The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

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

For the first time in his life, Mark Zuckerberg will answer questions under oath — not to a Senate subcommittee where politicians perform for their clips, but to a jury of regular people whose only job is to decide whether he's telling the truth. This is a genuinely different situation, and here's how to watch it.
The real danger for Zuckerberg isn't his testimony — it's the internal documents already in evidence that will be put in front of him. A 2018 Meta strategy document saying "if we want to win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens." Emails from Meta's own tech chief reporting back to Zuckerberg about plastic surgery filters, with Zuckerberg's response being that he needed "more data" before acting on known harm. Internal communications in which Meta employees referred to themselves as "basically pushers." These don't sound like a company run by a thoughtful parent.
The third thing to watch is Section 230 — the 1996 law that gives platforms blanket immunity for what users post. The plaintiffs' argument, which the judge has already allowed the jury to consider, is that this trial isn't about content. It's about design. Infinite scroll. Autoplay. The Like button. If design liability succeeds here, it blows a hole in the legal shield that has protected every major platform for decades. The question at the heart of this trial — who makes these decisions, who profits, and who ends up paying — is one I've been covering for years. Wednesday gives us a jury's answer.
Originally published at The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full transcripts: https://theripcurrent.substack.com

A 20-year-old woman started using YouTube at age six and Instagram at age nine. She's now suing both companies, and her case has just become the most important tech trial since the DOJ went after Microsoft in 1998. Here's what's actually at stake — and why it matters whether you're a parent or not.
The trial isn't just about one person's mental health. It's a bellwether case for more than 1,500 similar lawsuits waiting in the pipeline, and the first time CEOs of major social media platforms — including Mark Zuckerberg, who testifies this week — have had to answer questions in front of a jury rather than a Senate subcommittee. The internal documents already in evidence are extraordinary: YouTube memos describing "viewer addiction" as a goal, Meta's Project Myst finding that traumatized kids were especially vulnerable to the platform and that parental controls made almost no difference, and a strategy document laying out a pipeline designed to bring kids in as tweens and keep them as teens.
The central legal question is whether Section 230 — the 1996 law that has shielded every major platform from liability for nearly 30 years — protects design decisions like infinite scroll, autoplay, and the Like button. The judge has already ruled that the jury can consider design liability. If that argument wins, it changes the legal landscape for every platform that has ever made an engineering choice optimized for engagement. Nobody voted on infinite scroll. No regulator approved autoplay. A small group of engineers and executives made those decisions, and billions of people — including six-year-olds — inherited the results. A Los Angeles jury is now being asked to weigh in on that.
Originally published at The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full transcripts: https://theripcurrent.substack.com