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 significant document that has come out of discovery — Greg Brockman's private diary (with the line "then it was a lie"), Elon Musk's email calling Jeff Bezos "a bit of a tool," Sam Altman texting Musk "you're my hero" while preparing to fight him in court, Shivon Zilis asking Musk whether she should "keep info flowing" from inside OpenAI's board, and Mark Zuckerberg privately offering to suppress criticism of DOGE and proposing a joint bid on OpenAI's assets.

Every quote is sourced to the public court record. Links to primary documents are in the written piece at TheRipCurrent.com.

For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.

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 FTC investigated AI companies. No binding rules. The California AG reviewed OpenAI's conversion from nonprofit to for-profit and approved it. The institutions that were supposed to exercise oversight have declined to. What's left is a civil lawsuit, decided by nine people from Oakland who had nothing to do with building the AI industry and everything to do with living inside it.Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and Mira Murati will all testify. Nine jurors will decide what it means.For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.

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 TechCrunch and CNBC — that the National Security Agency is actively using Anthropic's newest and most powerful AI model anyway. The NSA is part of the Department of Defense. The same department arguing in court that Anthropic's tools threaten national security is running those tools in live intelligence operations right now.This piece traces the parallel to GPS: how the military wove it into everything after the Gulf War, let the backup skills disappear, and discovered what that cost when Russia started jamming the signal in Ukraine. The AI dependency is less than a year old and it's already complete. The Pentagon's own lawyer said so in court.For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://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 have now catalogued 35 internal Meta studies from whistleblowers and litigation discovery. What those studies found — 13% of 13-to-15-year-olds reporting weekly unwanted sexual advances, one in three teen girls experiencing worse body image, Mark Zuckerberg noting internally that "3 percent of billions of people is a lot of people" — is different in kind from what external academics can measure.The external science isn't weak because researchers aren't trying. It's limited because the companies won't share the data. And the companies cite that limited external science in their own defense.For written reports, including all the source documents, please become a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.

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 leaving behind. Cook built Apple into the most profitable company in American history — $4 trillion market cap, $416 billion in annual revenue, a gross margin of 46.9% — by mastering three conditions: cheap Chinese manufacturing, the App Store's 15–30% commission on every digital transaction, and the iPhone's cultural grip as the gateway to all of it.All three are now in question simultaneously. Tariffs and geopolitical pressure are destabilizing the supply chain. Agentic AI threatens to route around the App Store entirely. And competitors from OpenAI to Meta are racing to define what the post-iPhone hardware form factor looks like.His successor, John Ternus, is an engineer who has touched every Apple product for 25 years. Whether that's the right profile for what Apple faces is a genuine open question. The board is betting it is.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.

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 discovery. What those studies found — 13% of 13-to-15-year-olds reporting weekly unwanted sexual advances, one in three teen girls experiencing worse body image, Mark Zuckerberg noting internally that "3 percent of billions of people is a lot of people" — is different in kind from what external academics can measure.The external science isn't weak because researchers aren't trying. It's limited because the companies won't share the data. And the companies cite that limited external science in their own defense.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, please become a subscriber at https://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 collided with the business of war. We talk about Palantir, Claude, the Jevons Paradox applied to killing, and why the people building these systems openly admit they're worried about what they've built.

A conversation you won't hear anywhere else.

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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. Just Amazon, Apple, Google, JPMorgan Chase, and eight others kicking it around for 135 days with $100 million in compute credits. This is the Einstein-Szilard letter moment — and nobody called Roosevelt.I'm Jake Ward. Sign up at TheRipCurrent.com for more.

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 rules, and created mandatory independent review. That was 2012.Today, Anthropic is testing Mythos inside a private club of 11 corporations — Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, JPMorgan, and others — while the White House is silent and federal oversight is nowhere in sight.This week on The Rip Current: what the dual-use research framework (DURC) got right, why AI needs its own version of an Institutional Review Board, and why "we're talking to the government" is not the same thing as "the government is in charge."The Rip Current covers the big invisible forces shaping our lives. New episodes weekly.🔗 TheRipCurrent.com

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 of a leader who tells employees exactly what they need to hear to stay committed — and then behaves very differently behind closed doors. The safety team was promised 20% of compute. They got less than 2%.What makes this more than a profile of a difficult boss is that Altman isn't running a normal company. He's at the center of decisions that will affect jobs, creativity, and the structure of economic life for the next generation — and there is currently no meaningful regulation, no democratic input, and no market mechanism capable of holding him accountable. The same day the New Yorker piece published, OpenAI released a 13-page document about industrial policy and the future of AI — full of ideas like adaptive safety nets and efficiency dividends that the company has never once lobbied for. I walk through why that timing matters, what the document actually says, and what the combination of these two releases tells us about how power really works in AI.This is a story about who makes decisions, who profits, and who pays — and why journalism like the New Yorker's investigation may be one of the only tools we have left.Originally published at The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access, exclusive analysis + full transcripts.