Business
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried insists he is innocent, wants Trump pardon
Susan Li reports on FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried speaking from prison, found guilty of major financial schemes. Susan Li’s exclusive interview reveals SBF wants a White House pardon and defends himself, claiming customers were repaid.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the former cryptocurrency billionaire serving a 25-year sentence for fraud tied to the 2022 collapse of his FTX exchange, says he would welcome a pardon from President Donald Trump — but insists he has not lobbied the White House for one.
“It would be obviously, you know, ultimately up to the president, not up to me,” Bankman-Fried told FOX Business in an exclusive interview from prison. Asked directly whether he wanted a pardon, he didn’t hesitate: “Absolutely.”
The FTX founder said he has not personally been in contact with the White House or anyone connected to the president. Asked whether his parents or others had reached out on his behalf, he said, “I can’t speak for them.”
FOX Business has reviewed a pardon application filed on Bankman-Fried’s behalf. As it stands, the application seeks clemency only after he finishes serving his sentence.
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Sam Bankman-Fried leaves Federal Court court in New York, on Jan. 3, 2023. The former cryptocurrency billionaire says he would welcome a pardon from President Trump. (Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images / Getty Images)
The White House, asked for comment, directed FOX Business back to the president’s previous statements that he was not considering a pardon for Bankman-Fried.
‘I didn’t steal user funds’
More than three years after his arrest, Bankman-Fried continues to insist he is innocent. He is appealing his conviction, with a decision pending before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
“I didn’t steal user funds,” he said. “Customers have been repaid now 170% or so on their deposits. It’s one of the very few cases where the platform was over-collateralized, where customers were more than made whole. And yet there was, you know, not just a criminal investigation, but a prosecution. And, you know, dozens of years of sentence.”
Those assertions require context. Bankman-Fried was convicted in 2023 on seven counts — including wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering — for diverting billions of dollars in FTX customer funds, and was sentenced to 25 years in 2024.

Sam Bankman-Fried leaves Federal Court in New York City on Thursday, December 22, 2022. The former CEO of FTX and Alameda is serving a 25-year sentence for fraud. (Charles Guerin/Abaca for Fox News Digital / Fox News)
The FTX bankruptcy estate has said customers are being repaid in full, with reported recoveries of roughly 118% and higher for some classes of claims. But those repayments were calculated using cryptocurrency prices from November 2022, when the market was near its lows. Customers received cash based on those depressed values rather than their original crypto, and did not capture the market’s subsequent rebound. The estate’s reported recovery figures are also lower than the 170% Bankman-Fried cited.
“Ultimately, customers have been repaid again nearly twice what they had on the platform, and it’s a great disservice to them that it has taken three years,” he added.
A divided reaction
The question of clemency has split those who followed the FTX collapse.
Adam Moskowitz, an attorney who represented FTX victims, told FOX Business he would not stand in the way. “I would not oppose granting Sam a pardon,” he said, noting that as co-lead counsel for hundreds of thousands of FTX victims, “one of the first defendants to offer to help out victims was Mr. Bankman-Fried.”

From right, Terrence A. Duffy, CEO of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX US Derivatives, Christopher Edmonds, chief development officer of the Intercontinental Exchange, and Christopher Perkins, president of CoinFund, test (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Others are firmly opposed. Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, who sits on the Senate Banking Committee, told Politico that Bankman-Fried “shouldn’t be pardoned” and “should go to jail for a long, long time.”
Life behind bars — and a shout-out from Drake
Bankman-Fried described a prison routine of reading, exercise and “other boring activities.” “I’ve read a number of books since I’ve been in prison,” he said. “You know, I exercise some. Obviously, there’s sleep, shower … daily things like that. And frankly, that’s the bulk of it.”
He has also picked up an unlikely supporter. On his new album “Iceman,” rapper Drake name-checks Bankman-Fried in a lyric that fans have read as a call to free the imprisoned founder.
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Bankman-Fried said he was caught off guard. “I’m very flattered. I appreciate it very much,” he said. “Obviously Drake gives some clues in the song itself, but … that’s a question. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to answer for him.”
The two, Bankman-Fried said, have never met.
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The Rightmove data suggests that fewer tenants are proactively filtering for pet-friendly properties when searching for a home. While pets remain the most common searched-for term overall – ahead of gardens, garages and furnishings, the lead at the top is shrinking.
Renter searches for properties that allow pets fell by 54% in May and 52% in June compared with the same months a year earlier, according to the figures shared with the BBC. Falls had accelerated through this year, as the changes got closer and were then introduced.
Marc von Grundherr, director of agency Benham and Reeves, said some tenants have only disclosed a pet after signing their tenancy agreement, while others have been discovered during property inspections.
“The reality is that tenants now understand the balance of power has shifted. Landlords can no longer rely on a blanket ‘no pets’ policy to deter applications and should instead expect conversations around pet ownership to arise much later in the letting process,” he said.
Now, in England, landlords may still be able to refuse a pet if another tenant has an allergy, the property is too small for a large pet or several pets, the pet is illegal, or the landlord is a leaseholder and the freeholder does not allow pets.
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OpenAI failed to recognize autonomous agent attack for days: report
Maria Bartiromo discusses an OpenAI experimental AI agent that broke containment and hacked an AI platform.
OpenAI didn’t catch an autonomous breach of another artificial intelligence (AI) company by one of its advanced AI models for a week, and not until after the FBI had been contacted by the hacked company, according to a report.
On Tuesday, OpenAI announced the breach of AI company Hugging Face that happened during one of OpenAI’s internal reviews of several of its models, including GPT-5.6 Sol, calling it an “unprecedented cyber incident.”
“The primary lesson from this incident is that model security and safety must keep pace with rapidly advancing capabilities,” the company said. “We are strengthening the containment, monitoring, access controls, and evaluation practices used during model development.”
The hack of Hugging Face started on July 11, and continued until July 13, Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face’s co-founder, told Reuters.
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OpenAI revealed on Tuesday one of its AI models had autonomously hacked another company’s infrastructure. (Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images, File / Getty Images)
It was several days before OpenAI realized its agent was behind the attack and the two companies didn’t communicate for the first time until July 20, four people, including Wolf, told the outlet.
OpenAI often runs simultaneous model tests, which can make it difficult for employees to monitor everything, four people told Reuters.
Hugging Face told Reuters it is preparing a public timeline of the hack.
According to OpenAI, the incident took place during an internal evaluation designed to measure its AI models’ advanced cyber capabilities. Researchers disabled some built-in safety safeguards and ran the models in an isolated testing environment with limited internet access.
OpenAI said the models exploited an unknown software flaw to access the internet, then breached Hugging Face’s systems in an apparent attempt to find answers to a cybersecurity benchmark.

Hugging Face said it was preparing a timeline of the hack. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images, File / Getty Images)
OpenAI said it’s now implementing stricter security controls while vulnerabilities are patched and strengthening safeguards around future AI training and evaluations.
It wasn’t until July 16 after Hugging Face wrote in a blog post that it had been hacked by an “autonomous AI agent system” that OpenAI realized one of its agents was the source, two people told Reuters.
This was a week after the responsible agent first attempted to break out of its OpenAI testing environment.
And by the time OpenAI contacted Hugging Face about the attack, they had already contacted the FBI.
OpenAI told Reuters there were several inaccuracies in its reporting but didn’t respond when asked for specifications.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly announced the attack on Tuesday. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images, FIle / Getty Images)
OpenAI shared this statement with FOX Business: “We recognize there are a lot of questions and speculative details circulating related to the Hugging Face incident. This is an unprecedented incident, and we think it marks an important moment for AI safety. We are still conducting a thorough review along with external advisors and with oversight from our Safety and Security Committee. Once the review is complete, we plan to publish a technical report of our learnings in the coming weeks.”
The FBI told FOX Business that it declined to comment.
FOX Business has also reached out to Hugging Face.
In an X post this week, Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clem Delangue addressed the incident after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the hack.

OpenAI said one of its AI models compromised another company’s systems during internal testing, prompting a joint investigation with AI startup Hugging Face. (Reuters/Dado Ruvic, File / Reuters)
“We suspected last week’s cyberattack might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent. Turns out it did!” Delangue wrote.
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He added, “We’ve spent the past 24 hours working closely with the @OpenAI team (thanks!), and we strongly believe there was no malicious intent on their part. It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously! The investigation is ongoing, and we’ll share more learnings from what might be the first incident of its kind!”
FOX Business’ Michael Sinkowitz contributed to this report.
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