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Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Wednesday, March 11, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, sources say the U.S. government is investigating Binance around Iranian sanction evasion. Meta is helping authorities worldwide crack down on scammers YouTube literally now is officially the biggest media entity in the world and the legal way to listen to full songs right inside of TikTok. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech the Journal says that the U.S. department of justice is investigating Iran's use of Binance to evade sanctions, focusing on money flowing to networks backing terror groups like Yemen's Houthis. Quote the probe follows the crypto exchanges dismantling of an internal investigation into more than $1 billion that flowed through the platform to a network funding Iran backed terror groups, according to company documents and people familiar with the matter. Officials have contacted people with knowledge of the Iranian transactions to seek interviews and gather evidence, some of the people said. The Wall Street Journal couldn't determine whether the Justice Department is investigating Binance itself for potential misconduct or solely the customers on its platform. The inquiry puts the world's largest crypto exchange back in the legal spotlight after its founder Changpeng Zhao, known as cz, received a pardon from President Trump in October. Binance pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating U.S. anti money laundering and sanctions laws, paying 4.3 billion DOL fines and agreeing to operate under U.S. oversight. Zhao pleaded guilty to a related charge and spent four months in jail. The Treasury Department appointed monitor overseeing the company's compliance program also recently requested that the exchange provide information about the Iranian transactions, including about a business partner that sent much of the money, according to people familiar with the requests. Binance suspended the employees investigating their transactions last November, not long after they flagged $1.7 billion moving from Chinese clients into digital wallets used by Iran to its proxies, including Yemen's Houthi militants, the Journal reported last month, citing internal reports submitted by the employees. Of that total more than $1 billion was sent by the business partner, a Hong Kong based payments company called blessed trust. Binance's 2023 agreement with US authorities requires it to screen clients for potential terrorism financing and sanctions evasion and to report suspicious transactions to the Treasury Department. The company last year asked department officials to remove its monitor, which is scheduled to continue until 2029 and has BL many of the monitor's earlier requests, the Journal has previously reported. Binance has said it was confident it complies with all reporting obligations and it cooperates with law enforcement and regulators. A Binance spokesman said the exchange categorically did not directly transact with any sanctioned entities. He said that the company uncovered a sophisticated multi jurisdictional pattern of financial activity and that the Iranian connections were only identified and sanctioned after Binance began investigating and taking action in lockstep with law enforcement to shut down this network. End quote. Worth noting that Binance has filed a New York defamation lawsuit against Dow Jones over The Wall Street Journal's February 23rd article on the crypto exchange's handling of Iran linked transactions. Meta has disabled more than 150,000 accounts worldwide as the Royal Thai Police, the FBI, the US Department of Justice and others are apparently in the process of disrupt criminal scam centers in Southeast Asia, quoting Axios. These centers power many large scale romance, cryptocurrency and law enforcement impersonation scams targeting Americans. Officials say the networks are getting more targeted and more sophisticated. Meta assisted the Royal Thai Police during the second Joint Disruption Week, a coordinated international crackdown on scam operations. Meta shared platform data about suspicious activity tied to scam networks. When platforms and law enforcement can share information and coordinate our efforts, we can disrupt these scam networks faster and more effectively than any of us can do alone, david Agranovich, Meta's director of global threat disruption, told reporters. Many scam texts and phone calls originate from trafficked workers forced into cyber scam centers in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, often run by Chinese criminal groups. US Law enforcement and the Treasury Department have been stepping up their operations against these centers over the last year, imposing sanctions, making arrests and issuing an executive order. As AI tools improve, scammers are using them to create convincing Personas, generate multilingual scripts and tailor outreach to specific targets. In a threat report published Wednesday, Meta said scam groups are shifting from high volume romance and crypto schemes to more targeted tactics. They're identifying wealthy individuals or people in high trust roles and impersonating regulators, attorneys or law enforcement to pressure them to pay fake fines or surrender account credentials. Scammers are becoming increasingly nimble, Agranovich said. Meta is rolling out new features across Facebook, messenger and WhatsApp to help users spot scams. Earlier on Facebook, users will get alerts if a new friend request shows suspicious signals. WhatsApp will warn users if a link or device linking requests looks suspicious or tries to take over their account. Messenger will offer an AI review tool that scans conversations for common scam patterns, including suspicious job offers. End quote. Anthropic has debuted Anthropic Institute, an internal think tank led by co founder Jack Clark combining its societal impacts, Red Team and economic research teams. Quoting the Verge, it will focus on researching AI's large scale implications, such as what happens to jobs and economies, whether AI makes us safer or introduces new dangers, how its values might shape ours, and whether we can retain control Part of the company. The news comes with C Suite Changes 2 AnthroPic co founder Jack Clark is moving into a new role leading the think tank. His new title will be Head of Public Benefit after more than five years as head of public policy. The public policy team, which tripled in size in 2025 per anthropic, will now be led by Sarah Heck, who has formerly headed external affairs. Anthropic will also open its planned office in Washington, D.C. and the public policy team will continue to focus on issues like national security, AI, infrastructure, energy, quote democratic leadership in AI. Clark told the Verge that the Anthropic Institute's debut has been in the works for a while and that he's been thinking about moving into a role like this since November. But the timing comes just days after Anthropic sued the US Government over its designation as a supply chain risk, which would bar its clients from using Anthropic's tech in all of their own work with the Department of Defense. The suit alleges that the Trump administration illegally blacklisted the company for setting red lines on mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous lethal weapons. When asked about this, Clark said it's never dull working in AI here at Anthropic. There's always something going on. The pace of AI progress isn't slowing itself down for external events, and neither are we. Clark said the situation hasn't directly changed the planned research agenda, but that he felt it has affirmed Anthropic's decision to release more information to the public. What we're experiencing with the last few weeks just sort of shows you how much hunger there is for a larger national conversation by the public about this technology, he said. The Anthropic Institute launches with about 30 people, including founding members Matt Botvinek, formerly of Google DeepMind Anton Korenek, a professor on leave from the University of Virginia's Department of Economics and Zoe Hitzig, a researcher who left OpenAI after its decision to introduce ads within ChatGPT. The new think tank combines Anthropic Societal Impact teams, which studies AI's impact on different areas of society its Frontier Red Team, which stress tests AI systems for vulnerabilities and issues and its Economic Research Team, which tracks a implications for the economy and the labor market. The Anthropic Institute also plans to incubate new teams, such as a team led by Botvinnik studying how AI will impact the legal system. Hitzig and Korenek will lead large economic research projects. Clark said he expects the think tank's number of staff will double every year for the foreseeable future. Is Anthropic concerned about devoting more resources to long term research when it's very likely to lose some portion of its income in the short term? When the Verge asked Clark, he said he had no concerns. People tend to buy trust, clark said, and a lot of what we can produce are the sort of research that help businesses trust us long term. Anthropic has always viewed its investment in safety and studying and reporting on the safety of its systems as being not a cost center, but a profit center. Clark also said he believes that powerful AI, essentially Anthropic's own term for AGI, or artificial general intelligence, will arrive by the end of this year or early 2027, and that he decided to change roles largely due to the pace of AI progress. He added that when he looked back at his last year, he focused more on policy matters like SB53 than he did on AI research and development and other matters he wanted to give attention to. Anthropic said in a release that the Anthropic Institute is specifically dedicated to answering the hardest questions posed by powerful AI. End quote.