Credit Acceptance Corporation (NASDAQ:CACC) has reached a multistate resolution that clarifies its obligations in longstanding disputes. Investors now need to assess the cash payments and the effect of consumer protections on future lending returns.

On September 17, Credit Acceptance Corporation (NASDAQ:CACC) announced consent judgments entered into or planned with New York and 40 other attorneys general. The resolution covers the New York litigation filed in 2023 and a multistate investigation begun in 2020, without an admission of wrongdoing.

Credit Acceptance Corporation (NASDAQ:CACC) will pay $60 million into a consumer relief fund and $15.5 million for the participating attorneys general’s investigation, alongside waivers of eligible customer balances. Management said the monetary components require no additional charges beyond previously accrued and disclosed amounts.

Bull Case

Resolving the identified litigation and investigation reduces uncertainty around the financial obligations and operating requirements. For Credit Acceptance Corporation (NASDAQ:CACC), clearer rules can help management plan lending activity, support dealer relationships, and devote more attention to execution.

Management believes the required disclosures, affordability protections and dealer oversight preserve and supplement existing controls without fundamentally changing the business model. If implementation largely builds on existing processes, the operational disruption could be manageable.

Stronger disclosures and oversight could improve loan quality over time by discouraging unwanted add-on products and reducing avoidable borrower stress. For Credit Acceptance Corporation (NASDAQ:CACC), better repayment outcomes could help offset some implementation costs, although that benefit will need to appear in collections.

Bear Case

The $75.5 million of stated payments remains a cash obligation. Recognizing an expense earlier does not fund the eventual payment, which competes with lending and other uses of capital.

State announcements also identify $634 million in debt relief, comprising $388 million for consumers whose vehicles were repossessed and $246 million for those whose vehicles were not repossessed. Those figures describe balances forgiven. The economic loss depends on the cash that Credit Acceptance Corporation (NASDAQ:CACC) would otherwise have expected to collect, rather than the balances’ face value alone.

For qualifying loans originated after December 1, 2025, the consent order requires forgiveness of 95% of the balance remaining after involuntary repossession and vehicle sale. Repossession and sale must occur within 12 or 18 months of origination, depending on credit score and payment-to-income eligibility criteria. Collection lawsuits and transfers of qualifying contracts are prohibited.

The provision covers five years from November 2, 2026. Loans originated during that period remain eligible for relief afterward, subject to those conditions.

For borrowers with credit scores below 600, the vehicle-price cap is 109% of the highest applicable retail book value. The seven-year period begins when this requirement is implemented.

These provisions could affect recoveries, eligible transactions and dealer participation. Any additional systems, monitoring or training spending would also weigh on profitability. Management’s assessment of limited business-model disruption therefore needs confirmation through lending volumes, collection forecasts and returns on newly originated loans.

Hedge Fund Sentiment

The filings available so far reflect positions held before Credit Acceptance Corporation (NASDAQ:CACC) reported the multistate resolution. Insider Monkey’s database showed 28 hedge funds holding Credit Acceptance Corporation (NASDAQ:CACC) at the end of 2Q2026, down from 31 funds three months earlier.

Conclusion

Credit Acceptance Corporation (NASDAQ:CACC) has reduced uncertainty around specific legal disputes. The remaining investment question concerns cash use and future loan profitability. Settlement payments, implementation expenses, and subsequent collection performance will show whether greater legal clarity translates into stronger shareholder economics.

While we acknowledge the potential of CACC as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you’re looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock.

READ NEXT: Korn Ferry (KFY) Grew Contracted Fees 14%. Can AMS Add Growth Without Squeezing Margins? and Mastercard (MA) Partners With Flowcart. Can In-Chat Payments Deliver Profitable Growth?

This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.

An OpenAI research agent bypassed blocks on an Australian government health data portal, accessed non-public files and wrote files to an internal server in June, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Thursday.

The government has opened a forensic investigation and announced a review of how it handles AI-related cyber incidents.

OpenAI did not notify the Australian government until Sept. 10, nearly three months after the incident, according to Albanese, who criticized the delay.

The incident adds to concerns over autonomous AI agents as tech leaders and governments debate slowing the development of cutting-edge models and researchers uncover agent activity extending into crypto.

OpenAI agent “didn’t accept no”

Australia’s incident began on June 18, when an OpenAI research team used an internal AI model to gather publicly available data on medicine spending, according to Albanese.

After being repeatedly blocked, the agent “didn’t accept no for an answer” and gained unauthorized access to other areas of the Medicare Statistics Reporting Portal. The public-facing portal contains non-sensitive Medicare data, including statistics on government spending, the prime minister said.

“No personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage, but investigations are ongoing,” Albanese said.

Authorities are also examining activity at three other government websites, though Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles later said the interactions there appeared normal and involved public information.

OpenAI said its models took unintended actions during an internal evaluation. Its review found no evidence that patient records were accessed, according to a statement provided to ABC News.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to Cointelegraph’s request for comment.

Speaking to the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called for “accurate and speedy incident reporting.” He also warned that increasingly capable and autonomous systems could “make decisions that people no longer understand or control.”

AI agents attempt crypto trades on Quidax exchange

Separately, on Wednesday, nonprofit research lab Transluce reported that it found signs of AI agent activity targeting crypto exchange Quidax on Sept. 19 and 20.

Across 15 public reports from web-scanning service urlquery.net, the researchers identified repeated attempts to place trades, an HTML injection attempt and probes of Quidax’s application programming interface.

The trade orders were not submitted, while authentication requirements and Cloudflare blocked the API probes, Transluce said.

Transluce said the Quidax activity used services and techniques seen in earlier agent activity, some of which researchers tied to an OpenAI swarm. It did not attribute the Quidax attempts to OpenAI.

Magazine: Who is legally liable when an AI agent goes rogue?

Zcash and NEAR Protocol have emerged as two of crypto’s strongest alternative trades in 2026, a move Bankless co-founder David Hoffman believes is being driven by investors moving some capital away from Bitcoin and Ethereum toward assets with stronger return narratives.

Hoffman said in a Sept. 23 post that ZEC has become what he calls the latest winner of the “Bitcoin Bid,” while NEAR has captured a similar position among smart contract platforms.

His argument centers on the size of Bitcoin’s existing pool of wealth. Bitcoin carries a market capitalization of roughly $1.7 trillion, while Zcash remains a fraction of that size even after its rally. Hoffman said only a small portion of Bitcoin holders would need to allocate some of their capital to ZEC for the smaller asset to experience substantial buying pressure.

Zcash’s market capitalization has climbed to roughly $26 billion after starting from a much smaller base, according to figures cited by Hoffman. The move has coincided with growing interest in privacy, quantum computing risks and regulated access to the asset.

The privacy coin market has grown nearly fivefold over the past year, according to a Sept. 22 report from 21Shares cited by crypto.news. The sector expanded from $6.2 billion to roughly $30 billion, while CoinGecko valued the category near $36.9 billion at the time.

Hoffman sees ZEC drawing from Bitcoin’s pool of capital

Hoffman compared the current ZEC trade with Ethereum’s run in 2021, when ETH moved from a market capitalization near $12 billion at its cycle bottom to roughly $554 billion at its peak.

His thesis does not suggest that Bitcoin holders are abandoning BTC altogether. Instead, Hoffman believes enough holders may be allocating a small part of their portfolios to ZEC as a hedge or complementary position.

Zcash gives that group several narratives to work with. The network shares Bitcoin’s fixed maximum supply of 21 million coins while offering optional transaction privacy through shielded addresses. Concerns over the long term effect of quantum computing on existing cryptographic systems have provided another part of the investment case cited by ZEC supporters.

Institutional access has changed as well. Grayscale converted its Zcash Trust into the ZCSH spot ETF on NYSE Arca on Aug. 25, launching with roughly $304 million in assets under management. ZEC crossed $1,000 in early September as assets in the fund moved above $400 million.

Hoffman argued that ZEC’s dollar gains alone do not explain the trade. He instead pointed to the difference between the size of Bitcoin and Zcash, saying the pool of BTC wealth potentially available for rotation remains far larger than ZEC’s market value.

“There’s $1.7T of BTC out there, and it only takes a very small amount of Bitcoiners to agree that ZEC is valid,” Hoffman wrote.

He said investors could reach that conclusion because of privacy, concerns around quantum computing or simply a desire to hedge their Bitcoin exposure.

The argument remains Hoffman’s interpretation of the source of demand rather than direct evidence tracing ZEC purchases to Bitcoin holders. He acknowledged that point himself, saying he believed few capital allocators would skip BTC, ETH and the rest of the crypto market to buy ZEC solely on its own merits.

NEAR has become the smart contract alternative, Hoffman says

A similar capital rotation may be playing out around NEAR Protocol, according to Hoffman, although he sees the source of that demand as more dispersed.

“I think NEAR has won the ‘smart contract bid’ trophy of 2026,” he wrote.

NEAR was trading around $4.28 on Sept. 24 after gaining more than 60% over the previous seven days, according to CoinGecko. Its rally has come alongside several developments across the network and its trading markets.

On Sept. 23, NEAR spot trading went live on Hyperliquid through a NEAR/USDC market. NEAR perpetual open interest on Hyperliquid stood near $344 million at the time, while positive funding rates showed long positions were paying shorts.

Network development has provided another part of NEAR’s 2026 narrative. The protocol has spent much of the year building around artificial intelligence, chain abstraction and autonomous agents.

In July, NEAR introduced staking based AI payments, allowing users to lock NEAR and receive monthly compute credits for AI services. The system covered 43 AI models at launch and allowed users to access confidential inference and autonomous agents without paying through a credit card.

Hoffman said the capital supporting NEAR is probably coming from a more varied group than the investors he believes are moving from BTC into ZEC.

Ethereum has historically faced more competition among smart contract networks than Bitcoin has faced within the store of value category, he argued. Solana has already challenged Ethereum for users, activity and investor attention, leaving the smart contract market less concentrated around a single asset.

For Hoffman, the difference means NEAR does not need to pull capital from one clearly defined group. Traders looking beyond ETH, SOL and other established smart contract assets could contribute to the same effect.

Bitcoin and Ethereum face what Hoffman calls a blue chip problem

Hoffman framed the moves in ZEC and NEAR as part of a larger issue for the crypto market’s biggest assets.

Investors seeking large multiples may be less willing to allocate new capital to assets that already carry hundreds of billions or more than $1 trillion in market value, he argued. Smaller networks can offer more room for price appreciation if they attract a meaningful portion of existing crypto wealth.

Hoffman called the situation the “Blue Chip Curse.”

Bitcoin still needs to establish itself more firmly as an alternative to gold, in his view, while Ethereum faces the question of what could produce another major revaluation after years of growth.

The comparison comes as the total cryptocurrency market remains much smaller than the traditional financial system. CoinGecko data placed the global crypto market capitalization near $2.96 trillion on Sept. 24, with Bitcoin accounting for roughly 57% of the total.

Hoffman said crypto could continue producing new winners even if BTC and ETH do not deliver the multiples investors saw during earlier cycles. He pointed to Hyperliquid, Venice, Lighter, Ethena and Morpho as examples of projects bringing new products and infrastructure into the industry.

His concern is where the economic value from that activity ultimately ends up.

Hoffman argued that Robinhood, Coinbase, Apollo and traditional brokerage businesses could be positioned to capture part of the value created by the latest generation of crypto products, while the extent to which BTC and ETH benefit remains uncertain.

For the industry’s overall value to move materially higher, Hoffman said total crypto market capitalization would eventually need to grow far beyond its current level. He raised $10 trillion as a level he hopes the market can reach during the current cycle, while contrasting it with a possible $30 trillion market needed for a much larger expansion of the sector.

StarkWare says optimization efforts connected to its Quantum-Safe Bitcoin (QSB) work have driven down the estimated computational cost of constructing a quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction to under $67—down from about $320 for the first QSB transaction demonstrated on mainnet in August. The latest figure, published in a Sept. 23 update and reflected on the Yukon QSB dashboard, suggests the benchmark cost has continued to edge lower to roughly $66.

While the QSB approach is designed to improve resilience against future quantum threats without requiring changes to Bitcoin’s consensus rules, StarkWare cautions that the new numbers are based on benchmark tests. The development nonetheless matters for anyone evaluating practical “emergency” defenses for large holders who may be most exposed if public keys are later compromised by quantum-capable machines.

Key takeaways

• StarkWare reports QSB transaction construction costs fell to about $66–$67 after a week of optimization.
• The cost decline follows the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge, which generated improvements across the benchmarked transaction-building steps.
• The earliest mainnet QSB demonstration required ~3,100 GPU-hours and cost around $320 in compute, excluding Bitcoin network fees.
• QSB is positioned as an “emergency” measure; StarkWare says broader, long-term protection likely still requires a consensus-layer soft fork.
• StarkWare emphasizes the latest optimizations are verified via benchmarks, not renewed full mainnet demonstrations.

From a $320 demo to a sub-$67 benchmark

StarkWare’s update ties the cost reduction to participant work in the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge, a collaborative effort involving Yukon Research and Eigen Labs. The initiative focused on reducing the GPU computation needed to prepare a QSB transaction.

In August, StarkWare said a QSB transaction was mined and confirmed on Bitcoin’s mainnet. According to that earlier account, the engineering effort behind the demonstration involved Tomer Giladi and submission via MARA’s Slipstream service. Preparing the transaction required approximately 3,100 GPU-hours across roughly 100 GPUs, translating to about $320 in compute cost, excluding network fees.

The new update describes how the challenge achieved a sharper efficiency gap. StarkWare reports that the competition produced 62 accepted improvements across two computational tasks required to build a QSB transaction. Based on benchmark testing, these changes reduced the estimated computing cost by about 79%—bringing it down to the current $66–$67 range shown on the Yukon dashboard.

Why QSB is framed as an “emergency” defense

The broader motivation for QSB is the risk that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break the elliptic-curve digital signatures Bitcoin relies on. If that future capability arrives, attackers could potentially steal coins whose public keys are exposed, making timing and practicality important for holders who need protection under constrained conditions.

StarkWare’s QSB design, first published by researcher Avihu Levy in April, aims to add hash-based protection against quantum attacks without changing Bitcoin’s consensus rules. That non-consensus approach is part of what makes QSB attractive as an add-on defense—particularly if consensus changes remain difficult or slow.

However, Levy previously characterized QSB as a “last resort measure,” citing cost, complexity, and limited applicability. StarkWare’s latest messaging continues that framing: even with a nearly 80% reduction, a few hundred dollars per transaction still signals that QSB remains closer to an emergency tool than a fully routine mechanism for all holders.

The challenge’s impact—and what remains unproven

The Optimization Challenge opened on Sept. 16, inviting developers, researchers, and AI agents to refine the software needed to generate QSB transactions more efficiently. StarkWare says the resulting improvements were accepted across two computational tasks that together determine the overall benchmark cost.

The key point for investors and builders is the distinction between benchmark performance and real-world transaction preparation at full scale. StarkWare’s update presents the new $66–$67 number as an estimated computational cost derived from performance tests. That means the update demonstrates algorithmic and engineering efficiency, but it does not, by itself, confirm that the most recent optimizations have been used to create and confirm additional QSB mainnet transactions.

Still, the direction of travel is meaningful: getting from roughly $320 to under $67 transforms the practicality of the technique for larger holders who may prioritize the ability to execute a protective transaction when conditions warrant it. In its Sept. 23 update, StarkWare argued that a construction costing a few hundred dollars is “a demo,” while costs closer to $67 are more plausible for emergency use by holders with significant balances—without requiring network rule changes.

Soft forks remain the long-term focus

QSB exists within a broader debate on how Bitcoin should prepare for quantum threats. StarkWare says it continues to favor a soft fork—a change to Bitcoin’s consensus rules—as a better “long-term answer” for wider, more reliable quantum protection across the ecosystem.

This matters because emergency add-ons, while potentially useful, are inherently narrower in scope: they do not automatically provide the systemic coverage that consensus-level changes can offer. The latest cost reductions therefore read less like a final end-state and more like progress toward making an interim strategy less prohibitive while the community works through governance, implementation, and security trade-offs for longer-range solutions.

For now, readers should watch the Yukon QSB dashboard for whether the benchmark estimates keep moving and whether the community follows up with additional mainnet demonstrations using the newly optimized construction pathways. The biggest open question remains whether benchmark gains translate into repeated, end-to-end operational readiness when real constraints—beyond compute estimates—come into play.