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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.

By Gideon Lewis-KrausMay 20, 2026

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.” ♦ 

How I Built My Mac Setup for Maximum YouTube Productivity

 

Google's New AI Plans Are Bleak, at Least for Everyone in the Real World

 

 

Google Introduces Gemini Omni, a Multimodal AI That Knows the World

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“Google announced Gemini Omni, a multimodal AI video creation tool that can generate videos from text, images, and existing videos. Omni features advanced editing capabilities, allowing users to modify or replace elements within videos. The tool will be integrated into the Gemini app, Google Flow, and YouTube Shorts, with a watermark indicating AI-generated content.

​

Gemini Omni will transform the way you edit videos. 

Google/Screenshot by Blake Stimac

Google announced its latest AI product, Gemini Omni, during its I/O conference on Tuesday. Unlike existing text-to-video products such as Veo, Omni can take in virtually any input to create realistic, lifelike videos. 

Built on Gemini modeling architecture, Omni is a true multimodal input and output system, allowing you to create videos from text, images and existing videos. At launch, you'll be able to create videos with the aforementioned inputs, but image; text generations will be available in a future update. 

With Gemini at its core, Omni can process and interpret multiple types of inputs to produce a consistent, sophisticated final product. Omni builds on Google's existing products by integrating Gemini Intelligence.

The rise of AI-created videos comes at a paradoxical time as companies such as Google make incredible advances with the technology, while social media feeds become more filled with AI slop. Google considers Omni the "next big step" toward building AI that can model and simulate the real world. It's a world model with advanced reasoning, capable of generating videos grounded in the world we know today. Omni demonstrates advanced physics capabilities, enabling it to create realistic video outputs. Here's what's coming in Gemini Omni from Google I/O.

Powerful (and scary) editing capabilities

As with its powerful video generation, Omni also has advanced video editing capabilities. If you create a video with Omni, you can feed it back into the tool, make impressive changes with just a prompt or incorporate additional media. You can even upload your own videos and change or swap out individual elements, allowing for a new way to edit videos that has essentially never been available before. 

That ability to fully replace elements in a person's video could lead to some dark outcomes, making Omni's advanced editing abilities as alarming as they are impressive. But Google has built-in guardrails. First, any output from Omni will automatically include Google's SynthID watermark, so you know that what you're viewing has been altered in some way by AI. This is a big deal, as Omni essentially lets you change how reality is perceived. 

Multiple access points

People will be able to play with Gemini Omni in a variety of ways. It's a prominent feature within the newly redesigned Gemini app, where you can add built-in templates to your camera roll with a single click. Additionally, you'll be able to create a custom avatar that looks and sounds like you and add it to videos. 

For some paid subscribers, Omni will be available on Google Flow and YouTube Shorts, starting on Tuesday. Omni will roll out to developers and enterprise customers via APIs in the coming weeks, allowing for custom integrations. 

Omni Flash and Omni Pro

Like most Gemini models, Omni will be split into Flash and Pro versions, though the former will be available initially. Google is working on an even more powerful model, Omni Pro, which will become available in the future.” 

 

Google Has So Many New Smart Glasses Coming Soon. I Wore Them All

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“Google is releasing three new smart glasses products this year, including a prototype dual-display set and wireless AI glasses made with Samsung, Gentle Monster, and Warby Parker. These glasses feature advanced AI capabilities, such as language translation and AI-generated widgets, and are designed to integrate seamlessly with existing phone apps and services. While Google acknowledges privacy concerns surrounding smart glasses, they are working on measures like bystander LED indicators and fraud detection to address these issues.

​

Samsung, Google, Gentle Monster, Warby Parker and Xreal are going some wild Gemini places. But how will they address the growing privacy concerns?

See full bioMay 19, 2026 10:46 a.m. PT

Google and Samsung's glasses, left, and Google and Xreal's Project Aura, right, are two parts of a new wave of Gemini-powered tech arriving this fall.

Scott Stein/CNET

I found myself facing a wall, talking to a smiling molecule that emerged from a vase. I had pinched my fingers over the very real vase, and now a very unreal molecule floated in front of me, googly eyes blinking, as it told me about its properties in ceramic material. This whole chat, AI-generated via Gemini, emerged as a hovering 3D graphic on glasses I was wearing. They were plugged into a phone-sized device running an app that was apparently coded on the fly in just days.

This advanced AR glasses setup, known as Project Aura, is just one of three Google glasses products coming this year. And there's more -- also on deck are wireless AI glasses made with Samsung, Gentle Monster and Warby Parker, slated for the fall, ready to compete with Meta's Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. I spent time with all of them, and even a prototype dual-display set of wireless glasses, at Google's Mountain View campus. Back in December, I'd done a demo as well, but my latest deep dive showed me more, and better, things that all of these glasses can do. I was wowed.

Will Google help make smart glasses feel more everyday and useful? Or solve how offputting and potentially threatening their cameras and AI tech make some people feel? My latest set of demos at Google's campus, part of Google's AI-centric I/O developer conference, convinced me that they could be the best smart glasses out there. They could even help redefine what smart glasses can be. And they're the first glasses I've seen that really feel ready to work with the apps and services we have on phones already. 

In 2026 we've seen a flood of smart glasses, a category of product that most people don't wear and many are increasingly wary of. But Google's Gemini-powered glasses could change what's possible more than nearly any other glasses I've seen so far. The reason, clearly, is the AI and software under the hood -- and what Google's doing to lay groundwork for where Apple is reportedly heading too. That's even clearer to me now after meeting again with Google's head of XR, Shahram Izadi, and Samsung's Jay Kim, head of that company's MX customer experience division.

These are prototype glasses, with custom prescription inserts added for the demo, but these Samsung/Google glasses are lightweight and still have a display in one lens.

Scott Stein/CNET

Google's glasses look ready to one-up Meta on AI smarts

I test-drove multiple versions of the smart glasses that Google and Samsung are releasing later this year. What I saw were still prototype models, but their more watch- and phone-connected features have more AI skills than Meta's latest glasses. But they still don't have prices yet, or even an official name.

Called "Intelligent Eyewear" for now, the glasses will be given product names later on by Warby Parker, Gentle Monster and Samsung when they're released this fall, according to Izadi, who spoke with me at Google's headquarters.

Watch this: The Future of Smart Glasses Is Coming This Fall

07:00

The glasses will all have cameras, microphones and embedded speakers like Meta's line of smart glasses, and also will come in display-free and single-display versions. The always-on Gemini Live mode on these glasses could follow me around a room and describe plants or tell me how to play a board game. I've seen these tricks before. But Google's advantage over Meta is how these AI tools relay back to apps already on phones, like Google Keep and Google Calendar. Or appear on watches. 

My room experiences using Gemini Live on the glasses, saved as a record in Google Keep on a connected phone.

Scott Stein/CNET

A translation demo I tried showed how automatic language recognition could identify French or Portuguese, spoken by people in the room with me. I saw on-screen captions in the display-enabled glasses, and audio translation relayed at a slight delay, tone-matched to speaking cadence and perceived speaker gender.

The glasses can also show AI-generated widgets that can work like mini apps to show quick-glance information like weather, scrollable in a stack.

One of the Warby Parker glasses designs, which I didn't get to try on, is coming this fall.

Google

Lightweight, in multiple designs

These glasses feel lighter-weight than Meta's Ray-Ban Displays: At 49 grams, they felt close to the heft of display-free Meta Ray-Bans. The two Warby Parker and Gentle Monster designs weren't something I got to try yet, but the prototype pair I wore is meant to represent a similar size and comfort, and they felt good despite having a single display inside one lens. They're definitely smaller than the equivalent, larger pair of display-enabled Ray-Ban Displays.

The Gentle Monster frames have a distinctive look.

Google

The Warby Parker and Gentle Monster designs look fun, though, at least in photos. Warby's rounded edges look good, with a frame that still seems somewhat thick. The oval-shaped Gentle Monster frames are definitely going for a different look, and I'm curious how much more other design types flex. There will be more, Izadi and Kim confirmed.

The prototypes I wore again, meanwhile, look more like Ray-Bans: generic and black-framed but functional.

Photos taken on the Samsung/Google glasses relayed instantly to the connected phone and smartwatch. WearOS watches could act as glasses viewfinders.

Scott Stein/CNET

Connecting with watches as well as phones

Photos I took on the glasses popped up moments later on a Pixel Watch worn by one of Google's team, showing off how a WearOS smartwatch could be a connected camera viewfinder. I tried taking a photo of the room with the glasses and adding Nano Banana effects: a David Lynch vibe and 1930s cartoon characters eating sushi. The image was updated in under a minute on the glasses, and it also popped up on the watch and the phone.

Nano Banana's Lynch-with-cartoon-with-sushi AI reinvention of a photo taken with the glasses. It showed up in-glasses, and on the phone shortly after.

Scott Stein/CNET

The glasses have a touchpad in one arm, which works with angle and double taps and swipes (single tap-hold for Gemini, double finger swipe for volume), and a camera shutter button on the top of one arm. They could also be controlled to some degree with a watch, although I didn't get to try that. Watch gestures would help, especially since Google doesn't have anything like Meta's neural band yet.

Dual displays are coming, too

Google's also working on dual-display glasses, which might not come until at least 2027. The prototypes I demoed again were notably heavier, and while I also tried this demo last year, this time the quality looked better for playing a Spider-Man clip converted to 3D by YouTube, and playing back 3D models that I could move with tilts and turns of my head, almost like augmented reality. Scrolling widgets moved by in 3D too.

The dual-display model is still being finessed, and Izadi and Kim acknowledged that there's no release timeframe yet. It's next on deck: maybe next year or the year after. But Izadi expects dual, single and no-display glasses to be on sale together down the road, likely at a range of prices.

AI privacy measures? Unknown

Samsung's and Google's teams admit that the world of wearables is a challenge to figure out and that public apprehension about face tech and camera-enabled glasses is something that still needs to be figured out. Meta's already faced multiple privacy problems and has muddy lines on its AI privacy policies. Google plans to go into more details on data privacy on its glasses at a fall event, says Izadi. 

"We've been doing a lot of thinking from the very beginning with these kinds of devices. Given the privacy aspects, you have to design with privacy in mind from the very, very beginning and leverage some of the standards that have been set in the AI world," says Izadi, who adds that a bystander LED indicator, fraud detection for AI and other features are part of the glasses. 

But expect the privacy rules for Gemini to work much like Gemini already does on phones, although glasses will have more situations where they could run in a live, always-on mode. Izadi says some of the challenge is "user education" but that when it comes to privacy "we do need to raise the bar, for sure."

"I think market expectation is higher on us," Samsung's Kim adds. "We're studying a lot. We've been thinking about it for a long time, from the beginning."

The prototype glasses I tried run the same experiences as the upcoming Warby Parker and Gentle Monster models.

Scott Stein/CNET

Prescriptions shouldn't be a problem

I did my demos of all these glasses using custom inserts matched to my heavily myopic prescription, but Google and Samsung are confident that their range of all-day smart glasses with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster will support prescription ranges including my own, even in display-enabled models. 

"We are really going deep there," says Izadi. "This is where some of the partnerships with the eyewear companies have been really important." Izadi points to the display-enabled Even Realities G2 glasses that I've worn using my prescription as "existence proof" that they can be made.

I hope so, because I plan to test out Google's glasses as my everyday pair. Unlike Meta's prescription support-limited Ray-Ban Displays, it looks like that could actually happen.

Google Health? Possible at some point

Google's new Fitbit Air and Gemini-powered health coach, which I'm test driving now, already had me thinking about how fitness and health could be a part of the next wave of glasses. Izadi acknowledges that the glasses could access data like this and interconnect, just not right away.

Kim points to the triangulation between rings and watches and glasses and phone. 

"Everything will come together in a way to support each other," he says, but also adds "You don't want to overwhelm the consumer, it has to be very natural and fit into your body." 

At its Unpacked event in July, Samsung is going to get into more glasses details and reveal more Gentle Monster and Warby Parker designs, so we may learn more on the fitness front there. But it's clear that Samsung and Google are going to make it happen. Meta's fitness focus with its glasses and Garmin, and the whole outdoors lifestyle pitch of glasses, makes it an obvious fit.

Xreal's Project Aura supports hand tracking, and it works just like it does on VR headsets to pinch, scroll and control apps.

Scott Stein/CNET

Project Aura: A pocket-size Gemini computer plus glasses

Now let's get back to that talking molecule demo that stunned me, which came courtesy of Google and Xreal's Project Aura, one of the most fascinating products I've seen in a while. It's not the first time I've tried it, but as Aura readies to launch later this year, this new batch of demos reminded me what amazed me back in December. In many ways, this glasses-plus-processor-puck combo delivers what a VR headset can do, and possibly more, in a little package that also works with your phone, laptop or Steam Deck.

It doesn't work with your phone directly. Instead, it has a processor puck that runs Android XR and Android apps, relaying this to glasses. It's very much a living model of what Meta's Project Orion prototype AR glasses were going for two years ago when I tried them, but with hardware available now, and with hand tracking via cameras instead of using a gestural neural band like Meta has. 

Anyone who's ever tried a pair of display-enabled tethered glasses, like those that Xreal or Viture or TCL sell, might know how good these "headphones for your eyes" can look. Project Aura is better, extending the field of view of its microOLED displays to 70 degrees, effectively enough to fill the glasses and not feel like you're missing too much.

Project Aura comes with its own travel case. The processor puck it uses is about the size of a phone.

Scott Stein/CNET

Aura, as I said last year, can do all the things Samsung's 6-month-old Galaxy XR mixed reality headset can do -- but in a smaller package. The phone-sized processor puck has a touchpad surface and fingerprint ID button, and runs all the Android apps and VR/AR-enabled experiences that Galaxy XR does. The glasses have cameras and depth sensors that can enable hand tracking, pinching and scrolling apps and playing VR games. 

But this little package can also run a lot of AI-intensive things. Gemini Live can run in conjunction with any app, but you can also plug in other devices via USB-C/DisplayPort. Connecting a Steam Deck meant I could play Hollow Knight on the glasses on the big screen, but also open a YouTube window and drag it next to the game in any position, watching run-throughs. It can support five apps open at once, or have Gemini Live watch my Steam Deck gameplay and give playthrough advice. I could connect an iPhone or a MacBook or any other device and layer it with Gemini Live analysis, too.

The Xreal Project Aura glasses with my prescription inserts. They look and function a lot like Xreal's other glasses, with a whole extra dose of Gemini and Android XR and hand tracking.

Scott Stein/CNET

Aura as a road to AI coding for XR?

What really wowed me was seeing an app vibe-coded with Google tools that ran right in Aura via WebXR, demonstrating how Aura could potentially be used to AI code and preview 3D experiences that I've never seen done before. One app I tried, a 3D drawing experience called 3D Paint -- I used my fingers to sketch in the air like the old VR app Tilt Brush -- was was vibe-coded in Chrome on Project Aura using Gemini Canvas. Apparently it took minutes to do.

Two other apps -- a Gemini music experience called Gemini Melody where I sketched lines in the air and had Gemini turn them into musical tones and interactive music tracks, and that talking molecule experience, called Gemini Molecule -- were standalone XR apps made in a week, coded using Google Antigravity and Gemini APIs. They're all demos of what sorts of AI-powered XR apps could be made and tested with Project Aura. If this is as easy to do as Google makes it seem, Project Aura could transform the VR/AR landscape in wild ways. It makes me want to try to vibe code.

Samsung and Google glasses on my eyes, Xreal Project Aura perched on my head. When will these concepts converge?

Scott Stein/CNET

Aura shows where glasses and phones could head next

Aura will go on sale as an actual product later this year, but at an unknown price. I expect it might be a more expensive product than I'd like, but it's also truly a shrunken-down set of some of the same pieces that Vision Pro and Galaxy XR were aiming for, in a form I'm more likely to use on the go. It's part dev kit, part portable VR replacement and preview of where AR glasses that connect with our phones could eventually evolve.

Imagine the phone-sized processing puck that Aura uses being the phone in our pockets instead. Current phones can't do it, but Aura feels like a preview of what's possible. 

"No plans yet, but it's an obvious next step, I would say a logical next step," Izadi says to me of taking the Aura experience into glasses that work with our phones directly. But that might take some time. 

Kim adds, "I think the phone will probably stay as a sort of central hub for many years to come," noting that phones and watches are destined to stay connected to phones down the road. 

I agree. But it's clear that the capabilities of those connections are just getting started. Project Aura is going to arrive sometime later this year alongside the wireless Warby Parker and Gentle Monster glasses, but it's a more advanced preview of a full computer with Gemini… and, really, the AR glasses I've been waiting for.”