The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

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.

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, written in the company’s own words, before anyone forced them to write it. And in my view, whatever First Amendment complications and cultural battles we have to sort through, we are much better for seeing the world as these companies see it. That’s the whole game.

More cases are coming, more documents will surface, and each one is going to chip away at the industry’s core public defense — that addiction is a user problem, not a design problem. When it becomes clear just how thoroughly companies understand the line between healthy and unhealthy use of their products, regulators can simply demand access to the dashboard companies already have. The fight ahead isn’t about whether companies knew where the line was. It’s about how we’ll use that knowledge to protect autonomy and agency when it’s under threat.

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: the design of the platform is the harm. Not the content. Not the people on it. The autoplay, the infinite scroll, the algorithmic feed — a jury of 12 everyday people just ruled that those features constitute a defective product.Nita breaks down why this is such a powerful verdict, why it avoids Section 230 and First Amendment protections, and what the business model — not to mention society — looks like when liability forces the industry to redesign.This is a conversation I've been waiting 10 years to have.Please become a member for early access to videos like these!New episodes and written analysis are at TheRipCurrent.com, and please subscribe to Nita Farahany's wonderful work at https://nitafarahany.substack.com/, where she's currently offering readers a seat inside her AI Law and Policy Class.

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 them.

In this video, I break down what happened, why I consider this the equivalent of the cigarette settlements or the seat belt mandate, and how a dinner I attended while writing my book The Loop — where addiction researchers presented a how-to manual for making apps as addictive as possible — set me on a path that ends at this moment, 10 years later.

The era of unaccountable behavioral design is over. The question now is what comes next.

New episodes and full written analysis every week at TheRipCurrent.com — subscribe for free or become a paid member for the full investigation layer.

My book, The Loop, lays out the framework behind all of this: https://www.amazon.com/Loop-Creating-World-Without-Choices/dp/031648718X/

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.

In this episode, I break down what happened, why I consider this the equivalent of the cigarette settlements or the seat belt mandate, and how a dinner I attended while writing my book The Loop — where addiction researchers presented a how-to manual for making apps as addictive as possible — connects directly to what this jury just decided.

The era of unaccountable behavioral design is over. The question now is what comes next.New episodes and full written analysis every week at TheRipCurrent.com — subscribe for free or become a paid member for the full investigation layer.

My book, The Loop, lays out the framework behind everything we just witnessed: https://www.amazon.com/Loop-Creating-World-Without-Choices/dp/031648718X/

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 either jury finds for the plaintiffs, it could set the per-user cost that gets applied across more than 1,600 pending lawsuits — and establish that behavioral harm through product design is something American courts can and will punish.I also discuss COPPA 2.0, the child privacy bill that just passed the Senate unanimously, and why I think the courts — not Congress — are going to be the institution that strikes the balance between an open internet and a safe one.

Subscribe on Substack for the full written analysis and early, exclusive content: https://www.theripcurrent.com

My book, The Loop, lays out how AI and platform design narrow the choices available to us before we ever decide: https://www.amazon.com/Loop-Creating-World-Without-Choices/dp/031648718X/

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 that harmed a young woman's mental health. That verdict could come any day.
I've been covering both cases — including an on-the-record interview with New Mexico AG Raúl Torrez, who brought the suit. Full, free breakdown — including a detailed history of the case — at TheRipCurrent.com.