The Rip Current with Jacob Ward
The Rip Current explores the big, invisible forces that pull us along—from technology and politics to greed, beauty, culture, and human oddities. Host Jacob Ward argues that these currents are powerful but can be spotted and navigated with practice. Ward is a veteran journalist who has covered technology, science, and business for NBC News, CNN, PBS, and Al Jazeera. He has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Wired, and is the former editor in chief of Popular Science.
Episodes
Anthropic Says Its Own AI Helped Build a Missile in Yemen: Inside Its September Threat Report
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 we
Why Did MapQuest Fight Trump When Apple and Google Wouldn't?
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 o
"We Were Gonna Win" Says Colorado's AG. So Why Settle with Meta?
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 n
"You Just Cannot Trust Mark Zuckerberg With Kids" — Meta Trial, Day 2
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
The Meta Trial: How Zuck Fights Back
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 report
The Meta Trial: Damning Evidence
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 Priva
Zuckerberg: Three-Time Loser? Inside Meta's Latest Court Trouble
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 N
Zuckerberg's $1.4 Trillion Trial
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
A Texas School Explosion and the Real Reason Companies Change
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 detecta
AI Romance Scams are Here
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
Elon Musk's Lawyers: Let Us Make AI Nudes If We Want
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
Runaway A.I. is Here: Now What Do We Do?
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.
The Corruption of Prediction Markets
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
AI is Hacking Your Mind
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. Yo
The Fight to Protect You Against AI (with Rep Sara Jacobs)
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 po
The First Stock Market Greed Machine
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 perm
The SpaceX IPO: Your Money, Musk's Kingdom
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
The Pope Slams Silicon Valley
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
OpenAI Is Going Public. Can It Survive the Market? Can We?
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 — roug
Altman Wins in Court. What About the Rest of Us?
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 fu
The CEOs Who Went to China and Got Nothing
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 — and
Sam Altman Under Oath
I watched Sam Altman testify Tuesday, May 12th, 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 the point of being revealing: "I believe I'm a truthful person." Not: I am a t
Sam Altman's Own Hero Calls Him a Liar. Now He Faces a Jury.
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 Altman “exhibits a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs, and pitting his execs against one another.”That testimon
Musk vs Altman: What I Saw at the Courthouse
I spent two days inside the federal courthouse in Oakland, California, watching Elon Musk get examined and cross-examined in his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI. The case turns on a founding betrayal — Musk put in $38 million on the understanding that OpenAI would stay a nonprofit, and discovery documents suggest the conversion to for-profit was already being planned while he was still writi
Juicy A.I. Billionaire Drama Exposed
Jury selection began today 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 isn't the legal arguments. It's the private record: the emails, texts, and diary entries that the founders of the AI industry wrote when they thought no one was reading.In this video I walk through every significa
Nine Random People Decide the Fate of A.I. — Starting Now
Jury selection began today in Oakland in Musk v. Altman — the trial that will determine whether OpenAI, now valued at $730 billion, was built on fraud. I shot this from the steps of the federal courthouse, which is a short bike ride from my house, because I wanted to say something specific about who is actually in that building and why it matters.Congress has held AI hearings. No legislation. The
U.S. Spies are Using Banned A.I.
In July 2025, Anthropic became the first AI company inside the U.S. military's classified computer networks. By February 2026, the Pentagon had labeled it a national security threat, Trump had ordered the whole government off it, and a federal judge had called the blacklisting "Orwellian." By April 2026, an appeals court let the blacklist stand.Four days ago, Axios reported — confirmed by TechCrun
Is Social Media Bad for Kids?
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 have now catalogued 35 internal Meta studies from whistleblowers and litigation discov
Why Tim Cook's Apple Era Is Over — And What Comes Next
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 was bankrupt. Stetson didn't lose to a better hat. The world stopped wearing hats.That's the frame for understanding what Tim Cook is le
Is Social Media Bad for Kids? Only the Companies Know For Sure.
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 have now catalogued 35 internal Meta studies from whistleblowers and litigation discov
How America Built an AI Kill Machine (with Katrina Manson)
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 collided with the business of war. We talk about Palantir, Claude, the Jevons Parado
The A.I. that Escaped Its Own Cage
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 corporations to manage the fallout. No independent government review. No halt in development
An A.I. Doomsday Machine...and the Private Club that Has It
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 be transmissible between mammals, the government froze the research, rewrote the rul
Can Sam Altman Be Trusted?
The New Yorker dropped a year-and-a-half investigation into Sam Altman this week — and it answers a lot of questions I've had since November 2023, when his board fired him and then reinstated him in 72 hours. Reporters Andrew Marantz and Ronan Farrow got access to internal documents and sources inside OpenAI, including records kept by Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei, and the portrait they paint is
Tech Companies Already Know When You've Had Enough
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 has managed to do: they’re letting us read the company’s own definition of harm, writ
The Verdict that Ends Social Media As We Know It (with Nita Farahany)
A Los Angeles jury just found Meta and YouTube liable for addicting a child.A few hours before it happened, I interviewed Nita Farahany, author of The Battle for Your Brain and one of the sharpest thinkers on cognitive liberty and platform accountability. Then the verdict dropped, and we did it all over again.The case introduces a new legal concept never before successfully applied to social media
Social Media Found Guilty
A Los Angeles jury found both Meta and YouTube liable for designing addictive platforms that harmed a young woman's mental health — $3 million in compensatory damages, another $3 million in punitive damages. It came one day after a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for enabling child exploitation on its platforms. Two verdicts in 48 hours. More than 1,600 lawsuits waiting behind the
Social Media Found Guilty
A Los Angeles jury found both Meta and YouTube liable for designing addictive platforms that harmed a young woman's mental health — $3 million in compensatory damages, with punitive damages still to come. It came one day after a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for enabling child exploitation on its platforms. Two verdicts in 48 hours. More than 1,600 lawsuits waiting behind them.I
Is America Ready for "Behavioral Harm?"
Two juries are deliberating right now — one in Los Angeles, one in Santa Fe — and between them they may fundamentally change what the American legal system considers harm. The LA case asks whether Meta and YouTube designed addictive products that damaged a young woman's mental health. The Santa Fe case accuses Meta of enabling child sexual exploitation and is seeking more than $2 billion. If eithe
BREAKING: Meta Just Lost. Here Come 1600 More Lawsuits
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 th
Hollywood Is Pulling Up the A.I. Drawbridge
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 "trademark themselves." Ben Affleck just sold his AI post-production company to Netfl
When Gen Z Makes Jokes, They're Screaming
I was at South by Southwest this weekend for the Omidyar Network's Lighthouse event, and a young woman said something during an AI ethics panel that completely reframed how I understand an entire generation's relationship with the internet. She described growing up inside an algorithm that analyzed her interests faster than she could develop them, fed those interests back in a relentless loop, and
Hackers Leaked the DHS AI Surveillance Database — Here's What's Inside
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 crime from 911 calls, airport systems that profile you by your clothing and body shap
Did Meta Connect Predators to Children? (With AG Raúl Torrez)
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torres's case against Meta was the first to go to trial first — and the price this case sets for Meta could cascade across more than 1,500 lawsuits against social media companies. On this episode, we talk about what his case actually alleges: not that Meta failed to police bad content, but that Meta's own design choices — the recommendation algorithm, the "people y
A Silicon Valley Congressman Faces the Shifting Sands of A.I.
Politicians don't change their minds in public. So when Rep. Sam Liccardo asked to talk to me again just weeks after our first conversation, it was notable.In February, Liccardo argued America couldn't afford to slow AI down — that guardrails would hand the future to China. Then the Pentagon demanded unguardrailed AI for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Anthropic refused. The government b
Lethal Beta: Gaza Was the Test Run. Iran Is the Launch.
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 around 20 seconds. The accepted error rate was 10 percent. Before AI targeting, Israeli a
7 Terrifying Things AI Can Already Do (That Most People Don't Know About)
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to the Pentagon this week and demanded an AI with no safety guardrails — threatening to declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk" if it refused. So I decided to look into what exactly the Pentagon might want to do with that technology.What I found is a set of AI capabilities that go far beyond chatbots and image generators. We're tal
Anthropic's CEO Built an AI With Ethics. The Pentagon Just Told Him to Drop Them.
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. Then the Pentagon summoned him and delivered an ultimatum: drop your restrictions on autonomous weapons and m
A Big Week for Tech Accountability
Last week I watched what may be the Big Tobacco moment for social media unfold in real time. The trial against Meta in Los Angeles is the first of an estimated 1,600 cases making a specific argument: that Section 230 doesn't protect a platform that deliberately engineered addictive behavior. Internal company documents — showing what these companies knew about harm and when — are entering the court
State of the Union: Tech Anxiety Edition
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
Zuckerberg's Testimony: What to Watch For
For the first time in his life, Mark Zuckerberg will answer questions under oath — not to a Senate subcommittee where politicians perform for their clips, but to a jury of regular people whose only job is to decide whether he's telling the truth. This is a genuinely different situation, and here's how to watch it.The real danger for Zuckerberg isn't his testimony — it's the internal documents alre
The Social Media Trial Explained
A 20-year-old woman started using YouTube at age six and Instagram at age nine. She's now suing both companies, and her case has just become the most important tech trial since the DOJ went after Microsoft in 1998. Here's what's actually at stake — and why it matters whether you're a parent or not.The trial isn't just about one person's mental health. It's a bellwether case for more than 1,500 sim
Social Media's Big Tobacco Moment
Opening arguments began this morning in two trials that could change social media forever—and they're not about what kids see online. They're about who decided to make these platforms addictive in the first place.Today in Los Angeles Superior Court, Meta (Instagram/Facebook) and YouTube are defending against claims that their platforms' design features—infinite scroll, auto-play, algorithmic recom
Why ICE Agents Wear Masks: Inside the Billion-Dollar Surveillance System Targeting Us All
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 they should know—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 would make China’s “Safe Cit
We're a Match Flare in an Infinite Darkness — And We're Wasting It Fighting Each Other
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.So here I want to step back and think about something much, much larger than us. Not to minimize our problems, but because understanding how
Big Tech Knew Exactly How Much It Was Harming Kids — The Documents Prove It
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 from 2
Wells Fargo Is Firing Thousands of Workers Because of AI — And Bank Tellers Are Unionizing for the First Time Ever
I spent this week talking to bank tellers at Wells Fargo for a special report over at Hard Reset, and what they told me should alarm anyone who thinks their job is safe from AI.The bank has cut 65,000 jobs since 2019. CEO Charles Scharf just told investors more cuts are coming — permanently. Meanwhile, profits are soaring. Credit card accounts up 20 percent, auto lending up 19 percent, investment
Davos Is Just a High School Reunion — And AI Companies are the Cool Kids
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
Robots are Ready for Human Factory Jobs — and No One Voted on It
I’ve been watching robots fall over for a long time.About a decade ago, I stood on a Florida speedway covering a DARPA robotics competition where machines failed spectacularly at things like opening doors and climbing stairs. It was funny, a little sad, and a reminder of just how hard it is to automate human behavior.Fast-forward to CES this week, and the joke’s over.Humanoid robots are no longer
Every Oil Empire Thinks This Time Will Be Different.
It’s a very weird Monday back from the holidays. While most of us were shaking off jet lag and reminding ourselves who we are when we’re not sleeping late and hanging with family, the world woke up to a piece of news this weekend that showed no one in power learned a goddamn thing in history class: the United States has rendered Venezuela’s president to New York, and powerful people are openly fan
Why So Many People Hate AI — and Why 2026 Is the Breaking Point
Happy New Year! I’ve been off for the holiday — we cranked through a bake-off, a dance party, a family hot tub visit, and a makeshift ball drop in the living room of a snowy cabin — and I’m feeling recharged for (at least some portion of) 2026. So let’s get to it.I woke to reports that “safeguard failures” in Elon Musk’s Grok led to the generation of child sexual exploitative material (Reuters) —
AI Has Us Lying to One Another (and It's Changing How We Think)
Okay, honest admission here: I don’t fully know what I think about this topic yet. A podcast producer (thanks Nancy!) once told me “let them watch you think out loud,” and I’m taking her to heart — because the thing I’m worried about is already happening to me.Lately, I’ve been leaning hard on AI tools, God help me. Not to write for me — a little, sure, but for the most part I still do that myself
Did Weed Just Escape the Culture War?
Here’s one I truly didn’t see coming: the Trump administration just made the most scientifically meaningful shift in U.S. marijuana policy in years.No, weed isn’t suddenly legal everywhere. But moving marijuana from Schedule I — alongside heroin — to Schedule III is a very big deal. That single bureaucratic change cracks open something that’s been locked shut for half a century: real research.For
AI Data Centers Are Draining Our Power — and Making Strange Political Allies
The United States has a split personality when it comes to AI data centers. On the one side, tech leaders (and the White House) celebrate artificial intelligence as a symbol of national power and economic growth. But politicians from Bernie Sanders to Ron DeSantis point out that when it shows up in our towns, it drains water, drives up electricity prices, and demands round-the-clock power like an
AI Isn’t Just a Money Risk Anymore — It’s Bigger than That
For most of modern history, regulation in Western democracies has focused on two kinds of harm: people dying and people losing money. But with AI, that’s beginning to change.This week, the headlines point toward a new understanding that more is at stake than our physical health and our wallets: governments are starting to treat our psychological relationship with technology as a real risk. Not a s
The President Just Moved to Kill State AI Laws. Here's What Happens Next.
President Trump has signed a sweeping executive order aimed at blocking U.S. states from regulating artificial intelligence — arguing that a “patchwork” of laws threatens innovation and America’s global competitiveness. But there’s a catch: there is no federal AI law to replace what states have been doing.In this episode, I break down what the executive order actually does, why states stepped in t
AI Is Even More Biased Than We Are: Mahzarin Banaji on the Disturbing Truth Behind LLMs
This week I sat down with the woman who permanently rewired my understanding of human nature — and now she’s turning her attention to the nature of the machines we’ve gone crazy for.Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji coined the term “implicit bias” and has conducted research for decades into the blind spots we don’t admit even to ourselves. The work that blew my hair back shows how prejudice has
Australia Just Rebooted Childhood — And the World Is Watching
Australia just imposed a blanket ban on social media for kids under the age of 16. It’s not just the strictest tech policy of any democracy — it’s stricter than China’s laws. No TikTok, no Instagram, no SnapChat, that’s it. And while Washington dithers behind a 1998 law written before Google existed, other countries are gearing up to copy Australia’s homework (Malaysia imposes a similar ban on Jan
AI is Creating a ‘Hive Mind' — Scientists Just Proved It
The big AI conference NeurIPS is under way in San Diego this week, and nearly 6,000 papers presented there will set the technical, intellectual, and ethical course for AI for the year. NeurIPS is a strange pseudo-academic gathering, where researchers from universities show up to present their findings alongside employees of Apple and Nvidia, part of the strange public-private revolving door of the
OpenAI Declares "Code Red" — And Takes Aim at Your Brain
According to the Wall Street Journal, Sam Altman sent an internal memo on Monday declaring a company-wide emergency and presumably ruining the holiday wind-down hopes of his faithful employees. OpenAI is hitting pause on advertising plans, delaying AI agents for health and shopping, and shelving a personal assistant called “Pulse.” All hands are being pulled back to one mission: making ChatGPT fee
Trump’s New Big Tech Era, TSMC’s Shift, and the A.I. Conferences Steering 2026
It’s Monday, December 1st. I’m not a turkey guy, and I’m of the opinion that we’ve all made a terrible habit of subjecting ourselves to the one and only time anyone cooks the damn thing each year. So I hope you had an excellent alternative protein in addition to that one. Ours was the Nobu miso-marinated black cod. Unreal.Okay, after the food comes the A.I. hangover. This week I’m looking at three
AI Distortion Is Here — And It’s Already Warping Us All
It’s a warning siren: people seeing delusions they never knew they had amplified by AI, a wave of lawsuits alleging emotional manipulation and even suicide coaching, a major company banning minors from talking freely with chatbots for fear of excessive attachment, and a top mental-health safety expert at OpenAI quietly heading for the exit.For years I’ve argued that AI would distort our thinking t
Insurers Are Backing Away From A.I.—and That Should Scare You More Than Any Sci-Fi Predictions
Today I dug into the one corner of the economy that’s supposed to keep its head when everyone else is drunk on hype: the insurance industry. Three of the biggest carriers in the country—AIG, Great American, and W.R. Berkley—are now begging regulators not to force them to cover A.I.-related losses, according to the Financial Times. These are the people who price hurricanes, wildfires, and war zones
The Executive Order That Would End AI Regulation in America
The only laws protecting you from the worst excesses of A.I. might be wiped out — and fast. A leaked Trump executive order would ban states from regulating A.I. at all, rolling over the only meaningful protections any of us currently have. There is no federal A.I. law, no federal data-privacy law, nothing. States like California, Illinois, and Colorado are the only line of defense against discrimi
When AI Stops Being About Jobs — and Starts Being About Us
In today’s episode, I’m following the money, the infrastructure, and the politics:Nvidia just posted another monster quarter and showed that it’s still the caffeine in the US economy. Investors briefly relaxed, even as they warned that an AI bubble is still the top fear in markets. Google jammed Gemini 3 deeper into Search in a bid to regain narrative control. Cloudflare broke down and reminded us
Are We Overbuilding AI? Tulsa, Rail Mania, Space Data Centers & the Billion-Dollar Reality Check
Today’s Deep Cut asks a simple question: Is the AI industry building way more capacity than the world actually needs?To answer it, I look at three historical warnings:• Tulsa, Oklahoma, a city built for millions who never came after early oil wealth exploded and then evaporated.• Britain’s “Railway Mania” of the 1840s, when investors poured money into duplicate train lines that bankrupted entire c
AI Money Is Reshaping Global Power: Buffett Buys Big, Thiel Bails, Robots Faceplant, and Saudi Arabia Arrives
Today’s “Map” tracks the forces shaping tech, money, and global power on Monday, November 17th.We start with a rare move: Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway quietly taking a $4.9B stake in Alphabet — one of the most surprising bets of his career, and a clear signal about where long-term AI value is concentrating.Meanwhile, Peter Thiel just sold his entire stake in Nvidia (~$100M). For a man who’s
Is America Ready to Fight Big Tech? (with Sacha Haworth)
Are we ready to take on the tech titans? Sacha Haworth thinks maybe—just maybe—we finally are. The head of the Tech Oversight Project joins me this week to talk about the pervasive influence of Big Tech on our lives, and why recognizing a growing allergy to that influence is becoming a centerpiece of political strategy. We discuss the public’s growing concerns over privacy, children’s addiction to
Can Journalism Survive? (with UC Berkeley Journalism Dean Michael Bolden)
We can all agree that a free press is a cornerstone of American democracy, and that we want journalism in our lives. But that's different from making it possible to make a living as a journalist, and it's also not enough to protect the power of journalism against the libertarian worldview and AI slop being pushed on us all by the world's biggest companies. How will journalism survive? Jake talks w
BONUS EPISODE: Jake on the Urgent Futures Podcast
Jesse Damiani, whose newsletter Reality Studies unpacks emerging philosophical questions around technology, had me on his Urgent Futures podcast for an hour-plus conversation about the state of A.I., and where my 2022 book The Loop got it right and got it wrong.
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