The Rip Current

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com The White House handed Congress its long-awaited AI legislative framework today, and I’ll be honest with you: I went surfing this morning because I felt confident I knew what was going to be in it. Everything we’ve watched David Sacks and the administration signal since December’s executive order pointed here — to...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Val Kilmer died in 2025 — but he’s appearing in a new film anyway , resurrected by AI with his family’s blessing. The story of how it happened is surprisingly moving. The story of what it means for everyone who isn’t already famous is a lot darker. Matthew McConaughey told a room full of desperate drama students to...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com The overwhelming smell of gasoline hit me from the parking lot. It’s a horrific smell anyway — volatile organic compounds like propane, butane, pentane, hexane, ethane, and benzene vaporize as soon as they hit open air, which is part of what makes oil an efficient fuel — but it was the dissonance between my nose an...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com A group of hackers has released a massive database from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Industry Partnership, and it reveals the full scope of the AI surveillance apparatus being assembled on American soil. Published by Distributed Denial of Secrets, the data exposes contracts for AI that predicts c...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com As I write this, closing arguments are underway in the California case against Meta and YouTube, one of two bellwether trials that could determine whether thousands of families can hold social media companies legally responsible for harms to children. New Mexico AG Raúl Torres’s case went to trial first, and his ha...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Read the full written analysis here: The Trump administration declared Anthropic — maker of the Claude AI — a national security supply chain risk, cutting the company off from federal contracts and signaling to private partners that working with them carries serious risk. The reason? Anthropic refused to strip the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com You’re about to watch a lawmaker’s thinking shift in real time — and in public. When I first talked to Silicon Valley Congressman Sam Liccardo in February, he was making a very Silicon Valley-friendly argument: we can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, China will eat our lunch, don’t slow down. Then Iran happen...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com For decades, Israel has deployed new weapons systems in Gaza, collected data on what works, refined them, and sold the results internationally as “battle-tested” technology. That pipeline is now running on AI. A system called Lavender assigned kill ratings to 37,000 Palestinians. Operators approved strikes in aroun...

I joined Anderson Cooper on CNN Friday evening to break down President Trump's ban on Anthropic across the federal government. I made the point that while Anthropic deserves credit for holding its ethical red lines on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, this isn't a story about a principled company blindsided by the Pentagon — Anthropic pursued this classified work through a partnership with...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com This week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth put a deadline on Anthropic — hand over an unguardrailed version of your AI by Friday, or be declared a supply chain risk. The press is covering it as a policy fight. But the real question isn’t whether the Pentagon should be able to strong-arm an AI lab. The real question...

In the grand tradition of presidential addresses, I stand here — well, no, I’m sitting, actually —to tell you exactly how things are going. Unlike those addresses, I do not tell you things are going great. I borrowed the format — the gallery anecdote, the foreign policy chest-beating, the optimistic entrepreneurship section, the infrastructure close — and used it to describe the world as I’m seein...

Dario Amodei has been unusually candid about what keeps him up at night: AI used to surveil citizens at scale, weapons that fire without human intervention, technology that stamps out “pockets of disloyalty” before they can grow. He’s been writing those worries in public since last year. Now the Pentagon — which traditionally is supposed to be the guardrail around unacceptable use — is threatening...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Dario Amodei is the rare tech CEO who actually tried to set limits on what his AI could be used for. He published an 80-page constitution telling the world what Claude is supposed to value. He wrote a 20,000-word essay warning about what happens when AI companies accumulate too much power. Now the Pentagon has summ...

The social media trial is what happens after a decade of unchecked platform design: the documents surface, the internal research about harm becomes public, and the legal system gets its hands on the evidence. The Anthropic situation is what happens before that reckoning — we’re watching it in real time, at the exact moment when the choices are still being made. What I’m watching most closely in th...

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Before Mark Zuckerberg said a single word under oath yesterday, someone was already waiting for him at the courthouse door — and Al Jazeera English caught it on video. A man dropped a stack of papers in front of the Meta CEO as he entered court and said: “Mark Zuckerberg, you’ve been served.” We don’t yet know what...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com The thing to understand about today’s testimony is that Zuckerberg wasn’t just defending Instagram — he was road-testing an ideological posture. (Symbolized in part by an early moment when his entourage walked in wearing the camera-laden Meta Ray-Ban glasses and got chewed out by the judge for it.) The “we wouldn’t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com This trial is the first time in American legal history that a jury gets to look inside these companies and decide whether the design choices that shape billions of people’s daily lives were made responsibly. That’s not hyperbole — it’s the actual legal question on the table. The LA case is the opening act. Behind i...

Opening arguments started this morning in two landmark trials that could reshape social media forever. In Los Angeles Superior Court , Meta (Instagram/Facebook) and YouTube face a 19-year-old plaintiff known as “KGM” who claims their platforms’ addictive design features caused her anxiety, body dysmorphia, and suicidal thoughts starting at age 10. Simultaneously, New Mexico’s attorney general is s...

Ever wonder why ICE agents cover their faces during raids? They know exactly what surveillance technology can do when your face is captured in public. And that’s because they’re operating the most sophisticated surveillance apparatus ever deployed on American soil. With a $75 billion budget from last year’s reconciliation process , ICE has gone on a shopping spree that rivals China’s “Safe Cities”...

AI is getting people fired — openly, loudly, and at scale. Amazon just cut 16,000 corporate jobs. Dow announced 4,500 more. And in both cases, executives are gesturing toward AI as the reason, or at least the backdrop. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: it’s not because AI is ready to replace these workers. A new study from Harvard Business Review shows that companies are laying people off in ant...

This is a massive week for anyone who’s been watching Big Tech’s impact on kids. Internal documents from Meta , Google , YouTube , Snapchat , and TikTok are being made public as part of major lawsuits, and what they reveal is damning. Two themes emerge. First: the business value of kids. A 2020 Google presentation literally says “solving kids is a massive opportunity.” An internal Facebook email f...

It’s a dark time. We have an unaccountable federal police force killing Americans in the street. Heather Cox Richardson , the foremost historian of the American political moment, ended her show in tears. The American experiment feels more experimental than ever. As any beat reporter can tell you, when a national event falls outside your coverage area, you find refuge, and sometimes even comfort, i...

Promotional plea: if you have a moment, please head over to my YouTube channel and give it a follow. This week TikTok changed to U.S. owners, and my preparations for that change have involved investing more of my time in YouTube content. The more subscribers I get over there, the better I can insulate myself against whatever happens next on TikTok. Hit subscribe please! I spent this week talking t...

Every January, the world’s wealthiest decision-makers descend on the World Economic Forum in Davos, and we’re told this is where the future gets negotiated. This year, while the world talks of Greenland, geopolitics, tariffs, and other surreal headlines coming out of the Alps — I’m thinking about the social dynamics on the literal streets of that mountain town. Like any professional convening that...