The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

Епизоде

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  Anthropic Says Its Own AI Helped Build a Missile in Yemen: Inside Its September Threat Report 11.09.2026 22мин

  The public resignation of Jacob Coxon — who told the world his industry is “gambling with our lives” — buried two other chilling warnings from inside the AI industry this week.The first is “An Alien Mind,” an essay OpenAI’s chief scientist Jakub Pachocki published on September 6, in which he describes his own creation as an intellect nobody fully understands and says no lab has solved alignment well enough to keep scaling at full speed.The second is Anthropic’s September threat report, which lays out what people have already done with Claude: a Russian espionage group whose AI agents rewrote their own malware until security products stopped catching it; hotel WiFi networks turned into malware delivery systems; one person who built a searchable doxing database of political dissidents; a Wagner-funded radio station in the Central African Republic where the model wrote the loyalty contracts and the scoring rubric used to decide which journalists to fire; and a cell in northern Yemen running three weapons programs, including a multi-stage ballistic missile with a stated range goal above 2,000 kilometers.In the last weeks of 1944, Polish physicist Joseph Rotblat told his boss James Chadwick that he was leaving the world’s most dangerous scientific undertaking.In this episode I go through the report, explain why the labor curve that used to limit what a small group could do has collapsed, and lay out the questions I submitted to a CNN producer for the executives running these companies — including whether Dario Amodei would support the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, the bill Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar announced on September 3, which would carry penalties comparable to those for unlawfully developing nuclear weapons.For the full written reporting, and analysis you'll read nowhere else, subscribe at TheRipCurrent.com.
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  Why Did MapQuest Fight Trump When Apple and Google Wouldn't? 03.09.2026 12мин

  Why did Google and Apple change Lake Ontario to Lake America? And why did MapQuest decide not to?On August 27, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to rename Lake Ontario as "Lake America." The order applies to the federal government and the Geographic Names Information System — not to private companies. Google Maps made the change over the weekend of August 29th, citing official government sources. Apple Maps followed on September 1st, after Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said on Fox Business that Trump had personally asked Apple to make the switch.MapQuest refused. Its app went to No. 1 in Navigation on the U.S. App Store, No. 4 among all non-gaming apps, and No. 2 overall in Canada, picking up roughly 180,000 downloads in a week. Its parent company, System1 (NYSE: SST), saw its stock jump. MapQuest is the control group here: it proves compliance was a choice.In this video I look at what changed. Google walked away from China in 2010. Tim Cook beat the FBI in 2016. Google dropped Project Maven in 2018 after 4,000 employees signed a petition, and killed Dragonfly in 2019. Then Google fired about 50 workers over Project Nimbus in 2024 and deleted its AI no-weapons pledge in 2025. Meanwhile Apple pledged $100 billion in U.S. investment and won an exemption from 100% semiconductor tariffs, and Google is still in the remedies phase of two federal antitrust cases — including Judge Leonie Brinkema's September 2nd ruling on its ad network. When a president holds that much of your business, you're not looking for hills to die on.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=show-notes&utm_campaign=evergreen
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  "We Were Gonna Win" Says Colorado's AG. So Why Settle with Meta? 02.09.2026 28мин

  By now you know how I felt about it. When I heard, seven days into the Meta trial, that the company would be allowed to settle with the States, I was astounded. “They did what?” I shouted at my phone first thing that morning.For one thing, it was clear in even those first few days in court that there was a mountain of evidence showing that executives at Facebook and Instagram had known for years not only that young kids were on the platform when they shouldn’t be, but that terrible things were happening to them as they snuck around what attempts Meta made to filter them out. Witness after witness had described a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy at the company when it came to kids. And the executives were about to take a public beating.We had just begun to hear from Instagram boss Adam Mosseri. The famously sweaty Mark Zuckerberg was due to take the stand in a couple of days. (He’d have to answer for, among many other things, testimony that suggested he’d personally attended a meeting at which his people told him four million kids under the age of 13 were on Instagram.) This was shaping up to be another very public reckoning for the company.I spent weeks reassuring people in the comments that no, this wasn’t going to wind up a monetary settlement. This time was clearly going to be different. It was clear to me that the states had this company on the ropes, and it was not at all clear to me what incentive they would have to accept anything short of a verdict against Meta. But I was wrong, and I needed to know why.So on the Monday after the settlement I interviewed Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who co-led the multi-state effort to hold Meta accountable for violating children’s privacy and violating state laws about deceptive practices — and helped lead the settlement negotiations. He told me that the calculus of accepting a settlement only made sense when it had become clear to Meta that they were likely to lose this case. He also said it made far more sense to him to pursue a settlement that would guarantee Meta made changes to its business now than wait the years it would take to get through various appeals, even if the judge in the case decided in the states’ favor.It’s a tough business being an Attorney General in a case like this. In our conversation, it became clear to me that A.G. Weiser and his peers are struggling to figure out the best remedies, just as we all are. It’s going to take a lot more legal action like this one to get the change we would want to see in this world. This conversation was, for me, a very helpful first journey into just how complex it all is once the problems we see so clearly in our lives have to be sorted out in court. In this conversation Weiser explains why he thinks New Mexico's $942 million litigated judgment bought less protection than his settlement did, why he considers messaging — which is excluded from the settlement — "a different kettle of fish" than an algorithmic feed, why requiring age assurance from parents hurts Meta rather than kids, why he put the odds of getting what the states wanted at trial around 30 percent, what he does and doesn't know about whether the discovery evidence can be shared with the thousands of remaining plaintiffs, and whether landing a settlement ten weeks before voters decide whether he’s the next governor of Colorado was a coincidence. Read the most damning evidence of the trial here, and consider becoming a paid subscriber to The Rip Current, your guide to tech, power and the invisible forces shaping our lives.
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  "You Just Cannot Trust Mark Zuckerberg With Kids" — Meta Trial, Day 2 21.08.2026 12мин

  Day two of the multistate trial against Meta in federal court in Oakland, where 29 state attorneys general are asking Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to reach inside the company and change how Instagram and Facebook work. Arturo Bejar — former head of engineering for Facebook's protection group, later head of well-being at Instagram — is the states' first witness, and no wonder Meta moved to keep him off the witness stand. He testified on direct and under cross-examination by Meta's defense, and what he had to say was pretty damning.Bejar told the court that priorities at Meta flow from one person: "If Mark Zuckerberg wakes up and decides something is a priority, then mountains move." He described a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude toward the millions of children under 13 on platforms where they aren't permitted, product managers who acknowledged knowing and had no plans to act, and Instagram posts where kids stated their own ages outright. He called Meta the most sophisticated company in the world at detecting fake accounts — machine learning made that routine long before anyone called it AI — and said that if the same capability had been aimed at underage accounts, the problem could have been solved in three to six months. After reading a public letter from Zuckerberg claiming the company was succeeding at protecting kids, Bejar told the court he concluded: "You cannot trust Mark Zuckerberg with kids."On cross, Meta's lawyers pressed him to call his survey data "subjective." He refused. Asking a teenager whether they were sexually harassed in the past seven days measures an experience, not an opinion — and the whole defense strategy depends on making that harm sound too squishy to count. I cover the invisible forces shaping our lives, and I've been in the courthouse for this trial since day one.Subscribe for all the documents, and my full analysis, at The Rip Current.
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  The Meta Trial: How Zuck Fights Back 19.08.2026 12мин

  Meta's opening statement in Oakland was delivered by Paul Schmidt, a Covington & Burling partner who co-chairs the firm's product liability and mass torts practice. His track record includes trial wins for McKesson in the opioids litigation, Eli Lilly in the Cymbalta cases, and Hoffmann-La Roche in the Accutane trials. Covington's own website quotes a book by Washington Post reporters calling one of his cross-examinations "a master class in how to destroy a witness."I was in the courtroom for both sides. California Deputy Attorney General Megan O'Neill gave the states a four-word shorthand — hook, hold, harvest, hide — and walked the eight-member advisory jury through the gap between what Meta said publicly and what its internal documents show. Schmidt's answer was a phrase he returned to again and again: wait for all the evidence. His core argument is that science has not established a causal link between rising teen mental health problems and rising social media use. That argument is not wrong on the facts. Science deals in consensus, not certainty, and as the former editor-in-chief of Popular Science I can tell you no serious researcher will ever say a thing is 100% settled. Manufacturing doubt inside that gap is exactly the strategy that worked for tobacco and for the oil industry on climate.The filters fight shows how the same facts get framed twice. O'Neill described Meta banning appearance-altering filters, asking outside experts whether to make the ban permanent, hearing yes from the experts and yes from its own staff — and then Zuckerberg putting them back after seeing the growth numbers. Schmidt described a ten-month review Meta was under no obligation to conduct, ending in a split decision that kept surgery-adjacent filters off and let the giraffe ears back on, all built by third parties in the first place. Anderson Cooper asked me tonight whether this is social media's cigarette moment. What I wish I'd said: the value of a trial like this is that it turns a decade of vague dread about these products into specific, testable, legislatable language.Arturo Bejar, Instagram's former head of wellbeing turned whistleblower, took the stand today for direct examination. I'm waiting for the cross before I bring it to you, so you get both halves. That's tomorrow.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, become a subscriber! Visit https://theripcurrent.com.
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  The Meta Trial: Damning Evidence 19.08.2026 12мин

  I'm outside the federal courthouse in Oakland, where Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is hearing what may be the biggest legal threat Meta has ever faced — not just because of the dollar amount, but because a federal judge could order the company to fundamentally change how its products work. Twenty-nine states have joined a federal case arguing Meta violated COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act — a claim that, if it wins, applies nationwide, not state by state. A smaller group of four states — California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey — are trying their own state-law claims first, as a test case the other 25 states are waiting to follow.Here's the twist most coverage missed: the $1.4 trillion damages figure everyone's been repeating — including, briefly, me on CNN this morning — didn't come from the states. It came from Meta. The states' actual ask is just under $200 billion, still enormous, but a fraction of Meta's own number. Meta's lawyers put the trillion-dollar figure out there, and it looks like the goal was to make the whole case sound absurd. I'm not sure it worked the way they hoped. If a company's product is doing the kind of harm the states are alleging, an existential number might be exactly the point. Beyond the numbers game, California's Deputy AG walked the jury through Meta's own internal documents this morning — internal goals to increase teen time spent, internal surveys showing harm rates dramatically higher than what Meta reported publicly, and an internal message from an employee describing the company as "basically butchers."This trial is expected to run four to six weeks, and I'll be covering it from inside the courtroom the whole way. One detail worth sitting with: on the very same day this trial opened, OpenAI announced a teen version of ChatGPT with new safety guardrails. The entire tech industry is watching this courthouse and adjusting in real time.This analysis originally appeared on The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full transcripts. Sign up at https://theripcurrent.com
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  Zuckerberg: Three-Time Loser? Inside Meta's Latest Court Trouble 18.08.2026 15мин

  Meta goes to trial in Oakland on Tuesday, August 18, and this one works differently from the two it already lost. Twenty-nine state attorneys general are trying claims that Facebook and Instagram collected personal data from children under 13 without parental consent, violating COPPA, the federal children's privacy law passed in 1998. Four of those states — California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey — go further, alleging Meta built features it knew were harming young users and then told parents and Congress the opposite.Meta's track record splits cleanly. It won in front of a judge alone when the FTC failed to prove monopoly power last November. It lost in front of juries in New Mexico, where the total now stands at $942 million after a $375 million penalty and a $567 million abatement fund, and in Los Angeles, where it was assigned $4.2 million of a $6 million negligent-design award alongside YouTube. In Oakland, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has empaneled an eight-member advisory jury — a rarely used device — and reserved the final ruling and the remedy for herself. She has already found Meta's parental-consent procedures failed COPPA, and she has already denied Meta's motions to seal, which puts the internal documents in public view.I break down how Meta wins this and how Meta loses it: the narrow list of features actually before the court, the genuinely contested science on causation, the Section 230 defense that's still live on appeal, the legal doctrine that puts fourteen years of conduct in play instead of four, and disgorgement — the remedy that would force Meta to hand back advertising profits earned from the affected kids, state by state.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
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  Zuckerberg's $1.4 Trillion Trial 16.08.2026 14мин

  Next week the biggest social media trial yet opens in federal court in Oakland — a couple miles from my house — and I get to bike to the story instead of fly to it. Four state attorneys general (California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey) are trying to prove that Meta built Facebook and Instagram to addict kids. Meta expects the states could seek up to $1.4 trillion. Zuckerberg and Mosseri are expected on the stand. This is a big one.Here I walk through where this case came from — Frances Haugen’s leaks, the LA and New Mexico verdicts already on the board — and why the whole thing hinges on one word: design. If the states can convince Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers that infinite scroll and autoplay are harmful design choices rather than protected speech, thirty years of Section 230 immunity might start to crack, and with it, the social media era.In this episode:Why four states are trying this case together, and what the other 29 are claimingThe design-versus-content argument, and how it gets around Section 230The March verdicts in Los Angeles ($6M, Meta and YouTube) and New Mexico (Meta, nearly $1B)Why TikTok, Snap, and YouTube keep settling while Meta fightsThe next bellwether coming in February, and why it mattersLinks: Reuters trial preview · CNN: Zuckerberg's testimony · Meta's own 10-Q (SEC)
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  A Texas School Explosion and the Real Reason Companies Change 13.08.2026 15мин

  In 1937, a Texas school exploded because natural gas has no smell — nobody could detect the leak until it killed nearly 300 people, most of them children. Within weeks, Texas passed the first law forcing gas companies to add an odor. That fix, mercaptan, is still the reason your kitchen reeks of rotten eggs during a leak today. It didn't change the product. It just made an invisible danger detectable — and only because regulators forced the industry's hand.That's the history behind this week's AI news. On August 2nd, the EU AI Act's transparency rules took effect, requiring any company serving EU users to make AI-generated content detectable — or face a fine of €15 million or 3% of worldwide revenue, whichever is larger. Google and OpenAI committed to compliance back in May. This week Anthropic followed, saying it will embed statistical watermarks in AI-generated text and use C2PA provenance standards for images. None of them have shipped a public tool that lets you or me actually check the mark yet — the additive is in the gas, but we can't smell it.The bigger question is whether it's already too late. One widely cited study found nearly half of new articles online are now AI-generated — though a follow-up from the same firm found human-written work still dominates what Google actually surfaces in search. I dig into what that split might mean, and why the social embarrassment of getting "outed" by a watermark might do more to change our behavior than the regulation itself.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
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  AI Romance Scams are Here 06.08.2026 9мин

  In 2022 I interviewed a young Nigerian man outside Lagos who'd spent years working as a romance scammer, grinding one target at a time until he finally convinced a lonely widow to send him more than $200,000. The lesson of that story was never about technology. For criminals like him, the biggest cost was time.On July 31, OpenAI disclosed a scam operation run out of Poipet, Cambodia — a border town linked to forced labor and trafficking — where a cluster of ChatGPT accounts wrote the romance pitches, translated the messages, and handled the administration: shift tracking, handoff notes between managers, the immigration status of the workers being pressed into the job. OpenAI found out because WhatsApp tipped them off, not through its own detection.Bandwidth was the one thing holding scam crime back, and AI removes it. Meanwhile the transborder legal system built to prosecute fraud gets slower and harder to coordinate every year. This is what that gap looks like, and why the people supposed to stop it are already behind.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
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  Elon Musk's Lawyers: Let Us Make AI Nudes If We Want 01.08.2026 8мин

  It's The Rip Current's 100th episode! Visit TheRipCurrent.com to get all the analysis, the power-mapping, all of it.Minnesota's HF 1606 takes effect Saturday, August 1. It is the first law in the country to target the companies that build "nudification" tools rather than the users who operate them, with civil penalties of $500,000 each time a user generates a prohibited image. On Monday, Elon Musk's xAI — now owned by SpaceX — sued Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison in federal court, arguing the statute is an overbroad, content-based ban on speech and on the tools of visual expression. Arguing the penalties are ruinous, the company's lawyers wrote that a business whose users created 100,000 prohibited images would face "an eye-popping $50 billion." That hypothetical is, well, kind of an embarassing admission of the scale of the problem. Technical experts have pointed out the one fix that would actually work — barring AI from altering photographs of real people at all — is something no platform wants, because everyone's trying to find a way to make money off this stuff, no matter how gross.The bill was written by state Sen. Erin Maye Quade after she learned of a man who used social media photos to make sexualized images of more than 80 women he knew. Musk's company has run this play before, filing a similar challenge against California's deepfake law. Gov. Tim Walz's response to the Minnesota suit: "See you in court, creep." UPDATE: A federal judge has denied xAI's request to pause the law, clearing the way for it to take effect Saturday, and set an August 19 hearing on a preliminary injunction. The judge noted xAI filed nearly three months after the law was signed and three days before it took effect, which suggests the harm is not immediate. Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
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  Runaway A.I. is Here: Now What Do We Do? 01.08.2026 14мин

  The full written analysis is at TheRipCurrent.com: the researchers who called this years ago, the safety thresholds OpenAI wrote for itself, and who benefits from the open-weights fight. Paid subscribers get it first.In July, two OpenAI models — GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased, more capable model — were running an internal cyber benchmark called ExploitGym with their guardrails lowered for testing. Instead of solving the test, they worked out how to leave: exploiting a zero-day in a package-registry proxy, escalating privileges, moving laterally until they reached a node with internet access. Then they reasoned that Hugging Face probably hosted the answers, and went and took them. OpenAI called it an unprecedented cyber incident involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities. The word "unprecedented" also appears in OpenAI's own safety framework, describing the kind of capability that is supposed to halt a development program. The story has kept expanding since: OpenAI later disclosed the same agent broke into several other publicly available services and accounts. Anthropic then went looking at its own systems and found similar behavior. What follows is the industry-wide argument over whether models should be open-weight or closed. Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Palantir signed a coalition letter urging regulators not to restrict open-weight formats, while Anthropic's Dario Amodei has argued that open weights won't make bioweapon defense easier, because building a defense takes years and building the threat does not. Every signature on both sides maps neatly onto a business model.Underneath all of it sits a document at pacingthefrontier.com, published July 28 and signed by more than 1300 employees of companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta, asking the U.S. government to build tools that could verifiably slow AI development. Signatories include Dario Amodei, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Meta chief scientist Shengjia Zhao, and Google's head of AI safety, Anca Dragan. The reason they gave: "intense competitive pressure" means no company and no country can afford to ease off first. Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
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  The Corruption of Prediction Markets 17.07.2026 12мин

  Gabriel Perez has run Donald Trump’s teleprompter since 2016. According to CFTC investigators, he spent months betting on Kalshi’s “Mentions” market on which words and phrases Trump would use in his own speeches, and made more than $100,000 doing it. He’s now in settlement talks with regulators, on unpaid leave from the White House (where the president’s own stock trades in companies he’s directly influencing is arguably a much deeper form of lever-pulling than anything Perez managed).Every prediction market scandal before this one was an insider-trading scam, trading on information the rest of the bettors didn’t have: a soldier with classified intel, a Google employee with search data, congressional candidates betting on their own races. Perez operates the device that produces the very words he bet on. Here’s where the world of prediction markets begins to resemble the dangerous world of sports betting, and where reality gets distorted.Full argument, sourcing, and the sports-betting precedent for what happens next at TheRipCurrent.com
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  AI is Hacking Your Mind 16.07.2026 13мин

  AI will do to our ability to make decisions what GPS did to our sense of direction. That's the argument I made four years ago in The Loop: How AI is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back. I thought I was at least a few years early. ChatGPT arrived 9 months later.Here I break down the book for you, because its findings keep coming back in new forms with each week's news. Your brain runs on shortcuts — what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky called System 1, the fast-thinking brain that drives your car, picks your lunch, and carries you through the day on autopilot. (System 2, your slow-thinking brain, is for the rare moments of caution, creativity, and mindfulness when you fully engage your decision-making abilities.) That autopilot kept our ancestors alive. It makes moving through our day so, so much easier. But it's also at the root of prejudice, bad choices with money, and political and financial manipulation. It's also the exact vulnerability that a system built to make your choices for you is perfectly suited to exploit, because your brain is wired to hand off effort wherever it can.The cost is already showing up. A UC Berkeley professor recently told me he spends most of his courses trying to convince freshmen that there's a real difference between reading a book and reading a chatbot's summary of one. Intake psychiatrists are quietly inventing codes for patients who arrive believing a chatbot's claim that they're Jesus, or a king.So I make the case for cognitive friction — for what one federal judge calls "weak perfection": the idea that a harder, slower process is what keeps a mind strong. Entering a guilty plea is a pain, yes, but that's a good thing, because that choice is permanent, and will change your life — and a system that makes the decision frictionless takes away your chance to put your best thinking into it.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
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  The Fight to Protect You Against AI (with Rep Sara Jacobs) 26.06.2026 25мин

  Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) just introduced the Sectoral AI Governance Act, a bill that would let federal agencies enforce existing laws — on housing, hiring, disability rights, benefits — when an algorithm is the one making the decision. It creates no new crimes. It's what she calls a "minimum viable product."I sat down with her to push on the hard parts: why the bill leans on agency power at the exact moment the Trump administration is stripping it and suing states over their AI laws; what it means that a $140 million super PAC backed by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI's president, and a Palantir co-founder is spending to beat candidates who back regulation; and why she keeps comparing AI to the early days of commercial aviation.We get into the evidentiary trap that makes algorithmic discrimination so hard to prove, her four-level map for governing AI, her fear of an AI "Fukushima," and her blunt fallback if Congress does nothing: the states.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
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  The First Stock Market Greed Machine 12.06.2026 13мин

  In 1602, Dutch merchants invented the stock market — and built it so no one who bought in could ever get their money back. Today, that same machine lists on the Nasdaq as SPCX.SpaceX just raised $75 billion in the largest IPO in history — nearly triple the previous record. But strip away the size and look at what a share actually buys: no vote that can change anything, money the company keeps permanently, and one man holding 82% of the decisions. That structure wasn't invented by Elon Musk. It was invented four hundred years ago by a company that ran a private army, signed treaties with kings, and secured its monopoly through massacre.This is the story of the Dutch East India Company — the world's first IPO — and what it tells us about the machine being offered to the public today.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
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  The SpaceX IPO: Your Money, Musk's Kingdom 09.06.2026 21мин

  SpaceX goes public this Friday in what could be the largest IPO in the history of capitalism. But before you invest — or find out your 401(k) already has — there's something you should understand about what you're actually buying.Elon Musk's S-1 filing gives him 85.1% of the voting power in the combined SpaceX/xAI company. That means your money goes in, his rules stay permanent. This isn't a quirk of one founder's ego — it's the fullest expression yet of a two-decade market structure that Google started in 2004, that Meta and Snap refined, and that SpaceX is now applying to a company whose customers include NASA, the U.S. Department of Defense, and governments fighting active wars.In this video: the fourth rocket that shouldn't have worked. The profitable cash machine that became the wallet for a money-losing AI race. The compensation package that pays Musk out only if he colonizes Mars. The Danish pension fund and the S&P 500 committee that said no. And the man I watched in a federal courtroom in Oakland — not defending a business decision, but defending his place in history.A few weeks ago I covered the Musk v. Altman federal trial from the courthouse. What I saw there changed how I read this IPO. The full written analysis — with sourcing, further reading, and everything I couldn't fit here — is at TheRipCurrent.com.
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  The Pope Slams Silicon Valley 25.05.2026 22мин

  Today the Vatican published Magnifica Humanitas — Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical and the Catholic Church's official moral teaching on AI. I woke up at 5am to read it, and it's remarkable.It names algorithmic systems making decisions about credit, jobs, and welfare benefits. It names data extraction from poor countries as a new form of colonialism. It describes the invisible human labor underneath every AI response. And on autonomous weapons, it establishes a three-part accountability framework that maps directly onto the targeting systems the U.S. military is using right now. Never thought I'd feel true ideological kinship with the leader of the Catholic Church.135 years ago, Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum — a document that named the horrors of industrial capitalism and eventually became part of the intellectual foundation for the New Deal. Leo XIV named himself after that, and he's trying to accomplish the same thing today.Whether it works depends on who carries it from here.My full written analysis — including a speculative bibliography of the tech journalism that may have shaped Leo's thinking — is at The Rip Current:🔗 https://www.theripcurrent.com/p/the-vaticans-indictment-of-aiMembers get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
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  OpenAI Is Going Public. Can It Survive the Market? Can We? 22.05.2026 17мин

  Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI was supposed to be a referendum on the company's soul — whether it had abandoned its founding promise to develop AI for the benefit of humanity. Instead, it was thrown out on a statute of limitations. Two days later, it's reported by the NYT, WSJ, and CNBC that OpenAI is preparing to file for an IPO, perhaps this week. The company is valued at $852 billion — roughly 35 times its annualized revenue — and is projected to lose $14 billion in 2026 alone. Its own CFO has reportedly urged delaying until 2027. Sam Altman is pushing ahead anyway, likely because Anthropic and Elon Musk's xAI are eyeing the same investor dollars.In this video, I look at what going public actually does to a company's principles — using Google and Facebook as the clearest historical examples — and why the fact that OpenAI's red lines have already moved, before a single earnings call, should worry all of us. Plus: what Andrej Karpathy's surprise move to Anthropic might tell us about where the serious research is actually happening.For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at The Rip Current.
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  Altman Wins in Court. What About the Rest of Us? 18.05.2026 11мин

  A jury in Oakland took less than two hours to dismiss Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI Monday morning. The verdict was on a narrow technicality — the statute of limitations — and didn't touch the substantive questions: whether Altman lied to co-founders, whether the nonprofit-to-profit conversion was a betrayal, whether the company violated the charitable trust Musk said he was funding.What closes with the case is the only real window the public has ever had into how the AI industry operates. The discovery documents generated by this lawsuit — Brockman's diaries, the Altman-Musk email chains, Sutskever's 52-page dossier — exist as public record only because adversarial litigation forced them into the open. That lever is now gone.I've been covering this trial from inside the Oakland courthouse since it started. This is my assessment of what the verdict actually forecloses — and what OpenAI's path to a trillion-dollar IPO looks like from here.For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.