The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

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.

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

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.

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.

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.