Am I ReplA(I)ceable? 🤖

Maybe think twice about advice from AI giants.

It’s not that you’re worthless in the job market. You might just be “lower-value human capital.” At least, that’s what Standard Charter CEO Bill Winters had to say after announcing an anticipated 7,000 back-office jobs will be cut by 2030.

Despite plans for mass layoffs, major hire announcements hitting the headlines this week, like an OpenAI co-founder set to lead the helm at Anthropic, indicate AI companies value people even if the job market seems brutal.

This week, we’ll look at:

• The SEC prepares a framework for tokenising stocks

• Standard Charter’s plans to cut 15% of corporate roles

• Anthropic wins big with their latest executive hire

[Tokenised Stocks? Yes, Please! 🏦]

The SEC is preparing to greenlight a new framework for trading tokenised versions of publicly traded stocks, potentially reshaping how equity markets function in the U.S.

The Context 🧑‍💻:

• The SEC is expected to release an “innovation exemption” for tokenised securities as early as this week, allowing trading platforms to offer digital versions of publicly traded stocks under a lighter regulatory structure.

• In a notable twist, the SEC is leaning toward permitting “third-party” tokenised stocks to trade on decentralised crypto platforms, though they may not carry traditional shareholder rights like voting power or dividends.

• Major Wall Street institutions are already racing to position themselves: DTCC plans limited production trades of tokenised assets by July, Nasdaq has developed a framework for blockchain-based share issuance, and NYSE has a partnership with OKX to build a 24/7 tokenised securities trading platform.

• The move has drawn pushback from industry players like Citadel Securities and SIFMA, who warn that broad exemptions could weaken investor protections, fragment markets, and create uncertainty around pricing when multiple tokenised wrappers of the same stock trade simultaneously.

The Coverage 📰:

• “SEC to Ready Plan for Trading Crypto Versions of Stocks” (Bloomberg)

• “SEC to propose tokenized stock framework as Wall Street efforts deepen”(CoinDesk)

• “SEC’s innovation exemption for tokenized stocks to come as early as this week: Bloomberg” (The Block)

• “SEC readies plan for trading crypto versions of stocks, Bloomberg News reports” (Reuters)

PR Perspective 🔎:

This story signals that the boundary between crypto infrastructure and traditional equity markets is rapidly dissolving. The SEC’s anticipated innovation exemption represents a deliberate regulatory bet that blockchain rails can handle stock trading, and that the benefits of 24/7 markets and near-instant settlement outweigh the risks of reduced investor protections. For the industry, the most significant detail is the allowance of third-party tokenised stocks without issuer consent. This opens the door to a parallel equity ecosystem built entirely on crypto infrastructure, independent of the companies being tracked.

[StanChart’s AI Announcement Backfires 🗣️]

Standard Chartered set out to announce an AI restructuring. It ended up in a communications crisis instead.

The Context 🧑‍💻:

• Standard Chartered plans to cut 7,000-8,000 back-office jobs by 2030, about 15% of its corporate roles, as part of a push to lift returns on equity to around 18% by 2030.

• CEO Bill Winters said the cuts are about replacing “lower-value human capital” with technology investment, with AI and automation doing the heavy lifting across support centres in Chennai, Bengaluru, Kuala Lumpur, and Warsaw.

• The phrasing triggered significant backlash across Asia, including a public rebuke from former Singapore President Halimah Yacob. Winters followed up with a staff memo walking back the tone and reaffirming that the bank’s future depends on its people.

• StanChart is part of a wider trend of banks using AI to trim headcount, with Mizuho also announcing thousands of cuts. The restructuring is expected to push income per employee up roughly 20% by 2028.

• Affected staff will get advance notice and access to retraining programmes, though the bank has not yet confirmed exactly where the job losses will land.

The Coverage 📰:

• “Standard Chartered to replace ‘lower-value human capital’ with AI”(Sky News)

• “StanChart CEO Reassures Staff After ‘Lower-Value Human’ Backlash” (Bloomberg)

• “StanChart to cut over 7,000 jobs, boost AI to replace ‘lower-value human capital” (Reuters)

PR Perspective 🔎:

Whilst AI-driven restructuring at this scale is becoming standard across global banking, what made this one land badly was a single phrase: “lower-value human capital.” In an investor briefing, it reads as financial shorthand, but everywhere else, it signals how leadership views its own workforce.

The follow-up memo was the right move, but the retraining commitment and the human angle were always part of the plan and should have led the announcement.

The communications lesson is straightforward: when announcing large-scale workforce changes, the people narrative needs to lead.

[Anthropic’s OpenAI Hire 👔]

Anthropic’s latest hire is a previous OpenAI founder.

The Context 🧑‍💻:

• Andrej Karpathy, who was an OpenAI co-founder and a previous Tesla executive, has joined Anthropic’s pretraining team. He will lead the data training process for Claude’s AI intelligence models.

• Beyond his exec roles, Karpathy is known for coining the term ”vibe coding” in relation to AI writing code.

• Anthropic’s latest valuation was $900 billion, following a $30 billion funding round.

The Coverage 📰:

• “OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic’s pre-training team” (Tech Crunch)

• “Anthropic hires OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, former Tesla AI leader” (CNBC)

• “OpenAI Cofounder And Former Tesla AI Leader Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic”(Forbes)

• “Andrej Karpathy, Tesla Alum and OpenAI Co-Founder, Joins Anthropic” (WSJ)

PR Perspective 🔎:

The role may be exciting for Karpathy, but the credibility Anthropic has won off the back of the hire is the real win. To have a ChatGPT developer leave OpenAI, as well as exit an executive role at Tesla, for a leadership position at Anthropic gives the company an advantage in the generative AI race. The number of headlines attributed to this hire alone shows that people will always lend the greatest credibility to a brand. No matter how incredible the product, it’s always the a-listers that will take a company to the finish line.

[Tweet of The Week]

Credit: @ToolySOL

---

Connect with YAP Global: Website, X & LinkedIn

The usual disclaimer: This newsletter collates the main themes and headlines of the week in DeFi/crypto/metaverse/Web3/NFT land and tries to provide unbiased context. It’s aimed at anyone who wants to keep an eye on the space. It’s put together by a team at YAP and doesn’t contain any promotion of our clients (if one is mentioned, we’ll flag that).

The team: Founder Samantha Yap, Samvidha Sharma, Sofia Anderson, Meghna Dembla, William Knight, Shajar Qureshi, and TJ Thomas. Your feedback is, as always, welcome. Ping us at thecontext@yapglobal.com. Old newsletters can be found here.

This newsletter is prepared by YAP Global, a financial and technology PR consultancy that advises companies in the digital assets, fintech, stablecoins, AI, and agentic finance sectors. Find out more about us here.