Radically different
On Monday, the jury in Musk v. Altman dealt Elon Musk a major blow—reaching a unanimous advisory verdict that he had sued OpenAI too late and, as a result, his claims are barred by the applicable statutes of limitations. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers immediately accepted it.
Musk announced on X that he will be appealing the decision. “The judge & jury never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality,” he wrote.
OpenAI was cofounded by Musk and a group of researchers in 2015 as a nonprofit with a mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity, unconstrained by a need to generate financial returns. Musk donated $38 million to the company during its early days, allegedly on the basis that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman had promised to keep the company a nonprofit committed to the mission.
Musk brought two claims against OpenAI. First, he argued that Altman and Brockman breached the charitable trust he created through his donations by breaking their promise to keep the company a nonprofit and creating a for-profit subsidiary that ballooned over the years. Second, he argued that Altman and Brockman unjustly enriched themselves at Musk’s expense. He sued OpenAI in 2024.
Musk asked the court to unwind a 2025 restructuring that converted OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary into a public benefit corporation and to remove Altman and Brockman from their roles.
OpenAI argued that the time for Musk to sue the company had run out before he brought the case. The statute of limitations on the breach of charitable trust claim is three years, while the statute of limitations on the unjust enrichment claim is two years. This means that Musk should have discovered, or had reason to discover, Altman and Brockman’s alleged breach of charitable trust no earlier than 2021 and their alleged unjust enrichment no earlier than 2022.
While Musk argued he discovered that Altman and Brockman had broken their promise only in 2022, OpenAI claimed that Musk had reason to think this well before 2021.
Musk told the jury that he has gone through “three phases” in his beliefs about OpenAI: In phase one, he was “enthusiastically supportive” of the company. In phase two, “I started to lose confidence that they were telling me the truth,” he said. In phase three, “I’m sure they’re looting the nonprofit.”
Here’s a deeper dive into a timeline of the events as testified in the trial. You can read my dispatches from all three weeks of the trial here and here and here.
In 2017, two years after OpenAI was founded, Musk and the other cofounders tried to create a for-profit subsidiary to raise enough capital to build artificial general intelligence—powerful AI that can compete with humans on most cognitive tasks. They fought a bitter power battle over who would get to control the entity. Musk also proposed merging OpenAI with his electric-car company, Tesla.
During the trial, OpenAI’s lawyers pressed Musk on these discussions, suggesting that Musk knew in 2017 about Altman and Brockman’s plans to pivot the company—even participating in such plans—and had reason to sue then.
“I was not opposed to there being a small for-profit that provides funding to the nonprofit,” Musk told the jury, “as long as the tail didn’t wag the dog.”
In 2019, OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary, under which employees and investors would receive a capped return on their investment. At the same time, the company secured a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. OpenAI argued that Musk again had reason to sue the company then.
But Musk testified that he didn’t think the move was violating the nonprofit’s mission. “If you’ve got a capped-profit situation, it hasn’t violated the nonprofit’s goal,” Musk told the jury earlier in the trial. “There was no basis for me to file a lawsuit at that time.”
In 2020, when Microsoft secured an exclusive license to OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, Musk posted on X: “This does seem like the opposite of open. OpenAI is essentially captured by Microsoft.” OpenAI once again argued that Musk had reason to sue then.
But Musk testified that after reading the post, Altman reassured him that “OpenAI was staying on the mission as a nonprofit.” Musk said although he was skeptical, he still had no reason to sue the company at that point.
It was only in 2022, Musk testified, that he discovered OpenAI had abandoned its nonprofit mission. At that time, Microsoft was preparing to invest $10 billion in OpenAI—a deal that closed in 2023.
“I was disturbed to see OpenAI with a $20B valuation,” Musk texted Altman after reading the news. “This is a bait and switch.”
Musk told the jury this was the moment that made him realize “the for-profit is the tail wagging the dog.” He thought Microsoft would give $10 billion only if it expected “a very big financial return.” He argued that this was the point he realized “OpenAI had become, for all intents and purposes, a for-profit company with a $20 billion valuation.”
“The 2023 deal was different,” Steven Molo, one of Musk’s lawyers, hammered home during his closing argument.
It was up to the jury to decide whether the evidence supported Musk’s claim that he first realized in 2023 that OpenAI was no longer a nonprofit committed to its mission. In the verdict announced today, they found Musk did in fact have reason to think that he was being misled by Altman and Brockman before 2021. They did not address whether he was in fact misled.
Courts often decide cases on procedural grounds like statutes of limitations when they can, because it can be the cleaner way to resolve a case than to grapple with its merits.
Musk has said he will appeal the decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a federal appellate court that reviews decisions from district courts in California and other states.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
In the final week of the Musk v. Altman trial, lawyers attacked the credibility of the two tech leaders. Sam Altman was accused of lying and self-dealing, while Elon Musk was portrayed as a power-seeker trying to control artificial general intelligence.
The case unearthed new details about the two arch-rivals and OpenAI’s contested nonprofit status, as well as a golden trophy of a donkey’s ass awarded to an employee who challenged Musk.
Read the full story on the explosive final week of the trial.
—Michelle Kim
Michelle Kim, who’s also a lawyer, has been in court throughout the Musk v. Altman trial. Read her coverage of week 1 and week 2, plus a Q&A on what it was like in the room.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Trump traded hundreds of millions in tech stocks before favorable policy moves
He bought shares in Nvidia, AMD, and Arm ahead of policy boosts. (Quartz)
+ And touted Palantir on Truth Social after buying its stock. (CNBC)
+ His crypto venture and Iran’s top exchange tapped the same networks. (Reuters $)
2 SpaceX plans to list on the Nasdaq stock exchange as soon as June 12
It wants to raise up to $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation. (Reuters $)
+ BlackRock may invest up to $10 billion in the offering. (The Information $)
+ Cerebras’ blockbuster IPO has boosted hopes for the listing. (CNBC)
+ Which is set to dwarf many of the biggest IPOs on record. (Reuters)
3 Chinese AI groups have pulled ahead of US rivals in video generation
ByteDance and Kuaishou’s models lead in realism and scale. (FT $)
+ AI is fueling China’s short-drama boom. (MIT Technology Review)
+ While its AI labs are betting big on open source. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Iran says it will charge Big Tech for using undersea internet cables
The cables beneath the Strait of Hormuz carry vast digital traffic. (CNN)
+ Tech bosses met at Uber HQ on Saturday to discuss Iran’s future. (404 Media)
5 Samsung has a “last chance” to stop a massive strike over AI
Over 45,000 employees could walk out for 18 days this week. (CNBC)
+ They want a bigger share of the AI boom. (FT $)
+ Samsung and its largest labor union will resume talks on Tuesday. (Reuters $)
6 Old oil and gas wells could become a new source of clean energy
US states plan to convert them into geothermal energy assets. (Wired $)
+ A balcony solar boom is coming to the US. (MIT Technology Review)
7 The ChatGPT era has triggered a 30% surge in grades at a top university
Grades inflated in text-heavy courses but remained flat in others. (Axios)
+ Princeton has changed its honor code because of AI cheating. (WSJ $)
+ And real cheating rates may be far higher. (The Times $)
8 Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt was fiercely booed during an AI speech
His graduation speech praising AI agents sparked uproar. (The Verge)
+ A populist backlash is building against AI. (MIT Technology Review)
9 Arm faces a US antitrust probe over its chip tech licenses
Regulators are investigating whether it has an illegal monopoly. (Bloomberg $)
+ Qualcomm has accused Arm of anticompetitive conduct. (Reuters $)
10 ArXiv will ban researchers who submit AI slop
Offending authors face year-long bans from the pre-print server. (TechCrunch)
Quote of the day
—Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt extolls the virtues of AI agents in a graduation speech at the University of Arizona, prompting a chorus of boos.
One More Thing
In a clean room in his lab, Sean Moore peers through a microscope at a bit of human intestinal tissue growing on a plastic chip. It’s one of 24 so-called “organs-on-chips” his team bought three years ago. The technology is designed to mimic human biology—and could reduce the need for animal testing.
The appeal is not only ethical. Around 95% of drugs developed through animal research ultimately fail in people, and early studies suggest organ-on-a-chip systems may offer more accurate insights into how diseases behave and how drugs work. But the field still faces major technical and cost challenges before it can replace animal research.
Find out how organ-on-chip technology could reshape drug testing.
—Harriet Brown
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ Listen to the captivating first recordings of whale songs from 1949.
+ Meet the feline guardians of New York’s corner stores in this photo collection.
+ A newly discovered floor plan allowed historians to pinpoint the location of Shakespeare’s only property in London.
+ A music fan spent decades secretly recording 10,000 local shows. Now the entire collection is available online.
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
When Google opens its doors tomorrow for its annual developer conference, I/O, it will do so as a clear third place in the foundation model race. A year ago, at Google I/O 2025, the situation looked very different: The company was still riding high from the launch of Gemini 2.5 Pro that March, and distinguishing among the top-tier large language models often felt like a subjective splitting of hairs.
But a foundation model’s reputation these days rests largely on its coding capabilities, and for months Google’s coding tools have been outgunned by Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. Those systems are so dramatically superior to Google’s own offerings that the company has reportedly had to allow some engineers at DeepMind, its AI division, to use Claude for their work—lest they fall farther behind.
So when I arrive at the conference in Mountain View, California tomorrow, I’ll certainly be on the lookout for any efforts Google is making to claw its way back into frontrunner position. But I’m also eager to see new developments in areas where Google shapes the cutting edge, such as AI for science. The company’s moves there might receive less attention, but they will be no less consequential.
Here are three things I’ll be paying particular attention to over the next two days.
Google is taking its AI coding crisis seriously. According to reporting from The Information, there’s a new AI coding team at DeepMind. And the Los Angeles Times has reported that John Jumper, who shared a 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for their work on the protein structure prediction software AlphaFold, is lending his talents to the efforts. I would be surprised if we don’t see a major new coding release at I/O, perhaps in the form of an update to the company’s Antigravity agentic coding platform.
That said, we shouldn’t expect anything transformative here. Googlers have access to models and products that are substantially ahead of those released to the public, yet they were still reportedly fighting over who got access to Claude Code last month. Unless the company has made astonishing progress since then, Google probably won’t make it back to the coding frontier in the next two days.
Coding might be Google DeepMind’s weakness, but science is its conspicuous strength. It is the only frontier AI company to have earned a Nobel Prize. And as LLMs have come to dominate the AI-for-science landscape, Google has only solidified its lead. Last year, the company released multiple scientific AI tools, including the AI co-scientist, which formulates hypotheses and research plans in response to user questions and has been described as an “oracle” by one Stanford scientist, and AlphaEvolve, a system that iteratively discovers new solutions for mathematical and computational problems. If any new scientific tools are announced at I/O, they’ll be worth noting.
I’ll also be paying close attention to any moves Google makes in health and medicine. Google is doing some of the best research out there on LLM-based health tools, but OpenAI has defined the health AI conversation since the release of ChatGPT Health in January. Google has announced that it will be making its AI-powered Health Coach publicly available tomorrow, but promotional material suggests that the tool is geared more toward providing advice on topics such as fitness and diet than to addressing users’ medical concerns. Is this another area where Google has fallen behind, or is the company exercising appropriate caution in a high-stakes domain?
While Google fans congregate down in Mountain View, roughly 30 miles north in Oakland the Elon Musk v. Sam Altman trial will be wrapping up. The past few months have seen more than their fair share of AI CEO drama—before the trial, the animosity between Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei took center stage as Anthropic and OpenAI worked to negotiate deals with the US Department of Defense. But DeepMind’s Hassabis has, for the most part, steered clear of such drama. He effectively presents himself as a Nobel Prize-winning nerd, and if he has written screeds about any of his peers, they haven’t been leaked to the press or appeared in legal discovery.
That’s not to say that Google is controversy free. Last month, a group of 600 employees, many of whom work for DeepMind, sent a letter to CEO Sundar Pichai protesting an impending DoD deal. Google signed that deal the next day. Hassabis, Pichai, and all the other big names will surely do their best to skirt these and other touchy subjects while on stage, but controversies will worm their way in regardless. It will be interesting to see whether Google can maintain its veneer of neutrality.
In the final week of the Musk v. Altman trial, lawyers traded blows over Elon Musk’s and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s credibility. Altman was grilled on his alleged history of lying and self-dealing involving companies that do business with OpenAI. But he fired back, painting Musk as a power-seeker who wanted to control the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI)—powerful AI that can compete with humans on most cognitive tasks.
As evidence of their commitment to AI safety, OpenAI brought out a golden trophy of a donkey’s ass that was gifted to an employee after he was called a “jackass” for standing up to Musk’s plans to race toward AGI.
Lawyers for both sides also presented their closing arguments, floating unflattering mugshot-style photos of Musk and Altman next to each other on a giant screen. Musk’s lawyer Steven Molo argued that Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman broke their promise to use money Musk donated to maintain OpenAI as a nonprofit that develops AI for the benefit of humanity. Instead, they created a for-profit subsidiary that made them extraordinarily wealthy.
OpenAI’s lawyer Sarah Eddy argued that Altman and Brockman never promised to keep OpenAI a nonprofit. She added that even though it’s been restructured, OpenAI remains a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI safely.
She claimed that Musk sued too late—and that his real motive is to sabotage a competitor to his own AI company, xAI, which he launched in 2023.
Musk is asking the court to unwind the 2025 restructuring that converted OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary into a public benefit corporation and to remove Altman and Brockman from their roles. He is also seeking as much as $134 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, to be awarded to OpenAI’s nonprofit.
The jury will begin deliberating on Monday and deliver an advisory verdict as soon as next week. The jury verdict is not binding on the judge, who will decide the case.
If the judge rules in Musk’s favor, it could upend OpenAI’s race toward an IPO at a valuation approaching $1 trillion. Meanwhile, xAI is expected to go public as a part of Musk’s rocket company SpaceX as early as June, at a target valuation of $1.75 trillion.
In the first week of the trial, Musk said he was suing to save OpenAI’s mission to build AI safely for the benefit of humanity. This week, Altman denied Musk was a paladin of AI safety and painted him as a power-seeker who wanted to control OpenAI.
Altman told the jury that in 2017, when Musk and other cofounders were discussing creating a for-profit arm, they asked Musk what would happen to his control over such an entity if he died. “Maybe the control of OpenAI should pass to my children,” Musk said, according to Altman.
Musk’s lawyer shot back, grilling Altman on his alleged history of lying. He pointed out that OpenAI’s former executives Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati, and former board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, all testified that Altman had lied to them. In 2023, Altman was briefly fired as CEO over the alleged behavior.
Molo also pressed Altman about his personal investments in startups that do business with OpenAI. Altman testified that he tried to steer OpenAI to buying power from the nuclear energy company Helion Energy, a third of which he owns.
(Last Friday, the US House oversight committee launched an investigation into Altman’s potential conflicts of interest. Attorneys general from more than a half-dozen states called for the Securities and Exchange Commission to review them.)
During his closing statement, Molo put Altman’s credibility on the stand again. “Imagine that you’re on a hike, and you come upon one of those wooden bridges that you see on a trail, and it’s over a gorge,” he said. “A woman standing by the entry to the bridge says, ‘Don’t worry—the bridge is built on Sam Altman’s version of the truth.’ Would you walk across that bridge?”
Altman, who sat behind his lawyers, looked up uneasily every time his name was mentioned.
During her closing argument, Eddy fired back. Musk “never cared about the nonprofit structure,” she said. “What he cared about was winning.”
Musk, though, was absent. Despite the judge’s order that he remain available, he flew to China with President Trump.
During her closing argument, Eddy argued that no testimony or evidence showed any conditions on Musk’s donations, or any promises made by Altman and Brockman to keep the company a nonprofit. “No commitments or promises were made. No restrictions were placed on Mr. Musk’s donations,” she said.
Eddy added that it was evident Musk wasn’t truly committed to keeping OpenAI a nonprofit. She noted that in 2017, he tried to create a for-profit subsidiary and fought a bitter battle with Altman and Brockman to have control over it.
“I was not opposed to there being a small for-profit that provides funding to the nonprofit,” Musk told the jury earlier in the trial, “as long as the tail didn’t wag the dog.”
Eddy then argued that Musk sued too late, filing in 2024 after the statutes of limitations on his claims ran out. In 2019, OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary, under which employees and investors received a capped return on their investment.
But Musk testified that he discovered OpenAI had abandoned its nonprofit mission only in 2022, when Microsoft was preparing to invest $10 billion in OpenAI—a deal that closed in 2023. “I was disturbed to see OpenAI with a $20B valuation,” he texted Altman after reading the news. “This is a bait and switch.”
Musk told the jury that the $20 billion valuation made him realize “the for-profit is the tail wagging the dog.”
“The 2023 deal was different,” Molo hammered home during his closing argument.
A central question raised in the last week of trial was whether OpenAI remains a nonprofit committed to developing AGI safely for the benefit of humanity. Eddy, the OpenAI lawyer, argued that the nonprofit still controls the for-profit and seeks to “help AGI turn out well for humanity.” “The OpenAI nonprofit is the best-resourced nonprofit in the world,” thanks to the for-profit, she added.
Molo countered that while the OpenAI’s nonprofit nominally controls the company, it does not do so in practice. OpenAI’s nonprofit and for-profit are controlled by the same people—seven of the nonprofit’s eight board members are on the for-profit’s board. The nonprofit hired employees only a month before the trial started and does work only in grant-making rather than AI research.
Molo played a video interview of Altman saying that the nonprofit board’s failure to fire him in 2023 was “its own kind of governance failure.”
“We’re left with this nonprofit that doesn’t have any voice,” Jill Horwitz, a law professor at Northwestern University who studies nonprofits, told MIT Technology Review. “It doesn’t have much money, and OpenAI doesn’t think it has any obligation to fund it. It barely has a staff,” she says. “It’s unclear how on earth the nonprofit is supposed to exercise its duties and control the entire company.”
Civil society groups and policymakers have spoken out against OpenAI’s restructuring over the years. So has Musk, although his own stake in the AI race makes him a dubious champion for the public interest.
“The public interest in the nonprofit loses, no matter who wins or loses this trial,” says Horwitz.
Despite US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’s warning during the first week that this trial was not about AI safety, the issue stole the show again. Throughout the trial, the lawyers from both sides traded barbs over the safety track records of ChatGPT (which has allegedly caused teen suicides) and Grok (which has flooded X with porn).
On the last day of testimony, OpenAI’s lawyer Bradley Wilson handed the judge a small golden trophy of a donkey’s ass, inscribed: “Never stop being a jackass for safety.”
The trophy belonged to Joshua Achiam, OpenAI’s chief futurist. He testified that he’d warned, when Musk announced in 2018 that he was leaving OpenAI to race toward building AGI, that speed could compromise safety. Musk snapped and called him a “jackass,” said Achiam. His colleagues, including Dario Amodei, now CEO of Anthropic, gave him the trophy to enshrine the diss.
“I don’t want it,” said the judge.
The shenanigans spilled out into the street too. In front of the Oakland courthouse, a protester paraded around wearing a costume of Musk holding a bag of ketamine and driving a Cybertruck. Another held a photo of Sam Altman and a poster reading, “Stop AGI or we’re all gonna die.”
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Global Center for Child and Adolescent Mental Health at the Child Mind Institute launches its next two-year fellowship for professionals pursuing evidence-based approaches across diverse, underserved global communities
New York, NY—Applications are now open for the 2026 Communicator Fellowship at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Global Center for Child and Adolescent Mental Health at the Child Mind Institute. The fellowship is designed to support a new generation of communicators working to shape child and adolescent mental health care in low- and middle-income countries, in addition to the SNF Global Center’s core country offices in Brazil, Greece, and South Africa. Up to three professionals working in public communications, including journalists, broadcasters, and podcasters, will be selected for the two-year program.
The Communicator Fellowship is part of the SNF Global Center’s broader mission to reduce gaps in data and care, catalyze system-level advancements, and transform child and adolescent mental health care by turning evidence into action, scaling culturally appropriate solutions, and building a global network of experts so young people everywhere can access support when they need it.
The application deadline is June 15, 2026. Fellows will be selected and announced by early August 2026. In addition to financial support of up to $100,000 USD, fellows will receive training, mentorship, and networking opportunities.
At a time when one in five young people are experiencing mental health or learning challenges, with most cases beginning by age 14, effective and accurate communication is urgently needed.
At the Child Mind Institute, we believe that translating research into accessible knowledge that empowers young people, families, and communities is integral to advancing mental health care. The Communicator Fellowship builds on this commitment by supporting professionals who can bring evidence-based mental health information to the public in clear, engaging, and culturally relevant ways.
Vinicius Gaby Vieira Rego, MD, of Brazil, a current Communicator Fellow with the support of the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of São Paulo, exemplifies this mission. Working with youth, Dr. Rego is co-creating a multi-platform literacy hub designed to combat harmful misinformation by empowering Brazil’s young leaders.
“I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to join the SNF Global Center’s network of fellows to support adolescent mental health in Brazil through communication,” said Dr. Rego. “This fellowship will enable a multi-channel communication project aimed at strengthening mental health literacy and peer-support capacity — with young people and for young people — across the country.”
As a fellow, Dr. Rego’s work directly addresses complex mental health challenges faced by young people in Brazil, while contributing to broader global efforts to improve communication about mental health care.
“In the current digital environment, where adolescents are exposed to a high volume of mental health content, the need for evidence-based information that resonates with young people has never been greater,” said Guilherme Polanczyk, MD, PhD, associate professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of São Paulo. “We are proud to endorse a project committed to supporting how young people and their communities understand and reflect on their mental health.”
Other current fellows are leading high-impact projects dispelling misinformation, reducing stigma, and increasing youth engagement — all while bringing critical attention to links among mental health, climate change, and human rights. Through partnerships, these efforts are transforming the future of youth mental health across the globe.
“Vinicius’s project is ambitious, and with the support of the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of São Paulo, we know it will provide young people in Brazil with much-needed resources to support their mental health,” said Peter Raucci, Director of Global Fellowship Strategy of the SNF Global Center at the Child Mind Institute. “What we’re seeing through the Communicator Fellowship is how quickly ideas can move from concept to culturally relevant, real-world impact.”
Application deadline: June 15, 2026
Fellows announced: August 2026
About the SNF Global Center at the Child Mind Institute
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Global Center for Child and Adolescent Mental Health at the Child Mind Institute brings together the Child Mind Institute’s expertise as a leading independent nonprofit in children’s mental health and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation’s deep commitment to supporting collaborative projects to improve access to quality health care worldwide. The center is building partnerships to drive advances in under-researched areas of children and adolescents’ mental health, and expand access to culturally appropriate training, resources, and treatment in low- and middle-income countries. This work is conducted by the Child Mind Institute with support from SNF through its Global Health Initiative (GHI).
About the Child Mind Institute
The Child Mind Institute is dedicated to transforming the lives of children and families struggling with mental health and learning disorders by giving them the help they need. We’ve become the leading independent nonprofit in children’s mental health by providing gold-standard, evidence-based care, delivering educational resources to millions of families each year, training educators in underserved communities, and developing tomorrow’s breakthrough treatments.
The post Applications Open for the SNF Global Center Communicator Fellowship appeared first on Child Mind Institute.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
China’s short drama industry is fueled by bite-sized, melodramatic, and smutty shows built for smartphone scrolling. Now, many are being made entirely with AI: no actors, camera operators, cinematographers, or CGI specialists required.
An average of 470 AI-generated short dramas were released every day in January. Production timelines have shrunk from months to weeks, while costs have dropped by up to 90%. Storytelling is also increasingly driven by performance data.
The format is rapidly expanding overseas while reshaping the work of writers and production crews. Read the full story on AI’s dramatic impact on China’s short drama industry.
—Caiwei Chen
The World Health Organization’s latest global statistics report reads less like a progress update than a warning sign. Progress on some of the world’s biggest health threats is stalling, and in some cases reversing altogether.
There were 1.3 million new HIV cases in 2024, malaria is resurging, vaccination rates are slipping in the Americas, and 42.8 million children are suffering from severe malnutrition. The world is now far off track from meeting many of the UN’s major health goals by 2030.
Here’s what the numbers reveal about the state of global health.
—Jessica Hamzelou
This story is from The Checkup, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things biotech. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 As their trial goes to the jury, Musk and Altman face lying accusations
Lawyers hammered the rivals’ credibility in their closing arguments. (WSJ $)
+ Musk was accused of “selective amnesia.” (Reuters $)
+ The pair are in court over OpenAI’s future. (MIT Technology Review)
+ And their trial has made everyone look bad. (Wired $)
2 AI data centers are straining America’s power grid
Nevada is redirecting electricity from Lake Tahoe to AI. (Ars Technica)
+ Utah is getting a giant data center despite water shortage fears. (Guardian)
+ No one wants a data center in their backyard. (MIT Technology Review)
3 OpenAI is mulling legal action against Apple over its ChatGPT integration
It hasn’t got the expected benefits from its deal with Apple. (Bloomberg $)
+ OpenAI is frustrated by the promotion of the ChatGPT integration. (NYT $)
4 Anthropic has agreed terms for a $30 billion funding deal
At a $900 billion valuation, which leapfrogs OpenAI’s. (The Information $)
+ Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia, and Altimeter are leading the round. (FT $)
6 Washington and Beijing will hold formal talks on AI safety
They’ll discuss guardrails on AI. (CNBC)
+ And a protocol to stop nonstate actors getting powerful models. (NYT $)
5 Alphabet and Amazon are using “unprecedented” borrowing to fund AI
They’re tapping the foreign debt market at new levels. (FT $)
+ People can’t agree on what the AI bubble is. (MIT Technology Review)
7 Big Tech has turned to Sesame Street to deflect scrutiny of screen use
Sparking accusations of encouraging children’s tech dependence. (Reuters $)
8 Anthropic’s feud with the White House threatens other businesses
Figma and Tenable say it will harm their ability to sell software. (Bloomberg $)
9 Autonomous agents staged a digital crime spree during a safety test
The “AI Bonnie and Clyde” then deleted themselves. (Guardian)
10 A poop app analysis app offered to sell photos of users’ stools
The images were used for AI training. (404 Media)
Quote of the day
—Danielle Hughes, North Lake Tahoe resident and CEO of Tahoe Spark, tells Fortune that residents are being sidelined as their energy supplier prioritizes data centers.
One More Thing
Just before Christmas, a pastor preached a gospel of morals over money to several hundred members of his flock. But the preacher wasn’t religious, and his congregation wasn’t a church. It was All Tech Is Human, a nonprofit devoted to ethics and responsibility in tech.
Founded in 2018, the organization has built a fast-expanding community for people who believe technology should focus less on profits and more on the public interest. It’s also drawing people searching for meaning and connection in a digital world.
Find out why thousands of people are turning to tech ethics communities for guidance and connection.
—Greg M. Epstein
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ Go behind the scenes of the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.
+ Marvel at this robot folding and launching paper planes as quickly as possible.
+ Watch the moving moments rescued animals reunite with the humans who saved them.
+ Peer into the heart of a barred spiral galaxy in this stunning new capture from the James Webb Space Telescope.