FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried is escorted by corrections officers to the Magistrate’s Court on December 21, 2022 in Nassau, Bahamas.
Joe Raedle | Getty Images
Sam Bankman-Fried is flying Wednesday night to New York, according to the office of the attorney general of the Bahamas, where he is later expected to be arraigned in U.S. federal court, concluding a days-long saga.
Bankman-Fried, 30, was indicted in New York federal court on Dec. 9 and arrested three days later by Bahamas law enforcement at the request of U.S. prosecutors.
His attorney, Jerone Roberts, reading from an affidavit signed Dec. 20, told the court that Bankman-Fried was consenting to extradition in part due to a “desire to make the relevant customers whole.” Bankman-Fried was “anxious to leave,” Roberts told the court.
It is unclear how his return would help plug the $8 billion balance sheet hole that, according to federal complaints, came as a result of risky trading and extravagant spending by FTX executives.
Bankman-Fried will face arraignment and bail proceedings after he lands. Unlike other white-collar cases, however, Bankman-Fried faces a particular set of challenges.
“This is obviously not the typical case,” former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti told CNBC. “He is facing decades in prison. And he doesn’t have ties to the community in SDNY like a typical defendant would and also has ties to a foreign jurisdiction. So prosecutors have a shot at getting the judge to order detention unless the defendant posts property or a significant cash bond.”
Throughout the extradition waiver process, Bankman-Fried’s Bahamas legal team and U.S. lawyers have appeared to be at loggerheads. His legal team initially stated that it would fight extradition attempts, but on Saturday a person familiar with the matter told CNBC that the crypto billionaire had changed his mind and would return to the United States.
On Monday morning, Bankman-Fried’s Bahamas counsel said the former billionaire wouldn’t return to the United States without viewing a copy of his indictment, with the lawyer telling a Bahamas magistrate that he was “shocked” to even see Bankman-Fried in court.
Chaos ensued as reporters and attorneys for Bankman-Fried attempted to pin down whether the former crypto billionaire would be rendered back to the United States for arraignment in federal court.
Finally, on Tuesday, a Bahamas prison official and a source familiar with the matter confirmed that Bankman-Fried had signed extradition paperwork and would appear for his final hearing in Nassau on Thursday.
When Bankman-Fried lands in New York, the so-far atypical proceedings should take on a more familiar tenor. In a typical federal case, the accused “would be taken to the detention center for processing before the initial detention hearing/arraignment,” former CFTC trial attorney & Kennyhertz Perry partner Braden Perry told CNBC.
“But again, if arranged in advance with the magistrate in charge of the detention hearing, the court may allow a hearing before processing, but that is unlikely. His attorneys could also waive the detention hearing, at least for now, and request a more detailed evidentiary hearing to ensure their best arguments are made with proper evidence for detention, as it’s usually a one-time shot at getting out before trial,” Perry continued.
Bankman-Fried stands accused by federal law enforcement and financial regulators of perpetrating what the SEC called one of the largest and most “brazen” frauds in recent memory. Replacement CEO John J. Ray described a “complete failure of corporate control” at the company.
Federal regulators have alleged that Bankman-Fried used that $8 billion worth of customer assets for extravagant real estate purchases and vanity projects, including stadium naming rights and millions in political donations.
Beta Technologies shares surged more than 9% after air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility announced an up to $1 billion deal to buy motors from the Vermont-based company.
Eve, which was started by Brazilian airplane maker Embraer and is now under Eve Holding, said the manufacturing deal could equal as much as $1 billion over 10 years. The Florida-based company said it has a backlog of 2,800 vehicles.
Shares of Eve Holding gained 14%.
Eve CEO Johann Bordais called the deal a “pivotal milestone” in the advancement of the company’s electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, technology.
“Their electric motor technology will play a critical role in powering our aircraft during cruise, supporting the maturity of our propulsion architecture as we progress toward entry into service,” he said in a release.
Amazon’s cloud unit on Tuesday announced AI-enabled software designed to help clients better understand and recover from outages.
DevOps Agent, as the artificial intelligence tool from Amazon Web Services is called, predicts the cause of technical hiccups using input from third-party tools such as Datadog and Dynatrace. AWS said customers can sign up to use the tool Tuesday in a preview, before Amazon starts charging for the service.
The AI outage tool from AWS is intended to help companies more quickly figure out what caused an outage and implement fixes, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of agentic AI at AWS, told CNBC. It’s what site reliability engineers, or SREs, do at many companies that provide online services.
SREs try to prevent downtime and jump into action during live incidents. Startups such as Resolve and Traversal have started marketing AI assistants for these experts. Microsoft’s Azure cloud group introduced an SRE Agent in May.
Rather than waiting for on-call staff members to figure out what happened, the AWS DevOps Agent automatically assigns work to agents that look into different hypotheses, Sivasubramanian said.
“By the time the on-call ops team member dials in, they have an incident report with preliminary investigation of what could be the likely outcome, and then suggest what could be the remediation as well,” Sivasubramanian told CNBC ahead of AWS’ Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia has tested the AWS DevOps Agent. In under 15 minutes, the software found the root cause of an issue that would have taken a veteran engineer hours, AWS said in a statement.
The tool relies on Amazon’s in-house AI models and those from other providers, a spokesperson said.
AWS has been selling software in addition to raw infrastructure for many years. Amazon was early to start renting out server space and storage to developers since the mid-2000s, and technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Oracle have followed.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, these cloud infrastructure providers have been trying to demonstrate how generative AI models, which are often training in large cloud computing data centers, can speed up work for software developers.
Over the summer, Amazon announced Kiro, a so-called vibe coding tool that produces and modifies source code based on user text prompts. In November, Google debuted similar software for individual software developers called Antigravity, and Microsoft sells subscriptions to GitHub Copilot.
Attendees pass an Amazon Web Services logo during AWS re:Invent 2024, a conference hosted by Amazon Web Services, at The Venetian hotel in Las Vegas on Dec. 3, 2024.
Noah Berger | Getty Images
Amazon has found a way to let cloud clients extensively customize generative AI models. The catch is that the system costs $100,000 per year.
The Nova Forge offering from Amazon Web Services gives organizations access to Amazon’s AI models in various stages of training so they can incorporate their own data earlier in the process.
Already, companies can fine-tune large language models after they’ve been trained. The results with Nova Forge will lean more heavily on the data that customers supply. Nova Forge customers will also have the option to refine open-weight models, but training data and computing infrastructure are not included.
Organizations that assemble their own models might end up spending hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, which means using Nova Forge is more affordable, Amazon said.
AWS released its own models under the Nova brand in 2024, but they aren’t the first choice for most software developers. A July survey from Menlo Ventures said that by the middle of this year, Amazon-backed Anthropic controlled 32% of the market for enterprise LLMs, followed by OpenAI with 25%, Google with 20% and Meta with 9% — Amazon Nova had a less than 5% share, a Menlo spokesperson said.
The Nova models are available through AWS’ Bedrock service for running models on Amazon cloud infrastructure, as are Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 models.
“We are a frontier lab that has focused on customers,” Rohit Prasad, Amazon head scientist for artificial general intelligence, told CNBC in an interview. “Our customers wanted it. We have invented on their behalf to make this happen.”
Nova Forge is also in use by internal Amazon customers, including teams that work on the company’s stores and the Alexa AI assistant, Prasad said.
Reddit needed an AI model for moderating content that would be sophisticated about the many subjects people discuss on the social network. Engineers found that a Nova model enhanced with Reddit data through Forge performed better than commercially available large-scale models, Prasad said. Booking.com, Nimbus Therapeutics, the Nomura Research Institute and Sony are also building models with Forge, Amazon said.
Organizations can request that Amazon engineers help them build their Forge models, but that assistance is not included in the new service’s $100,000 annual fee.
AWS is also introducing new models for developers at its Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week.
Nova 2 Pro is a reasoning model whose tests show it performs at least as well as Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5, OpenAI’s GPT-5 and GPT-5.1, and Google’s Gemini 3.0 Pro Preview, Amazon said. Reasoning involves running a series of computations that might take extra time in response to requests to produce better answers. Nova 2 Pro will be available in early access to AWS customers with Forge subscriptions, Prasad said. That means Forge customers and Amazon engineers will be able to try Nova 2 Pro at the same time.
Nova 2 Omni is another reasoning model that can process incoming images, speech, text and videos, and it generates images and text. It’s the first reasoning model with that range of capability, Amazon said. Amazon hopes that, by delivering a multifaceted model, it can lower the cost and complexity of incorporating AI models into applications.
Tens of thousands of organizations are using Nova models each week, Prasad said. AWS has said it has millions of customers. Nova is the second-most popular family of models in Bedrock, Prasad said. The top group of models are from Anthropic.