Telegram’s user count has steadily climbed towards 1 billion

Sherwood News

Telegram: 1 arrested founder, 950 million users, and ~50 employees

8/28/24 6:52AM

Once a tech platform approaches a billion users, it stands to reason that most people have heard of it. Telegram might have been the exception… at least until its founder, Pavel Durov, was arrested in Paris as part of a wider investigation into an array of crimes taking place on the platform, from the spread of child sexual abuse material to drug trafficking.

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Some 950 million people reportedly use Telegram every month, a figure that’s steadily climbed every year since it was launched in 2013, and one that makes it more popular than Twitter/X, Snapchat, and Pinterest.

While millions use Telegram as a simple messaging service like WhatsApp or iMessage, many flock to the platform to take advantage of Durov’s laissez-faire approach to content moderation, which has seen it become “a theater of war, a clandestine marketplace, a safe haven for the deplatformed” and, according to the same Atlantic piece, “the world’s most important app”.

The way that Durov’s been running Telegram made the Russian-born billionaire’s arrest inevitable, writes Casey Newton in a new Sherwood piece, with the defense of its content moderation as “within industry standards” seeming “obviously false”. However, the longstanding accusations against Telegram and its position on criminal activity don’t seem to have hurt it on the road to 1 billion users.

Durovs’ arrest is perhaps even more important than it would be for any other founder-led company because of its remarkably small headcount: the business reportedly employs just ~50 full-time staff, meaning that the Telegrammer:worker ratio sits at around 19 million to 1.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

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Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5