The feds seized a stake in Anthropic from Sam Bankman-Fried's friends. What happened to the shares?

Two associates of Sam Bankman-Fried invested in Anthropic. After they were sentenced for fraud, their shares entered a legal black hole.

ANGELA WEIS/Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI

• Sam Bankman-Fried's Anthropic stake was liquidated in bankruptcy court two years ago.
• The feds seized shares belonging to two co-conspirators, Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh.
• The government quietly sold those Anthropic shares last year. It's unclear where the money will go.

A little over a year ago, the federal government acquired a stake in Anthropic without paying a penny.

The shares were seized from associates of the crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. From there, they disappeared into a legal black hole.

As Anthropic rockets toward what could be the biggest IPO in history, those shares could now be worth billions of dollars.

Bankman-Fried's own Anthropic stake was liquidated in the bankruptcy of his failed cryptocurrency exchange. The Anthropic equity owned by Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh, two associates who invested alongside him, took a different path. The government seized those shares and sold them to existing Anthropic shareholders, according to a person familiar with the sale.

It's still unclear whether the proceeds will be paid out to victims of the $11 billion fraud case, or if the feds will just keep the money.

It also remains a mystery which investors bought Singh's and Ellison's stock and how much they paid, but Anthropic shares have been on such a dizzying climb that it's likely those investors made a killing on them.

Bankman-Fried was convicted in 2023 on fraud and money laundering charges and sentenced to 25 years in prison after the collapse of his cryptocurrency empire. Prosecutors said he used his crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research, to siphon billions of dollars from customers of FTX, his crypto exchange.

The story of the crypto criminals' Anthropic shares is a tale with extraordinary elements, including one of the biggest financial frauds in modern history, a messy bankruptcy docket, and a company that experienced one of the fastest appreciations in business history as the world suddenly realized AI's existential importance.

An intelligent investment

Bankman-Fried, Singh, and Ellison each invested in Anthropic's 2022 Series B funding round. Bankman-Fried bought $500 million worth, which according to court records represented 13.56% of Anthropic at the time. Singh acquired $40 million in shares, and Ellison acquired $10 million in shares, court records reviewed by Business Insider show.

The artificial intelligence company's valuation has soared over the past four years. On the secondary market, Anthropic has been valued at $1.5 trillion. It is the most valuable private company in the world, according to Crunchbase.

The Anthropic shares purchased by Singh and Ellison could together be worth between $4.17 billion and $5.03 billion today, based on the $965 billion valuation the company announced this May, according to Olav Sorenson, who teaches venture capital strategy at UCLA. Harrison Rolfes, an analyst at PitchBook, put the combined figure at $2.62 billion. If Anthropic went public at a $2 trillion valuation, the shares would be worth about $5.44 billion, Rolfes said.

Among Sam Bankman-Fried's many investments was a sizable stake in Anthropic, the AI company that has since soared in value.

Bloomberg/Getty Images

Four of Bankman-Fried's close friends and executives at his companies pleaded guilty as co-conspirators. Two of them, Singh and Ellison, testified against him.

Ellison was the CEO of Alameda Research, which traded and invested funds that belonged to FTX depositors. She was also Bankman-Fried's on-and-off romantic partner. Singh, an FTX executive and early employee, helped hide the commingling of funds between the two companies.

After the collapse of FTX, Bankman-Fried's Anthropic shares — which were owned by Clifton Bay, an entity affiliated with Alameda Research — ended up in bankruptcy court along with the other dredged-up remains of his companies. His Anthropic shares were liquidated to pay FTX's creditors.

The estate in 2024 sold Bankman-Fried's Anthropic shares to a few dozen buyers for a total of $1.3 billion, more than double what he paid. The largest stake went to an entity affiliated with the United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund, bankruptcy court filings show.

The feds take a stake in Anthropic

As part of their sentences, a judge required Singh and Ellison to forfeit their Anthropic shares, which prosecutors said could be considered proceeds of their crimes.

At Singh's sentencing hearing, one of his attorneys, Andrew Goldstein, said Singh purchased his shares before participating in the criminal conspiracy and "he actually may have had a legitimate legal claim" to the shares but agreed to give them up as part of his plea agreement "because it was the right thing to do."

Reached for comment for this story, Goldstein told Business Insider that Singh hopes the government is able to quickly distribute proceeds of the sale to FTX victims. An attorney for Ellison declined to comment.

Nishad Singh was required to give up his shares of Anthropic as part of his sentence.

Bloomberg/Getty Images

A federal judge ordered Ellison's and Singh's Anthropic shares to be transferred to the federal government, which took ownership of Ellison's shares in February 2025 and Singh's in April of that year, according to previously unreported court records.

Ordinarily, victims of crimes are compensated through a restitution process, which is overseen by courts. But the number of potential FTX victims could be in the millions, prosecutors said in court filings. As a result, the judge ruled, victim compensation would be handled through a process called remission, which is overseen by the Justice Department.

During Ellison's sentencing hearing, Justice Department prosecutors told the judge that the DOJ would either set up its own claims administration process to compensate victims, or work with the FTX bankruptcy process to identify victims and provide forfeited funds to them.

At the time, FTX's bankruptcy process was in full swing. A Delaware court appointed Sullivan & Cromwell, the elite Wall Street law firm, to untangle the company's assets, figure out who was owed money, and pay them.

The creditors in the FTX bankruptcy, prosecutors noted, largely overlapped with FTX's victims. They were generally depositors, lenders, and investors who were defrauded by Bankman-Fried and other executives. Prosecutors said the Justice Department could work with the bankruptcy estate's lawyers to get money back to them, as it had in previous large-scale financial frauds such as Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.

There was an unusual twist that set the FTX bankruptcy apart. Bankman-Fried's investments — especially the Anthropic shares, along with some cryptocurrency — had grown substantially in value since FTX's collapse. Earlier in 2024, the Sullivan & Cromwell lawyers who'd taken over FTX projected that all the creditors would be repaid in full, with interest.

The Marshals take control

While prosecutors said they intended to use Singh's and Ellison's Anthropic shares for remission, the Justice Department could technically do whatever it wanted with them, according to Duncan Levin, a white-collar defense attorney who teaches a course on forfeiture at Harvard Law School.

"It's a very opaque process," he said. "It's completely at the discretion, by law, of the attorney general of the United States."

Typically, when the feds seize shares of private companies through criminal asset forfeiture, they send the shares to the US Marshals Service Complex Assets Unit for liquidation. The unit tries to value the shares as any other investor would, said Michael Bachner, a white-collar criminal and securities litigation attorney.

"They may look to: What would an institutional purchaser pay for these securities?" Bachner said. "Are there funds that are valuing the securities? Is there a secondary market already out there?"

For the sale of the Anthropic shares, timing was crucial. The Marshals Service is supposed to preserve as much value as possible, Bachner said. By the time the feds got hold of the shares, Anthropic had become an economy-shifting AI giant. In its March 2025 Series E fundraising round, Anthropic was worth $61.5 billion. By its Series G round at the start of 2026, it was worth $380 billion.

At the same time, each fundraising round diluted the Series B shares. The FTX estate told the bankruptcy court that Bankman-Fried's shares, which in 2022 represented 13.56% of Anthropic, represented 7.84% of the AI company in January 2024.

Sunil Kavuri, a victim of Sam Bankman-Fried who has advocated for FTX creditors, said it would be "diabolical" for the government to hold onto the proceeds.

David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

The Marshals Service sold Singh's and Ellison's shares to existing Anthropic investors sometime last year, according to the person with knowledge of the sale.

It's not clear when exactly the agency sold the shares, to which investors, how those investors were chosen, at what price the shares were sold, or how much money the government made in the sale. Depending on when they were sold in 2025, the combined shares could have been worth between $300 million and $1.1 billion, according to Sorenson, the UCLA professor. Rolfes, the PitchBook analyst, estimated a range between $250 million and $630 million, depending on the timing.

The Marshals Service declined to comment. A representative for the Justice Department said information about asset sales and victim compensation is confidential.

The revenue from the sale of Singh's and Ellison's Anthropic shares doesn't appear to have been transferred to the FTX estate as of the end of June this year, according to bankruptcy court filings from the estate, which continues to compensate victims and creditors.

The FTX estate received $638 million last year from assets seized by the Justice Department, according to the estate's annual report for 2025. Other filings show that nearly all of that amount came from the sale of Robinhood shares previously owned by Bankman-Fried. The estate expects to receive about $400 million more from the government at some point in the future, according to the annual report. That would include proceeds from cryptocurrency and other investments made by Bankman-Fried.

One of Bankman-Fried's victims, Sunil Kavuri, told Business Insider that the Justice Department should use the proceeds of Ellison's and Singh's Anthropic shares to compensate victims. It would be "diabolical" for the government to hold onto the proceeds, he said.

Victims haven't actually been made whole, he said, because the bankruptcy court calculated the losses of FTX depositors using the time of FTX's bankruptcy declaration, when crypto prices were at a low ebb. Kavuri previously argued in bankruptcy court that the FTX estate should have held on to its Anthropic shares for longer to take advantage of the company's swift growth.

Representatives for the FTX estate declined to comment. The Justice Department spokesperson said the matter was ongoing, and that the DOJ "prioritizes victim compensation from forfeiture and takes all steps to ensure forfeited funds are provided to victims."

The government could end up just keeping the money, Bachner said.

"They've invested millions and millions and millions of dollars in prosecuting Bankman-Fried. And they want to get at least reimbursed for their costs, so sometimes they'll do that," he said. "It's really a unilateral government decision."

Jack Newsham and Katie Roof contributed reporting for this story.

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Bosses say Gen Zers aren't ready for work. Whose fault is that?

Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI

My first internship gave me a simple task: Email a press release to a large list of reporters. I followed the meticulous formatting instructions from a binder, and hit send.

Minutes later, a supervisor let me know that I had botched this most basic responsibility. I needed to BCC the list of recipients, something I had neglected to do because in my time in a college classroom, I hadn't learned what BCC meant. It was the kind of rookie mistake I couldn't anticipate and learn only by bumbling through my first office job. For today's young workers, navigating first jobs may become even more complicated.

Bosses say Gen Z isn't really workplace ready. Glenn Fogel, CEO of Priceline's parent company Bookings Holdings, has said young workers need more guidance on the norms of the office. Former Whole Foods CEO John Mackey said that young people "don't seem like they want to work." In 2024, a poll of nearly 1,000 business leaders from Intelligent.com found that 75% of companies said some or all of recent grads they hired were "unsatisfactory," and another survey of 800 HR leaders sponsored by Hult International Business School, found that 37% of HR leaders said would prefer to have a robot or AI do a job than hire a recent new grad, while another 30% said they would rather leave the job vacant.

"Workplace ready" is a slippery designation that shifts shape by industry or office. Employers hungry for workers who know how to get an ROI on AI have tied their hopes to an ever-growing cohort of AI native Gen Zers entering the workforce. After emphasizing technical skills during the 2010s, they're finding AI can automate some of that work. Communication has become more valuable, just as a generation who had their adolescence marred by COVID and grew up on screens enters the workforce. "What I think colleges need to do — and companies — is first integrate people into what is work: how do you socialize, what is expected of you, and then how can you help me with AI, using AI to help enhance our processes that we have today," says Jason Desentz, chief human resources officer at Toshiba, who sees training young people as a "shared responsibility" between schools and colleges.

Desentz also thinks schools should emphasize skills over what many think of as traditional academia. "Can we focus on the stuff that actually matters, and get rid of the fluff?" he says

"The question isn't whether colleges should prepare students for careers. They absolutely must," says Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. "It's whether we prepare students for the job that exists today, or give them the kinds of knowledge, skills, competencies, and judgments to navigate a lifetime of work in an economy that's going to continue to change, especially with the rapid proliferation of AI."

New grads may never have stepped into the office workplace ready. But today's young workers have a maze with even more twists and turns to navigate.

---

Each generation unlocks a new stigma upon entering the workforce. Gen X bosses saw Millennials as soft and spoiled, Boomer bosses saw Gen Xers as apathetic slackers, and Silent Generation bosses saw Boomers as hippies determined to disrupt the society's morals and norms. The allegations against Gen Z, who embraced Lazy Girl jobs and Quiet Quitting, are just the latest packaging.

"Every age group gets that complaint because the transition from school to work is different," says Peter Cappelli, a professor in the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. That transition smooths, and young people grow into jobs just as their parents did. But the professors I spoke to for this story agreed that these new grads are different — they're coming to college without the communication skills typical freshman had in the past.

COVID-19 shutdowns disrupted their high school experience. Gen Z has spent more time on screens and less time dating than their predecessors, and just over a third of those ages 16 to 19 worked a summer job this year, a rite of passage that reached a historic high of 58% in 1978, according to the Pew Research Center. They have grown up with parents increasingly involved in school and extracurriculars who have constant connection to their kids, some of which they have maintained throughout college and the early years of their children's careers.

A growing number of Americans are questioning the value of a college degree. A 2024 Gallup poll found that just 36% of respondents had a "great deal" of confidence in the higher education system, compared to 57% in 2015. Palantir has offered a pipeline for people to skip college and intern at the company. Stanford dropout Sam Altman recently said he thought four years was too long for college, and that the experience could be dramatically compressed.

The professors I spoke to said that if anything, today's college students need more time to develop. Tessa West, a professor of psychology at New York University who a piece for The Wall Street Journal earlier this year titled "A New Lost Generation: Why Gen Z Is Unprepared for the Workplace," says she has noticed freshman have arrived on campus less able to communicate, and with less experience in romantic relationships, debating, or confronting professors. In some ways, college professors now have to build the skills previous students had mastered upon arriving at campus into their coursework. "It falls on us to fix it," West says. "Anyone can learn the technical skills. It's the relational skills."

Now add that college students have been handed the keys to Gen AI tools that are altering how people communicate with one another and make it easier to cheat their way to a degree and enter the workforce with neutered critical thinking skills. Headlines about Gen Z in the workforce have sounded alarm bells. The Financial Times reported this spring about a finance firm that pivoted away from STEM graduates toward those with humanities degrees, after finding the 2025 intern class to have "shallow" ideas for which their AI native skills couldn't compensate.

The real office situation isn't so dire, but new grads have room to improve. Fifty-five percent of employers said new college graduates' skills at least partially aligned with hiring needs, and 42% said their skills "very closely aligned," in a survey of hiring managers conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Seventy-one percent said recent grads were "somewhat prepared" for the workforce, and only 22% were very well prepared.

NACE also asked employers what the most important skills were: professionalism, teamwork, communication, and critical thinking landed at the top. But only about half said they found new grads proficient in communication, critical thinking, and professionalism, while about 75% said the new grads were proficient in teamwork. In 2024, 66% of employers told NACE new grads had a high proficiency in critical thinking.

NACE didn't have data about these same questions going further back, but in 2014, the AAC&U surveyed top business leaders and found they were down on Millennials: Just a quarter said new grads at the time were well prepared to do critical thinking, communicating, and solving complex problems at work. A 2007 survey by the AAC&U found 63% of employers thought too many recent graduates did not have the necessary skills to thrive at work.

A vast majority of employers told NACE that recent grads were somewhat or very prepared to use AI at work. "Students are better at using AI than people in my workforce," says Annie Chechitelli, chief product officer at EdTech software company Turnitin. She says that today's students may sometimes struggle with resilience and may not have done the hard work — particularly if they become overreliant on AI, but she plans to keep hiring young people. "They're more creative thinkers. I think that they have a different perspective of the world that's more applicable."

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Seeking a target for their dissatisfaction, employers are pressuring colleges to emphasize career readiness and prepare students for the AI era, all while colleges fend off a culture war in which they must combat funding losses and defend their value to parents and prospective students who increasingly question if college is worth its skyrocketing cost.

The conversation about a lack of work readiness often skips over the employer's responsibility. Companies hiring young workers have traditionally made an implicit concession to take on the fresh faced employees who need some polishing, in exchange paying them less and assigning them tedious tasks. But many companies have slacked on training workers. Training hours for entry-level workers has been falling since the 2000s, as more training has been geared toward upskilling mid- and senior-level talent. By 2023, a majority of workers said they did not have a mentor, according to the Pew Research Center.

The rush to skill a tech workforce for lucrative jobs may have hit a turning point. From 2007 to 2022, humanities degrees dropped by 25% in most disciplines, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2012, the Obama administration set a goal of boosting STEM graduates by 1 million over the next decade, a goal that was exceeded as 4.6 million STEM graduates earned degrees by 2022. AI has lowered the bar for performing technical work, and employers have increasing interest in hiring people with liberal arts degrees. This shift over the past decade shows how hard pivots by schools and groups of young people to meet employers' expectations can create an overcorrection.

By 2023, a majority of workers said they did not have a mentor.

Colleges are taking the heat for a generational issue, scrambling to reinvest in career centers and align their classrooms with AI skill expectations, all while trying to draw the line between a smart use of AI and cheating. "I don't think they're responsible for it, but if you're thinking who could do anything about it, that's the easiest place to push," Cappelli says of colleges.

Last year, Dartmouth College rechristened its Center for Professional Development as the Center for Career Design, shifting its focus to helping students find their areas of passion rather than a direct focus on one profession, sometimes using an AI tool to narrow down options that fit their interests, a sort of aptitude test befitting for 2026. The center has set out to raise $94 million to add more career coaches, internships funded by the college, and future-proof students to a changing interview process and shifts in demand for AI skills. "We wanted students to be equipped to navigate the future of work," says Joe Catrino, the center's executive director. "It's ambiguous, it's tumultuous, it is all over the place right now."

To navigate those unknowns, Catrino says the center needs to bridge the gaps in how employers and schools talk about career readiness and skills. That includes conversations with employers about how Dartmouth students have performed in internships and first jobs, and what skills employers are seeking, while shifting how students talk about themselves and their abilities to also focus on skills rather than a quick name drop of companies and schools.

This fall, colleges welcome another class of students whose educations and childhoods have been marked by screens, AI, and anxious parents. The schools must educate them for jobs that may not yet exist in a workforce that's become chilly to new grads. The concept of what makes someone workplace ready in four years could wildly shift, but the idea that there's always some stumbling and learning to be done on the job won't.

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Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

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I couldn't land a job, so I started AI training for $15 an hour. Now I make $100 an hour and built a career around AI.

Mo Zohourian

• Mo Zohourian turned to AI training when he couldn't land a traditional 9-to-5.
• He started on generalist projects at $15/hour and now makes $100/hour as a sales specialist.
• Even though he had 15 years experience in sales, Zohourian said his AI career has grown much faster.

This is an as-told-essay based on a conversation with Mo Zohourian, who works as a contractor for AI training companies, specializing in sales management. His work and project rates have been confirmed by Business Insider. Zohourian also consults on AI for small businesses and founded Annotation Academy, an educational platform for AI training. This story has been edited for length and clarity.

I moved to Canada from Iran in 2023 and started searching for jobs. I had 15 years of experience in entrepreneurship and sales management, but after back-to-back interviews, I was not getting hired.

I had been applying for about 10 months when I saw an ad on LinkedIn offering work for $15 per hour to train AI, no experience needed. Because I didn't have a job, I said, "Okay, I'll give it a shot," but I was skeptical. I didn't even tell my wife that I started doing it until I received the first payment.

A few years later, I've built a career around AI. I now earn $100 per hour on AI evaluation as a specialist in sales management. I also consult for small businesses on how to use AI and have launched a platform to teach others how to become AI trainers.

It's been crazy. I never thought that AI would be my profession when I started doing it.

My sales experience helped me move on to higher-paying AI training projects

Initially, the work was inconsistent, and I was still looking for full-time jobs.

About three months in, I got a project for $30 an hour. The company I was doing work for had assessments you could take, and by passing them, you would be eligible to work on more important projects. I took and passed assessments for English literature, reasoning, and mathematics. I started making $35 an hour.

I started doing work for multiple companies. Sometimes I'd make $45 an hour on a project, other times $70. There isn't a baseline. Sometimes a project pays less than the one you did before it. As a freelancer, you don't have the same leverage. It is what it is. You can take it or leave it.

Everything changed when the expert jobs started to show. The biggest jump in pay and consistent work was when I started getting assigned sales projects, because that was my expertise.

Initially, the expert projects were limited to STEM fields such as physics, chemistry, and coding. As soon as they started to look for sales experts, I already had a good track record of high-quality tasks on all the platforms, so I was able to get on projects. If I hadn't had a history on these platforms, I don't think I would've gotten the higher-paying sales projects.

Now I work as a sales manager expert on high-stakes projects. I've been consistently getting on projects for $100 an hour for the past 10 months.

These projects are so different from when I started AI evaluation, when everything was so easy — just writing a prompt, writing two responses, and writing a simple justification. Now, with agentic AI and the more powerful models, the tasks are completely different and more complex.

I work a lot, but AI training gave me flexibility and the freedom to start my own business

I stopped applying to full-time jobs about three months after I started AI evaluation, but I still thought AI training was a transition job. It wasn't until about a year of AI training that I was sure it was what I wanted to do.

I typically spend 20 to 40 hours a week on AI training. There may be a one- to two-week pause, or even a monthlong pause, in a project. I always have the option to start another project. But because I have my own business, I use those windows to be more focused on what I am doing personally.

Currently, my priority is my business. I started a firm as an AI consultant helping small businesses use AI to be more efficient. I got my first client, a meal prep company, through someone I met at a party last year. I also launched Annotation Academy, an online platform where I teach people how to do AI evaluation. I got my first paying client for that on launch day in June.

I work a lot, from early in the morning to late at night. But because I can set my own schedule, I still have the luxury of spending time with my son — dropping him off, picking him up, taking him to classes. I can live a life that I love in a way that I could not if I had a full-time job.

My businesses are profitable, but I don't pay myself a salary from them. Because of my AI evaluation job, I can reinvest that money into the company for future expansion and live on my income from AI evaluation.

When I started AI training, I had some savings and was not under great financial pressure. That helped me stay in AI evaluation when the work was inconsistent. The tasks were also much simpler then, so I was able to grow in the work as the tasks became more difficult. But there is a huge demand right now for people who can deliver and who have domain expertise.

This job changed my life in a good way. After working in sales for 15 years, I was attached to it. You think you can develop faster in an industry that you built a foundation on. But for me, I could never find the quick advancement that I found in AI training.

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This creator got 'micro-canceled' for promoting Claude. She says AI use is becoming a social taboo.

Anthropic and OpenAI have partnered with influencers for paid promotions. Their comments sections are filling with a chorus of boos.

Bloomberg/Getty Images

• Emma Orhun was caught in a hailstorm of negative comments after partnering with Anthropic.
• "I was nervous that everything that they said was right," she told BI.
• Orhun said she's worried that ongoing backlash will make people less candid about AI use.

Emma Orhun was alone in her apartment when a flood of harsh comments rolled in.

"The first hour was the scariest," she told Business Insider. "People are saying mean things, and then, I have no one to turn to and be like, 'Are they right? Are they not? Am I crazy?'"

Orhun, an Ottawa-based social media influencer and former Shopify design technologist, said she was "micro-canceled" for posting a promotion for Anthropic. She received another round of backlash after talking about that experience on "The Internet is Dead" podcast.

She's not alone. Influencers — including those who make money creating promotional content for their followers — have been getting virtual rotten tomatoes flung in their direction when they pair up with AI labs.

In late July, for example, OpenAI hosted a luxury retreat in upstate New York for roughly a dozen social media personalities. The weekend event included workshops on AI use cases and a beekeeping seminar. When the influencers posted pictures of their OpenAI-branded jars of honey and videos detailing their weekend learnings, the comment sections swarmed with angry followers calling the event everything from "dystopian" to "morally bankrupt."

Orhun didn't attend that event, but her paid promotion with Anthropic received a similar response. Some longtime followers told her AI was "bad for the earth" or said they would unfollow.

"I was nervous that everything that they said was right," she told Business Insider.

The comments made her doubt herself, but they didn't change her mind. "When you yell at people about it and say, 'I'm right, you're wrong' and 'you're a terrible person,' that is no way to get on the same page about anything," she said.

On the podcast, Orhun argued that women online are often expected to act as a kind of moral compass — and suggested that men could use the same AI tools without attracting the same scrutiny.

@brittanydeitch @⌘ emma on doing a Claude brand deal and the discourse around it #ai #coding #claude #womeninstem ♬ original sound - brittany

After the clip drew its own criticism, Orhun said she would now qualify that argument. She pointed to male creators who have also faced backlash for AI promotions and said the reaction to her Claude ad "might not be a gender thing."

She still believes the broader expectation is uneven, though. Women online, she told Business Insider, are more often expected to take the ethically correct position on everything from politics to technology.

Orhun said she now worries that negative comments are putting users in what amounts to an AI closet. Continued backlash could make people less candid about their AI use, she argued.

"I know a lot of people who use the tools," she said, but "they just won't talk about it."

In her own creations, Orhun draws a line between using AI to help with technical work and using generative AI to produce artwork. She uses tools like Claude to code and work through unfamiliar technical problems, but said she won't use AI to generate her art.

"I draw every single day," she said. "I love art, human-made art so much."

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I dropped out of college to sell Pokémon cards full time. My business made $7.8 million in sales last year alone.

Andres Fernandez dropped out of his college in Florida to start his own business, which sells Pokemon cards.

Andres Fernandez

• Andres Fernandez dropped out of his business degree program in college to found his own company.
• The company, MintlyCollects, made $7.8 million in sales in 2025 and became a family business.
• Fernandez said that he believes you can't "just go with the flow" and find a direction in life.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Andres Fernandez, founder and CEO of MintlyCollects, which specializes in selling Pokémon cards on the live selling platform, Whatnot. The company's two Whatnot accounts have around 500k followers altogether. The essay has been edited for length and clarity.

I was born and raised in Miami, and I've always been an out-of-the-box kid.

When I signed up for college, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I was going to college because my mom was making me go, and I was studying business, which I find to be cliché.

After just one semester, I dropped out to be a full-time Pokémon card seller.

Rather than getting a business degree to work a corporate job, I ended up building a real business that's mine.

How I found my direction

I was super into video games, YouTube, Twitch, and content creation growing up. I had played Pokémon video games since I was 10, but I wasn't a collector. That changed when my little cousin's birthday came around, and I needed to get him a gift.

I went to Target and bought him some cards. We opened the cards together at his birthday party, and he pulled a $100 card from a $5 pack. As soon as I saw that, I was like, "I'm in. This is awesome."

I started collecting and ripping a lot of packs. At the time, I was working at a croqueta bar, frying food for $10 an hour. I was spending too much money on Pokémon cards, so I started creating content around Pokémon.

I eventually grew an account to about 30,000 followers and started selling on Instagram Live. Then Whatnot reached out to me.

I joined in late 2020, when Whatnot had just started its Pokémon side. I was probably one of the first five Pokémon streamers on the platform.

I saw the vision immediately. I grew up watching YouTube and Twitch, so I thought, "Imagine being on YouTube when YouTube first started." If you're consistent, you're going to succeed because as the platform succeeds, you're going to grow with it.

I was 20, and I stuck with it.

I built a family business

MintlyCollects has since turned into a family business, involving Fernandez's girlfriend, cousin, and close friends.

Andres Fernandez

For the first two to three years, I did everything myself. I streamed six days a week, packed orders, shipped them, and repeated the process Monday through Saturday.

My uncle eventually sat me down and said, "You're onto something. Quit your job. Stop school, and run with it."

So I did.

At first, I didn't know anything about running a business. I wasn't paying myself for the first two and a half years.

But I learned.

Eventually, I realized I couldn't do everything myself. I'm a control freak, but then I took a huge risk and spent $150,000 on my first really large sealed-product investment, and I needed help.

I turned to my friends and family and gave them a commission on the profits. If they streamed and did well, they got paid.

Now, my girlfriend works for me. Her best friend and her best friend's boyfriend work for me. My brother works for me. My girlfriend's cousin works for me. My childhood best friend also works for me.

Today, I have 10 streamers. We can stream more than 20 hours a day on one account and 15 hours a day on another, with both accounts running simultaneously.

In 2024, we did $3.7 million in sales. In 2025, we did $7.8 million, and we're on track to do more than $10 million to $11 million this year.

You can't just go with the flow anymore

Fernandez said his team is aiming to grow its sales in 2026 to over $10 million.

Andres Fernandez

People aren't going to like to hear this, but being comfortable doesn't equal success nine out of 10 times.

People think, "Oh, I'll go to college, and it'll all work out." No. You should be doing internships. You should be working. You should be gaining real experience.

I sacrificed years paying myself zero dollars to get where I'm at. The idea that you can just go with the flow and everything will work out may be true in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, but we're in a different era now.

Find a direction and an interest. If something isn't working, pivot. If you're in tech, go work for a company for free. Volunteer, gain experience, and you will figure something out.

As Gary Vaynerchuk said, you could go to a garage sale, find something, make it nicer, and flip it. Or go to Walmart and get a job, and use that money to start a local business.

Even if my business somehow failed today, I know going to figure something else out — that's how I see life.

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Snyk was worth $8.5 billion. The price of its employees' stock has collapsed.

Snyk advisor and former CEO Peter McKay.

John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

• Cybersecurity startup Snyk was valued at $8.5 billion in 2021. The rise of new AI tools hit it hard.
• The price of each Snyk share given to employees has plummeted to $1.16, a document says.
• Snyk said it doesn't comment on employee share valuations.

Snyk was one of cybersecurity's brightest startup stars, worth $8.5 billion at the height of the software boom. Now, the value of the stock it gives employees has fallen to a fraction of that, underscoring how dramatically fortunes have shifted for many software companies in the AI era.

Snyk, which is headquartered in Boston, became best-known for selling a vulnerability scanner that quickly finds bugs in code. It was valued at $8.5 billion in a 2021 funding round and at $7.4 billion in a 2022 funding round. Snyk has raised more than $1 billion from investors since its founding in 2015.

People with Snyk equity have been watching the value of their shares slide over the past few years, two former employees told Business Insider.

One recalled that around Snyk's peak valuation, their shares were worth over $10. By the summer of 2025, that had declined to around $3, the other former employee said. That figure is now down to $1.16 per share as of late August, according to an internal document.

Snyk said it doesn't comment on employee share valuations and declined to provide a valuation for Snyk at this time. Snyk said that 2026 has "brought accelerating momentum" and added that it has launched three new solutions over the past few months.

Dramatic valuation drops have hit some software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies this year due to the rise of powerful new AI systems, said Dan Morgan, a senior trust portfolio manager at Synovus Trust. Morgan added that startups are particularly vulnerable compared to larger, well-established firms.

"I would say it's definitely a trend, not an exception," he said.

Software startup Airtable, which was once valued at over $11 billion in 2021, entered into an agreement to be sold for $1.3 billion earlier this month. Another SaaS company, Domo, was once worth $2.8 billion and has a market capitalization of less than $200 million.

Snyk faces competition and a leadership shake-up

Snyk has been facing rising competition from AI labs like Anthropic and cybersecurity rivals like Wiz, which Google bought in March. Coinbase, for example, previously told Business Insider that it had used Anthropic's Claude to scan its codebase for bugs.

Snyk was growing steadily, though it remained unprofitable by the end of 2024, losing $188 million on $278 million in revenue, according to UK government records.

In December 2024, then-CEO Peter McKay told TechCrunch the company was "very close to break-even" and had plans for an initial public offering, though it wasn't rushing to do so.

Snyk has gone through at least two rounds of job cuts since 2025, according to former employees' LinkedIn posts. In June, Snyk said it was "flattening leadership" and "simplifying our structure" to move faster.

After about seven years as CEO, McKay announced in February he would step down, saying the company needed a new leader with "deep roots in product innovation and AI."

McKay now works as a "value accelerator advisor" for Goldman Sachs and as an advisor at Snyk. Snyk's chief financial officer, Kenneth MacAskill, stepped in as interim CEO.

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Alcohol became a flashpoint in the US-Canada trade war. Now both sides say they're losing.

Alcohol makers in the US and Canada say they're hurting as a result of the trade war.

John Fedele/Getty Images

• The US-Canada trade war escalated on Saturday with new 50% tariffs on Canadian alcohol.
• American booze was pulled from Canadian shelves last year and remains restricted in most of Canada.
• Alcohol makers in the US and Canada say both industries are hurting.

What started as an eye-catching retaliation tactic to tariffs has become a sticking point in the US-Canada trade war — and neither side is standing down.

The booze battle began last year after President Donald Trump imposed broad 25% tariffs on Canadian goods. Canada responded with its own 25% retaliatory tariffs targeting alcohol, among other products. The country's provinces went further, pulling American alcohol from shelves and halting new purchases or distribution.

A year and a half later, American alcohol remains shut out of much of Canada. The boycott was so effective that Trump cited it as a driving force for his latest tariffs, including a 50% tariff on alcohol from Canada that took effect on Saturday after talks between the two countries broke down.

While there's been plenty of finger-pointing about who started what, alcohol industries on both sides of the border say they're losing.

"Our industry is really just an unfortunate victim," Chris Swonger, CEO of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, said. "It's been devastating for the US industry over the last year and a half, and it's going to be significantly devastating for the Canadian spirits industry, but it'll trickle down and have an effect all the way from bartenders to our distributor partners to retailers to the American hospitality economy."

Alcohol represents just a tiny sliver of the hundreds of billions of dollars in goods traded between the US and Canada, but the impact of the trade war on the industry has been especially severe and visible, in part due to the outright bans as well as the direct impact on beloved alcohol brands.

For alcohol makers, the industry is also an unusual target for a trade war that's partially aimed at shifting manufacturing back to the US. Unlike other goods, alcohol is often prized specifically because of its country of origin. You can't make Canadian whisky in the US.

"An American consumer may love Canadian whisky, and someone else may love tequila," Swonger said.

The US and Canadian industries are calling for an end to the alcohol bans and tariffs

Canadian provinces, which control alcohol imports, enacted bans on American alcohol around March 2025, the same month Canada levied its retaliatory tariffs. While those tariffs were lifted in September 2025, most of the province-level bans remained in place.

Some provinces started allowing existing American stock to be sold, but continued to ban new imports. Eight out of 10 provinces still have some restrictions in place, with Alberta and Saskatchewan as the exceptions.

The bans turned out to be one of the more headline-grabbing results of the trade war. They were also effective at inflicting economic pain: Imports of US alcohol to Canada fell by 81%, from about $718 million to $137 million, from March 2025 through February 2026, compared with the preceding year, according to the White House. In comparison, total US exports to Canada fell 4.8% in 2025.

American alcohol makers felt they were being unfairly targeted. Lawson Whiting, CEO of Brown-Forman, the parent company of Jack Daniel's, said last year the bans were a "disproportionate" response to the tariffs. On an earnings call in June, the company said its organic sales in Canada fell nearly 60% in its 2026 fiscal year, as its products remained off shelves in most Canadian provinces.

Canadian provinces banned American alcohol in early 2025. Most of those restrictions are still in place.

VCG/VCG via Getty Images

Now, Canadian makers, which are far more dependent on the US market than their American counterparts are on the Canadian market, face Trump's new 50% tariffs, which he said were a direct response to "Canadian discrimination" against American-made booze.

The tariffs impact spirits, wine, and beer, with the most popular Canadian booze export to the US being Canadian whisky. Popular brands like Crown Royal, Canadian Club, and Fireball — the latter of which is made in America with imported Canadian whisky — could be affected.

"Both the Canadian and American spirits industries have felt significant impacts of this broader trade dispute," Cal Bricker, President and CEO of Spirits Canada, said in a statement in July.

Canadian spirit makers rely more heavily on exports to the US than American makers do on exports to Canada. Before the bans, Canada accounted for about 10% of US spirits exports. But 93% of all of Canada's spirits exports by value went to the US, according to Spirits Canada. Of all the spirits produced in Canada, nearly 50% are tied to US demand, the group says.

The bans on American alcohol didn't necessarily translate to an increase in sales for Canadian makers, either. Following the bans, overall spirits sales in Canada fell about 4.4% by volume, while sales volumes of Canadian-made spirits were essentially flat, according to Spirits Canada.

The alcohol bans were a key part of the failed negotiations

The provincial bans became a major talking point last week as Canadian and US officials sought to make a deal to avoid new tariffs.

Swonger said the alcohol industry feels it has unfairly become a "leverage point in broader trade negotiations." He said that while distillers appreciated Trump's efforts to prioritize the US alcohol industry going into negotiations, they also wanted to avoid the new 50% tariffs and get the bans lifted instead.

Prime Minister Mark Carney asked Canadian provinces to return US alcohol to their shelves last week as the countries closed in on a deal. Officials in two provinces, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, signaled they were ready to lift bans on American alcohol if a broader deal was reached.

Newfoundland said Thursday it would resume ordering American products, but changed course days later after the trade talks failed.

Canadian makers have also been telling the Canadian provincial governments that the policy intended to punish America is endangering them as well.

"While intended as a response to broader trade tensions, those measures have now become the stated basis for direct US retaliation against Canadian spirits exports," Spirits Canada said in July, encouraging the federal and provincial governments to work together to avoid US retaliation.

Now, trade associations in Canada and the US are pushing for the same goal: end the mini trade war over alcohol.

"We like to compete by sip and taste," Swonger said. "Not by trade barriers."

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