The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

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 Netflix for $600 million. These are people giving advice from inside the castle to people standing outside the walls. I want to talk about who actually gets left behind — and why the most sympathetic use of a technology is almost always the one they show you first.Paid subscribers get videos first, written transcripts, and full analysis pieces at TheRipCurrent.com

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 effectively stole the messy exploratory phase you need to figure out who you are. As a result, her generation is deeply skeptical of everything — and when they want to express fear, they don't march or write letters. They crack jokes.

This connects directly to the core argument of my book The Loop: AI systems don't just serve you content, they narrow what you're exposed to, and in doing so, they shape who you become. The constant irony, the memes about climate change and unaffordable housing, the tongue-in-cheek TikToks about AI ruining work — those aren't a generation being glib. They're a generation that has learned earnestness doesn't get results, and humor is the only channel they have left. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

I also reflect on what it was like to attend SXSW with no agenda for the first time, why conferences are usually a nightmare for reporters, and why Alanis Morissette from a hotel balcony is one of life's great pleasures.

Originally published at The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full transcripts: https://theripcurrent.com

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 shape, facial recognition on every ICE agent's phone, and Palantir's ELITE system — which uses Medicaid data to map neighborhoods for immigration raids.Some of what DHS is buying is perfectly reasonable — like machine learning tools to detect new synthetic opioids. But the volume and pace of this procurement is staggering: 238 active AI use cases, a nearly 40% increase in six months, and roughly 80% of them without documented risk management. A critical federal deadline on April 3rd is supposed to force agencies to implement safeguards or shut down high-impact AI tools. Whether that actually happens will tell us a lot about how seriously anyone in government takes oversight of this stuff.I go through the key contracts, explain what they mean, and connect them to the longer pattern of surveillance tech that I've been covering — including predictive policing failures and ICE's Mobile Fortify deployment. The full written analysis is available for paid subscribers at The Rip Current.Originally published at The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full transcripts: https://theripcurrent.com

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 you may know" feature, the engagement-above-safety tradeoffs documented in internal company documents — actively connected sexual predators to children. And that Meta knew it.Torres ran an undercover investigation posing as a preteen girl on Meta's platforms. What followed was a flood of sexual solicitations. When Meta challenged the results, Torres ran it again as a criminal sting. Three men showed up at a hotel expecting to meet children, and wound up in handcuffs. Torres says the internal documents he's obtained in discovery show roughly half a million children in English-speaking markets are exposed to inappropriate sexual content on Meta's platforms every single day — and that safety concerns about these features were repeatedly overruled by executives focused on engagement and revenue.This case isn't just about New Mexico. It's about what happens when the per-user damages number is established in a small state and then applied to California, Texas, New York, and Florida. It's about whether Section 230 — the 30-year-old legal shield that has protected social media companies from liability for content — can be circumvented by focusing on design rather than content. And it's about whether the legal strategy that revealed the tobacco playbook — knowing your product is dangerous, hiding it, marketing it as safe — will reveal something similar was going on inside social media companies.Originally published at The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full written analysis: https://theripcurrent.com

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 blacklisted them. OpenAI signed the contract. And the U.S. attacked Iran using the very AI it had just banned.

This conversation covers what is clearly shifting in Liccardo's thinking, why he now supports mandating at least some human control over every weapon system, and what Block's 4,000 layoffs mean for a lawmaker whose district includes Google, Apple, and Stanford.

Watch both conversations — the February version and this week's — and you'll see something you almost never see: a lawmaker's position evolving in real time, on the record. That's how fast this stuff is moving.Originally published at The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full transcripts: https://theripcurrent.com

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 analysts produced around 50 verified targets per year. After: up to 250 strikes per day. Gaza was the beta test. This week’s strikes on Iran are the product launch.

In this video, I’m coining a term for this dynamic — lethal beta — and tracing the full pipeline: from the AI systems deployed in Gaza, to the arms companies now filing for IPOs on the back of 241% revenue growth, to the Pentagon official who called Ukraine “an extraordinary laboratory” for military AI, to the ways the same logic is now normalizing autonomous warfare at a scale none of the original systems were designed for. As always, this isn’t just a story about technology. It’s a story about who makes decisions, who profits, and who pays.

Paid subscribers can read the full written analysis here:

Further Reading:

1. “’Lavender’: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing Spree in Gaza” — +972 Magazine, April 3, 2024: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

2. “Dirty Secret of Israel’s Weapons Exports: They’re Tested on Palestinians” — Al Jazeera, November 17, 2023: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/11/17/israels-weapons-industry-is-the-gaza-war-its-latest-test-lab

3. The Palestine Laboratory — Antony Loewenstein, Verso Books, 2023: https://www.amazon.com/Palestine-Laboratory-Exports-Technology-Occupation/dp/1839762217

4. “The Palestine Laboratory” (Documentary) — Al Jazeera English, January–February 2025: https://network.aljazeera.net/en/press-releases/%E2%80%98-palestine-laboratory%E2%80%99-exposes-israel%E2%80%99s-export-unique-systems-control-and

5. “Gaza: Israel’s AI Human Laboratory” — The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, June 12, 2025: https://www.thecairoreview.com/essays/gaza-israels-ai-human-laboratory/

6. “When AI Decides Who Lives and Dies” — Foreign Policy, May 2, 2024: https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/05/02/israel-military-artificial-intelligence-targeting-hamas-gaza-deaths-lavender/

7. “The Cruel Experiments of Israel’s Arms Industry” — Pulitzer Center: https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/cruel-experiments-israels-arms-industry

8. “The Genocide Will Be Automated — Israel, AI and the Future of War” — MERIP, October 2024: https://www.merip.org/2024/10/the-genocide-will-be-automated-israel-ai-and-the-future-of-war/

9. “War Rewrote the Rules: The World Studies Israel’s AI-Driven Battlefield Playbook” — Ynet News, February 2026: https://www.ynetnews.com/tech-and-digital/article/bjfoec900wl

10. “Artificial Intelligence on the Battlefield in 2025” — The Jerusalem Post: https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-861611

11. “Ukraine Is an ‘Extraordinary Laboratory’ for Military AI” — DefenseScoop, August 1, 2023: https://defensescoop.com/2023/08/01/ukraine-is-extraordinary-laboratory-for-military-ai-senior-dod-official-says/

12. “The Horrifying, AI-Enhanced Future of War Is Here” — The New Republic, November 2025: https://newrepublic.com/article/202753/ukraine-drones-ai-enhanced-future-war

13. “Governing AI Under Fire in Ukraine” — The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, June 15, 2025: https://www.thecairoreview.com/essays/governing-ai-under-fire-in-ukraine/

14. “Battlefield Drones and the Accelerating Autonomous Arms Race in Ukraine” — Modern War Institute, West Point, January 10, 2025: https://mwi.westpoint.edu/battlefield-drones-and-the-accelerating-autonomous-arms-race/

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 talking about WiFi routers that reconstruct human bodies through solid walls, Pentagon lasers that identify you by your heartbeat from 200 meters, Chinese gait-recognition systems that ID you with your back turned and face covered, and autonomous drone swarms that run a full kill chain — find, fix, finish — with no human individually controlling each step. Every item in this video is documented, sourced, and in many cases already deployed.

This is the landscape Anthropic seems to understand it's operating in. And it's the landscape the Pentagon wants full access to. The full written analysis with all sources is available to paid subscribers at The Rip Current.

Originally published at The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full transcripts: https://theripcurrent.com

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 mass surveillance, or lose the contract.The detail that isn't getting enough attention: Anthropic's AI was used in the operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The company found out after the fact. The safeguards didn't stop the deployment — they just created friction. That's the gap between the ethics document and the reality of doing business with the most powerful military on earth.This is a story about what principles actually cost when the economics get serious — and whether Amodei's public commitments will survive contact with a $200 million contract, a $380 billion valuation, and a defense secretary who thinks ideology is an insult.Originally published at The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full transcripts: https://theripcurrent.com

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 record. And then Mark Zuckerberg got served with legal papers walking into court. We don't know what lawsuit yet. But the image says everything.

On Friday I got into a public debate with Taylor Lorenz about whether the social media threat to young people is a moral panic or something genuinely new. We disagree. I think the internal documents coming out of these companies make the moral panic framing harder to sustain — when a company's own researchers document harm and management keeps optimizing for engagement, that's not cultural overreaction, that's a paper trail.

Then this morning the Anthropic story broke. The Pentagon summoned CEO Dario Amodei and told him to drop his internal ethics restrictions on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, or lose the contract. Amodei published an 80-page AI constitution last month and a 20,000-word warning essay this year. He named the trap he was worried about. Now he's in it.

The full analysis is at The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full transcripts: https://theripcurrent.com

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 seeing it right now. Consider this your State of the Union from someone with no speechwriters, no approval rating to protect, and nothing to sell you except the truth as best I can see it.Tonight’s address covers a seemingly random mishmash, but I promise I pull it all together: a soccer riot in India that is actually about all of us, a race with China that may be less about values than about who profits from the panic, a Pentagon deadline handed to the one AI CEO who tried to hold an ethical line, a concentration of power that makes “the market” sound quaint, the loneliness that comes with a billion-dollar company of one, and a set of courtroom reckonings that are a preview of where AI is headed next. The State of the Union is anxious. I remain hopeful. God bless America.

Originally published at The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full transcripts: https://theripcurrent.com