The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

Today the Vatican published Magnifica Humanitas — Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical and the Catholic Church's official moral teaching on AI. I woke up at 5am to read it, and it's remarkable.It names algorithmic systems making decisions about credit, jobs, and welfare benefits. It names data extraction from poor countries as a new form of colonialism. It describes the invisible human labor underneath every AI response. And on autonomous weapons, it establishes a three-part accountability framework that maps directly onto the targeting systems the U.S. military is using right now. Never thought I'd feel true ideological kinship with the leader of the Catholic Church.135 years ago, Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum — a document that named the horrors of industrial capitalism and eventually became part of the intellectual foundation for the New Deal. Leo XIV named himself after that, and he's trying to accomplish the same thing today.Whether it works depends on who carries it from here.My full written analysis — including a speculative bibliography of the tech journalism that may have shaped Leo's thinking — is at The Rip Current:🔗 https://www.theripcurrent.com/p/the-vaticans-indictment-of-aiMembers 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.

Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI was supposed to be a referendum on the company's soul — whether it had abandoned its founding promise to develop AI for the benefit of humanity. Instead, it was thrown out on a statute of limitations.
Two days later, it's reported by the NYT, WSJ, and CNBC that OpenAI is preparing to file for an IPO, perhaps this week. The company is valued at $852 billion — roughly 35 times its annualized revenue — and is projected to lose $14 billion in 2026 alone. Its own CFO has reportedly urged delaying until 2027. Sam Altman is pushing ahead anyway, likely because Anthropic and Elon Musk's xAI are eyeing the same investor dollars.
In this video, I look at what going public actually does to a company's principles — using Google and Facebook as the clearest historical examples — and why the fact that OpenAI's red lines have already moved, before a single earnings call, should worry all of us. Plus: what Andrej Karpathy's surprise move to Anthropic might tell us about where the serious research is actually happening.
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A jury in Oakland took less than two hours to dismiss Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI Monday morning. The verdict was on a narrow technicality — the statute of limitations — and didn't touch the substantive questions: whether Altman lied to co-founders, whether the nonprofit-to-profit conversion was a betrayal, whether the company violated the charitable trust Musk said he was funding.What closes with the case is the only real window the public has ever had into how the AI industry operates. The discovery documents generated by this lawsuit — Brockman's diaries, the Altman-Musk email chains, Sutskever's 52-page dossier — exist as public record only because adversarial litigation forced them into the open. That lever is now gone.I've been covering this trial from inside the Oakland courthouse since it started. This is my assessment of what the verdict actually forecloses — and what OpenAI's path to a trillion-dollar IPO looks like from here.For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.

Trump brought a dozen of America's most powerful CEOs to Beijing this week — Jensen Huang, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and others — to meet with Xi Jinping. The optics were big. The results were not. And the whole experience was presumably a nightmare for Trump's emotional-support CEOs.

Here's why: these companies aren't trying to expand into China. They're trying to hold onto what they already have — and in most cases, they're losing it anyway. Tim Cook has built Apple's entire supply chain around China. Nvidia has gone from 95% AI chip market share in China to nearly zero. Musk is trying to sell Teslas in a country that views Starlink as a military threat.

The world that made Silicon Valley possible — the open-market, borderless-money era that began when China joined the WTO in 2001 — is over. And no amount of diplomatic face time with Xi Jinping, or plane rides with Trump, is going to bring it back.

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.

I watched Sam Altman testify Tuesday, May 12th, in the Musk v. OpenAI trial in Oakland — his first and possibly only day on the stand. Within two minutes of cross-examination, Musk's attorney Stephen Molo was asking him point-blank whether he tells lies to advance his business interests. Altman's answers were careful to the point of being revealing: "I believe I'm a truthful person." Not: I am a truthful person. I believe I am.

Read the testimony of OpenAI cofounders who described a "pattern of lying" from Altman here.
The testimony produced a portrait of Altman that is hard to square with any single narrative. He described finding out Shivon Zilis — an OpenAI board member he'd kept around partly to smooth relations with Musk — had children with Musk only a year after the fact, and not learning Musk was the father until even later. Yet he kept Zilis as a board member.
He recalled a 2018 meeting at a Tesla facility about OpenAI's corporate future that ended with Musk just showing everyone memes on his phone. He explained his return after being fired in 2023 as running "into a burning building" — while under oath, and while not mentioning the simultaneous Microsoft job negotiations or the conditions he extracted for coming back, including removing most of the board.
The legal question, as Altman himself correctly stated near the end of cross, is narrow: did he breach a charitable trust, and was he unjustly enriched? The jury's verdict is advisory — Judge Yvette Gonzalez Rogers makes the call. And watching her tell billionaires what to do, and watching them say "yes, your honor," turned out to be the most clarifying thing about the whole proceeding.