The Justice Department said two men were sentenced for hosting laptops used by North Korean IT workers, bringing the total to eight sentences in five months. US prosecutors said they have secured eight sentences in the last five months against people acting as US-based proxies for North Korea-based IT workers, shedding new light on how they have been able to infiltrate US companies. Two men have been sentenced this month alone. The Justice Department said Wednesday that separate courts sentenced Nashville resident Matthew Issac Knoot and New York resident Erick Ntekereze Prince for helping North Koreans work remotely for US companies. The US perpetrators, known as “laptop farmers,” acted as recipients for laptops that US companies would send to new employees. They installed remote desktop software on the devices, allowing North Korean IT workers to use them remotely while appearing to work from the US. Read more
The Aptos Foundation said building infrastructure that enables sub-second finality without the need for human intervention is a key to supporting the next wave of AI agent adoption. Aptos Foundation and Aptos Labs have committed $50 million to Aptos development, with a particular focus on AI agent infrastructure and research, including support for two products it shipped last year to meet rising demand for onchain AI agent activity. Those products include Decibel, an AI-powered onchain order book and perpetuals exchange that launched on the Aptos mainnet in February, and Shelby, a decentralized storage protocol that seeks to support the workloads of AI agents, the Aptos Foundation said on Thursday. “Autonomous agents are already transacting onchain at frequencies no human can match, routing to whatever venue is fastest, most consistent, and least gameable,” it said. Read more