Transcript
Commercial Announcer (0:00)
This message comes from Capital One with the Venture X card. Earn unlimited double miles, a $300 annual capital one travel credit and access to airport lounges. Capital One what's in your wallet? Terms apply. Details@Capital1.com.
Lakshmi Singh (0:18)
Live from NPR News. I'm Lakshmi Singh. President Trump's pardon Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. The crypto billionaire had pleaded guilty to failing to establish enough guardrails in the world's largest crypto exchange to block money from flowing to terrorists and other criminal groups. After pleading guilty in 2023, he was sentenced to four months in prison. The Trump White House today says the prosecution was part of a Biden administration war on cryptocurrency. Democratic lawmakers have raised ethics concerns about such pardons. The NBA Portland Trailblazers head coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat player Terry Rozier are among dozens of people arrested by federal agents in connection with an FBI investigation into two illegal gambling schemes. One involved bets on NBA games and the other involved underground poker games. NPR's Becky Sullivan reports.
Becky Sullivan (1:15)
Federal officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel say that NBA insiders such as Rozier passed along confidential info to organized crime operations to place illegal bets on games.
Lakshmi Singh (1:25)
This is the insider trading saga for the NBA.
Bobby Allen (1:29)
That's what this is.
Becky Sullivan (1:30)
Rozier was previously investigated by the NBA back in 2023 after the league was alerted to suspicious bets on a game of his that year. The league had cleared him of wrongdoing. In a statement, npr, Rozier's lawyer said Rozier was not a gambler and that he, quote, looks forward to winning this fight. The second indictment alleges that crime groups used former NBA stars like Billups to lure unsuspecting victims into high roller underground poker games than cheated victims out of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Becky Sullivan, NPR News.
Lakshmi Singh (1:58)
The NBA has placed both players on leave from their teams and says it will continue to cooperate with the relevant authorities. Social media site Reddit is suing artificial intelligence company Perplexity over alleged data theft. NPR's Bobby Allen reports. It's the latest legal battle over the controversial data collection practices of the AI industry.
Bobby Allen (2:22)
Reddit says AI search engine Perplexity and other data scraping companies engage in a industrial scale unlawful collection of comments from millions of the site's users. Lawyers for Reddit compare the actions to would be bank robbers who can't get into a vault so they break into an armored truck instead. Perplexity denied the allegation, saying its practices remained principled and responsible. A wave of lawsuits are now playing out centered on how AI companies train chatbots to become so powerful. Vast corners of the Internet have been scanned without permission, spurring copyright lawsuits from publications like the New York Times. In this case, Reddit says other AI chatbots have struck licensing deals, but perplexity has refused. Bobby Allen, NPR News.