The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

May 25, 2026 — 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,...

May 22, 2026 — 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,...

May 18, 2026 — 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...

May 16, 2026 — 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...

May 14, 2026 — 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...