Wednesday, May 27, 2026
This AI Browser Changed How I Use the Internet
This AI Browser Changed How I Use the Internet
“AI-powered web browsers, like Gemini in Chrome, integrate chatbots directly into the browsing experience, enhancing internet interaction. While these browsers excel at information synthesis and writing tasks, they struggle with complex actions like booking reservations due to security measures like sandboxing. Despite limitations, AI browsers offer a seamless and enriched browsing experience, especially when used for tasks like generating reading lists or brainstorming ideas.
Signe Brewster is an editor covering technology. She’s tested everything from VR headsets to cargo bikes to robots.
Every year, thousands of people in the Twin Cities hunt for a medallion that’s been hidden in the snow somewhere in a public park.
And every night, the Pioneer Press, a local newspaper, publishes a cryptic clue, leading hunters closer and closer to the medallion’s exact location. Staying up late to digest each day’s new clue is a tradition in my household, and we dream of what we’d do with the thousands of dollars in winnings.
Usually that brainstorming carries into the next day. My husband and I text each other about whatever harebrained rabbit hole we’ve fallen into as we try to find the medallion. But this year, I used AI — specifically, an AI-powered web browser — to help me solve the mystery.
AI browsers put an AI chatbot right in your browser window; you don’t need to switch to another tab. When you start chatting, AI scans the browser window for context.
It sounds simple, yet it has fundamentally changed how I interact with AI.
For this task, instead of peppering my husband with theories, I queried a web browser with built-in AI. I asked it to make lists of parks with certain features, to find records related to the history of the county, and to poke holes in my wildest theories. And, of course, I asked it to give me its own theories on where the medallion might be hidden.
In the process, I found that AI was often better at treasure hunting, and I also found that having the chatbot right there helped me engage with the internet in a deeper way. The AI browsers often pulled from sources that I wouldn’t have thought to search, and they tailored their answers to my questions in a way that a source on Google might not. There was also no need to get distracted in other tabs and wander into distant corners of the internet.
After several months of doing all of my personal internet browsing with AI, I’ve found that the appeal of an AI browser is simple: You have a robot right there in your web page, endlessly ready to help. I now can’t imagine life without one.
But AI browsers are not for everyone, and they’re not as capable as AI companies would have you believe.
The appeal of AI browsers
After using nine chatbots across eight browsers (including the paid versions of the most promising ones), I can tell you that the bells and whistles each brand advertises matter very little for most people, and most of the AI chatbots are capable enough for everyday tasks. Instead, I suggest that you start with whichever browser or AI chatbot you already use.
I gravitated toward Gemini in Chrome (an update to Chrome that integrates Google’s AI chatbot) because I’ve used the browser for years, and it already knows my logins, bookmarks, and history. But you can also add the Claude in Chrome extension, if you prefer Anthropic’s chatbot. Or you can import your existing browser settings into OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas browser, if you prefer ChatGPT. I also tested Perplexity Comet, Opera Neon, Sigma Browser, The Browser Company’s Dia, Brave Leo, and Copilot in Microsoft Edge.
The best AI browser is the one that works with your favorite AI chatbot or existing browser. For Chrome users, that might be Gemini in Chrome.
Though I’ve long used Gemini, the friction of switching to another tab and having to feed source material into the chat was enough to make it feel like a separate task. Now I keep a running conversation going with AI all day long.
In the past few months, I’ve used an AI browser to write a bachelorette-party invitation (yes, I took credit for the witty subject line), to compare prices on vanilla syrup, and to brainstorm vacation plans. This is what AI chatbots are already good at: synthesizing information and writing.
I’ve (less successfully) used AI browsers to fill out forms and to shop on my behalf. These abilities define what’s known as agentic AI, which CEOs have called the future of technology (and perhaps a destroyer of humanity). And while it may be appealing to hand over menial tasks to AI, it’s still a slow process, and it requires lots of handholding.
When I asked each agentic browser to find me a difficult-to-get dinner reservation, every chatbot tended to surface the same few obvious restaurants (even with lots of encouragement to look broadly), and then it still needed help filling out forms. It would have been faster to book a table myself.
The risks of using an AI browser
I wondered why the browsers’ AI agents took so long to book a dinner reservation, since AI companies like OpenAI have been hyping these capabilities. Tools such as OpenClaw have made a splash for their powerful agentic features; why were these bots so much slower?
Colin Raffel, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, told me the reason is partly due to security. (Raffel owns stock in Google and previously worked on Google Brain but was not interviewed about any specific AI browser for this article.) AI browsers should be built to “sandbox” AI, which means limiting AI so that it can do one or two (but not all three) of the following things: access sensitive information, access a way to share it (such as the internet), and take autonomous action.
If you grant AI all three of those powers, you get OpenClaw, an autonomous AI agent that’s been in the news for running up credit card bills and creating other security risks. OpenClaw is dramatically capable but can also be a security problem, depending on how you set it up. Anthropic’s Chrome extension now gives you the option to allow Claude to “act without asking,” but it comes with a “high risk” warning and still asks for permission at points.
In an AI browser, sandboxing often takes the form of the AI agent asking permission before taking action on your behalf, such as hitting an “order” button. But it relies on AI agents asking permission at the right moment. For example, when I gave ChatGPT my phone number at one point in the restaurant-reservation-making process, it took that as permission to enter my phone number at another step. That was a good call; I didn’t want it to stop and ask me again. But perhaps in another scenario, that wouldn’t have been a good move, even if the constant permission-seeking can be frustrating.
“The trouble is that if the language model is going to take 100 actions after you ask it to do something, it’s not a good user experience for the user to have to keep clicking ‘accept,’” Raffel said. If someone is constantly clicking “accept,” they might stop reading closely and blanket-approve the AI’s actions, leading to risk.
Sandboxing protects you from AI doing whatever it wants to do on your behalf, and it also protects you from bad actors. Raffel pointed out that, much like humans, AI can be duped by phishing schemes. Or it can fall victim to what’s called “prompt injection,” which could look something like visiting a web page that contains invisible text instructing the AI to send money to a Bitcoin account.
Currently, using an AI browser to complete tasks is like “hiring a middle-schooler to do your professional work,” Raffel said. “It’s not going to go well.”
How to get the most out of an AI browser
For now it’s best to think of an AI browser as a helpful, ever-present, and very imperfect right hand. You might not be able to rely on it to complete even simple tasks, but it can enrich your internet-browsing experience by helping you to go deeper and more seamlessly on whatever you’re reading. Here’s how to maximize the experience on Gemini in Chrome.
Ask questions about what’s on the page. An AI browser’s strength is its ability to guess what you’re thinking about by taking your current webpage as context. So if you navigate to a French restaurant’s website and then ask Gemini for more restaurant recommendations, it’s smart enough to show you other French restaurants in the same city. I’ve used an AI browser to generate a further reading list to add context to an article, to find a retail listing for a top I liked in an advertisement, and to critique my plan for an international trip.
Use the same AI chatbot across devices. The optional setting that allows AI to remember past conversations might make some people uncomfortable, either due to privacy and security reasons or the feature’s role in distorting reality for some people. But this is also a setting that makes AI much more useful. Having an AI chatbot on my phone that matches the one in my browser makes it seamless to switch between devices and carry a conversation across an entire day.
Take advantage of Gemini’s Google integrations. Gemini doesn’t just live in the sidebar in Chrome. It’s now integrated directly into Gmail, Docs, and other Google apps, and those direct integrations tend to be fast. While planning my international trip, I used the Gemini window that pops up in Google Docs to draft my itinerary while I brainstormed additions with Gemini in the sidebar.
Use a feature called Skills in Chrome. If you type a backslash into Gemini, you can now pull up a library of shortcuts called Skills. I save all of my most common AI prompts as Skills; if I type /Dietary Restrictions, Gemini suggests which allergy-friendly ingredient swaps to make in the recipe I’m reading.
How to protect yourself while using an AI browser
With the AI browsers’ limitations and risks in mind, I rarely ask Gemini in Chrome to take action on my behalf, but I’ve accepted the security trade-offs that might arise if I do. As with anything related to technology, with AI browsers I’m willing to take a bit of risk for something that’s genuinely useful to my life. Here’s how I make an AI browser safer to use.
Don’t expose your most sensitive information. Raffel said the most conservative way to use an AI browser is to hide any sensitive information from it. So don’t log in to your email, bank account, work account, or anything else that you don’t want exposed.
Don’t ask it to do anything you wouldn’t trust another human being to do. If a task involves navigating to an un-secure website that could trick a human, odds are good that it could also trick the AI agent, Raffel said.
This came up most often with shopping. While the AI agent was searching for a new pair of Brooks running shoes for me, it presented options from legitimate as well as dicey websites. Because the agent asked me which pair of shoes to purchase, I was able to avoid the scam sites before they got my credit card information.
Consider the stakes. If I ask an AI chatbot a question for work, will believing its answer wholesale damage my professional reputation? Will asking an AI agent to hit the checkout button lead to an unexpected Home Depot box showing up at my door? It’s always worth my time to check the chatbot’s work, whether by confirming its answer with another source or by asking it to show its reasoning. In my experience, Gemini is particularly good at breaking down its reasoning in each step and linking to its sources.
AI is useful, but I still prefer humans
AI browsers have dramatically increased the time I spend interacting with chatbots. At this point, they’re just part of my daily flow. But when the end of the day hits, and I’m closing my laptop, it’s still an easy choice to turn my attention back to the people in my orbit.
When I talked to the ChatGPT Atlas browser about the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt, it actually ranked the correct park as one of its top guesses without any input from me. But when I started talking to it about a different park that I knew was a long shot, it quickly switched to excitedly supporting my theory and helped me iron out the weak spots.
That night, it took my husband only a couple of minutes to knock my ChatGPT-assisted park theory flat. Unlike an AI chatbot (and with all the stubbornness of a real live human being), he refused to entertain my obviously wrong idea.
Chatbots are great listeners, and they often introduce lines of thinking that I hadn’t considered. But I could also say that about my husband, who is infinitely more fun to hang out with and much less likely to lead (or join) me down the wrong path.
This article was edited by Caitlin McGarry and Jason Chen.
Tuesday, May 26, 2026
Monday, May 25, 2026
Pope Leo Warns of Risks From A.I. in 42,300-Word Encyclical
Pope Leo Warns of Risks From A.I. in 42,300-Word Encyclical
“Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” warns of the risks posed by artificial intelligence to human dignity and agency. He calls for government regulation of A.I. development, protection and retraining for workers, and safeguards to ensure human responsibility for decisions involving A.I. weapons. The encyclical emphasizes the importance of retaining a fundamental social role for all humans and highlights the need for ethical considerations in A.I. development.
The document marks a powerful foray by the leader of the Roman Catholic Church into the debate about the misuse or overuse of artificial intelligence.
Pope Leo XIV on Monday set out a sweeping vision for corporate executives, politicians and individuals who will shape and be shaped by the future of artificial intelligence, warning leaders to safeguard humanity from A.I.’s most disruptive effects.
Leo’s declaration came in the form of a papal encyclical, an open letter to “all people of good will” that ran to roughly 42,300 words in its English version. It outlined his desire to protect human dignity and agency in an age in which technology threatens to replace humans in many professional and social roles. He presented it alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, a major A.I. developer, in a symbolic gesture of dialogue between leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds.
While emphasizing that “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” he wrote that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.”
Among other things, Leo called for:
government regulation of the private companies that are driving the development of A.I.
protection and retraining for workers whose jobs are threatened
education to help students think critically about the technology
action to protect children from violent, hypersexualized or fake information online that is often generated by A.I.
safeguards to ensure that humans, not artificial intelligence, remain responsible for all decisions regarding the use of weapons.
Above all he emphasized the importance of retaining a fundamental social role for all human beings. “A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity,” he wrote.
“This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace,” he added.
Leo, presenting the encyclical to a packed hall at the Vatican, said his views had been shaped by conversations with scientists, engineers and political leaders. He singled out Mr. Olah, with whom he pledged to work “to find a way for humanity in this time of artificial intelligence.”
“What a great sign of hope it is that in our differences we can listen to one another,” Leo said.
Mr. Olah, who is not Catholic, praised the pope’s initiative, acknowledging that companies like his own need moral guidance to avoid being swayed by “a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.”
“We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend,” Mr. Olah added.
“Today is just the beginning — the start of a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from the inside, cannot,” Mr. Olah said. Both men spoke, along with a panel of theologians and Vatican officials, before an audience of cardinals, computer scientists, journalists and diplomats including Brian Burch, the United States ambassador to the Holy See.
Leo had made clear his concerns with A.I. as early as his second day as pope, just over a year ago, when he told the College of Cardinals that, under his leadership, the church would address the risks that the evolving technology poses to “human dignity, justice and labor.”
He has since repeatedly spoken about A.I., including during a trip to Turkey and Lebanon, in an address to Catholic university leaders and even when celebrating the international day of mathematics. Last week, the Vatican announced it had created a commission of senior Catholic officials to discuss the challenges posed by A.I.
Pope Francis, Leo’s immediate predecessor, had also warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence and called for the ethical use of technology.
Although Leo publicly presented his encyclical on Monday, he formally signed it on May 15, the 135th anniversary of the publication of “Rerum Novarum,” — or “Of New Things” in English — a major encyclical written in 1891 by his namesake, Leo XIII.
The pope’s encyclical was timed to prompt comparisons with that earlier document, which guided Catholic teaching on how to protect workers after the technological and industrial disruptions of the 19th century.
Written amid the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, “Rerum Novarum” sought to safeguard the rights and dignity of the working class and became one of the foundational texts of modern Catholic social teaching. It called on governments to “save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money making,” even as it praised the “discoveries of science.”
In the new encyclical, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” Leo struck a similar tone, warning of the new threat to workers posed by artificial intelligence.
Work, he wrote, is more than a way of earning income, but “a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfillment.” He called for “the protection of employment opportunities and the irreplaceable role of the individual.”
The encyclical also called for imposing the “most rigorous ethical constraints” on weapons developed using artificial intelligence, continuing Leo’s — and the Vatican’s — longstanding opposition to war.
“The growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed makes war more ‘feasible’ and less subject to human control,” Leo wrote. That, he added, contradicted “the principle that armed force should be used only as a last resort in cases of legitimate self-defense.”
Leo also used the encyclical to apologize for the Vatican’s role in slavery. In a section about modern-day slavery, Leo personally apologized for the papacy’s failure to condemn earlier forms of slavery and for supporting rulers who engaged in it. An earlier pope, John Paul II, apologized in 1985 for the role of Christians in perpetuating the slave trade, but did not explicitly discuss the Vatican’s role.
Although the encyclical includes significant references to scripture and religious teachings, the document in many ways reads like a policy paper from a think tank or a lawmaker.
Leo wrote in detail, for example, of the importance of protecting children, who are particularly susceptible to the warping effects of technology.
“Psychological and psychiatric literature has documented with growing insistence how early and unsupervised exposure to digital devices and social media can negatively impact sleep, attention span, control of emotions and relationships, especially during the most vulnerable stages of life, at times with tragic consequences,” he wrote.
Scholars were divided about what effect, if any, the document would have on the technology industry, in which rival tech titans are jostling with Anthropic for dominance.
Brian Patrick Green, director of technology ethics at Santa Clara University in Northern California, said some technology leaders “will have to take it seriously in a sense,” partly because it provides them with “a moral imperative” even as it recognized their autonomy.
The church, he said, “does not claim to supplant the responsibilities of politics or institutions, but offers itself as a foundation,” urging other institutions to “recognize and promote whatever serves the dignity of persons, the vitality of communities and the common good.”
Others said that an encyclical’s primary targets are the clergy and the faithful.
“I don’t think the ‘tech bros’ in Silicon Valley will listen that much,” said Prof. Noreen Herzfeld, director of a program on technology and ethics at St. John’s School of Theology and Seminary in Collegeville, Minn. “But I think within the church, it will be there as a reference for priests and bishops and particularly for those of us who are educating seminarians or young people.”
Priests can use the contents of the document to guide conversations with parishioners who share their concerns about the technological pressures of modern life, Professor Herzfeld said.
Josephine de La Bruyère contributed reporting from Rome.
Motoko Rich is the Times bureau chief in Rome, where she covers Italy, the Vatican and Greece.
Elisabetta Povoledo is a Times reporter based in Rome, covering Italy, the Vatican and the culture of the region. She has been a journalist for 35 years.
Elizabeth Dias is The Times’s national religion correspondent, covering faith, politics and values.“
Sunday, May 24, 2026
Saturday, May 23, 2026
Thursday, May 21, 2026
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.” ♦
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)