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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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.

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 claiming

• The design-versus-content argument, and how it gets around Section 230

• The March verdicts in Los Angeles ($6M, Meta and YouTube) and New Mexico (Meta, nearly $1B)

• Why TikTok, Snap, and YouTube keep settling while Meta fights

• The next bellwether coming in February, and why it matters

Links: Reuters trial preview · CNN: Zuckerberg's testimony · Meta's own 10-Q (SEC)

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.

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.