Thursday, May 21, 2026
US is ‘simply choosing not to stop’ Ebola outbreak after massive public health cuts, experts say
US is ‘simply choosing not to stop’ Ebola outbreak after massive public health cuts, experts say
“A new outbreak of the Bundibugyo variant of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has resulted in 482 suspected cases and 116 deaths. The US, which previously played a key role in global health efforts, has significantly reduced its funding and involvement, leaving the DRC and neighboring countries vulnerable. This withdrawal of support, coupled with the dismantling of USAID and the withdrawal from the WHO, has hindered outbreak detection and response efforts.
Hundreds of cases reported in the DRC after USAID has been dismantled and key scientific research canceled
A previously undetected outbreak of Ebola is coursing through parts of central Africa, and the US appears to be doing little to help stop it, after massive cuts to global and domestic public health efforts.
There is no cure and no vaccine for the rare Bundibugyo variant of Ebola, which has caused two outbreaks in recent decades. Health leaders and scientists are now racing to understand where the virus is spreading and attempting to stop it – but the US is notably absent in these efforts.
In the past year, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has been dismantled, thousands of staff at US health agencies were laid off, communications stalled and key scientific research canceled.
There are 482 suspected cases and about 116 deaths reported since April in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with two cases and one death in Uganda and potential spread to neighboring South Sudan. The outbreak “might have been going on for a few months”, said Kristian Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research.
The outbreak was immediately declared a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), before even convening the committee that usually makes that determination. Officials say it may last for months.
“The DRC is one of the most vulnerable health systems in the world, and was the second-biggest recipient of USAID funding,” said Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Center for Global Health Policy and Politics at Georgetown University. The US withdrawal of funding with “zero notice” has been “disruptive to the country’s basic activities”, he said.
US foreign assistance to the DRC dropped from $1.4bn in 2024 to $431m in 2025 and only $21m so far this year. Assistance to Uganda dropped from $674m to $377m in 2025 and a negative $1.2m so far in 2026.
“It was pennies compared to what you get in return,” Andersen said of global health investments. It is far cheaper and easier to prevent and contain outbreaks than it is to respond to them, he said. With the US cutting off the first option, the second scenario will become increasingly common.
The US also announced it would leave the WHO and end $130m in funding, which resulted in 2,371 lost jobs at the organization, Kavanagh said, calling the cuts a “self-inflicted wound that the administration has really brought on us”. This outbreak and response was “deeply foreseeable when you gut public health surveillance and you gut public health capacity”, Kavanagh added.
“It’s not just that we’re leaving the table, we are completely cutting ourselves out of the conversation,” Andersen said. “We are upending the table.”
The CDC has “always been the premier agency” when it comes to country-level leadership and played a key role as a partner “you could turn to”, Andersen said.
But under the second Trump administration, Ebola response teams were suspended, and health centers and medical supplies – particularly crucial with a virus spread through touch, with supportive care the only treatment – were dramatically cut back.
A world-class Ebola lab in Frederick, Maryland, with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was designed for exactly this scenario. The lab would normally be swinging into action, following up on research indicating monoclonal antibodiesand a vaccine might be effective against this strain, possibly testing those treatments and vaccines, performing in-depth sequencing work on the samples shared during the outbreak.
But that lab was shuttered last year, with staff laid off abruptly and their work – key for preventing and responding to outbreaks – ended with no notice. The website for the lab is still closed, indicating it has not been revived during this outbreak.
Satish Pillai, an incident manager for the CDC’s Ebola response, said he “can’t speak” to the NIH lab when the Guardian asked about it in a press conference on Monday. Instead, Pillai said that the US is able to test for Ebola through its laboratory network, a comment unrelated to the Guardian’s questions.
Because of layoffs, terminations and high-profile departures, key confirmed positions at US health agencies are vacant. Currently, the CDC has no director; there’s no US surgeon general; there’s no commissioner at the FDA.
Officials say there are now between 25 and 30 staff in the DRC country office. The CDC is sending one more person, Pillai said, and other experts are available remotely.
The DRC office suffered massive and sudden cuts when USAID was unexpectedly dissolved last year. Former employees sued the US government after they were abandoned and lost everything, with no jobs or options to evacuate from DRC, they said.
“When those USAID stop-work orders came out, there was a whole series of people who were actively looking for spillover in the DRC and in Uganda,” Kavanagh said. “There were hundreds of health workers doing surveillance activities, and then, of course, you had the bigger picture, which is the thousands of health workers who were doing HIV, TB, malaria, maternal and child health – all of these things funded through US funding from USAID and also some from CDC to be doing global health activities – who were the frontlines of detection.”
Patients don’t usually come to the clinic suspecting they have Ebola, he pointed out; they usually come in with a fever or other symptoms, and “those frontline community health workers … are always the ones that detect outbreaks early”.
That work ended abruptly and is now being replaced with country-by-country agreements, some of which appear to be predicated on resource-sharing agreements. The US government is “essentially holding hostage” the countries that have built health systems around US guidance, “and then from one day to the next you just cut it”, Andersen said.
In the past, the US had ensured that “many, many potential global outbreaks didn’t become global”, but now it’s stepping back, Kavanagh said, adding: “This outbreak should have been detected weeks ago, and exactly how and why will be figured out as we go, but it certainly says that the United States has stopped playing the role.”
Instead, the US is announcing travel bans for noncitizens who have recently traveled to the region, which is “public health theater” that essentially punishes the countries and doesn’t actually stop cases, Kavanagh said. The Africa CDC called for countries to refrain from “fear-driven” travel bans. “The fastest path to protecting all countries in the world is to aggressively support outbreak control at the source,” Dr Jean Kaseya, director general of the Africa CDC, said in a statement.
“At this point, this is an out-of-control epidemic that has now crossed borders, and this is really bad for the region, and will result in lots more deaths, and could be a real crisis,” Kavanagh said. Health leaders in the DRC are among the smartest, most experienced Ebola responders – but now they’re confronting an outbreak “with hundreds of millions of dollars cut from the global capacity to help them respond”.
Andersen noted “these countries are way more competent than we are in responding to something like Ebola” and that African scientists have done “remarkable” work already sequencing the virus, which demonstrates a new spillover event and could offer clues to where the outbreak originated.
“But that doesn’t mean that we should just completely cut ourselves out of the picture,” he said.
Outbreaks like these have economic, geopolitical and global stability implications, Kavanagh said. But they also matter because allowing anyone to die “needlessly of a disease that can be stopped is immoral, and we are living in a world where we don’t have to allow infectious diseases to spread unchecked”, he said. “Ebola can be stopped, and if we don’t mobilize the dollars and the public health efforts, then we are simply choosing not to stop the outbreak. Because it can be stopped. The question is, will it be? And when?”
Video shows ICE violently arresting Oregon farm workers and using facial recognition
Video shows ICE violently arresting Oregon farm workers and using facial recognition
“Newly released body-camera footage shows US immigration officers stopping a van of farm workers in Oregon, smashing their windows and using facial recognition software to try to identify one of them.
Videos from a 30 October 2025 operation were disclosed in court as part of an ongoing class-action lawsuit challenging Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) arrest tactics and racial profiling by agents. Lawyers for one of the detained farm workers shared the footage with the Guardian.
The officers did not have warrants to detain the workers, and a federal judge later said the arrests appeared to be unlawful and unjustified.
The footage shows an agent using his phone to capture the face of one of the detained workers, and agents later admitted in court that they used a facial recognition app during the operation. The case provides a window into ICE’s expanding use of this surveillance technology across the US, which has raised significant privacy and civil liberties concerns, particularly since the app can yield inaccurate results.
In the early morning on the day the footage was filmed, a team of ICE agents surveilled an apartment complex in Woodburn, a city south of Portland and home to many agricultural workers. An officer identified in court as JB later testified that the agents had chosen that location in part based on data surfaced from an ICE mobile app called Elite, which was built by the tech firm Palantir. The agent said the app helps officers find areas where they might find “targets” to potentially detain.
Agents decided to follow a white van leaving the apartment complex after running license plates and discovering the van’s owner was potentially an immigrant in the US without authorization, JB said. The officer said in court they did not confirm whether the driver of the van was, in fact, the vehicle’s owner, but that he felt it was suspicious the driver was making multiple stops for passengers: “You don’t know if it’s human trafficking or smuggling.”
Lawyers with Innovation Law Lab, an immigrant rights’ non-profit that filed the class-action and represented one of the farm workers, said the van was simply carpooling to a job site.
The body-cam video starts when officers pull over the van. It was around 5.30am and still dark out. Lawyers shared footage with the occupants’ faces blurred to protect their privacy.
“Bust it! Bust it!” one of the officers said, referring to the van’s windows. An officer then shouted commands in Spanish to open the window, but within seconds, shattered the van’s side window before occupants could comply.
A 45-year-old woman visible in the footage, identified as MJMA, is a farm worker and lead plaintiff in the lawsuit. The video captured her asserting her rights to remain silent, saying in Spanish, “We don’t have to answer,” and indicating she wanted a lawyer. She also instructed the others in the car not to speak as she called 911.
An officer identified in court as CM, whose body camera was recording the encounter, then said to another officer on scene: “She wants to lawyer up. She doesn’t want to identify herself, we’ll just take her.”
While MJMA was on the phone with 911 asking to speak to a Spanish-speaking dispatcher, an officer demanded she turn her phone off.
When the woman didn’t exit the car, CM said, “We gotta get them out. They’re on the phone, making … calls and stuff.”
He then grabbed MJMA and took her out of the car as she said in Spanish: “This can’t happen to us! They’re using force. No, no, no!” The officer then broke her phone, she later testified. The seven occupants of the car were then detained – six handcuffed and forced to sit on the pavement lined up against a wall, and an older woman detained on a bench.
“What a lovely bunch of people!” one of the officers shouted.
‘Inaccurate’ facial scans
As the farm workers sat along the wall, the video shows one agent pulling out his phone and holding it close to one man’s face, while another officer shone a bright flashlight on the man’s face. The agent held the phone up for about 12 seconds while the phone appeared to be scanning the man’s image.
Later in the video, one of the officers was heard saying: “Mobile Fortify couldn’t find him.”
Mobile Fortify is the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) facial recognition app, which officers use to scan the faces of individuals, cross-referencing it with various databases to try to identify them.
Officer: Mobile Fortify couldn’t find him.
DR, an agent involved in the Woodburn arrests, was asked about the app in court and acknowledged he didn’t know what databases it used and didn’t know the rate of accuracy, saying: “I’m not certain on the technical aspects.”
A female agent on the scene, identified as MK, testified that she did a “facial recognition mobile query” on MJMA, which led to a match with a “very … similar person”. The agent, however, said: “I wasn’t sure if it was her or not.” The match was a woman named Maria, the agent said. The agents then started saying the name, “Maria” to see if MJMA might respond, but she didn’t, the agent testified.
The woman’s name is not Maria.
The agent did another facial scan of MJMA and it came up with a different match, according to MK’s testimony. But MJMA continued to stay silent.
The agent testified that she believed MJMA “was in the country illegally” because she was only speaking Spanish and due to the “possible match” from facial recognition. Her scanning of MJMA was not caught on the body-cam footage.
During cross-examination, CM, the only agent who recorded body-cam footage, acknowledged he did not know the identity of any passengers when the officers stopped the van. The agent JB also revealed in court that his team was given a verbal order to target eight arrests per day, providing rare insight into DHS arrest quotas.
Four of the people detained from the van were later deported, according to a DHS spokesperson.
Nelly Garcia Orjuela, Innovation Law Lab staff attorney, said MJMA had an ongoing asylum case.
US judge Mustafa Kasubhai ruled against ICE in February in the class-action suit led by MJMA. He said officers had engaged in “misconduct” in Oregon and issued a preliminary decision broadly restricting agents in the state from arresting people without warrants.
Kasubhai noted that officers had made inaccurate statements in their reports about the Woodburn encounter, including falsely saying MJMA had entered the US unlawfully when she had arrived with a valid temporary visa. He said the claims of possible “smuggling” were “unfounded”, and noted that ICE’s reports inaccurately called the stop “consensual”.
The judge was also critical of the officers’ use of the facial recognition technology, saying it relied on data that “can be inaccurate and produce individuals who are here in accordance with immigration laws”.
The judge further said that in the Woodburn stop, officers “did not provide any meaningfully reasonable time for the driver to comply with his commands before shattering the driver side window”.
DHS did not respond to questions about the officers’ use of facial recognition during the arrests, but a spokesperson said in a statement that Mobile Fortify was a “lawful law-enforcement tool developed under the Trump administration to support accurate identity and immigration-status verification during enforcement operations”.
The app queries “limited” immigration datasets from Customs and Border Protection and “operates with a deliberately high matching threshold”, the spokesperson said. The app is used “in accordance with all applicable legal authorities”, the statement added. The Elite app, the spokesperson said, “centralizes information” from multiple federal agencies, allowing officers in the field to check individuals’ immigration status and criminal records.
The DHS spokesperson further defended ICE’s practice of arresting people without warrants, saying “officers use ‘reasonable suspicion’ to investigate immigration status and probable cause to make arrests” and that it had the support of the US supreme court. The statement said the seven people detained in Woodburn were undocumented and three of the workers who were deported had “accepted voluntary departure”. Those removed, the statement said, “received full due process”.
The Department of Justice did not respond to inquiries about the case.
Garcia Orjuela said the videos showed the brutality of ICE’s arrest strategies, with agents immediately smashing windows and bypassing people’s fundamental legal protections. “MJMA asserted her right to remain silent and was advising the other passengers in the car. The officers didn’t like that. It makes them do their job.” She added: “You have to know who you’re targeting before you arrest somebody. That is how due process works.”
Stephen Manning, Innovation Law Lab’s executive director, said the footage illustrated ICE’s “arrest first, justify later” tactics and praised MJMA for calmly defending her rights: “She knew the law better than the agents. She asked them to follow the law, and they actually violated the law [in response]. This never should have happened.”
Maanvi Singh contributed reporting“
Wednesday, May 20, 2026
Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, Really, We All Lost
Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, Really, We All Lost
“The cases of Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried at least offered a pleasant sense of comeuppance. But in Musk v. Altman, to root against Tweedledum was effectively to root for Tweedledee.
Illustration by Joan Wong; Source photographs from Getty
A famous logic puzzle takes place on a mythical island divided between the knights, who never lie, and the knaves, who always do. A foreign traveller encounters a fork in the road: one way guarantees safe passage, the other certain death. A member of each tribe is present, though it isn’t clear which is which, and the traveller is granted only one question. The solution is well known: ask either of them what the other would advise, and then to choose the opposite path. (An accurate account of a lie and an inaccurate account of the truth amount to the same wrong answer.) But this works only if someone is honest. What if nobody can be trusted? The Cretan philosopher Epimenides inspired an alternative scenario set on his own island, when he supposedly said that “all Cretans are liars.” Logicians call unstable statements like these “self-referential paradoxes,” or utterances that undermine their own claims. Epimenides would presumably have felt at home at trial of Musk v. Altman, which over the past few weeks turned an Oakland courtroom into an island of lying cretins.
In theory, the trial was about the good-faith control of artificial intelligence. In 2015, Elon Musk and Sam Altman founded OpenAI together as a nonprofit. Its mission—“to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity”—was explicitly intended to counter Google’s potential dominance of the technology, which seemed almost foreordained at the time. Musk pledged up to a billion dollars to prevent that outcome. It didn’t take long for the two men to disagree over the chain of command. Each thought he alone deserved to run the show. About two years and thirty-eight million dollars later, Musk took his remaining nine hundred and sixty-odd million dollars and went home. In his valedictory e-mail, he wrote, “My probability assessment of OpenAI being relevant to DeepMind/Google without a dramatic change in execution and resources is 0%. Not 1%. I wish it were otherwise.” OpenAI needed another source of largesse. With investors in mind, it opened a for-profit subsidiary and secured billions of dollars from Microsoft and others. This past October, the company completed a lengthy process of restructuring and recapitalization. Today, the subsidiary is worth something close to a trillion dollars.
Musk’s lawsuit alleged that Altman, along with other OpenAI executives and in collusion with Microsoft, “stole a charity.” He believes that they solicited his generosity on false pretenses, exploiting the cover of a humanitarian cause to build one of the world’s most valuable companies, and, in the process, enriching themselves beyond measure. The remedies he sought include the unwinding of OpenAI’s transformation into a for-profit company, the disgorgement of a hundred and fifty billion dollars in damages to be paid to the original nonprofit, and the final exile of Altman from the organization. It would effectively destroy the venture as such. The suit was an act of vengeance, and its primary function seemed to be to make everyone involved look heinous.
At the very least, it promised to be entertaining. During jury selection, one prospective juror assessed Musk to be “a greedy, racist, homophobic piece of garbage,” while a more restrained prospect deemed him only “a world-class jerk.” Musk’s lawyers argued that such sentiments were blatantly prejudicial. Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, the district-court judge and one of the few trial participants who managed to acquit herself honorably, told them to suck it up. “The reality is that people don’t like him,” she said. “Many people don’t like him—but that doesn’t mean that Americans nevertheless can’t have integrity for the judicial process.” In the first week of testimony, Musk took the stand and couldn’t help but get tetchy. He seemed to have the impression that he alone understood the finer points of trial law. The Verge reporter Elizabeth Lopatto, who seemed to be live-blogging her own disgorgement (not of money but of bile), wrote, “I have never been more sympathetic to Sam Altman in my life.”
Musk’s attorneys hoped that the second week—which rehashed an imbroglio from around Thanksgiving 2023, when the OpenAI board fired Altman only for Altman to return and fire almost the entire board—would mitigate Altman’s contrasting appeal. These allegations, for anyone unfortunate enough to have paid close attention, had long been rehearsed to death, and the iterative incantation of now-canonical lines from e-mails and text had the quality of operatic leitmotif: Altman had been removed, we heard again and again, for having been “not consistently candid in his communications.” The few novel revelations made him look less like a mastermind than kind of a loser. The existence of the lawsuit was almost redeemed by the release of a text thread between Altman, who was conferring with the Microsoft C.E.O., Satya Nadella, and Mira Murati, who briefly replaced Altman as chief executive. Altman plays the role of the clueless boyfriend who can’t accept that his partner is leaving him:
ALTMAN: can you indicate directionally good or bad? satya and others anxious
MURATI: Directionally very bad
“Directionally” is Silicon Valley jargon for “generally.” But Altman still doesn’t get it:
ALTMAN: can you wrap up soon? lots of pressure from msft for an update
MURATI: Sam this is very bad
MURATI: They don’t want you to
Most of the regular courtroom observers eventually gave themselves over to listlessness. Wired ran a story about the butt pillows used by OpenAI’s phalanx of lawyers and executives, including the president and co-defendant, Greg Brockman, to insulate themselves from the discomfort of the court’s benches. On a Tuesday morning of the third and final week of trial arguments, in the vacant hours of predawn Oakland, I arrived at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building to find a half-dozen journalists and interested civilians in the disorderly semblance of a self-organized queue. (One woman, who had severe bangs and a medieval-looking corona of braids, reminded Lopatto, the quick-witted Vergereporter, of a “stern German nanny”; she declined to provide her name or purpose and refused to recognize the authority of the line.) The general topic of desultory conversation was not the dispiriting trial of the present but the livelier intrigue of courtroom tech-dramas past—of Elizabeth Holmes, which inspired particular nostalgia, or Sam Bankman-Fried. Neither of those performances featured anybody to pull for, exactly, but at least they held out the pleasurable promise of comeuppance.
Had Musk v. Altman merely been a petulant matter of injured vanity, it might have played as a diverting farce. It was instead a travesty. The underlying issues—of how A.I. ought to be governed, and by whom, and how—are of great consequence. But in this trial, to root against Tweedledum was effectively to root for Tweedledee. It was a no-win situation.
The butt pillow might have begun as a symbol of the trial’s frivolity, but it was clear soon enough that it was also a powerful metaphor for the collective failures that got us here. It was difficult, sitting in the unyielding pews, not to feel personally implicated. These were the leaders our society had somehow been assigned. Mike Isaac, a veteran tech reporter for the Times, wasn’t ashamed to admit that Brockman had inspired him to secure his own butt pillow. Isaac, a magnanimous man who looks like the actor Wilford Brimley styled as a member of the hardcore band Minor Threat, offered to share the cushion, but it struck me as somehow more appropriate to sit in the docks as a penitent. The courtroom filled up quickly in anticipation of Sam Altman, who was set to appear on the stand that day under oath. The OpenAI C.E.O. has long been known for his boyishness, but the past few years have coarsened his features and frosted his spiky hair with gray tips. He looked like a lesser vocalist for ’N Sync on a reunion tour. His presence in the courtroom had the mournful air of someone who no longer qualified as precocious.
The basic question of the case, which is also the basic question of Altman’s career, is whether the transmogrification of OpenAI from a safety-minded nonprofit into a ravenous corporate behemoth was cynical in intention or merely in outcome. Recently, my New Yorker colleague Andrew Marantz appeared on a podcast to discuss the alternative ways to model his behavior: the “always-a-master-plan, 3-D-chess view” and the “improvisatory-checkers-all-along view.” There was a clever bit of trollery in Altman’s decision to hire as lead counsel the lawyer William Savitt, who had earlier forced Musk to follow through on his impulse to buy Twitter. Over hours of direct questioning, Savitt elicited from his brow-furrowed client a defense narrative that combined the most flattering elements of each version of the story. The part of the scheme that involved the creation of what he praised as “one of the largest charities in the world”—the nonprofit parent, by virtue of its equity stake in the for-profit subsidiary, has assets valued at more than two hundred billion dollars—was the result of what Altman repeatedly called “hard work” or “incredible work.” But the part of the scheme that involved the creation of one of the largest and most powerful for-profit companies in the world was extemporaneous—the by-product of having been “open to creative structures.” Altman said, “So this sounds a little silly to say now, but at the time, we almost didn’t start this effort because we thought Google was so far ahead that it might be hopeless to compete.”
The decision to stand up a profit-making entity was a matter of facts on the ground: the future of humanity required that OpenAI prevail in an existential battle against Google; this battle could not be fought without access to enormous pools of capital; it was impossible to court investors without the promise of returns. On these three points, everyone involved was in agreement: a dinky donor-funded charity would be taking an abacus to a data-center fight. It was acknowledged only in passing that the introduction of a fiduciary motive might create perverse incentives, and even then the worry was primarily about optics. As one of Musk’s consiglieri wrote in an e-mail, “I’m a super fan of capitalism and making tons of money doing great things, but not sure if this correlates with the ‘noble cause for humanity, not doing it to make money’ narrative.” What divided Musk and his lieutenants, on one side, from Altman, Brockman, and the OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, on the other, was the unresolved issue of which special man got to wear the pants. In September, 2017, Musk e-mailed Sutskever and Brockman to describe a scenario in which he “would unequivocally have initial control of the company.” He insisted that he had no interest in retaining unilateral power over the destiny of the species. At some unspecified time, he continued, the authority vested in him, by him, would devolve upon an expanded board: “The rough target would be to get to a 12 person board (probably more like 16 if this board really ends up deciding the fate of the world).”
This organizational structure might have struck a reasonable person as a trifle undemocratic, all things considered, but what was readily clear from the trial was that Musk and Altman agreed that A.I. governance was much too serious to be left in the hands of non-player characters such as the nine assembled jurors. Altman, at times, spoke to them like children: Microsoft built them a “big computer,” but they needed “more capital to keep building larger computers.” (The ongoing effect was like the scene in “Airplane!” where Julie Hagerty’s stewardess character, upon hearing that a passenger needs to go to the hospital, asks, “A hospital? What is it?” and Leslie Nielsen’s character treats her like ditz: “It’s a big building with patients, but that’s not important right now.”) In his defense, it seemed as though the main lesson he’d gleaned from his dealings with Musk is that many grownups are best treated as toddlers. Altman testified that Shivon Zilis, a Musk confidant, onetime OpenAI board member, and the mother of some of Musk’s many children, had “counselled me over the years when dealing with Elon to remind him of things that happened in the past, because he was often upset.” The chief prerequisite for Musk’s employment seemed to be a talent for tantrum avoidance.
But Musk deserved such condescension, and the jurors did not. With the exception of Microsoft’s C.T.O., Kevin Scott, a Silicon Valley engineer of the classic “Whole Earth Catalog” variety, not a single witness seemed to regard the jurors as the sorts of people with brains. David Schizer, the former dean of Columbia Law School, provided expert testimony at a rate of fifteen hundred dollars an hour—for a total he ballparked as somewhere north of three hundred grand—to describe the relationship between the OpenAI nonprofit and its subsidiary as that of a museum to its gift shop. The implication (in a trial of freely mixed metaphors) was that the profit-seeking tail of the shop had come to wag the patrimony-preserving dog of the museum. In response, the defense produced Daniel Hemel, a law professor at N.Y.U., who was paid seventeen hundred and fifty dollars an hour to argue that the gift-shop analogy was all wrong. It would be more accurate, he said, to compare the OpenAI corporation to the Newman’s Own brand, which directed its profits to support a philanthropic network of summer camps. The dog of outdoor adventures for seriously ill children was not, in other words, being wagged by the tail of the popular salad-dressing company.
The testimony consistently deployed a cavalier attitude about money. Bret Taylor, the chair of the OpenAI board, responded to an inquiry about his director’s compensation by saying, “I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know, but on the order of two hundred thousand dollars.” OpenAI’s chief futurist, a researcher named Joshua Achiam, wasn’t quite sure if he’d sold some of his equity last fall for more than twenty million dollars or less. These witnesses seemed to be hoping that the treatment of their financial windfalls as an afterthought would make them appear committed to elevated principles, but the net effect was to remind the jurors and the public that these sums represented little more than couch-cushion change to them. The winner of the expert-witness sweepstakes was the U.C. Berkeley computer-science professor Stuart Russell, the co-author of the canonical A.I. textbook and an outspoken proponent of A.I. safety. Musk’s attorneys brought him on to argue that OpenAI had played fast and loose with the technology, but Judge Gonzalez Rogers ruled that talk of existential risk was off-limits. (Musk’s lead attorney, Steven Molo, argued, “We all could die! We all could die as a result of artificial intelligence!” The judge observed that Musk might’ve endorsed this argument more sincerely if he hadn’t funded xAI as a competitor.) Russell struggled to find something relevant to say. To prep for his unused time, he was paid for a full forty-hour workweek at a rate of five thousand dollars an hour.
The acknowledgment of A.I.’s risk—existential threat or otherwise—was present only outside the courthouse, courtesy of a small cohort of the kinds of genteel retirees one might see a half-dozen miles north, in the Berkeley precincts of the worker-owned Cheese Board or Chez Panisse. One protester, with his face obscured by a ghoulish, oversized cartoon Musk mask, wore a Cybertruck suit made of corrugated cardboard with “Swastitruck” scrawled in runic letters. He brandished a quart-size ziplock bag labelled “Ketamine.” Three women danced around him, singing a capella about Musk and Altman’s shared depravity to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Altman didn’t exactly come off well, though he did get in some dryly amusing lines about having to endure Musk’s desire to show everyone memes on his phone. It didn’t really matter insofar as the evidence against Musk was challenging to refute. As document after document showed, Musk was well aware of the various plans under way to outfit their “summer-camp charity” with a substantial arm dedicated to the wanton sale of salad dressing. Musk had no problem going forward with a for-profit structure; his preference was to fold it into Tesla. (Altman testified that he’d looked askance at this plan: “Tesla is a car company.”) Even if Altman and others had in fact stolen his charitable valor, it was plain that his complaint did not fall within the three-year statute of limitations. But neither Musk nor his lawyers seemed to have embarked upon this case with the goal of juridical victory. It instead provided them with an opportunity to cast Altman, in advance of OpenAI’s expected I.P.O., as an untrustworthy guy. Molo, Musk’s attorney, is a stooped, pallid, funereal man with enormous hands, and he carried out his cross-examination with the solemnity of an undertaker. The first few minutes were supposed to be, I’m sure, a tour de force:
MOLO: Are you completely trustworthy?
MOLO: But you don’t know whether you’re completely trustworthy?
ALTMAN: I’ll just amend my answer to yes.
MOLO: Should the jury believe your testimony?
ALTMAN: I think that’s up to them, but I believe so.
MOLO: You believe so, or they should?
ALTMAN: Sir, I’m not gonna tell the jury what to think.
MOLO: Do you always tell the truth?
ALTMAN: I believe I’m a truthful person.
MOLO: That wasn’t my question, sir. Do you always tell the truth?
ALTMAN: I’m sure there is some time in my life when I have not.
Molo went on to recite previous testimony from various former employees or board members, who offered that Altman had dissembled about OpenAI’s safety protocols and created a “toxic culture of lying.” Altman suggested that he hadn’t heard their comments. Did Altman know that Dario Amodei, who worked alongside Altman at OpenAI before he left to found its rival Anthropic, had accused him of “misrepresenting the terms” of the initial Microsoft investment? Altman, who unlike Musk has a recognizable sense of humor, remarked, “Dario has accused me of many things.” At one point, perhaps ten minutes into this droning line of questioning, Molo asked Altman if he’d actually read the lawsuit. “Many versions, sir,” Altman said. The dubiousness of Altman’s character is of paramount importance to the world in general, but it seems the case—at least directionally—that it has, by this time, been priced into his reputation. To relitigate the matter on behalf of Musk only served to underline the conviction that all of these jerks deserved one another.
Besides, the cumulative effect of Molo’s sustained effort to demand Altman’s self-incrimination seemed to remind the courtroom that most of us, irrespective of our own faults, tend to think of ourselves as credible people doing our best. This, of course, is the real problem. Musk attempted to color Altman as a uniquely unsuitable supervisor of this technology, but this invariably invited further scrutiny into his own abject unfitness for the role. The only proper response to any of this is to point out that something as flimsy and corruptible as individual character was always going to be an insufficient basis for A.I. governance.
To claim that OpenAI’s mission of cultivating beneficial A.I. was compromised by Sam Altman is to let the entire industry off the hook. Yes, Altman seems to have a rather casual relationship with the truth. But it is far more interesting, complicated, and useful to take his self-defense at face value—to interpret the many sins of OpenAI, and its competitors, as the result of a good-faith exercise in futility. What if we imagined that he did in fact set out to do good? And discovered—or, perhaps better, failed to discover—along the way that this was structurally impossible? There are signs that some part of him anticipated his enterprise’s destiny from the beginning. In the earliest correspondence about what would become OpenAI, Altman seemed vaguely aware that the collective-action problem of A.I. governance had nothing to do with individual heroism. In 2015, he e-mailed Musk to say that the development of advanced A.I. was virtually an inevitability. He wrote that “if it’s going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first.” What he had in mind, he continued, was not exactly a rival outfit. It was, instead, something like a “Manhattan Project for A.I.” Perhaps the most salient thing about the Manhattan Project, however, was that it was not entrusted to the private sector. To launch such a transformational and dangerous program as a commercial initiative was reckless and hubristic; a “Manhattan Project run by a wealthy cabal” was as much a self-referential paradox as “all Cretans are liars.”
On Monday, the jury took only two hours to reach its verdict. Musk’s complaint, the panel found, had indeed exceeded the statute of limitations. If Musk had really thought that his beloved charity had been stolen, it would have occurred to him to raise the issue long before OpenAI had become what it is today. If he hadn’t cared before the launch of ChatGPT, he had no right to pretend to care now.
In a better world, Altman might emerge from this humiliating rite with some genuine humility. This is almost certainly too much to expect. Still, his courtiers seemed to be encouraging him to lean into sheepishness. On the last morning of testimony, Mike Isaac, of the Times, tweeted an image of his sad excuse for a courthouse lunch: a meat-based protein bar, Bumble Bee-brand Snack on the Run! Tuna Salad & Crackers, and vessels of sugary caffeine. After the morning break, Isaac sat down next to me on his butt pillow and tweeted a follow-up: “a good samaritan who took pity on me (and whose identity i will protect) came and gave me a bagel and cream cheese.” I’d been standing nearby when Altman made the offering of the paper-plated bagel. Looking like a chastened little boy, he said, softly, “My comms team told me to give you this.” ♦
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