🍭 Ransomware vs. Renderers 🥷

Good morning. Artists, Hackers, and Senators all walk into a bar…

Ok intern didn’t give me a punchline 🤦‍♂️

Let’s dig in.

🍭 What’s Cookin’:

• Artists vs Hackers

• Anthropic Backs new AI Bill

• ToolBox™: Film Without Filming

• And Everything Else

OpenAI
🥷 New Ransomware Just Dropped

The Bite: A new ransomware crew calling itself LunaLock just went after Artists&Clients, the platform where freelancers pick up commissions.

Their ransom note?
Pay us $50K or we’ll dump your stolen art into AI training datasets.

Yes, we’ve officially reached the “threaten to feed your work to Claude” phase of cybercrime.

First flagged by 404 Media, other outlets have since confirmed key details.

Snacks:

• $50K or bust: Hackers say they’ll leak stolen art and pump it into LLMs.

• Wrong target? Artists don’t exactly have enterprise-level cash flow.

• Ex-FBI, Cynthia Kaiser says it’s “novel, but probably won’t stick.”

• Tools like Glaze or Nightshade can “poison” art so AI can’t ingest it.

• Already lawyering up: Anthropic just paid $1.5B to settle with authors over data scraping. So yeah, stolen work isn’t a theoretical problem.

Why it Bites: “Pay us or we’ll ‘AI-ruin’ your portfolio” is nasty but maybe weak leverage.

Corporations and hospitals pay to stop operational chaos; freelancers don’t.

The threat may be more theater than tactic unless bigger marketplaces start getting hit.

Stop pretending you read those email attachments

Just forward or Cc the offending emails to [email protected].

We’ll reply with smart answers.

(You can even try forwarding this newsletter).

Steal This Prompt
🍩 See yourself as a Simpsons character

Jump into Springfield with bold lines and cartoon simplicity.

Upload the reference first, then your image second.

(Prompt link below. D’oh not included.)

1. Click this link (prompt)

2. Copy/Paste prompt into GPT

3. Upload reference image

4. Upload subject image

   
   🍭 Try the prompt on Snack Prompt 🍭

Everything Else
🧠 You Need to Know

💰 Koah raises $5M to bring ads into AI apps:

→ Most AI startups lose money.
Investors are betting that Koah’s model could save some of these startups’ burn rates.

🦄 In 2025, Europe birthed 10 unicorn startups:

→ TechCrunch compiled a list of these 10 companies.
Investment season is about to kick back off in Europe after VCs took the summer off.

👨‍🚀 SpaceX closes $17B deal:

→ Elon’s space company, SpaceX, is acquiring EchoStar’s spectrum for Starlink’s direct-to-phone service.

👨‍⚖️ Adtech company sues Google:

→ PubMatic, the advertising technology company, is suing Google for “monopolizing the ad technology market.”

🎥 OpenAI is making a movie??

→ The AI giant is creating an animated film called, Critterz.
The mission is to show Hollywood that AI can deliver high quality results at a fraction of the cost.

ToolBox™
🧰 5 AI Tools to Film Without Filming

🎬 CapCut AI Suite — AI video editor

→ Prompt-led editing with auto cuts, avatars, and asset generation—fast from camera to publish.

🎥 Synthesia — AI video from text

→ Produce training, onboarding, and explainer videos with expressive avatars—no cameras needed.

🧠 DeepBrain AI — Text-to-video studio

→ Generate videos with customizable AI avatars and intuitive editing—built for creators and teams.

🧑‍🎤 HeyGen — Your digital twin, on demand

→ Avatar videos that mirror gestures and tone for lifelike results—record once, publish everywhere.

Anthropic
💰 Big AI Backs California’s New AI Bill

The Bite: In Sacramento, Anthropic is doing something rare for a frontier lab: actually endorsing regulation.

The company just gave a full-throated “yes” to SB 53;

An AI law that forces big labs to be way less secretive.

It will force them to publish report cards, safety notes, and receipts on how their models actually work, instead of just dropping a blog post and calling it a day.

Snacks:

• Official stance: Anthropic literally posted: “We support SB 53.”

• Transparency: First state bill that forces big AI to actually show their work.

• Timing: Anthropic just shelled out $1.5B to settle with authors over pirated training data.

• Political spin: Politicians called it “first-in-the-nation” legislation.

Why it bites: When a company cheers for rules that restrict it, you’re either watching genuine maturity or some elite-level judo where regulation becomes PR armor.

Either way, this bill could become the blueprint for how states deal with frontier labs:

Open the box, show us the receipts, and stop pretending copyright lawsuits are just “cost of doing business.”