Donald Trump bought a bunch of tech stock the same day he announced his AI Action Plan, Threads' ubiquitous Mr Beast spam is part of a massive crypto scam network, Cloudflare will filter out web crawlers that serve AI companies

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Donald Trump bought a bunch of tech stock the same day he announced his AI action plan.
Thread's ubiquitous Mr Beast spam is part of a massive crypto scam network.
And Cloudflare will filter out web crawlers that serve AI companies.
It's Friday, July 3rd, and here's a quick look at some of the news happening in and around tech this morning from Engadget.
The New York Times has delved deep into Donald Trump's financial disclosures from the first year of his second presidential term. Without a doubt, it was the most personally profitable period of any president's term in office, personally netting him a figure north of $2 billion.
While much of that largesse was earned via cryptocurrency sales, Trump has also become an investor in big tech. A paper reports that on July 23rd, he bought up to $5 million of stock in Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Broadcom. It noted as well that the purchases were made on the same day the White House would release its long-awaited AI action plan. In January, The New York Times reported that brokerage accounts tied to the Trump family made more than 3,600 trades. But while the Trump family does not have its assets and a blind trust, it says it does not have a say in which companies its brokers buy and sell shares in. The paper has reported, however, that Trump has often made well-timed trades such as an investment made in Dell shortly before it secured a $9.7 billion defense contract. As the Times reported, Trump was legally obligated to disclose the purchases of stock in Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and the rest. But he did not. As a consequence of his repeated omissions, he has had to pay a small fine for failing to honor this rule. It's likely any future violations may not be so easy to deal with. In January of 2025, Trump says he was in favor of American citizens who are repeat offenders being made to leave the US.
If you've spent any time on Meta's Threads app in the last year or so, then you've likely seen what some are calling the Mr Beast Reply Guys. A spam account replies to a popular post with a nonsensical phrase and a low-quality screenshot of the British newspaper The Times featuring a fictitious story about Mr Beast. There's usually a second seemingly random image, often a bouquet of flowers, with an iPhone. Now, the formula has some minor variations, but these posts are absolutely everywhere. And like so much spam on social media, it's part of a massive crypto scam. According to an analysis from Zach Edwards, who is a staff security researcher at Infoblox, the person or group behind these accounts is running more than 10,000 malicious crypto casino websites. Engadget identified dozens of accounts, posting Mr Beast reply spam on threads, some of which have racked up hundreds of thousands of views over the last 30 days. All of the accounts were promoting websites that Edwards identified as being part of the same network. While scammers are constantly using new tactics to lure people into financial schemes, according to both Edwards and Mark Baer, head of consumer and scam detection platform Malware Bytes, the way these posts have played out on threads is unusual. For one, the posts do not contain obvious links to the scams they're promoting. Even the strange phrases that appear alongside the images, like pencil shavings curl like thoughts, do not read like the typical get-rich-quick crypto scam content many social media users frequently encounter. But look a little bit closer at the fake screenshots and you will find that every low-res photo of the YouTuber is accompanied by a fake news story claiming that he's launching a new project or promotion and giving away money if you visit a sketchy website.
Cloudflare has announced plans to automatically block mixed-use web crawlers that index websites for search engines and act as AI agents and trainers at the same time. The company previously offered its customers the optional ability to prevent crawlers from scraping their sites for AI chatbots, but now Cloudflare's stance is becoming more defensive by default. Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's CEO and co-founder, said, now that the majority of traffic on the Internet is non-human, we must go further and act faster so that a sustainable ecosystem can emerge. Web traffic used to indicate that people were viewing a website's ads or paying for its subscriptions, but the popularity of AI models that can visit sites on a user's behalf to pull up-to-date information has upended that system. Cloudflare's new approach is an attempt to rebalance the relationship in a way that's fair for both AI companies and anyone running a website starting September 15th. New customers and new websites from existing Cloudflare subscribers will default to allow for search but block training and agent use for pages with ads. Mixed-use crawlers that do not give site owners the option to choose whether their site is used for AI will also be blocked on pages with ads by default. Users with free accounts will also switch to these defaults unless they opt out ahead of the September 15th deadline. As part of these changes, Cloudflare is also releasing a new version of the Pay Per Crawl feature it introduced back in 2025 that allowed websites to block AI web crawlers by default unless companies paid to scrape their content. The feature is now called Pay Per Use, and rather than base payments on whether a web page has been crawled, Cloudflare says site owners will be paid when their content appears in answers from AI chatbots. The announcement only mentions partnerships with Ceramic.AI and u.com, but Cloudflare likely hopes other AI companies will join as its customers opt in. Besides, generally trying to make the relationship between websites and AI companies more fair, as TechCrunch noted, Cloudflare also seems to be indirectly targeting Google. The company's announcement mentions that the largest search engine has access to about two times more information than leading AI companies because they make it difficult for customers to remain discoverable without also being used for AI. Google's main crawler, Googlebot, both indexes websites for the company's various search engines and collects information to train Gemini and power AI features like AI overviews and AI mode. Google lets websites opt in to a separate crawler called Google Extended that only crawls websites for traditional search results. But if a publisher wanted to be included in AI mode results, but doesn't want their content to train Google's models, well, they don't have an option. Cloudflare's new policy is an attempt to force Google and other companies with mixed use crawlers to change their tactics.