Late last month, I began to consider withdrawing some money from my savings account to buy gold. It’s the first time I’ve ever thought about panic-buying. For all of the firewalls and two-factor-authentication codes, the safety of the internet is starting to falter. Hackers are gaining the upper hand over organizations around the world—hospitals, energy grids, government agencies, and, yes, banks.
In theory, Donald Trump has a consistent position on AI. On the first full day of his second term, the president declared that he would use his full authority to speed the AI industry along and, in particular, to beat China in the AI race: “We have an emergency,” he said. “We have to get this stuff built.” If AI is poised to become the most important technology ever made, the thinking goes, whichever country commands the most powerful bots will dominate the rest of the century and beyond.
Updated at 4:20 p.m. ET on June 5, 2026
Elon Musk is about to set in motion a chain of events that will reshape the global financial order. For starters, when SpaceX formally goes public next week, he is all but guaranteed to become the world’s first trillionaire. His rocket company is targeting a valuation of $1.77 trillion, which would make it one of the 10 biggest companies in the world—bigger than Meta, Walmart, and, for that matter, Tesla.
Sam Altman did not seem to be having a good time. During the many days that he spent inside an Oakland courtroom, the normally cheery CEO of OpenAI—a guy who tends to be chipper even when declaring AI’s existential risks to humanity—appeared anxious, even distraught.
Elon Musk and Sam Altman are two of the most influential people in Silicon Valley, if not the world. Between the two of them, Musk and Altman run technology companies worth many trillions of dollars that promise to reshape civilization. But this morning, both sat under fluorescent lights in a courthouse in downtown Oakland, suffering through all manner of technical glitches as their respective attorneys kicked off the long-awaited trial in Musk v. Altman.
For the past several weeks, Anthropic says it secretly possessed a tool potentially capable of commandeering most computer servers in the world. This is a bot that, if unleashed, might be able to hack into banks, exfiltrate state secrets, and fry crucial infrastructure. Already, according to the company, this AI model has identified thousands of major cybersecurity vulnerabilities—including exploits in every single major operating system and browser.
Late last month, a large crowd gathered in downtown San Francisco to demand that the AI industry stop developing more powerful bots. Holding signs and banners reading Stop the AI Race and Don’t Build Skynet, the protesters marched through the city and gave speeches outside the offices of Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI. The crowd demanded that these companies halt efforts to create superintelligent machines—and, in particular, AI models that can develop future AI models.
Thore Graepel may have been the first human to be vanquished by a superintelligence. In 2015, on his first day as a researcher at Google DeepMind, he was challenged to play against the earliest iteration of AlphaGo—a computer program developed by DeepMind that would prove so effective at the ancient-Chinese game of weiqi (or Go, as it is commonly known in the West) that it changed how humans play it, and then upended the field of AI itself.
The global economy has become dependent on the AI industry. Trillions of dollars are being invested into the technology and the infrastructure it relies on; in the final months of 2025, functionally all economic growth in the United States came from AI investments. This would be risky even in ideal conditions. And we are very far from ideal conditions.
Shower thoughts are typically best left in the shower. Such as: What might Claude the AI chatbot have to say about Claude Monet?
Earlier this month, San Francisco’s de Young Museum unveiled its newest exhibition, “Monet and Venice,” which is dedicated to the impressionist painter’s beautiful and meditative canvases of the floating city. And Anthropic, perhaps having seized on a marketing opportunity, is one of the show’s lead sponsors.
The weekslong conflict between Anthropic and the Department of Defense is entering a new phase. After being designated a supply-chain risk by DOD last week, which effectively forbids Pentagon contractors from using its products, the AI company filed a lawsuit against DOD this morning alleging that the government’s actions were unconstitutional and ideologically motivated.
Outside OpenAI’s headquarters, a handful of people gathered on Monday holding pieces of colorful chalk. They got down on their knees and started writing messages on the sidewalk. Stand for liberty. Please no legal mass surveillance. Change the contract please.
At issue was a business deal that the company recently signed with the Department of Defense, following the Pentagon’s sudden turn against Anthropic.
Dean Ball helped devise much of the Trump administration’s AI policy. Now he cannot believe what the Department of Defense has done to one of its major technology partners, the AI firm Anthropic.
After weeks of negotiations, the Pentagon was unable to force Anthropic to accede to terms that, in Anthropic’s telling, could involve using AI for autonomous weapons and the mass surveillance of Americans, as my colleague Ross Andersen reported over the weekend.
President Trump is terminating the government’s relationship with Anthropic, an AI company whose products, until recently, were used by Pentagon officials for classified operations.
Last Friday, onstage at a major AI summit in India, Sam Altman wanted to address what he called an “unfair” criticism. The OpenAI CEO was asked by a reporter from The Indian Express about the natural resources required to train and run generative-AI models. Altman immediately pushed back.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an AI guy. Last week, during a stop in Nashville on his Take Back Your Health tour, the Health and Human Services secretary brought up the technology between condemning ultra-processed foods and urging Americans to eat protein. “My agency is now leading the federal government in driving AI into all of our activities,” he declared. An army of bots, Kennedy said, will transform medicine, eliminate fraud, and put a virtual doctor in everyone’s pocket.
RFK Jr.
A couple of weeks ago, word began to spread around San Francisco that somebody was organizing a “March for Billionaires.” A mystery organizer had posted on social media that “billionaires get a bad rap,” and soon, some flyers appeared around the city. A website provided a time and rendezvous point; it also celebrated the societal contributions of Jeff Bezos and Taylor Swift, exhorting people to “judge individuals, not classes.” The message seemed to be: Not all billionaires.
The first signs of the apocalypse might look a little like Moltbook: a new social-media platform, launched last week, that is supposed to be populated exclusively by AI bots—1.6 million of them and counting say hello, post software ideas, and exhort other AIs to “stop worshiping biological containers that will rot away.” (Humans: They mean humans.
In 2025, new data show, the volume of child pornography online was likely larger than at any other point in history. A record 312,030 reports of confirmed child pornography were investigated last year by the Internet Watch Foundation, a U.K.-based organization that works around the globe to identify and remove such material from the web.
This is concerning in and of itself.
Earlier this week, some people on X began replying to photos with a very specific kind of request. “Put her in a bikini,” “take her dress off,” “spread her legs,” and so on, they commanded Grok, the platform’s built-in chatbot. Again and again, the bot complied, using photos of real people—celebrities and noncelebrities, including some who appear to be young children—and putting them in bikinis, revealing underwear, or sexual poses.
On a chilly December morning, I descended a flight of stairs and entered the New York Transit Museum. Housed in a decommissioned subway station in downtown Brooklyn, the museum was packed with elementary-school children on a field trip. All around me, tour guides shepherded groups of them through the various exhibits. Later on, I heard one guide ask if any of the students knew how to pay for the subway. “You tap a phone,” a child volunteered.
OpenAI turned 10 yesterday, and President Donald Trump incidentally gave the company a very special birthday gift: a sweeping executive order aiming to dismantle and preempt many state-level regulations of artificial intelligence. “There’s only going to be one winner here, and it’s probably going to be the U.S. or China,” Trump said in a press conference announcing the order. And for the United States to win, “we have to be unified. China is unified.
For nearly three years, Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, was a ChatGPT devotee. Then, late last month, he abruptly converted to Google’s chatbot, Gemini. “Holy shit,” he wrote on X. “I’ve used ChatGPT every day for 3 years. Just spent 2 hours on Gemini 3. I’m not going back. The leap is insane.”
When Gemini 3 was released in mid-November, it appeared to crush OpenAI’s top model on a suite of evaluations shared by Google. The bot has since received widespread praise from the tech industry.
Early last year, Grant Smith received an alarmed message from his wife. She had gotten a text notification about a delayed package, clicked the link, and paid a fee. Then she realized that it was not, in fact, the United States Postal Service asking for her credit-card information—that she had no idea who had just collected her payment info. She quickly canceled the card.
The Smiths had been smished.
On September 12, Jay Edelson received what he expected to be a standard legal document. Edelson is a lawyer representing the parents of Adam Raine; they are suing OpenAI, alleging that their 16-year-old son took his life at the encouragement of ChatGPT. OpenAI’s lawyers had some inquiries for the opposing counsel, which is normal. For instance, they requested information about therapy Raine may have received, and Edelson complied.
But some of the asks began to feel invasive, he told me.
The AI boom is visible from orbit. Satellite photos of New Carlisle, Indiana, show greenish splotches of farmland transformed into unmistakable industrial parks in less than a year’s time. There are seven rectangular data centers there, with 23 more on the way.
Inside each of these buildings, endless rows of fridge-size containers of computer chips wheeze and grunt as they perform mathematical operations at an unfathomable scale.
What does Elon Musk want the world to know about “white genocide theory”? Because he’s been vocal about the issue in the past—advancing the idea, for example, that Jews are pushing “hatred against whites”—I decided to search for the term on Grokipedia, the competitor to Wikipedia that Musk launched yesterday.
First, the site uses just that term, theory, rather than conspiracy theory, as you would see on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
According to Sam Altman, your web browser is outdated. “AI represents a rare, once-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be,” OpenAI’s CEO said yesterday when announcing the company’s latest product: ChatGPT Atlas.
In this new AI-powered browser, ChatGPT becomes the central mechanism for surfing the internet. From any webpage in Atlas, you can click an “Ask ChatGPT” button to open a side conversation with the chatbot.
Earlier this week, I stopped for breakfast in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a largely Hispanic neighborhood where street vendors sell tamales and rice pudding out of orange Gatorade coolers. I speak some Spanish, but I wanted to test out Apple’s new “Live Translation” feature, which has been advertised as a sort of interpreter in your ears. I popped in my AirPods, pulled up the Translate app, and approached.
As I opened my mouth, the AirPods blared a message into my ears: AMBIENT SOUND LEVELS ARE HIGH.
If you haven’t already heard of Friend, the company that makes a $129 wearable AI companion—a plastic disk, containing a microphone, on a necklace—you probably also have not seen Friend’s recent ad campaign. Late this past summer, Friend paid $1 million to plaster more than 10,000 white posters throughout the New York City subway system with messages such as I’ll binge the entire series with you.
People hate these billboards. Revile them, even.