The Rip Current

Sal Khan is one of the most universally admired people in tech — a tutor who turned his makeshift online study guides for his young cousin into a free online education for 200 million people around the world. So when the Greenwich Public Library asked me to debate him on the role of AI in education, I knew that I wasn’t going to be getting into a fistfight with him on stage, but I also knew that we had very different experiences navigating the world of tech power, and that an audience might learn a lot about how that world works from our conversation. We wound up having what I consider a very thoughtful and very interesting discussion, moderated by a Dartmouth senior, in front of a live audience, and with the kind permission of the library, I’m sharing it with you here. Stay tuned for the audience Q&A at the end, which produced some of the sharpest stuff of the night, including a finance professional who couldn’t quite see why we’re all so worried about AI, and a dad of four kids under the age of seven desperate for advice on how to raise them. Also, give Greenwich Library a follow on YouTube — they were very kind in letting me distribute this talk, and they have a wide range of fascinating guests on offer! For more cutting-edge conversations and insights about the latest news in tech, power, and politics, subscribe to The Rip Current with Jacob Ward. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe

I’m currently in Amsterdam to speak at a pair of events — TechSummit this week and World Summit AI next week — and I’m learning that being a European correspondent for American networks is brutal night-shift work. I landed at 9am local time this morning, stayed awake by biking around in the sun, and somehow managed to make it to 9pm, when I was pulled into a CNN appearance to offer my thoughts on the AI meeting at the White House today. But about halfway through an appearance on CNN International, the presenter cut in to say that Trump had taken the stage. Here’s a clip of how far I got: I then had to sit and listen live as he brushed aside the existential threats that the tech leadership standing with him had raised, boasting instead that the very smart and very rich people behind him were going to “self-police.” Speaker Mike Johnson said that some sort of document would be distributed that solved our AI problems once and for all. Trump said that while the document might not be legally binding, it was “morally binding,” which I guess is good enough for him. Here, then, is my reaction to the presidential continuation of the anti-democratic nightmare that is the American rollout of AI at scale. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe

The public resignation of Jacob Coxon — who told the world his industry is “gambling with our lives” — buried two other chilling warnings from inside the AI industry this week. The first is “An Alien Mind,” an essay OpenAI’s chief scientist Jakub Pachocki published on September 6, in which he describes his own creation as an intellect nobody fully understands and says no lab has solved alignment well enough to keep scaling at full speed. The second is Anthropic’s September threat report, which lays out what people have already done with Claude: a Russian espionage group whose AI agents rewrote their own malware until security products stopped catching it; hotel WiFi networks turned into software delivery systems; one person who built a searchable doxxing database of political dissidents; a Wagner-funded radio station in the Central African Republic where the model wrote the loyalty contracts and the scoring rubric used to decide which journalists to fire; and a cell in northern Yemen running three weapons programs, including a multi-stage ballistic missile with a stated range goal above 2,000 kilometers. In this episode I go through the report, explain why the labor curve that used to limit what a small group could do has collapsed, and lay out the questions I submitted to a CNN producer for the executives running these companies — including whether Dario Amodei would support the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, the bill Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar announced on September 3, which would carry penalties comparable to those for unlawfully developing nuclear weapons. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe

The story of MapQuest refusing to rename a lake isn’t about MapQuest. It’s about Big Tech, and whether we can rely on its principles. On Anderson Cooper 360 last night, anchor Jim Sciutto asked me whether Google and Apple’s decision to rename Lake Ontario per the president’s wishes was a matter of business. “I don’t think it’s because they’re outraged by Canadian names on lakes,” I told him. And that’s not just a feeling: Trump last year said into the microphones that Apple was excluded from his 100% tariff on semiconductors because it had agreed to invest $100B domestically. When the lifeblood of your company — which for Apple is a steady flow of chips and hardware from China — is at the discretionary whim of the president, the name of a lake on your map isn’t a hill you’ll die on. The question, of course, is what hills a Big Tech player will die on, even if it threatens the business. As we see software engineers laid off (and with them, their political demands), and AI hyperscalers emboldening the tech industry to imagine a life without having to employ anyone (that’s how you should read the phrase “one-person unicorn” whenever you encounter it), the hills a company like Google or Apple consider non-negotiable feel like they’re getting taller and taller. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to read the reporting and analysis I can’t share on CNN. So while we want to tell this story in terms of the courage of MapQuest, I encourage you to think instead in terms of what big firms are willing to compromise, because I don’t think we know yet. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe