agents do the same thing - the recent Minecraft experiment was illuminating and anyone using enough of agent swarms/clusters have experienced similar things .

Maybe bureaucracy is emergent property of intelligence.

> increasing the workers' income tax bill.

They are not giving anything to employees for their personal use to use as they please, it is not part of their benefits whatsoever. It is work tooling, paid for by work. This is akin to Microsoft paying for Github or O365 for their staff. they can hardly put it in benefits, it has nothing to do with employee compensation or their taxable benefits.

OP is just using the benefits analogy as a comparison how IRS typically accounts for similar things when it is a benefit.

Employees staying at hotel for their personal vacation is a taxable benefit. Employees staying at a hotel as part of their job is a perk, and not considered a taxable benefit - A cruise ship can hardly say cost of cruise is now part of employee benefits (for tax it is not part of your comp) . They can of course market it as a "perk" to attract talent - same as the armed forces using cool extreme sport videos as an talent attraction tool. You can use in marketing yes, but it not part of your compensation.

Anthropic and other Frontier labs /Big Tech can definitely pitch token allowances as a selling point part of recruitment, but it cannot be counted as a taxable benefit - unless the employee can use it as they please outside work for any personal reason.

The CFOs he is talking about are the enterprises who are spending big money on the tokens ; they are not seeing RoI ; not hyperscalers or frontier labs

Yep, i can't disclose specific numbers but we went from $X/month/person budgets to $X-100/month recently, and this is a pretty big company with ~5000 people. From what I can tell the pursestrings are only tightening further too, too little actual real-world benefit for the obscene spend

% would be helpful, is it -1% or -100% per month per person?

Correct. The people that control the pot of money these labs ultimately need to survive seem increasingly unconvinced that giving these labs money is a good idea. At least at the levels the labs need to not go bankrupt.

Just a tad bit more ; it like saying either an event will happen or not so probability is 50%.

Your scenario is certainly possible, that doesn’t make both predictions equally (un)likely.

A similar incident would be the 1Billion robbery of the Bangladesh central bank

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery

Most of it was stopped and some was even recovered but $66Million is still lost 10years later .

In both incidents protection are reliant on the authorities to minimize the damage ; tether and circle able to freeze tokens is not that different from the traditional finance doing it.

Crypto is only reinventing structures that evolved in every financial system over time.

Overtime they are going away from their founding theme of decentralization . Exchanges and stable coin issuers who can freeze wallets and coins are by definition centralization ; it is worse though as these organizations are less transparent than banks with less accountability

And as the stable coin operators and exchanges grow closer with governments and political elites they will add more and more controls in exchange for legitimacy.

Azure (and AWS) offer Gov clouds, and probably on prem air-gapped deployment of their full stack of Fabric for that type of NEED security customers who can pay for it.

It is trade-off between risk and access/productivity with a cost dimension always.

Depending on your threat model you could go to typewriters /paper as some Russian department did famously few years back too.

I setup parts of govcloud.

The real sensitive customers are on oxide.

AWS (and others) have ladders of this was my point. GovCloud is just the one end of the this AWS also regions for Secret and Top Secret work which are reported to be air-gapped. There are probably programs beyond that where the customers are operating the stack fully on their own and so forth.

Perhaps OP means to say it is a honeypot criminals create for us ...

Not the best analogy; water is famously not wet; it makes a surface wet is the common consensus ; wetness is being a property of a surface

No, it is famously a pointless internet debate with no settled answer. There is no scientific definition of what can or can't be wet, saying that wetness only applies to surfaces is just an opinion. It's an entirely linguistic question, and most people would say water is wet. If you want more than descriptivism, the common definition is something like 'containing or being covered with liquid', and I think most people would agree that a mass of water contains water.

Not exactly? Options vested is yours to exercise within typically a 60 day[1] window or they expire if you are no longer in the employ of the company.

Exercising your vested options is a taxable event[2] and requires you to upfront some cash to buy the stock depending on what price(and rounds) your options were issued at- this price usually is considerably less than enterprise value of the same share lets say it is $1 and FMV of $100 at the time of issue, however even just $1 for vested 500,000 options is still $500,000 now.

For this simple[4] scenario you need $500,000 immediately to exercise the options into stock before they expire and about ~$13.86M by April to own[5]all stock if ends up say trading at $200 you are worth $100M then.

There are all kinds of funds who would loan you the money or buy the stock off you now on the secondary market, but vested options does not mean owned stock, and selling quickly after exercise is much higher tax under some scenarios.

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[1]Some companies have generous(relatively) terms ex-employees to exercise up-to 5-10years later; but it not default in the industry.

[2] This close to IPO that should be relatively small risk; i.e. if the company pulls IPO you still have to pay tax end of the year; if you exercise them.

[3] NSO/ISOs work quite differently, and options vest monthly in most corps and there are lot of creative structures out there; so cannot say how it would be for ANT employee specifically.

[4] Simple - because there usually more than singe 409A valuation and more than single set of options plan issued and plenty of other complex calculus only a finance expert would advise on.

[5] You could sell the shares to pay the ~14M-ish in tax but that could be disqualifying sale(2 year after grant, 1 year after exercise) for ISO meaning you will need to pay effectively 40M tax on your 100M holdings versus only ~$27M otherwise, so you would a take loan against the shares rather than sell to pay the tax.