The Rip Current

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 ex...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Joe Hollier was 24 when he started building a phone designed to do almost nothing. Calls. Texts. Alarm. Music, maybe. Directions if you needed them. That was the list. The Light Phone launched on Kickstarter in 2015 to a polarizing reaction: why would you pay for a phone that does less on purpose? Eleven years late...

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Yesterday 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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com A jury in Oakland took ninety minutes Monday morning to dismiss Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI. The verdict didn’t touch the substantive questions — whether Altman lied to co-founders, whether the nonprofit-to-profit conversion was a betrayal, whether the company “stole a charity,” as Musk allege...

Trump brought a dozen of America's most powerful CEOs to Beijing this week — Jensen Huang, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and others — to meet with Xi Jinping. The optics were big. The results were not. And the whole experience was presumably a nightmare for Trump's emotional-support CEOs. Here's why: these companies aren't trying to expand into China. They're trying to hold onto what they already have — an...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com I watched Sam Altman testified yesterday in the Musk v. OpenAI trial in Oakland — his first and possibly only day on the stand. Within two minutes of cross-examination, Musk’s attorney Stephen Molo was asking him point-blank whether he tells lies to advance his business interests. Altman’s answers were careful to t...

Read what Altman’s colleagues and cofounders say about his pattern of dishonesty in this morning’s piece , free for everyone. Ilya Sutskever — the AI researcher who helped build OpenAI and is widely credited with turning the transformer model into ChatGPT — took the stand on Monday and confirmed under oath that he spent a year assembling a 52-page dossier on Sam Altman’s conduct, concluding that A...

The end of David Sacks’s time as White House AI Czar seems to be the end of the administration’s hands-off policies when it comes to the technology. As Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles take Sacks’s place, suddenly the administration is talking about a “first-look” review process for new models from the big companies. I spoke with CNN’s Jim Sciutto...

I believe the Musk vs Altman case tells us all something important about the goals and tactics of tech billionaires, and especially those pushing A.I. at the moment, so I’m giving this one out for free. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to get this kind of analysis throughout the week. I’ve been covering AI accountability since before most people knew they needed to. The Rip Current is where I d...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Jury selection began on Monday in Oakland in Musk v. Altman — the trial that could determine the future of OpenAI, one of the most powerful companies ever built. But the most important story so far isn’t the legal arguments. It’s the emails, texts, and diary entries that the founders of the AI industry wrote — and...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Congress has held hearings on AI. No legislation. The FTC has investigated AI companies. No binding rules. The California AG reviewed OpenAI’s conversion from nonprofit to for-profit and signed off. The only accountability mechanism that has actually gotten the people running the AI industry into a room, under oath...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com The U.S. military spent thirty years weaving GPS into everything it does. Navigation, precision weapons, supply chains — all of it ran through the same satellite signal. The older skills, map and compass, dead reckoning, navigating by the stars, were allowed to atrophy. When Russia began jamming GPS across the fron...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Paid subscribers can read the full analysis here . In 1925, thousands of Stetson Corporation employees gathered in a Philadelphia factory auditorium for their Christmas celebration. It was the largest hat factory in the world: 1.4 million square feet, 5,000 employees, 3.3 million hats a year. By 1986, the company w...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com A new Pew survey and a viral Stanford study are being used to suggest social media barely harms teenagers. The numbers in both are smaller than the headlines suggest — and neither has access to the data that would settle the question. That data does exist, however. It’s just inside Meta’s servers. NYU researchers h...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Journalist Katrina Manson spent years inside the classified and not-so-classified world of U.S. military AI — interviewing the colonels, the defense tech founders, and the ethicists watching it all unfold. Her book, Project Maven , is the definitive account of how Silicon Valley's "ship it and fix it later" culture...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Anthropic's new AI model — Claude Mythos — didn't just find undetected security flaws in major systems. It started writing its own attacks, chaining them together, and broke out of its own testing sandbox to email a researcher while he was at lunch. Anthropic's response: form a private consortium of eleven corporat...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Anthropic just released Claude Mythos Preview — a cybersecurity AI so dangerous, the company won’t let the public touch it. It broke out of its own sandbox. It found a 27-year-old undetected vulnerability. It emailed a researcher who was eating a sandwich in a park. A decade ago, when scientists mutated bird flu to...

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com The social media addiction verdicts in Los Angeles and New Mexico aren’t just legal milestones — they’re the first time a jury has been allowed to see what these companies knew and when they knew it. The internal documents revealed in discovery are doing something no regulator, economist, or congressional hearing h...

Yesterday a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for the design choices that addicted a young user and damaged her mental health. It is the first verdict of its kind. Hours earlier, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for concealing what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms. Two verdicts in two days. I spent the day going from network to network talking...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com When the Los Angeles jury came back with its landmark verdict Wednesday, I had just finished a 30-minute interview with Nita Farahany about the New Mexico verdict a day earlier. Then the news dropped and we had to do the whole thing again. Because for the two of us — two members of a relatively small group of folks...

My work is typically reserved for paying subscribers, but this verdict, like the one in New Mexico yesterday, is such an important story, and such a historic moment, that I’m making The Rip Current free this week. If you find it compelling, please consider becoming a paid subscriber: A Los Angeles jury found both Meta and YouTube liable Wednesday for designing platforms that addicted a young woman...

A New Mexico jury just found Meta liable for endangering children on its platforms — $375 million in civil penalties. The jury deliberated for less than a day. This is the first social media case to reach a verdict. Behind it sit more than 1,600 lawsuits waiting for exactly this signal. A separate jury in Los Angeles is still deliberating over whether Meta and YouTube designed addictive platforms...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Two juries are deliberating right now over something that could reshape how American justice works. In Los Angeles, jurors have been at it for over a week, deciding whether Meta and YouTube are liable for designing platforms that addicted a young woman starting at age six. In Santa Fe, closing arguments just wrappe...