Crypto users who thought they had found a way into the hottest IPO in years through tokenized SpaceX stock discovered on Friday that the shares would not be arriving. Binance Wallet, Bybit, and Bitget Wallet all canceled their tokenized SpaceX offerings after xStocks, the tokenized equity provider behind all three products, failed to deliver the underlying assets. According to CoinDesk, xStocks and its partners had gathered more than $1 billion in customer orders tied to SpaceX access before the mechanism collapsed.

Bybit had launched the earliest campaign on June 7, introducing SpaceX as the first offering on its IPO Express product and telling users they could “participate in the SpaceX IPO subscription using crypto and gain early access before spot trading begins.” Binance Wallet followed with its own SPCXx campaign on Thursday, describing it as a “non-guaranteed subscription process” through xStocks. Bitget Wallet told users on June 9 that they could “access tokenized stock exposure to SpaceX” through the same provider.

When SpaceX actually went public on Friday, none of the crypto allocations materialised. Bybit told users that “due to the xStocks’ inability to deliver the underlying assets,” it had received no allocation and no subscribed SpaceX shares would be issued. The exchange offered automatic refunds plus a reward calculated at 10 per cent APR over a fixed four-day period. Binance canceled its campaign the same day, refunding all locked USDC and promising to distribute $1 million worth of its own bStocks SpaceX tokens equally among participants by June 18.

The scale of the failed allocation was significant. According to The Defiant, Binance’s SPCXx campaign alone attracted $557 million in on-chain subscriptions across nearly 27,700 addresses before being unwound with nothing distributed. Bitget Wallet also announced full refunds for affected users. Community reports indicated that Kraken customers fared somewhat better, with some subscribers receiving roughly four shares’ worth of tokenized SpaceX exposure, far less than requested but more than zero.

The allocation crunch was not entirely unique to crypto. SpaceX’s $75 billion IPO was more than four times oversubscribed, with approximately $250 billion in total demand. Traditional brokerage customers also received fewer shares than they requested, though Fidelity, Charles Schwab, and SoFi all completed at least partial allocations for eligible participants. The difference is that crypto customers got nothing at all.

The failure exposed a structural problem with how these products were built. Crypto exchanges did not have direct relationships with SpaceX’s underwriters or the IPO allocation process. Instead, they relied on xStocks as an intermediary to secure and deliver the underlying shares, adding an extra link in the chain between the customer and the asset. When that intermediary could not obtain shares from the massively oversubscribed offering, the entire tokenized product collapsed regardless of how much demand the exchanges had aggregated.

Even crypto industry insiders found the arrangement problematic. Tom Farley, CEO of crypto exchange Bullish, posted on X that “maybe tokens should actually be approved by the issuer and therefore be the actual underlying share.” ARK Invest’s Lorenzo Valente had flagged the issue earlier on Friday, posting that he had “seen 40 exchanges and wallets advertising SpaceX stock” and asking, “What exactly am I buying?”

Not every tokenized SpaceX product failed. The xStocks SPCXx token did eventually go live after the IPO, and CoinGecko listed tokenized SpaceX products at a combined market capitalisation of nearly $50 million on the first trading day. That figure is barely a rounding error against SpaceX’s roughly $2.1 trillion public valuation. Meanwhile, PreStocks’ Solana-based SpaceX token was trading at a steep discount to the actual public shares, a gap the issuer had warned about due to a six-month lockup on the underlying shares.

The episode arrived as the SEC had already delayed a plan, reported by Bloomberg in May, to allow crypto firms to trade tokenized versions of US stocks. Tokenized equities are being promoted alongside stablecoins as evidence that crypto is finding mainstream adoption, but the SpaceX debacle demonstrated how much of that adoption still depends on centralised issuers, custodians, and allocation pipelines. The original pitch for Bitcoin was to reduce reliance on trusted financial intermediaries. What happened on Friday was a reminder that tokenized stocks, by their nature, cannot escape them.

Anthropic’s sudden move to suspend access to its newest AI models following a U.S. government directive has raised fresh questions across the global technology industry. In India, the decision has reignited a long-running debate over whether one of the world’s largest AI markets can afford to rely on technologies built and controlled elsewhere.

The announcement came late Friday, when Anthropic said it had received the U.S. government directive requiring it to suspend access to its recently launched Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for all foreign nationals, including its own foreign national employees. The move came shortly after the company announced a partnership with Indian IT services giant Tata Consultancy Services to expand enterprise AI adoption in India, underlining how closely the country’s AI ambitions have become tied to technologies developed and governed in the U.S.

While the broader implications remain unclear, some reports said the initial security concerns were first reported to the government by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. And The Information said the White House is unlikely to extend similar restrictions to other AI companies and is privately blaming Anthropic’s handling of alleged jailbreak vulnerabilities. Anthropic has disputed the government’s characterization and argued the action should not have been taken.

Regardless, the development has triggered debate among Indian founders, investors, and policy experts over whether the country should accelerate efforts to build domestic AI capabilities, deepen investment in open-source alternatives, or continue relying on a handful of U.S. frontier model providers. For some, the episode is a wake-up call on technological dependence. For others, it is a reminder that access to increasingly critical AI systems can be shaped by geopolitical decisions beyond India’s control.

India has become one of the most important markets for frontier AI companies. Anthropic and OpenAI have both described the South Asian nation as their second-largest market after the U.S., reflecting its growing importance in the global AI race. The companies have already set up their offices in India, expanded local hiring, partnerships, and enterprise initiatives in recent months, betting on India’s vast base of developers, startups, and businesses to accelerate adoption of their latest technologies.

For many in India’s technology sector, Anthropic’s Friday announcement was about more than just one AI company. It reopened questions about the country’s long-term AI strategy and whether India could afford to remain dependent on a small number of foreign frontier AI providers.

“It completely changes things,” said Aakrit Vaish, founder of Indian AI venture platform Activate, referring to Anthropic’s decision. “I think this materially changes the way all of us should be thinking about sovereign AI in India.”

Vaish told TechCrunch that he woke up on Saturday morning “shocked and confused” by the announcement and said it strengthened the case for developing domestic AI capabilities. He expects startups to increasingly turn to open-source models and plans to encourage companies in his portfolio to reduce their dependence on a small number of frontier AI providers.

For some founders, the bigger concern was what restrictions on frontier AI access could mean for competitiveness. Vijay Rayapati, co-founder and CEO of Atomicwork, told TechCrunch that the episode highlighted the risks facing startups whose teams span multiple countries if access to advanced AI systems increasingly becomes subject to geopolitical restrictions.

Atomicwork has around 25 employees in the U.S., though much of its product engineering team is based in Bengaluru, India.

“If your AI team is not made up entirely of U.S. citizens, you are at a competitive disadvantage,” Rayapati said, arguing that unequal access to frontier AI models could give some companies a significant edge over rivals.

The concern comes as parts of India’s tech sector are already grappling with questions about how AI could reshape the economics of global talent. This week, U.S. real estate technology company Opendoor shut its India office less than two years after expanding in the country, with CEO Kaz Nejatian citing a push to bring operational work closer to customers in the U.S. and a shift toward smaller AI-native teams.

While Opendoor did not specify how much of the decision was driven by AI-related efficiencies, the move added to a broader debate about how advances in AI could affect the future of global technology work and what that might mean for India’s position as an engineering talent hub.

Beyond Anthropic

In addition to startups and AI builders, the Anthropic episode also prompted a broader debate among India’s technology leaders about dependence on foreign AI infrastructure.

Sridhar Vembu, founder of Indian SaaS company Zoho, said the move showed that “technology is the ultimate weapon” and urged Indian organizations to increasingly embrace smaller and open-source models.

“What can our government do right now? Ensure that orgs in India embrace smaller models, both Indian and Chinese open source ones,” Vembu wrote on X.

Investor and former Infosys executive Mohandas Pai responded to Vembu on X, arguing that the development highlighted the need for a far more ambitious national AI strategy and calling on the government to substantially increase investments in AI, computing infrastructure, and deep technology.

“We are way behind and need a national mission to get going quickly,” Pai wrote, urging the government to create an annual ₹500 billion (about $5 billion) fund for AI and deep tech, alongside a ₹2 trillion (around $21 billion) credit guarantee program to support cloud infrastructure, hardware, and semiconductor development.

Pai’s proposal would dwarf India’s existing AI efforts. In 2024, New Delhi approved the IndiaAI Mission with an outlay of ₹103.72 billion (about $1.2 billion) over five years, aimed at expanding compute infrastructure, supporting startups, and developing indigenous AI capabilities.

Despite growing interest in AI and New Delhi’s push to develop domestic capabilities, India remains a relatively small player in frontier model development. Only a handful of startups are pursuing foundational AI models, including Sarvam, which released open-source models earlier this year. However, another high-profile AI startup, Krutrim, pivoted toward cloud and AI infrastructure services after initially positioning itself around foundational model development.

Much of India’s AI ecosystem has instead concentrated on applications and specialized models built on top of existing foundation models. Recent examples include Avataar AI, which launched a video-generation model earlier this week aimed at providing a lower-cost alternative to offerings from rivals including Google’s Veo, Kling, Luma, and Runway.

Not everyone agrees that the primary challenge is a lack of capital. Responding to Pai’s comments, Lightspeed partner Hemant Mohapatra argued that the biggest constraints to building globally competitive AI companies are talent, access to computing resources, and execution, rather than simply the size of investment commitments.

Mohapatra estimated that training a frontier AI model could cost anywhere from hundreds of millions to several billion dollars, depending on the approach, but said successful AI companies have historically scaled their capital requirements over time as adoption grew.

Yet for some policy observers, the implications extend well beyond AI startups or model providers.

Prasanto Roy, a New Delhi-based technology policy expert who advises multinational companies, said the episode would likely reinforce concerns within the Indian government about strategic autonomy, comparing it to the lesson many countries drew from Russia’s loss of access to SWIFT and other parts of the global financial system following its invasion of Ukraine.

He told TechCrunch that the move was likely to provoke a significant nationalist backlash in India and described it as a poorly considered decision by Washington, with consequences extending far beyond Anthropic itself.

“Even if this is corrected or reversed, the Anthropic episode shows there’s no such thing as a geopolitically neutral foreign LLM,” Roy said. “American AI models are bound to American geopolitics.”

Notion’s integration with Anthropic apparently had a hiccup this weekend.

Early Sunday morning, the company posted, “Anthropic’s Opus 4.7 and 4.8 models are experiencing degraded performance, which is causing a higher rate of failures for users selecting these models in Notion AI.”

As a result, Notion said it was disabling use of “all Anthropic models” in its automated productivity tool.

Twelve hours later, Notion’s head of product Max Schoening wrote that he was “astonished” at “the amount of people RT-ing this because they want a story around model quality to be the reason.” (According to the public stats on X, Notion’s post has been reposted around 1,200 times.)

“The degraded performance was a temporary service disruption,” Schoening said. “This happens. It happens to Notion, GitHub, AWS, your OpenClaw, and everything in between.”

He added that Notion has restored access to Anthropic’s models.

Meanwhile, an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement, “A brief infrastructure issue caused elevated errors on multiple Claude models for a short period of time. The issue has since been resolved. We’re grateful to our users for their patience while we worked to restore service.”

As its traffic continues to climb, alternative search engine DuckDuckGo is leaning into anti-AI sentiment with the launch of new browser extensions that allow users to set its no-AI search experience, noai.duckduckgo.com, as their default search engine.

Once enabled, users will be directed to DuckDuckGo’s AI-free search page, where there are no AI-assisted answers, no chat prompts, and fewer AI images in the search results, the company claims. The extensions are currently available for Chrome and Firefox users. Meanwhile, people who have switched to the DuckDuckGo web browser already have their AI settings preserved, even if they clear their browser history.

The company says the extensions are meant to help people have a consistent AI-free search experience — something that’s harder to come by these days, especially after Google announced its AI-first revamp of its search engine at its developer conference earlier in May.

Since then, traffic to DuckDuckGo has been booming. Last week, the company noted that web visits to its no-AI search page were up nearly 30% week-over-week, and its U.S. app installs were also up 18.1% week-over-week, with U.S. iOS app installs peaking at 69.9% week-over-week growth.

Those trends followed news that Google was overhauling its search box in the biggest change to its search engine in more than 25 years. Now, instead of returning links at the top of the page, Google will favor sending users into AI-generated search overviews, which are becoming more interactive experiences capable of creating visualizations, charts, graphs, or even mini apps, as needed. Follow-up questions from AI Overviews will push users into an AI Mode chat experience. The traditional “10 blue links” that defined Google in its earlier days are more of an afterthought, appearing below all this AI-fueled productivity.

But not everyone is on board with having AI made the default, which is why some are making the move to alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo, Kagi, and others.

DuckDuckGo says traffic to its no-AI search page was up threefold on Thursday, May 28, 2026 — a new high-water mark since Google’s search announcement — and the numbers are still climbing. The growth is not coming in spurts either, the company points out. Instead, visits are averaging roughly 84% above the baseline, suggesting a more sustained shift.

In addition to the new “no AI” search Chrome and Firefox extensions, DuckDuckGo will soon update its original DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera to offer controls for AI search settings, as well.

It’s worth noting that DuckDuckGo isn’t an anti-AI company. The company still offers its own AI chatbot with access to many popular models, and a subscription plan that provides access to the latest models and other tools, like a VPN service, identity theft restoration, and personal information removal services.

SpaceX has added new language to its IPO filing that warns prospective investors about the company’s access to a potentially scarce resource: water.

The company, which now includes Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, wrote in an amended version of the filing on Monday that access to water — required to cool its data centers — is just as important as SpaceX’s ability to secure power, processors, and other critical resources.

The addition comes amid an ever-evolving debate about how much water data centers use, and whether that usage is contributing to localized droughts that are being made worse by climate change.

Deep in the “risk factors” section of SpaceX’s IPO filing, the company added language about water to a section about the challenges of scaling AI infrastructure.

Previously, SpaceX focused on telling investors that its data centers were primarily constrained by access to “power at economically feasible prices,” along with long construction timelines and material shortages. The amended filing adds multiple lines about water access. SpaceX now tells prospective investors in the IPO that data center buildouts are constrained by the “availability of power and water at economically feasible prices.”

The company goes on to say that “significant water resources may be required for cooling large-scale data center operations.” Water availability is such a concern that SpaceX says it has become a “critical consideration in data center site selection, development and operations.”

SpaceX also says that “water scarcity, drought conditions, competition for local water resources, or regulatory restrictions on water use could limit our ability to obtain sufficient water for cooling, constrain data center cooling capacity, increase our costs, delay or limit expansion of our data center infrastructure, or require us to implement alternative cooling techniques that may be more costly or less available.”

It’s not clear what inspired SpaceX to add this language about water to its filing, or why it was left out of the initial version. The company is in the pre-IPO period, during which the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been sending SpaceX “comment letters” seeking clarification or additional details about the filing. It’s possible that questions from the SEC led to this particular change, though we won’t know until those comment letters are made public in the weeks following the IPO.

Adding more detail about SpaceX’s access to water was not the only change the company made in this first amended filing. SpaceX also revealed that it is setting aside up to 5% of the stock being sold in the IPO for employees and friends of executives. SpaceX also added language that warns investors that the company may issue a “significant” number of shares in future transactions following the IPO — a hint at a potential merger with Tesla — which could create dilution for existing shareholders.

Instagram has resolved a security issue that allowed several users’ accounts to get hacked. The attack appeared to rely on tricking Meta’s own AI-powered support chatbot into granting access to a victim’s account.

Over the weekend, several users on Reddit claimed that their Instagram accounts had been compromised, and a number of users on X warned of similar account hijackings. The compromised accounts include the Instagram handle for the Obama-era White House, which appears to have been inactive since 2017; and the account of the U.S. Space Force’s chief master sergeant John Bentivegna.

Security researcher Jane Wong said her Instagram account was also taken over. 

“The password got changed without my knowledge and I was getting different password reset attempts throughout yesterday,” said Wong. “Quite concerning.” 

A video posted on X showed the step-by-step process to hack someone’s Instagram account. The hacker allegedly used a VPN to spoof the targets’ presumed location to avoid triggering Instagram’s automated account protections. Then, the hacker opened a chat with Meta AI Support Assistant and asked the bot to add a new email address to the target’s account. The chatbot can be seen sending a verification code to the email address provided by the hacker; the hacker then shares the verification code with the chatbot, which prompts the chatbot to show a button to “Reset Password.” The hacker enters a new password and takes over the victim’s account. 

TechCrunch was able to verify that the hacker’s public email mailbox, which was displayed in the video, effectively received the verification code. 

The attack relied on the fact that at no point the hacker had to take over the legitimate email address linked to the victims’ Instagram account. 

On Monday, Instagram spokesperson Andy Stone said in a reply to Wong’s post and others that the issue was now fixed. It’s unclear how many Instagram users had their accounts improperly accessed.

Meta did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.