Tech Brew Ride Home - The New King Of All Media

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

Sources say the US 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. Justice Department Probes Iran’s Use of Binance to Evade Sanctions (WSJ) Meta, Thai police shut down 150,000 scam accounts (Axios) Anthropic is launching a new think tank amid Pentagon blacklist fight (The Verge) YouTube Lays Claim to Another Crown: The World’s Largest Media Company (THR) Nintendo Shares Soar 10% as Surprise Hit Pokémon Game Lifts Mood (Bloomberg) TikTok Teams With Apple Music to Allow Users to Stream Full Songs (Variety) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Welcome to the TechBrew Ride Home for Wednesday, March 11th, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. Sources say the U.S. government is investigating finance around Iranian sanction of Asian. META is helping authorities worldwide crack down on scammers. YouTube literally now is officially the BORNESA.

biggest media entity in the world, and the legal way to listen to full songs right inside of TikTok. Here's what you miss 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, Chang Peng Zhao, known as CZ, received a pardon from President Trump in October. Bidenance pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating U.S. anti-money laundering and sanctions laws paying $4.3 billion in fines and agreeing to operate under U.S. oversight. Shao 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 set 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 finance its proxies, including Yemen's healthy 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 2020 agreement with U.S. 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 blocked 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, quote, uncovered a sophisticated, multi-jurisdictional pattern of financial activity,

and that the Iranian connections were, quote, 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 Dal Jones over the Wall Street Journal's February 20. third article on the crypto exchanges handling of Iran-linked transactions. Meta has disabled more than 150,000 accounts worldwide as the Royal Thai Police, the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice, and others are apparently in the process of disrupting 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 Ogranovich, 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. U.S. 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, Agravich 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, quote, 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. Per of the company. The news comes with C-suite changes to 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, and, 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 Anthropics sued the U.S. government over its designation as a supply chain risk, which would bar its clients from using Anthropics 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 its sense. 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 Anthropics' 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 Botvinnik, formerly of Google Deep Mind, Anton Korenek, a professor on leave from the University of Virginia's Department of Economics, and Zoe Hitzig, a researcher who left Open AI after its decision to introduce ads within chat GPT. 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 AI's implications for the economy and the labor market. The Anthropic Institute also plans to incubate new teams such as a team led by Botvinik, studying how AI will impact the legal system. Hitzig and Koronek 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 Anthropics' 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 work last year, he focused more on policy matters like SB 53 than he did on AI research and development

and other matters he wanted to give attention to. Anthropics said in a release that the Anthropic Institute is specifically dedicated to answering the, quote, hardest questions posed by powerful AI, end quote. No one goes to Hank's for spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet, so Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs

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I do harp on this a lot I know but I think it's worth noting That this is an official milestone own, quoting the Hollywood reporter. YouTube's cultural influence is already hard to ignore, but 2025 could nonetheless be a turning point for the Google-owned video platform. It's the year it became the world's largest media company. YouTube had more than $60 billion in revenue in 2025, parent company Alphabet

reported last month. Now the influential financial research firm Moffat Nathanson runs the numbers and comes to the conclusion that YouTube's estimated $62 billion in 2025 will have allowed it to past the Walt Disney Company's media business, which generated $60.9 billion last year, excluding Disney's lucrative experiences division. The firm which declared YouTube the new king of all media last year is now valued at between $500 and $560 billion, far above any traditional media competitors. The closest would be Netflix, which has a market cap of about $409 billion as of writing. YouTube's ad revenue hit $11.4 billion in Q4, totaling over $40 billion for

the year, but it also has an enormous subscription business encompassing YouTube premium, YouTube music, NFL Sunday ticket, and the YouTube TV virtual multi-channel video service. YouTube TV now has around 10 million subscribers and is likely to overtake pay TV leaders, charter, and Comcast in the coming years. YouTube now has paid out more than $100 billion to creators, music companies, and media partners reflecting its starring role in the entertainment ecosystem. There are two really fundamental things that we do for creators. YouTube CEO Neil Mohan told the Hollywood reporter last year just a few hours after announcing the milestone. One is help them build an audience and connect with their fans, regardless of where

those fans are in the world. And the second thing we do is we help them build businesses. That's what that $100 billion represents for me. Moffett Nathitson argues that the scale as a distributor, both of pay TV and creator-led content, will help YouTube continue its explosive growth. So will its heavy investment into AI tools, which will allow creators to produce more content at a faster cadence. Over the next few years, unlike almost any other asset we cover, we strongly believe that YouTube will be a major beneficiary of both the structural tailwinds and headwinds facing technology and media companies. Michael Nathanson writes, end quote. I told you recently that people were thinking Nintendo was sort of in trouble,

but now people have changed their minds. Nintendo's stock has jumped more than 10.5% its steepest climb since April 2025 after Pokemon Pocopia, a Switch-2 exclusive released on March 5th, sold out at major U.S. retailers. Quoting Bloomberg, Switch-2 momentum is surging thanks to the viral hit, helping to counteract memory-cost headwinds that have weighed on Nintendo stock since late 2025, wrote Jeffrey's analyst Atul Goyal in a note. Amazon has already raised the price of the Pokemon title to around $80 and a sign of its popularity, he added.

Pokemon Pocopoeia's success is a welcome surprise for Nintendo investors who have been battered by fears that skyrocketing memory prices fueled by insatiable demand for AI could squeeze the company's margins. The Pokemon game was a dark horse, said Hedeki Yasuda, a senior analyst at Toyo's securities. It was totally off people's radars, making its popularity a positive development. The Animal Crossing-style game has been flying off store shelves from Japan to Canada, underscoring its global appeal, he said. However, even taking into account, Wednesday, days climbed, Nintendo's shares have lost almost 30% from a recent peak in November, end quote. So, apparently, Pocopia shifts away from the traditional Pokemon battling toward a social, cozy

experience, again, very much like Animal Crossing. It's on a tropical island just like Animal Crossing, and players focus on building and decorating their own personal spaces while interacting with various Pokemon. It's all customization, friendship building, and low-stress activities like photography and exploration, apparently. Finally, today, TikTok is partnering with Apple to let Apple music subscribers play full songs without leaving the TikTok app and also use a listening party feature in the coming weeks, quoting variety. The company is announced on Wednesday that they will launch Play Full Song, which gives Apple Music subscribers the option to hear a full song they might discover while browsing on TikTok. The Play Full Song button can be found on the For You page or the

sound detail page for any given song, and users can save those songs to your music and add them directly to their Apple Music playlist. Additionally, Apple Music and TikTok are introducing a listening party feature where fans can communally listen to songs from a specific artist and interact with each other in a chat. Thus far, artists are curatorially chosen to use the listening party feature, but it's expected to expand in the near future. Both product integrations will be rolled out worldwide in the coming weeks. Tapping into the music you love should feel effortless, said Apple Music's only Oberman in a statement. TikTok previously dabbled in the music streaming space with its TikTok music product,

which was angled as a competitor to Spotify and Apple Music. A parent company ByteDance launched TikTok music outside of the United States, but eventually sunsetted the service before it could reach the market in November 2024. TikTok also partnered with Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music in 2023 to launch the ad to music app feature, which let users save songs from TikTok to third-party music streaming services. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow. Ryan Reynolds here for MintMobil. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities,

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