According to Beating AI news, the San Francisco police received a 911 call reporting that an Anthropic user threatened the company's CEO and claimed to be bringing an AR-15 rifle to the office at 500 Howard St. to harm employees working there. The police intervened, but the identity of the caller has not been disclosed, and there are currently no updates on the situation. This is not the first time Anthropic has received violent threats in recent months. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that in April, someone entered their headquarters lobby claiming that an executive 'would be killed'; in the same month, there were threats made against employees' families, and in June, another individual threatened to bring a handgun to the company over a refund issue.

On August 19, the Korean won broke the 1400 mark against the US dollar for the first time since October of last year.

On August 19, according to monitoring by PeckShield, the liquidity protocol Maya Protocol was hacked, resulting in a loss of assets valued at $1.7 million, with the primary asset being 20 bitcoins.

On August 19, according to TradingBeats (formerly Hyperinsight), Yushu Technology's contract liquidation volume reached $6.31 million in nearly 4 hours, ranking first. Among these, the largest single short position liquidation exceeded $570,000. Additionally, on trade.xyz, the 24-hour trading volume for Yushu Technology contracts reached $42.24 million, with a contract open interest of $32.02 million. Currently, there are 486 long positions and 728 short positions on the platform.

On August 19, new developments emerged regarding the Coldcard hardware wallet theft that occurred in July 2026. The Bitkey team under Block discovered that the initial attackers had used a paid account from a well-known blockchain data service provider to query the affected addresses. Internal logs from the relevant platform showed a high degree of matching in terms of request volume, timing, and execution sequence, suggesting that law enforcement may have identified the attackers. Previous tracking by Galaxy Research indicated that the first wave of attacks transferred 1,082.65 BTC, which remains in the attackers' addresses. The total losses from this Coldcard vulnerability incident have exceeded 1,800 BTC, affecting over 5,000 addresses. Investigations revealed that the attack stemmed from a random number generation vulnerability in some Coldcard firmware, resulting in insufficient entropy for private key generation, allowing attackers to compute and crack the wallets. Coldcard has since released a fix and urged affected users to migrate their funds as soon as possible.

On August 19, according to an official announcement, Binance contracts will launch Yushu Technology on August 19, 2026, at 10:45.

On August 19, Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX and Chief Investment Officer of Maelstrom, addressed questions regarding his continued investment in AI and crypto projects despite believing there is a bubble in AI. Hayes responded by stating that the current AI bubble primarily exists in the 'debt used to build data centers' and in the stock valuations of loss-making hyperscalers and cutting-edge AI laboratories, rather than in the AI technology and applications themselves. He remarked, 'Price is what you pay, value is what you get.' He expressed his '100% belief in the agentic economy,' a new economic model driven by AI agents. He further pointed out that the substantial debt-funded construction of data centers could ultimately lead to an oversupply of computing power, which would reinforce the investment logic and promote the development of his supported AI+crypto project, Flop Labs. Previously, Hayes has discussed the impact of AI capital expenditures on market liquidity, suggesting that since the commercialization of ChatGPT, a significant amount of funding has flowed into AI infrastructure, squeezing the space for the crypto market to gain new liquidity.

On August 19, Bank of America released its August Global Fund Manager Survey, which showed that among the 180 asset management representatives surveyed (with a total management scale exceeding $500 billion), the level of optimism has surged to the third highest since 2022. This indicates that bullish sentiment in the financial markets has climbed to its highest point in nearly four years. This extreme exuberance is clearly reflected in the institutional positioning. The survey reveals that the current cash allocation ratio of fund managers has dropped to 3.5%, the lowest range since the survey began in 1998. Bank of America's Chief Equity Strategist Michael Hartnett pointed out that according to Bank of America's 'cash rule', when the cash ratio falls to or below 4%, it typically triggers a 'contrarian sell signal'. This means that the current market positioning has become overly crowded, and in the absence of continued incremental capital inflows, any negative shocks related to growth, inflation, or policy could provoke significant market volatility. In light of the current extremely optimistic environment, Bank of America also proposed some contrarian investment ideas in the survey. Given the global institutions' general underweight in bonds and gold, taking a contrarian long position in bonds or buying undervalued gold or UK stocks may provide better defensive returns when market sentiment reverses.

On August 19, Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX and Chief Investment Officer of Maelstrom, addressed questions regarding his investments in AI/crypto projects despite believing there is a bubble in AI. Hayes responded that the current AI bubble primarily exists in the 'debt used to build data centers' and the stock valuations of loss-making hyperscalers and cutting-edge AI labs, rather than in AI technology and applications themselves. He stated, 'Price is what you pay, value is what you get.' He expressed his '100% belief in the agentic economy,' a new economic model driven by AI agents. He further pointed out that the large-scale construction of data centers funded through borrowing could ultimately lead to an oversupply of computing power, which would reinforce the investment logic and promote the development of his supported AI + crypto project, Flop Labs. Previously, Hayes has also discussed the impact of AI capital expenditures on market liquidity, arguing that since the commercialization of ChatGPT, significant funds have flowed into AI infrastructure, squeezing the space for the crypto market to gain new liquidity.

On August 19, U.S. President Trump posted on social media stating: In light of the agreement reached between Canada and the United States, I have suspended the 50% tariff measures that were set to take effect tomorrow morning for a period of three days! The great Keystone XL pipeline, which was long ago killed by Joe Biden, may have a chance to be revived! (Jin Shi)