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Sam Bankman-Fried’s legal team is asking a U.S. district court judge to grant the former FTX CEO “uninterrupted access” to his daily prescribed medication while he is in jail. That includes Adderall for treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

“For over five years Mr. Bankman-Fried has been prescribed Emsam 9mg/24 hrs transdermal patch for the treatment of depression,” Bankman-Fried’s attorney, Mark Cohen, wrote in a letter to Judge Lewis Kaplan on Monday. “And for the past three years, Mr. Bankman-Fried has been prescribed Adderall 10mg tablets, 3-4x/day for the treatment of ADHD.”

Kaplan approved the motion later in the day.

On Friday, Kaplan sided with a request by federal prosecutors to revoke Bankman-Fried’s bail over alleged witness tampering. Bankman-Fried was remanded to custody directly from a court hearing in New York and sent to Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, or MDC, according to Bureau of Prisons records.

Unless an appeal filed by the defendant’s legal team is successful, Bankman-Fried is expected to remain in custody until his criminal trial, which is due to begin Oct. 2. He faces charges for allegedly conspiring to defraud investors and customers out of billions of dollars in a scheme that led to the collapse of FTX and sent shockwaves throughout the crypto industry. He pleaded not guilty.

The latest request from Bankman-Fried’s lawyers includes a letter from his psychiatrist, George Lerner, who has been treating the former FTX CEO since February 2019.

“Mr. Bankman-Fried has a history of Major Depressive Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder,” Lerner wrote.

ADHD is among the most common neurodevelopmental disorders in children. Bankman-Fried told a Bahamas judge in December that he took medication to treat depression and ADHD.

Lerner added in his letter that Bankman-Fried had tried other antidepressants but said they were ineffective for his symptoms.

“Additionally, there have been times when Mr. Bankman-Fried did not have access to the Emsam patch (typically when travelling/abroad) and exhibited symptoms of depression, including lethargy, anhedonia, low motivation, and increased ruminations,” Lerner wrote.

Without his medication, Lerner warned the judge, “Bankman-Fried will experience a return of his depression and ADHD symptoms and will be severely negatively impacted in his ability to assist in his own defense.”

Cohen said Bankman-Fried was only able to bring a “small supply” of his daily medication when he was remanded to custody on Friday — a supply apparently only sufficient to last him a few days.

“We respectfully ask that the Court promptly enter an order directing MDC to ensure that our client has continuous access to the specific medications and dosages that are described in Dr. Lerner’s letter,” wrote Cohen.

For nearly a year, there’s been a nationwide shortage of Adderall, the popular stimulant used to treat ADHD. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has called on drug manufacturers to up production.

Bankman-Fried was sent to jail over his decision to leak private diary entries by his ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, to The New York Times. In many of her personal writings, Ellison expressed self-doubt and feelings of stress in her role as the former head of Bankman-Fried’s failed crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research.

“I have been feeling pretty unhappy and overwhelmed with my job,” she wrote in an entry dated February 2022. “At the end of the day I can’t wait to go home and turn off my phone and have a drink and get away from it all.”

Ellison, who pleaded guilty to federal charges in December 2022, has been cooperating with the government and is expected to be a star witness for the prosecution.

During his 33-minute ruling Friday, Kaplan said probable cause for witness tampering had been met by the prosecution, adding that Bankman-Fried’s contribution to the Ellison story was designed to “hurt” and “discredit” a witness.

The prosecution described the effort by Bankman-Fried as a “means of indirect witness intimidation through the press.” 

The government has requested that Bankman-Fried be remanded to a jail in Putnam, New York, where he would have access to a laptop with internet access for defense preparation, rather than staying at MDC, which is the facility closest to the courthouse but has limited web access for prisoners.

CNBC’s Dan Mangan contributed to this report.

WATCH: Sam Bankman-Fried’s bail revoked

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OpenAI to acquire Neptune, a startup that helps with AI model training

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OpenAI to acquire Neptune, a startup that helps with AI model training

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attends an event to pitch AI for businesses in Tokyo, Japan February 3, 2025.

Kim Kyung-hoon | Reuters

OpenAI has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Neptune, a startup that builds monitoring and de-bugging tools that artificial intelligence companies use as they train models.

Neptune and OpenAI have collaborated on a metrics dashboard to help teams that are building foundation models. The companies will work “even more closely together” because of the acquisition, Neptune CEO Piotr Niedźwiedź said in a blog.

The startup will wind down its external services in the coming months, Niedźwiedź said. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

“Neptune has built a fast, precise system that allows researchers to analyze complex training workflows,” OpenAI’s Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki said in a statement. “We plan to iterate with them to integrate their tools deep into our training stack to expand our visibility into how models learn.”

OpenAI has acquired several companies this year.

It purchased a small interface startup called Software Applications Incorporated for an undisclosed sum in October, product development startup Statsig for $1.1 billion in September and Jony Ive’s AI devices startup io for more than $6 billion in May.

Neptune had raised more than $18 million in funding from investors including Almaz Capital and TDJ Pitango Ventures, according to its website. Neptune’s deal with OpenAI is still subject to customary closing conditions.

“I am truly grateful to our customers, investors, co-founders, and colleagues who have made this journey possible,” Niedźwiedź said. “It was the ride of a lifetime already, yet still I believe this is only the beginning.”

WATCH: Sam Altman hits reset at OpenAI, pausing side bets to defend ChatGPT’s AI lead

Sam Altman hits reset at OpenAI, pausing side bets to defend ChatGPT’s AI lead

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Micron stops selling memory to consumers as demand spikes from AI chips

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Micron stops selling memory to consumers as demand spikes from AI chips

A person walks by a sign for Micron Technology headquarters in San Jose, California, on June 25, 2025.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Micron said on Wednesday that it plans to stop selling memory to consumers to focus on meeting demand for high-powered artificial intelligence chips.

“The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage,” Sumit Sadana, Micron business chief, said in a statement. “Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments.”

Micron’s announcement is the latest sign that the AI infrastructure boom is creating shortages for inputs like memory as a handful of companies commit to spend hundreds of billions in the next few years to build massive data centers. Memory, which is used by computers to store data for short periods of time, is facing a global shortage.

Micron shares are up about 175% this year, though they slipped 3% on Wednesday to $232.25.

AI chips, like the GPUs made by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, use large amounts of the most advanced memory. For example, the current-generation Nvidia GB200 chip has 192GB of memory per graphics processor. Google’s latest AI chip, the Ironwood TPU, needs 192GB of high-bandwidth memory.

Memory is also used in phones and computers, but with lower specs, and much lower quantities — many laptops only come with 16GB of memory. Micron’s Crucial brand sold memory on sticks that tinkerers could use to build their own PCs or upgrade their laptops. Crucial also sold solid-state hard drives.

Micron competes against SK Hynix and Samsung in the market for high-bandwidth memory, but it’s the only U.S.-based memory supplier. Analysts have said that SK Hynix is Nvidia’s primary memory supplier.

Micron supplies AMD, which says its AI chips use more memory than others, providing them a performance advantage for running AI. AMD’s current AI chip, the MI350, comes with 288GB of high-bandwidth memory.

Micron’s Crucial business was not broken out in company earnings. However, its cloud memory business unit showed 213% year-over-year growth in the most recent quarter.

Analysts at Goldman on Tuesday raised their price target on Micron’s stock to $205 from $180, though they maintained their hold recommendation. The analysts wrote in a note to clients that due to “continued pricing momentum” in memory, they “expect healthy upside to Street estimates” when Micron reports quarterly results in two weeks.

A Micron spokesperson declined to comment on whether the move would result in layoffs.

“Micron intends to reduce impact on team members due to this business decision through redeployment opportunities into existing open positions within the company,” the company said in its release.

WATCH: Winners and losers from surge in prices for memory chips

The winners and losers from the surge in memory chip prices

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Microsoft stock sinks on report AI product sales are missing growth goals

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Microsoft stock sinks on report AI product sales are missing growth goals

Microsoft: Have not lowered sales quotas or targets for salespeople

Microsoft pushed back on a report Wednesday that the company lowered growth targets for artificial intelligence software sales after many of its salespeople missed those goals in the last fiscal year.

The company’s stock sank more than 2% on The Information report.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company has not lowered sales quotas or targets for its salespeople.

The sales lag occurred for Microsoft’s Foundry product, an Azure enterprise platform where companies can build and manage AI agents, according to The Information, which cited two salespeople in Azure’s cloud unit.

AI agents can carry out a series of actions for a user or organization autonomously.

Less than a fifth of salespeople in one U.S. Azure unit met the Foundry sales growth target of 50%, according to The Information.

In another unit, the quota was set to double Foundry sales, The Information reported. The quota was dropped to 50% after most salespeople didn’t meet it.

In a statement, the company said the news outlet inaccurately combined the concepts of growth and quotas.

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“Aggregate sales quotas for AI products have not been lowered, as we informed them prior to publication,” a Microsoft Spokesperson said.

The AI boom has presented opportunities for businesses to add efficiencies and streamline tasks, with the companies that build these agents touting the power of the tools to take on work and allow workers to do more.

OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Salesforce, Amazon and others all have their own tools to create and manage these AI assistants.

But the adoption of these tools by traditional businesses hasn’t seen the same surge as other parts of the AI ecosystem.

The Information noted AI adoption struggles at private equity firm Carlyle last year, in which the tools wouldn’t reliably connect data from other places. The company later reduced how much it spent on the tools.

Read the full story from The Information here.

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