By DAVID KLEPPER

WASHINGTON (AP) — North Korean hackers have pilfered billions of dollars by breaking into cryptocurrency exchanges and creating fake identities to get remote tech jobs at foreign companies, according to an international report on North Korea’s cyber capabilities.

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Officials in Pyongyang orchestrated the clandestine work to finance research and development of nuclear arms, the authors of the 138-page report found. The review was published by the Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team, a group that includes the U.S. and 10 allies and was set up last year to observe North Korea’s compliance with U.N. sanctions.

North Korea also has used cryptocurrency to launder money and make military purchases to evade international sanctions tied to its nuclear program, the report said. It detailed how hackers working for North Korea have targeted foreign businesses and organizations with malware designed to disrupt networks and steal sensitive data.

Despite its small size and isolation, North Korea has heavily invested in offensive cyber capabilities and now rivals China and Russia when it comes to the sophistication and capabilities of its hackers, posing a significant threat to foreign governments, businesses and individuals, the investigators concluded.

Unlike China, Russia and Iran, North Korea has focused much of its cyber capabilities to fund its government, using cyberattacks and fake workers to steal and defraud companies and organizations elsewhere in the world.

Aided in part by allies in Russia and China, North Korea’s cyber actions have “been directly linked to the destruction of physical computer equipment, endangerment of human lives, private citizens’ loss of assets and property, and funding for the DPRK’s unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs,” the report said, using the acronym for North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The monitoring group is made up of the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea and the United Kingdom. It was created last year after Russia vetoed a resolution directing a U.N. Security Council panel of experts to monitor Pyongyang’s activities. The team’s first report, issued in May, looked at North Korea’s military support for Russia.

Earlier this year, hackers linked to North Korea carried out one of the largest crypto heists ever, stealing $1.5 billion worth of ethereum from Bybit. The FBI later linked the theft to a group of hackers working for the North Korean intelligence service.

Federal authorities also have alleged that thousands of IT workers employed by U.S. companies were actually North Koreans using assumed identities to land remote work. The workers gained access to internal systems and funneled their salaries back to North Korea’s government. In some cases, the workers held several remote jobs at the same time.

A message left with North Korea’s mission to the U.N. was not immediately returned on Wednesday.

MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) — Meta Platforms is cutting roughly 600 artificial intelligence jobs even as it continues to hire more workers for its superintelligence lab, the company confirmed on Wednesday.

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Axios first reported the cuts, which will affect Meta’s Fundamental AI Research, or FAIR unit, as well as product-related AI and AI infrastructure units.

Its newer TBD Lab unit won’t be affected. Citing a memo sent to workers by chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, Axios said the company is encouraging employees affected to apply for other jobs at Meta, with most expected to find other roles. The Menlo Park, California-based company is also still recruiting and hiring for TBD Lab, which is developing Meta’s latest large language models. Large language models are the technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini — and Meta’s Llama.

Meta has taken a different approach to AI than many of its rivals, releasing its flagship Llama system for free as an open-source product that enables people to use and modify some of its key components. Meta says more than a billion people use its AI products each month, but it’s also widely seen as lagging behind competitors such as OpenAI and Google in encouraging consumer use of large language models, also known as LLMs.

By DEE-ANN DURBIN

Beyond Meat’s shares briefly sizzled Wednesday before heading back down again.

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The plant-based meat company’s shares more than doubled early Wednesday before closing at $3.58 per share, which was down 1%. Still, it was a surprising comeback for a stock that was trading at an all-time low of 50 cents per share late last week.

Investors cheered Beyond Meat’s announcement Tuesday that it’s increasing the availability of some of its products at U.S. Walmart stores. Beyond Meat said that its chicken pieces, Korean BBQ-style steak and burger six-packs will now be easier to find in more than 2,000 Walmart stores.

Beyond Meat also launched a direct-to-consumer website this week, which will try to build buzz by offering limited releases of new products.

But perhaps the biggest driver of interest in Beyond Meat is Roundhill Investments, which added Beyond Meat to its Meme Stock ETF, or exchange-traded fund, on Monday. The fund consists solely of meme stocks, which are stocks that gain popularity and trading volume based on social media hype rather than a company’s financial performance.

Investors have been sporadically turning to meme stocks throughout 2025 in an effort to find bargains amid a very pricey stock market. The stocks are often the target of “short sellers,” or investors betting against the stock.

Beyond Meat was the darling of the plant-based meat industry when it went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange in 2019.

But in recent years the El Segundo, California-based company has been struggling with weak demand for its burgers, sausages, tenders and other products. Beyond Meat’s net revenue was down 15% in the first six months of this year.

Beyond Meat’s stock price cratered last week after the company announced the expiration of lock-up restrictions on some of its 326 million shares of new stock as part of a plan to help it reduce its debt load and extend the time until its debt matures. The lock-up had prevented shareholders from selling the stock but now they were free to do so.

Schemes of national governance are complicated and subject to generalization, but for the sake of argument, let’s put “democracy” at one end of a spectrum and “autocracy” at the other and consider the bright line that separates them?

There isn’t one.

In fact, since 1997 the Center for Systemic Peace has maintained a 21-point scale that takes into account various political variables — elections, the role of the military, economic inequality, political violence and so on — in order to describe where countries stand on the scale between democracy and autocracy.

On the autocracy end, at -10, are the countries that you would expect: North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, obvious autocracies all.

At +10 are the apparent democracies: Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada and, until recently, the United States.

In the middle, between -5 and +5, are what political scientists call partial democracies, hybrid regimes or anocracies. They embody elements of both autocracy and democracy, and the point where one clearly shades into the other is elusive.

In her ominously entitled book, “How Civil Wars Start,” published in 2023, political scientist Barbara F. Walter describes the erosion of America’s standing on this 21-point scale during President Donald Trump’s first term, which began with the U.S. at +10.

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, America’s score fell to a +8 based on Trump’s efforts to purge government figures he deemed disloyal and to punish opponents. He refused to disclose his tax returns, and he pardoned friends who were guilty of crimes.

By 2019 Trump was refusing to cooperate with Congress, especially in connection with his impeachment. He sued to block subpoenas and refused to turn over information needed for congressional oversight. The polity scale score dropped to +7.

The pandemic and the George Floyd protests encouraged Trump’s tendencies to absorb power into the executive branch. And then there was January 6, an indisputable, if inept, effort to overturn an election.

By the end of Trump’s term, the U.S.’s score had dropped to +5, making America, according to Walter, an anocracy, rather than a democracy, for the first time in more than 200 years.

I searched in vain for the U.S.’s current score, but Trump’s first nine months in office can’t have been good for it. It’s easy to see why Trump’s critics worry that we’re headed for genuine autocracy.

Of course, few countries aspire to autocracy. About the only countries that are honest about this are places such as Saudi Arabia, which unashamedly calls itself a Kingdom. China, on the other hand, is officially the People’s Republic of China. North Korea, fooling no one, is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Even Iran, a thoroughgoing theocracy, calls itself the Islamic Republic of Iran.

But we have (or had) a real republic, and it would be a shame, despite its imperfections, to let it slip away.

Because, as the analysis above suggests, autocracy always comes gradually. Where’s the point when we are no longer a republic, or even an anocracy, but have become an autocracy?

Is it when the president openly orders his Department of Justice to prosecute his political enemies? Is it when he sends federalized troops under flimsy pretenses into states and cities governed by Democrats? Is it when he uses military force against a sovereign nation (Venezuela, for example) without bothering to consult Congress or ask for a declaration of war?

Or does autocracy begin with less dramatic measures, like when Trump started calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and required others to do the same? Or when he renamed American military installations to honor the Confederate officers (despite the cover story) who fought to preserve slavery because… well, because he could?

Or does autocracy begin when something clicks in the mind of the wannabe authoritarian and he realizes that he can do nearly anything he wants with impunity?

I thought of this last week when Trump threatened to relocate World Cup matches scheduled to be played in Boston next year because Boston’s mayor is “radical left.”

Maybe autocracy starts with something as trivial as this. Or maybe it starts the moment our country loses the will to say no to Trump.

John M. Crisp, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, lives in Texas and can be reached at jcrispcolumns@gmail.com.