The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

Jacob Ward
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The Rip Current covers the big, invisible forces carrying us out to sea, from tech to politics to greed to beauty to culture to human weirdness. The currents are strong, but with a little practice we can learn to spot them from the beach, and get across them safely. Veteran journalist Jacob Ward has covered technology, science and business for NBC News, CNN, PBS, and Al Jazeera. He's written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and is the former Editor in Chief of Popular Science magazine.

  1. 15H AGO

    Did Meta Connect Predators to Children? (With AG Raúl Torrez)

    New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torres's case against Meta was the first to go to trial first — and the price this case sets for Meta could cascade across more than 1,500 lawsuits against social media companies. On this episode, we talk about what his case actually alleges: not that Meta failed to police bad content, but that Meta's own design choices — the recommendation algorithm, the "people you may know" feature, the engagement-above-safety tradeoffs documented in internal company documents — actively connected sexual predators to children. And that Meta knew it.Torres ran an undercover investigation posing as a preteen girl on Meta's platforms. What followed was a flood of sexual solicitations. When Meta challenged the results, Torres ran it again as a criminal sting. Three men showed up at a hotel expecting to meet children, and wound up in handcuffs. Torres says the internal documents he's obtained in discovery show roughly half a million children in English-speaking markets are exposed to inappropriate sexual content on Meta's platforms every single day — and that safety concerns about these features were repeatedly overruled by executives focused on engagement and revenue.This case isn't just about New Mexico. It's about what happens when the per-user damages number is established in a small state and then applied to California, Texas, New York, and Florida. It's about whether Section 230 — the 30-year-old legal shield that has protected social media companies from liability for content — can be circumvented by focusing on design rather than content. And it's about whether the legal strategy that revealed the tobacco playbook — knowing your product is dangerous, hiding it, marketing it as safe — will reveal something similar was going on inside social media companies.Originally published at The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full written analysis: https://theripcurrent.com

    33 min

  2. MAR 8

    A Silicon Valley Congressman Faces the Shifting Sands of A.I.

    Politicians don't change their minds in public. So when Rep. Sam Liccardo asked to talk to me again just weeks after our first conversation, it was notable. In February, Liccardo argued America couldn't afford to slow AI down — that guardrails would hand the future to China. Then the Pentagon demanded unguardrailed AI for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Anthropic refused. The government blacklisted them. OpenAI signed the contract. And the U.S. attacked Iran using the very AI it had just banned. This conversation covers what is clearly shifting in Liccardo's thinking, why he now supports mandating at least some human control over every weapon system, and what Block's 4,000 layoffs mean for a lawmaker whose district includes Google, Apple, and Stanford. Watch both conversations — the February version and this week's — and you'll see something you almost never see: a lawmaker's position evolving in real time, on the record. That's how fast this stuff is moving.Originally published at The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full transcripts: https://theripcurrent.com

    21 min

  3. MAR 5

    Lethal Beta: Gaza Was the Test Run. Iran Is the Launch.

    For decades, Israel has deployed new weapons systems in Gaza, collected data on what works, refined them, and sold the results internationally as “battle-tested” technology. That pipeline is now running on AI. A system called Lavender assigned kill ratings to 37,000 Palestinians. Operators approved strikes in around 20 seconds. The accepted error rate was 10 percent. Before AI targeting, Israeli analysts produced around 50 verified targets per year. After: up to 250 strikes per day. Gaza was the beta test. This week’s strikes on Iran are the product launch. In this video, I’m coining a term for this dynamic — lethal beta — and tracing the full pipeline: from the AI systems deployed in Gaza, to the arms companies now filing for IPOs on the back of 241% revenue growth, to the Pentagon official who called Ukraine “an extraordinary laboratory” for military AI, to the ways the same logic is now normalizing autonomous warfare at a scale none of the original systems were designed for. As always, this isn’t just a story about technology. It’s a story about who makes decisions, who profits, and who pays. Paid subscribers can read the full written analysis here: Further Reading: “’Lavender’: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing Spree in Gaza” — +972 Magazine, April 3, 2024: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/ “Dirty Secret of Israel’s Weapons Exports: They’re Tested on Palestinians” — Al Jazeera, November 17, 2023: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/11/17/israels-weapons-industry-is-the-gaza-war-its-latest-test-lab The Palestine Laboratory — Antony Loewenstein, Verso Books, 2023: https://www.amazon.com/Palestine-Laboratory-Exports-Technology-Occupation/dp/1839762217 “The Palestine Laboratory” (Documentary) — Al Jazeera English, January–February 2025: https://network.aljazeera.net/en/press-releases/%E2%80%98-palestine-laboratory%E2%80%99-exposes-israel%E2%80%99s-export-unique-systems-control-and “Gaza: Israel’s AI Human Laboratory” — The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, June 12, 2025: https://www.thecairoreview.com/essays/gaza-israels-ai-human-laboratory/ “When AI Decides Who Lives and Dies” — Foreign Policy, May 2, 2024: https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/05/02/israel-military-artificial-intelligence-targeting-hamas-gaza-deaths-lavender/ “The Cruel Experiments of Israel’s Arms Industry” — Pulitzer Center: https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/cruel-experiments-israels-arms-industry “The Genocide Will Be Automated — Israel, AI and the Future of War” — MERIP, October 2024: https://www.merip.org/2024/10/the-genocide-will-be-automated-israel-ai-and-the-future-of-war/ “War Rewrote the Rules: The World Studies Israel’s AI-Driven Battlefield Playbook” — Ynet News, February 2026: https://www.ynetnews.com/tech-and-digital/article/bjfoec900wl “Artificial Intelligence on the Battlefield in 2025” — The Jerusalem Post: https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-861611 “Ukraine Is an ‘Extraordinary Laboratory’ for Military AI” — DefenseScoop, August 1, 2023: https://defensescoop.com/2023/08/01/ukraine-is-extraordinary-laboratory-for-military-ai-senior-dod-official-says/ “The Horrifying, AI-Enhanced Future of War Is Here” — The New Republic, November 2025: https://newrepublic.com/article/202753/ukraine-drones-ai-enhanced-future-war “Governing AI Under Fire in Ukraine” — The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, June 15, 2025: https://www.thecairoreview.com/essays/governing-ai-under-fire-in-ukraine/ “Battlefield Drones and the Accelerating Autonomous Arms Race in Ukraine” — Modern War Institute, West Point, January 10, 2025: https://mwi.westpoint.edu/battlefield-drones-and-the-accelerating-autonomous-arms-race/

    14 min

  4. FEB 28

    7 Terrifying Things AI Can Already Do (That Most People Don't Know About)

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to the Pentagon this week and demanded an AI with no safety guardrails — threatening to declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk" if it refused. So I decided to look into what exactly the Pentagon might want to do with that technology. What I found is a set of AI capabilities that go far beyond chatbots and image generators. We're talking about WiFi routers that reconstruct human bodies through solid walls, Pentagon lasers that identify you by your heartbeat from 200 meters, Chinese gait-recognition systems that ID you with your back turned and face covered, and autonomous drone swarms that run a full kill chain — find, fix, finish — with no human individually controlling each step. Every item in this video is documented, sourced, and in many cases already deployed. This is the landscape Anthropic seems to understand it's operating in. And it's the landscape the Pentagon wants full access to. The full written analysis with all sources is available to paid subscribers at The Rip Current. Originally published at The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full transcripts: https://theripcurrent.com

    11 min

  5. FEB 26

    Anthropic's CEO Built an AI With Ethics. The Pentagon Just Told Him to Drop Them.

    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

    13 min

  6. FEB 26

    A Big Week for Tech Accountability

    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

    9 min

  7. FEB 25

    State of the Union: Tech Anxiety Edition

    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

    15 min

  8. FEB 20

    Zuckerberg's Testimony: What to Watch For

    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

    11 min
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About

The Rip Current covers the big, invisible forces carrying us out to sea, from tech to politics to greed to beauty to culture to human weirdness. The currents are strong, but with a little practice we can learn to spot them from the beach, and get across them safely. Veteran journalist Jacob Ward has covered technology, science and business for NBC News, CNN, PBS, and Al Jazeera. He's written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and is the former Editor in Chief of Popular Science magazine.

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