanity—and they're some of the optimists—I think that's legitimately quite unnerving,” he says. Here’s how each of the characters in Mountainhead resembles real-world tech leaders. This article contains spoilers. Venis (Cory Michael Smith) is the dynamo.Cory Michael Smith in Mountainhead Macall Polay—HBOVenis is Armstrong’s “dynamo”: the richest man in the world, who has gained his wealth from his social media platform Traam and its 4 billion users. Venis is ambitious, juvenile, and self-centered, even questioning whether other people are as real as him and his friends. Venis’ first obvious comp is Elon Musk, the richest man in the real world. Like Musk, Venis is obsessed with going to outer space and with using his enormous war chest to build hyperscale data centers to create powerful anti-woke AI systems. Venis also has a strange relationship with his child, essentially using it as a prop to help him through his own emotional turmoil. Throughout the movie, others caution Venis to shut down his deepfake AI tools which have led to military conflict and the desecration of holy sites across the world. Venis rebuffs them and says that people just need to adapt to technological changes and focus on the cool art being made. This argument is similar to those made by Sam Altman, who has argued that OpenAI needs to unveil ChatGPT and other cutting-edge tools as fast as possible in order to show the public the power of the technology. Like Mark Zuckerberg, Venis presides over a massively popular social media platform that some have accused of ignoring harms in favor of growth. Just as Amnesty International accused Meta of having “substantially contributed” to human rights violations perpetrated against Myanmar’s Rohingya ethnic group, Venis complains of the UN being “up his ass for starting a race war.”Randall (Steve Carell) is the father.Steve Carell in Mountainhead Macall Polay—HBOThe group’s eldest member is Randall, an investor and technologist who resembles Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel in his lofty philosophizing and quest for immortality. Like Andreessen, Randall is a staunch accelerationist who believes that U.S. companies need to develop AI as fast as possible in order to both prevent the Chinese from controlling the technology, and to ostensibly ignite a new American utopia in which productivity, happiness, and health flourish. Randall’s power comes from the fact that he was Venis’ first investor, just as Thiel was an early investor in Facebook. While Andreessen pens manifestos about technological advancement, Randall paints his mission in grandiose, historical terms, using anti-democratic, sci-fi-inflected language that resembles that of the philosopher Curtis Yarvin, who has been funded and promoted by Thiel over his career. Randall’s justification of murder through utilitarian and Kantian lenses calls to mind Sam Bankman-Fried’s extensive philosophizing, which included a declaration that he would roll the dice on killing everyone on earth if there was a 51% chance he would create a second earth. Bankman-Fried’s approach—in embracing risk and harm in order to reap massive rewards—led him to be convicted of massive financial fraud. Randall is also obsessed with longevity just like Thiel, who has railed for years against the “inevitability of death” and yearns for “super-duper medical treatments” that would render him immortal. Jeff (Ramy Youssef) is the usurper.Ramy Youssef in Mountainhead Macall Polay—HBOJeff is a technologist who often serves as the movie’s conscience, slinging criticisms about the other characters. But he’s also deeply embedded within their world, and he needs their resources, particularly Venis’ access to computing power, to thrive. In the end, Jeff sells out his values for his own survival and well-being. AI skeptics have lobbed similar criticisms at the leaders of the main AI labs, including Altman—who started OpenAI as a nonprofit before attempting to restructure the company—as well as Demis Hassabis and Dario Amodei. Hassabis is the CEO of Google Deepmind and a winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; a rare scientist surrounded by businessmen and technologists. In order to try to achieve his AI dreams of curing disease and halting global warning, Hassabis enlisted with Google, inking a contract in 2014 in which he prohibited Google from using his technology for military applications. But that clause has since disappeared, and the AI systems developed under Hassabis are being sold, via Google, to militaries like Israel’s. Another parallel can be drawn between Jeff and Amodei, an AI researcher who defected from OpenAI after becoming worried that the company was cutting back its safety measures, and then formed his own company, Anthropic. Amodei has urged governments to create AI guardrails and has warned about the potentially catastrophic effects of the AI industry’s race dynamics. But some have criticized Anthropic for operating similarly to OpenAI, prioritizing scale in a way that exacerbates competitive pressures. Souper (Jason Schwartzman) is the hanger-on. Jason Schwartzman in Mountainhead Macall Polay—HBOEvery quartet needs its Turtle or its Ringo; a clear fourth wheel to serve as a punching bag for the rest of the group’s alpha males. Mountainhead’s hanger-on is Souper, thus named because he has soup kitchen money compared to the rest (hundreds of millions as opposed to billions of dollars). In order to prove his worth, he’s fixated on getting funding for a meditation startup that he hopes will eventually become an “everything app.” No tech exec would want to be compared to Souper, who has a clear inferiority complex. But plenty of tech leaders have emphasized the importance of meditation and mindfulness—including Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey, who often goes on meditation retreats. Armstrong, in his interview, declined to answer specific questions about his characters’ inspirations, but conceded that some of the speculations were in the right ballpark. “For people who know the area well, it's a little bit of a fun house mirror in that you see something and are convinced that it's them,” he says. “I think all of those people featured in my research. There's bits of Andreessen and David Sacks and some of those philosopher types. It’s a good parlor game to choose your Frankenstein limbs.”

The US has ordered companies that make software used to design semiconductors to stop selling to China without first obtaining export licenses. The restrictions go beyond software alone, covering chemicals for semiconductors, butane and ethane, machine tools, and aviation equipment, Reuters reported, citing two people familiar with the development. “On May 23, the US Government informed the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry about new export controls on EDA software to China and Chinese military end users globally,” said a Siemens EDA spokesperson. “Siemens has supported customers in China for more than 150 years and will continue to work with our customers globally to mitigate the impact of these new restrictions while operating in compliance with applicable national export control regimes. The company continues to support our employees and customers around the world who are using our technology to transform the everyday.” This represents the latest chapter in a tech war that began with restrictions on selling actual semiconductors to China. Now, the US is targeting the tools needed to design those chips — a potentially more damaging approach. Strategic shift to upstream controls Electronic design automation software makers — including industry leaders Cadence, Synopsys, and Siemens EDA — were sent notifications by the Commerce Department last Friday to cease supplying their technology to Chinese customers, the report said. The department will review license requests on a case-by-case basis, it added. The financial implications are substantial. Synopsys and Cadence earn annual revenue of about 16% and 12% from their China business. “With Cadence and Synopsys being US-based companies and Siemens contributing to more than 90% share of the EDA tools globally, this move further tightens EDA software sales in China,” said Neil Shah, VP for research and partner at Counterpoint Research. “EDA tools cannot be substituted and are the foundation to chip design and manufacturing.” What makes this strategically different is its upstream focus. Manish Rawat, semiconductor analyst at TechInsights, explained that, unlike previous hardware restrictions, “the new focus on EDA software targets the critical tools essential for designing advanced chips (5nm and below). This upstream control aims to block innovation before chips are manufactured, making it a more preemptive and disruptive tactic.” Why now? The timing reflects broader strategic recalibration. Rawat noted that “the US has shifted its strategy, now seeing China’s push for tech self-sufficiency — especially in AI and semiconductors — as a growing national security threat.” Since the 2020 CHIPS Act, coordinated export controls with allies like Japan and the Netherlands have strengthened US resolve. Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research, observed that targeting design-phase technologies “seeks to constrain the conceptual stage of advanced chip development — not merely production.” The timing may also serve as “a strategic bargaining tool amid paused tariffs and ongoing diplomacy,” Rawat suggested, signaling US willingness to escalate tech restrictions to strengthen its negotiating position. The EDA software packages from companies like Synopsys and Cadence are central to modeling, simulation, and verification of complex semiconductor architectures. “The software lifecycle of these tools is super important with updates, patches, and support to be at the forefront of leading edge, which will stop with the restrictions on licensing,” Shah pointed out. This ongoing dependency means even alternative tools would struggle to keep pace with rapidly evolving chip design requirements without continuous vendor support. China’s long road to independence For China, developing viable alternatives presents enormous challenges. While Chinese companies like Empyrean, Primarius, and Entasys have emerged as domestic providers, they remain far behind. “Developing advanced EDA software on par with Synopsys or Cadence is highly complex, requiring decades of R&D,” Rawat explained. “Fully closing the gap — especially for cutting-edge sub-7nm chip design — could take 5 to 10 years or more.” Gogia added that “while notable progress has been made in selected areas of analog and layout tooling, full-stack integration across simulation, IP compatibility, and foundry certification continues to lag.” The gap is widening. Shah noted that Cadence recently announced M2000 Supercomputers, integrating advanced AI into EDA workflows. “This widens the gap between what China can build with an indigenous toolchain, as these US companies are miles ahead.” However, China may have breathing room. “China has been relegated to access to advanced process nodes, so in the near to mid-term, they might not need an advanced toolchain as they won’t be able to design or manufacture advanced chips,” Shah observed. Beijing’s likely response China’s response will likely be multifaceted. “Beijing is likely to accelerate funding through increased subsidies and incentives for domestic EDA startups,” Rawat said. “It will also aggressively recruit global experts and repatriate Chinese talent with semiconductor software expertise.” Beyond domestic development, “China may build alternative chip design ecosystems less reliant on US intellectual property, though these will initially lag in sophistication,” Rawat added. Diplomatic measures may include reciprocal restrictions on US firms or supply chains involving Chinese technology. Toward a bifurcated design world The restrictions are accelerating what analysts see as an inevitable split. Gogia described emerging “parallel EDA stacks” where “global design ecosystems may begin to diverge, with export controls catalyzing separate compliance frameworks and IP governance models.” “This is accelerating a split into two spheres: a US-led system using Western tools and IP protections, and a China-led system focused on domestic tools and foundries,” Rawat added. This separation isn’t just technical — it’s institutional. “Engineering workflows, legal oversight, cloud infrastructure, and partner ecosystems are all being restructured to manage compliance in a fractured regulatory environment,” Gogia said. Global industry implications For multinational companies, this fragmentation creates significant challenges. “Multinational firms may need to adopt dual design workflows and navigate stricter compliance, affecting partnerships and operational efficiency,” Rawat said. Organizations face maintaining duplicate systems and complex compliance across jurisdictions. Smaller firms may find duplication costs force market exits or a narrowed geographic focus. To mitigate risks, companies “are likely to diversify supply chains and expand in neutral regions like India, Vietnam, and Singapore, emerging as new semiconductor design hubs,” Rawat pointed out. The EDA software restrictions represent the latest evolution in US-China tech competition, moving from end-product controls to fundamental design capabilities. “US continues to find stranglehold on China with critical software and hardware to cut off access to critical and advanced tools,” Shah said. For enterprise technology leaders, this signals an era where geopolitical considerations increasingly shape technology architecture decisions, requiring strategic planning for an increasingly fragmented world. Cadence and Synopsys did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.

The idea of becoming a real estate investor for as little as $5 may seem too good to be true. And for many users of Landa, a proptech company that promised just that — it has been. Landa emerged from stealth in August 2022, announcing a total of $33 million in funding and a pledge to help everyday Americans access residential real estate investment through fractional shares. CEO Yishai Cohen and former CTO Amit Assaraf founded Landa in 2019 in an effort to make real estate investment more inclusive. The app’s only requirements were that users be over age 18 and U.S. residents. They could start investing with just $5, and buy and sell shares as well as see real-time updates on their properties from the Landa app. (Assaraf left the company in December of 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile. He has not responded to requests for comment.) Today, Landa’s investment portal site is down and its app is inoperable. Users claim they can’t access their funds and haven’t been paid dividends in months. The startup is embroiled in litigation, including a lawsuit from its early venture investor Viola. One early user told TechCrunch that Landa stopped paying dividends to him on his shares in January. When he asked Landa about it, they “punted the question,” he said. “I repeatedly emailed them about it and just got deflecting answers, nothing real,” the user said. “Then a few months after that, the app became unusable. It would not open.” Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW The user then asked if he could delete his account, which he had opened in 2021, and sell the shares. But he found Landa had disabled his ability to sell shares. “They have essentially frozen me out of my funds and just shut down the app,” the user said. “Where is the money? Why won’t they return it to me?” Over 130 complaints have been filed against Landa to the Better Business Bureau, with dozens of people echoing similar allegations. For instance, on May 1, one user who filed such a complaint shared they had invested over $8,000 through Landa and stopped receiving dividends last fall. The user said Landa customer service replied to their emails by saying that the company is “working on it.”  In mid-April, when TechCrunch asked Landa about the issue — including the status of its downed site and whether the company itself had shut down — CEO Cohen said:  “Of course not. The site will be back up.” When asked why the app was not working and why users had not received dividends in months, Cohen’s terse reply still seemed to refer to the website, blaming the servers: “It’s unrelated to dividends. It’s from our servers. We are on it.” Upon further prodding, Cohen on April 18 shared the following statement: “We are aware of the issues currently affecting our platform and product, and want to assure all investors that we are actively working to restore full functionality as soon as possible. We have kept investors informed through all updates, including the server access issue. We appreciate the continued support of our investors and resident community, and remain committed to delivering on our vision of making real estate investing accessible to everyone.” Cohen did not respond to our request for a status update on May 20. Investors NFX and 83North did not respond to our multiple requests for comment.  Embroiled in a lawsuit  It’s not just users who are upset with Landa. The company’s primary lenders are suing.  Viola Credit and L Finance filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court against Landa in November 2024, accusing it of “numerous defaults” on more than $35 million worth of loans they extended to the company. (Viola is also an investor in Landa through its venture division.) The lenders also accused it of missing property tax payments that led to the forced sale of those properties, neglecting properties, and even failing to collect rents. The lawsuit — first reported by real estate industry publication Bisnow — states that after over a year of attempting to get Landa to honor their commitments, the lenders removed Landa as manager of the homes and appointed an independent property manager and a chief restructuring officer.  After further negotiations failed, the creditors later asked the court for, and were granted, an injunction blocking Landa from accessing bank accounts, interfering with their attempts to restructure the business, and reclaiming money they say is owed — including proceeds from property sales. Despite the injunction, the lenders returned to court in January 2025, claiming Landa told tenants to send rent payments to a different bank account not covered by the ruling. They discovered this while making repairs to one property’s septic system. They also accused Landa’s CEO of trying to sell or refinance some properties. The court ordered Landa to explain itself. Instead, in early March, Landa asked the court for a restraining order against Viola Credit and L Finance, claiming the independent manager was “installed unlawfully.”  Judge Jennifer G. Schecter was not pleased. In March, she ordered both sides to find a solution “that’s good for all of your clients.” She denied Landa’s request for an injunction and ordered the company to pay nearly $100,000. A few weeks later, Landa filed a formal countersuit. The case is still pending. Challenging model Landa is just one of several startups that emerged in recent years offering fractional real estate investing. It is also apparently not the only one that has struggled — especially after mortgage interest rates began soaring in 2022.  Fintor raised millions of dollars before seemingly pivoting to offer an “AI Agent to automate finance and real estate operations with human level performance.” Dallas-based Nada, which offered index-like real estate investment products called “Cityfunds,” allowing non-accredited investors to buy into a city’s home equity market with as little as $250, also appears to have pivoted. Its website now promotes a new tagline: “Access home equity to finance anything.”  Arrived was perhaps the highest-profile of the bunch — and the only one that seems to be actively operating under the same model. In May of 2022, TechCrunch reported that Arrived raised $25 million in a Series A funding round including Bezos Expeditions, to allow people to buy shares in single-family rentals with “as little as $100.” According to its website, the startup has to date paid out over $13 million in dividends and interest and has 766,000 registered investors. As for those people who invested with Landa, the future of their money appears uncertain. As of May 23, Landa’s investor portal website still redirects to a “come-back-soon” maintenance message. 

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is out, and it's already quite popular. In light of this, Level-5 has announced some free DLC is on the way, in recognition of the new Fantasy Life's positive reception.Announced on the Level-5 site, the developer has confirmed free DLC is coming to Fantasy Life i. While no release date is set yet, the team is teasing some new recipes, as well as new content to "update the world" (via Gematsu). It will also apparently allow players to utilize high-rarity weapons obtained from Treasure Groves and other sources.Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time went live for early access on May 18, with its full launch on May 21. It quickly climbed the Steam charts and started drawing players in, whether they were on the look-out for a new life-sim game or just eager for a new Fantasy Life game.PlayLevel-5's latest sits at a 'Very Positive' user review rating on Steam at the moment with over 3,000 reviews, and given the early confirmation of free DLC, it seems like the new game has certainly taken off.It feels like a solid win for Level-5, even after the departure of Keiji Inafune last year to "reassess and restructure" the project. Business operations of Level-5 Comcept were transferred to the parent company after Inafune left. In a post from March 2025, Level-5 boss Akihiro Hino described Inafune's departure as an "unexpected challenge."Fantasy Life i has taken off though, which hopefully bodes well for the rest of Level-5's roster of upcoming games. The studio announced a slew of games in a February 2023 Nintendo Direct, and while some have released, others are still in development. The yet-to-be-released games include some heavy hitters, like futuristic detective RPG DecaPolice and the next installment in the Professor Layton series, Professor Layton and the New World of Steam.While we wait to see when and how those games land, at least Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time players have some more chill life updates to look forward to. If you're currently playing Fantasy Life i, make sure to head over to our Fantasy Life i Gift Codes hub, where we're cataloguing all the Gift Codes and how to redeem them for some in-game goodies.Eric is a freelance writer for IGN.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Thursday announced the disruption of the online infrastructure associated with DanaBot (aka DanaTools) and unsealed charges against 16 individuals for their alleged involvement in the development and deployment of the malware, which it said was controlled by a Russia-based cybercrime organization. The malware, the DoJ said, infected more than 300,000 victim computers around the world, facilitated fraud and ransomware, and caused at least $50 million in damages. Two of the defendants, Aleksandr Stepanov (aka JimmBee), 39, and Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin (aka Onix), 34, both from Novosibirsk, Russia, are currently at large. Stepanov has been charged with conspiracy, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, aggravated identity theft, unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information, unauthorized impairment of a protected computer, wiretapping, and use of an intercepted communication. Kalinkin has been charged with conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to a computer to obtain information, to gain unauthorized access to a computer to defraud, and to commit unauthorized impairment of a protected computer. The unsealed criminal complaint and indictment show that many of the defendants, counting Kalinkin, exposed their real-life identities after accidentally infecting their own systems with the malware. "In some cases, such self-infections appeared to be deliberately done in order to test, analyze, or improve the malware," the complaint [PDF] read. "In other cases, the infections seemed to be inadvertent – one of the hazards of committing cybercrime is that criminals will sometimes infect themselves with their own malware by mistake." "The inadvertent infections often resulted in sensitive and compromising data being stolen from the actor's computer by the malware and stored on the DanaBot servers, including data that helped identify members of the DanaBot organization." If convicted, Kalinkin is expected to face a statutory maximum sentence of 72 years in federal prison. Stepanov would face a jail term of five years. Concurrent with the action, the law enforcement effort, carried out as part of Operation Endgame, saw DanaBot's command-and-control (C2) servers seized, including dozens of virtual servers hosted in the United States. "DanaBot malware used a variety of methods to infect victim computers, including spam email messages containing malicious attachments or hyperlinks," the DoJ said. "Victim computers infected with DanaBot malware became part of a botnet (a network of compromised computers), enabling the operators and users of the botnet to remotely control the infected computers in a coordinated manner." DanaBot, like the recently dismantled Lumma Stealer malware, operates under a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) scheme, with the administrators leasing out access starting from $500 to "several thousand dollars" a month. Tracked under the monikers Scully Spider and Storm-1044, is a multi-functional tool along the lines of Emotet, TrickBot, QakBot, and IcedID that's capable of acting as a stealer and a delivery vector for next-stage payloads, such as ransomware. The Delphi-based modular malware is equipped to siphon data from victim computers, hijack banking sessions, and steal device information, user browsing histories, stored account credentials, and virtual currency wallet information. It can also provide full remote access, log keystrokes, and capture videos. It's been active in the wild since its debut in May 2018, when it started off as a banking trojan. Example of typical Danabot infrastructure "DanaBot initially targeted victims in Ukraine, Poland, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Australia prior to expanding its targeting posture to include U.S.- and Canada-based financial institutions in October 2018," CrowdStrike said. "The malware's popularity grew due to its early modular development supporting Zeus-based web injects, information stealer capabilities, keystroke logging, screen recording, and hidden virtual network computing (HVNC) functionality." According to Black Lotus Labs and Team Cymru, DanaBot employs a layered communications infrastructure between a victim and the botnet controllers, wherein the C2 traffic is proxied through two or three server tiers before it reaches the final level. At least five to six tier-2 servers were active at any given time. A majority of DanaBot victims are concentrated around Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. "The operators have shown their commitment to their craft, adapted to detection and changes in enterprise defense, and with later iterations, insulating the C2s in tiers to obfuscate tracking," the companies said. "Throughout this time, they have made the bot more user-friendly with structured pricing and customer support." High-level diagram of multi-tiered C2 architecture The DoJ said DanaBot administrators operated a second version of the botnet that was specially designed to target victim computers in military, diplomatic, government, and related entities in North America and Europe. This variant, emerging in January 2021, came fitted with capabilities to record all interactions happening on a victim device and send the data to a different server. "Pervasive malware like DanaBot harms hundreds of thousands of victims around the world, including sensitive military, diplomatic, and government entities, and causes many millions of dollars in losses," said United States Attorney Bill Essayli for the Central District of California. The DoJ further credited several private sector firms, Amazon, CrowdStrike, ESET, Flashpoint, Google, Intel 471, Lumen, PayPal, Proofpoint, Spycloud, Team Cymru, and Zscaler, for providing "valuable assistance." Some of the noteworthy aspects of DanaBot, compiled from various reports, are below - DanaBot's sub-botnet 5 received commands to download a Delphi-based executable leveraged to conduct HTTP-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence (MOD) webmail server and the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) of Ukraine in March 2022, shortly after Russia's invasion of the country Two DanaBot sub-botnets, 24 and 25, were specifically used for espionage purposes likely with an aim to further intelligence-gathering activities on behalf of Russian government interests DanaBot operators have periodically restructured their offering since 2022 to focus on defense evasion, with at least 85 distinct build numbers identified to date (The most recent version is 4006, which was compiled in March 2025) The malware's infrastructure consists of multiple components: A "bot" that infects target systems and performs data collection, an "OnlineServer" that manages the RAT functionalities, a "client" for processing collected logs and bot management, and a "server" that handles bot generation, packing, and C2 communication DanaBot has been used in targeted espionage attacks against government officials in the Middle East and Eastern Europe The authors of DanaBot operate as a single group, offering the malware for rent to potential affiliates, who subsequently use it for their own malicious purposes by establishing and managing their own botnets using private servers DanaBot's developers have partnered with the authors of several malware cryptors and loaders, such as Matanbuchus, and offered special pricing for distribution bundles DanaBot maintained an average of 150 active tier-1 C2 servers per day, with approximately 1,000 daily victims across more than 40 countries, making it one of the largest MaaS platforms active in 2025 Proofpoint, which first identified and named DanaBot in May 2018, said the disruption of the MaaS operation is a win for defenders and that it will have an impact on the cybercriminal threat landscape. "Cybercriminal disruptions and law enforcement actions not only impair malware functionality and use but also impose a cost to threat actors by forcing them to change their tactics, cause mistrust in the criminal ecosystem, and potentially make criminals think about finding a different career," Selena Larson, a staff threat researcher at Proofpoint, said. "These successes against cyber criminals only come about when business IT teams and security service providers share much-needed insight into the biggest threats to society, affecting the greatest number of people around the world, which law enforcement can use to track down the servers, infrastructure, and criminal organizations behind the attacks. Private and public sector collaboration is crucial to knowing how actors operate and taking action against them." DanaBot's features as promoted on its support site DoJ Unseals Charges Against QakBot Leader The development comes as the DoJ unsealed charges against a 48-year-old Moscow resident, Rustam Rafailevich Gallyamo, for leading efforts to develop and maintain the QakBot malware, which was disrupted in a multinational operation in August 2023. The agency also filed a civil forfeiture complaint against over $24 million in cryptocurrency seized from Gallyamov over the course of the investigation. "Gallyamov developed, deployed, and controlled the Qakbot malware beginning in 2008," the DoJ said. "From 2019 onward, Gallyamov allegedly used the Qakbot malware to infect thousands of victim computers around the world in order to establish a network, or 'botnet,' of infected computers." The DoJ revealed that, following the takedown, Gallyamov and his co-conspirators continued their criminal activities by switching to other tactics like "spam bomb" attacks in order to gain unauthorized access to victim networks and deploy ransomware families like Black Basta and CACTUS. Court documents accuse the e-crime group of engaging in these methods as recently as January 2025. "Mr. Gallyamov's bot network was crippled by the talented men and women of the FBI and our international partners in 2023, but he brazenly continued to deploy alternative methods to make his malware available to criminal cyber gangs conducting ransomware attacks against innocent victims globally," said Assistant Director in Charge Akil Davis of the FBI's Los Angeles Field Office. Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter  and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.