11-3-2026 (Tuesday)
Hello, and welcome to The Intentional Brief - your weekly video update on the one big thing in cybersecurity for middle market companies, their investors, and executive teams.
I’m your host, Shay Colson, Managing Partner at Intentional Cybersecurity, and you can find us online at intentionalcyber.com.
Today is Tuesday, November 3, 2026, and it’s Election Day here in the United States, which is a fitting backdrop to talk through some of our AI and Crypto-related items, because they’ve all got a national political bent to them.
On Nationalization
There are a couple of stories that share a theme this week. The first story is one that likely most have already heard about, and that’s the $6.3B theft of cryptocurrency from exchange platform Binance. The FBI has attributed this theft to North Korean state-backed actors.
Reports now indicate that this was carried out via a job interview scam - but not the way you might traditionally think about how these North Korean threat actors work.
Instead of getting a job here and planting malware, they used what’s called “malvertising” to target a malicious package served as an ad to Binance employees on the wallet team, giving them a foothold to ultimately plan, deploy, and execute the theft.
What these proceeds actually end up being (Binance asserts that somewhere between $2.7B and $3B of the take is frozen), and end up being used for, remain an open question, but it’s probably more hacking and building nuclear capability for Kim Jong Un in North Korea.
They’re not the only country looking to fortify their arsenal. If you weren’t paying attention, you may have missed the news that multiple nations are now investing in strategic independence around AI models (independent, that is, from the US and China, who are really the only two games in town as far as models go):
News out of Canada that the government will invest up to $1.6B in Toronto-based AI company Cohere, with the subhead that “PM Carney says Canada won't wait for AI to be decided by other countries Canada doesn't trust.”;
In France, Mistral says that their latest release has outperformed Chinese open weight models, especially in the areas of coding and cybersecurity;
And in Japan, Sakana AI has announced that they intend to build their own models, with Nikkei reporting their aim is “to reduce the risks associated with relying on U.S. and Chinese models in such areas as defense and cybersecurity.”
So what are the takeaways for those of us who aren’t running entire countries, frontier AI labs, or covert missile programs?
It’s that you need to decide what’s strategically important to your long term success, and own the means of production for those critical resources. The pendulum has swung tremendously towards renting these resources from SaaS companies or hyperscaler cloud providers, but the pendulum is swinging back the other way.
Especially as you consider investing in more and more AI-based solutions, be mindful of the tradeoffs involved here. If the model changes, does your app or agent or workflow still perform? Can you run it in your own infrastructure? Can you make changes to better suit your needs? Etc.
It’s not feasible to build your own version of everything, but likewise, it’s probably not the best idea to outsource and rent everything either. We need to be mindful of the elements that are core strategic capabilities and ensure they’re durable enough for our business, whatever that means. Not easy to figure out, not easy to do, but the alternative is not easy to stand by either.
Fundraising
From a fundraising perspective, nearly $32B in newly committed capital last week, led by:
Advent International raised nearly $27b for its ninth flagship fund and over $3b for a new midmarket fund.
A strong signal that, at least to a meaningful amount of institutional investors, there remains opportunity for outsized gains in these private markets.
Anthropic continues to revise their S-1, and OpenAI knocked about $10B off of their fundraising target, so very much a frothy market - and we don’t even know how the elections will turn out yet.
A reminder that you can find links to all the articles we covered below, find back issues of these videos and the written transcripts at intentionalcyber.com.
We’ll see you next week for another edition of the Intentional Brief.
Links
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-cohere-ai-investment-9.7401367
https://www.wired.com/story/mistral-says-le-chonk-surpasses-chinese-models-cybersecurity/