OpenAI and Musk Fight Again; DOJ Mishandles Voter Data; Artemis II Comes Home

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2:26Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I am Brian Barrett, executive editor. And I'm Leah Feiger, senior politics editor. This week, we're discussing why OpenAI and Elon Musk's feud in the courts is starting to heat up again. And speaking of Musk, we're going to go over some key takeaways from SpaceX's recent confidential IPO filing. Then we'll dive into the rising concerns around how some agencies in the current administration are handling voter data. And finally, let's get away from it all and go to outer space and talk about why the Artemis II launch was such a big deal for everyone watching.

3:02Before we dig into our lineup this week, we do briefly have to talk about what happened between the U.S. and Iran in recent days. President Trump is threatening Iran again. Writing online this morning, Trump said, quote, a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. Moments ago, President Trump once again reiterated his threat to devastate Iran if a deal is not reached before the deadline he set of 8 p.m. Eastern time tonight. Breaking news out of the White House. The U.S. president has agreed to a two week ceasefire. The entire situation was very odd. I guess this is how global politics happens these days.

3:43I'm so curious for your thoughts. Well, yeah, talk about what happened and or more specifically what didn't happen this week, which was potential World War Three. We were on the brink of it. It feels like and I don't think that's it's it's interesting. Like there were good odds that Trump was bluffing, right? Because he has done this time and again, he says, here's this deadline and then he pushes it back. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. But what he's bluffing about has gotten really alarming, and it's only a bluff until it's not. You know what I mean? Like, I think threatening to annihilate an entire civilization, terrifying stuff, even if it's bluster.

4:18Terrifying bluster. What's wild about pushing this back two weeks is, like, you made this very pithy remark in Slack late last night, Brian. Sorry, I'm going to reveal it. Wow. was just like, see you guys in two weeks here, something along those lines. I said it in that voice too. Yes, exactly. I wrote it in Comic Sans. A hundred percent. And like, yeah, we will see each other in two weeks on this. I'm sort of wondering how, frankly, I'm not sure how much like the world capital W was a hundred percent paying attention to this anyway. And in two weeks, it feels like that's going to be even less so because it's just yet another Trump bluff.

4:56And like the boy who called World War Three is a very scary thing because at some point, is this real? Yeah, and it makes it very hard. I think there's people talk about the madman theory of politics, right? Which is Richard Nixon famously thought that if people thought he was erratic and unpredictable, then they wouldn't be able to sort of. Famously, this is a theory that people in the Trump administration like joke about. Yeah, and the difference is that Nixon was pretending to be a madman, whereas Trump feels very much settled into the role. We had some similar situations in the first Trump administration with North Korea, right, where Trump was sort of very overtly threatening, I'm going to push the big red button and my button's bigger than yours and I'm going to send a nuke to North Korea.

5:39Which again, in retrospect, was like, oh, well, he was just being Trump. But when Trump being Trump equals taking the world to the brink of the nuclear age and he seems fully capable of doing it, no, it's really alarming. I mean, I do want to, Leah, your point, I don't want it to get lost. You were saying, I'm not sure how much the world is paying attention. What do you, can you expand on that a little bit? Like, do you feel like there's just so much noise from Trump's true social account that people have tuned it out by now? Yes. Yes and no. Obviously, this was the headline. CNN had a countdown clock.

6:11There was a very specific corner of the world that was keeping the closest eye on this. I had a hard time working yesterday because I was constantly checking my phone, checking in with sources, which is all to say, though, you know, having conversations with friends that are politically minded who are going like, yeah, pretty wild, but like yet another Trump tweet, yet another Trump message. I haven't seen wild call outs from the people that you would sort of expect them to happen from, I suppose. And I'm speaking in a more global sense. I think that the world has been very hard hit by Iranian war already.

6:48Like this is, you know, Madagascar yesterday quite literally declared a state of emergency over the energy situation. Clearly, there have been very serious impacts already. I'm, I really, I guess maybe this isn't fair of me, but I really do think of this in so many ways as when we really do have to pay attention, will people be able to do so? I keep thinking about how quickly everyone moved on from Venezuela. the U.S. kidnapped the sitting leader. Oh, he's still in jail in New York. And still in jail in New York City, like quite literally blocks away from where I am right now, being able to pay attention, being able to like really care about this.

7:24I don't know. What do you think? I feel like you're giving everyone a little bit more credit than I am. I don't know. It's a weird thing where I feel like people in real life that I have talked to seemed aware of it, but also kind of resigned to it as like another thing. But I think that's kind of where we're at. The last thing I was saying this too is this is like, it's such a classic Trump deal in that it seems like it's not really a deal at all. It's a sort of, we've got a framework. It seems like it's on the right track. Meanwhile, there are still bombs flying in the region. The U.S. is involved.

7:57Maybe Bitcoin will have something to do with the, like it is just throwing in, it's that perfect combination of vagueness and like seediness that is the hallmark of the world. And also claims that the U.S. is going to financially benefit. Yeah. We're going to supposedly now this, the strait that was once free for passage is now going to be charging a fee shared between Iran and Oman, but also maybe the U.S. is getting into it. The news coming out of this is also changing moment to moment. It's so hard to figure out what we're paying attention to. And it feels very seedy. Yes, it all feels very seedy.

8:32I'm sorry, did we wage war to have, to charge a toll? Like what's happening here? It sounds like maybe. In terms of things that are maybe not seedy, but tawdry, or at least you kind of can't get enough in a voyeuristic way, I want to talk about the OpenAI-Elon Musk feud. There is a trial that's going to be headed to courts later this month. But in the meantime, on Monday, Leah, OpenAI sent a letter to the California and Delaware Attorneys General urging them to investigate, quote, improper and anti-competitive behavior by Musk and his associates, including Mark Zuckerberg, who was allegedly one of those associates.

9:13Again, this is all alleged. We got to get that, make that very clear. All this behavior is alleged. For some background who aren't familiar with Musk and OpenAI's history, because I think a lot of people maybe aren't, Musk is a co-founder of OpenAI. He sued the company and its CEO, Sam Altman, back in 2024, accusing them of violating OpenAI's founding mission as it restructured itself from a nonprofit to a for-profit organization. The idea of OpenAI when it started was we're going to have this nonprofit thing that is going to research AI for the benefit of humanity, make sure it's aligned, make sure that this very powerful force can be harnessed for good.

9:48And then they started making billions of dollars and spending trillions of dollars, and that sort of fell by the wayside a bit. Altman and Musk have a long history of throwing jabs at each other's expense. Open AI, I mean, you seem somewhat frustrated with them. You were one of the big contributors early on. The reason, I am the reason Open AI exists. Do you think Musk's approach then is from a position of insecurity? Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity. I feel for the guy. You feel for him? I do, actually. I don't think he's like a happy person. I do feel for him. Musk's defense team doubled down on Tuesday, requesting that if he wins the case that's coming up later this month.

10:23He is going to demand that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman need to be removed from their roles as officers in the company, and OpenAI needs to return to being a nonprofit. Not sure what power he actually has to compel those things, but the fact that he's really going for it, I think, shows just how vitriolic this situation has become. I love the gossip. I'm sorry, this is so entertaining. The boys are fighting. We're talking about like most like billion dollar companies here. This is so much money. And it's very messy. And I think OpenAI, apologies to any OpenAI people listening to this podcast, has been messy in general lately.

11:04You know, we've talked a lot about the revolving door of people leaving the company, people coming back to the company. You know, they had a big executive shakeup this week. They bought a podcast this week. Like, it is all over the place. Shout out to TBPN, the other tech podcast. Yep, yep. There's a lot of mess going around in general. And then you have Elon Musk coming in, who is trying to sort of upset the Apple cart even further. And I think as a background to all this too, SpaceX, Elon Musk's SpaceX, reportedly filed confidentially for an IPO last week. So they are at a very momentous time.

11:46I think everyone's racing to hit the IPO market, whether it's OpenAge, SpaceX, Anthropic, and SpaceX out the door first. So a lot going on here. And Musk is betting that SpaceX will be valued at nearly$2 trillion, which would be the largest IPO in history. This, again, like the backyard squabbles, it feels like so much more. How incremental do you think is the back and forth, though, between the Musk and Altman camps? Like, what are we – does this, like, actually mark a very big, like, juncture in this case? Or not really, just something that you're paying close attention to? No, I feel like this is something where it's Elon trying to twist the knife a little bit more.

12:28You know, I think using every opportunity to dig in and extract maximum impact if he's able to succeed. I do think this case will be really, really interesting, assuming they don't settle, which maybe they'll settle. Maybe this all goes away, but they both seem really entrenched. So, you know, the case will be really interesting because I feel like all of these AI companies have acted pretty much with impunity from the start. There's no real regulatory pressure. The only pressure is among each other and between each other for hiring, basically, because there's infinite money and there's infinite scope.

13:05So it feels like the first real sort of hit the brakes moment, potentially, if Musk is somehow able to pull out a win in court. Is this a good time for SpaceX to go public? It's a good question. I do think there is pressure to go public. I think there's only so many$2 trillion IPOs that the market can kind of like hang on to. And, you know, remember when we talk about SpaceX, it's not just rockets anymore. It's also XAI and it's X. It is so much of Elon Musk's empire rolled up into one. And so it would unlock a ton of capital for them to keep building out their data centers, to keep building compute.

13:46It would make them the first big AI company to go public, other than not counting, obviously, Google is a big AI company. Alphabet's been both growing time. So it is a chance to sort of get out there first. One thing I want to note, though, I don't know if you saw, and this is a side note, but it's another thing about Elon Musk extracting as much as he can out of everything he can is the way he operates. He is making any bank that wants to sort of pitch their services for the IPO, they all have to subscribe to Grok. They all have to be XAI customers. at a really big scale. Like that actually is like material money because these banks have thousands of employees.

14:24They're all going to have to go on Grock. Just a really, I think not the usual way these things work, but it is in Musk World. Yeah, there's no usual in Musk World. I think that that ship sailed a very long time ago, but that is kind of wild. I'm so curious to see where that happens. And I also, I mean, it's hard to not talk about Elon and Sam as political players. Like they're having these business squabbles that are taking place in a very large stage, not just because of how much money, but also because they, like, invariably different ways, have the ear of different people in the Trump administration.

14:57And just, I think, last thing on this, you mentioned them as political players. Absolutely. OpenAI, on Monday of this week, released a big policy document saying, here's how we think the post-AGI world needs to work in terms of policy. Here are some policy points that are going to prepare the world for where we're headed. There's a certain audacity to that. There's a certain trying to own the narrative to that. But it does speak to, yes, these are extremely political players. Let's talk about another fun part of politics everything, which is voter data. Ryan, don't you love voter data? I love voter data.

15:39I love voter data when it is kept private and kept in my state, and people can't use it to cross-reference for bad things. Well, I have a bummer of a story for you. Oh, no, Leah, no. Well, last week we learned in a court hearing in Rhode Island, a Department of Justice lawyer misled a judge about what the agency has been doing with voter roll data. So this DOJ lawyer, Eric Neff, who's the acting chief of the DOJ's voting section, said that nothing had been done with this information. But then our colleague David Gilbert reported that he later backtracked that statement and actually admitted that the preliminary internal data analysis of the non-public voter registration data has begun, which is a slightly complicated way to say, yeah, your voter data in certain states is being taken and being processed.

16:29And in the DOJ's case, they're looking for anomalies. They're trying to find people that they think should not be voting. This is part of a larger voter roll campaign that's been led by the DOJ. It started last year when the agency sent letters to election officials in almost every single state asking for unredacted voter rolls. That includes social security numbers, driver's licenses, dates of birth, and addresses. A lot of states have pushed back, and so the DOJ has actually sued 30 of them to force them to comply. Eric Neff, this lawyer, disclosed that the DOJ intends to share the state voter roll data with the Department of Homeland Security.

17:07The goal is to run this through a DHS system called SAVE, again, to check for non-citizens, deceased individuals, et cetera. I want to be so clear here that in all of the studies that have happened about non-citizen voting, it is teeny, teeny, tiny. We're talking like 30 people across many, many millions of votes. Like, this is not a real issue. Obviously, the Trump administration has made this an issue. The DOJ has now made this an issue. And it's pretty wild. And this voter data, it's not just, oh, this person voted Democrat, this person voted Republican. I just want to say again, this is your very personal information that is being pooled together in a way that it's not supposed to be.

17:47And a lot of states are really, really upset about it. Yeah. And I want to also just take a step back too. Like we need to get into the data privacy and the way they're using this. But I think there's also just the, I think there are two possibilities here with Neff, right? Neither of which is encouraging. One is he intentionally misled the court and then thought better of it the next day. Two, which I would argue is equally as alarming, he just didn't know. Right. He just didn't know what was going on with the data, which suggests a casualness with how this is being used and a lack of oversight with how this is being used that I think, regardless of any other factors, is really concerning.

18:26I 100 % agree. David Becker, who's the head of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, and he's also a former Justice Department lawyer, talked to David Gilbert for this story and basically said the same thing, which is just like this is so concerning. And I'm aware that it's this small moment, this specific state case, but is indicative of this larger, larger trend. It also comes at a time, Leah, that the DOJ's acting chief privacy officer has resigned. Not really a high priority for them to fill that role, I'm guessing. You know, we talked about this a little bit, I think, last week, too, this sort of full court press from the Trump administration to get access to this data.

19:04And I want to mention why it is compartmentalized is because voting is fundamentally a state issue or even more local than that. And that actually helps make it more secure because there's no one big switch that you can flip that says steal the vote, right? As much as Trump thinks there is. It comes down to local workers, local municipalities, states, secretaries of state running their own systems securely. As you said, there's no indication that this is a real problem, but they're going to keep going until they make it one. Yeah, and especially this is really not going to be pittering that, you know, quietly behind in the background either.

19:45Last week after Donald Trump effectively fired his attorney general, Pam Bondi, a lot of election deniers, as Wired reported again today, are really frothing for more and potential candidates that would be able to actually lean even further into election denial and make this process as convoluted and complicated as possible. I'm a little bit nervous I'm a little bit nervous I have to say Pam Bondi's resignation slash firing aside I think that there's a lot more that we're going to see from the DOJ in the coming weeks and months when it comes to the midterm elections Before we go to break let's talk about something that this week captured our attention not because it makes us anxious or afraid but makes us filled with joy and awe the Artemis II launch And here we go 10, 9.

20:37The mission shuttle with a crew of four astronauts lifted off smoothly on April 1st. Booster ignition and lift off the crew of Artemis II now bound for the moon. And as you've probably heard by now, Artemis II is the first crewed flight to orbit the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. It's pretty remarkable in and of itself, but it also goes further than that. For one, they've officially traveled further away from Earth than any humans have before. Good for humanity. We need some winds. We're putting them on the board. But it's also they're going to be testing whether NASA can send a crew to the moon itself to land there without any issues.

21:17That means testing the spacecraft's life support systems that are put in place for the astronaut. Hopefully laying the foundation for an enduring human presence on the moon. And then possibly maybe after that, although it's a little bit up in the air right now, Mars. Leah, I know that you have strong feelings about Artemis too. What has stood out to you on this journey? So I actually didn't get to watch it live because it was the first or second night of Passover. And I remember being like, oh, that's a bummer. I would love to go and do this. The next day I decided I want to relive this. I just read some amazing descriptions of what this was like.

21:52And it got me. I mean, this crew has already broken so many records. They've traveled farther from Earth than any humans ever have. They broke the distance record previously held by Apollo 13 since 1970. They passed behind the moon. The photographs of them passing behind the moon, which is, again, one of the longest communications blackout in human spaceflight history, 40 minutes before they reestablished contact with mission control. Just feats of humanity. Like you are, it is truly where no person has gone before. They saw features of the lunar far side that have never been seen by human eyes.

22:33Just really shocking, incredible, awe-inspiring stuff. And not to mention, and this is me revealing just really how much I love reality TV, I suppose. I love the characters here. I love every single one of the astronauts. They are posting these incredible videos and sharing that awe and joy of their space flight with others. It's not just about breaking the records. It's not just all like serious all the time. You know, one of my favorites recently was like showing the food that they're eating and like how they're rehydrating their shrimp packets. Yeah, the jar of Nutella floating quietly through the shuttle.

23:11Yeah, it's lovely. It's so lovely and special. special. I'll say, if you haven't had a chance to see the pictures taken by the astronauts, which Leah, I know you have, but they've taken a bunch of photos along the way with high quality equipment, telescopic lenses. We have several of them on Wired. To interject a little tiny downer in this celebration of joy and all that humanity can achieve, there is a rampant corner of the internet that insists that all this is fake and all this is AI and da-da-da-da-da. I knew you were going to bring this up. Yeah, just briefly. It's upsetting me to my core in like a very intense way.

23:47I see conspiracy theories online on a daily basis. Like most people in a very specific corner of the internet think that not only is like former president Joe Biden dead, but that he's been dead for a very long time. Like there, I am used to that. But for whatever reason, this is really getting me. I get that this is the original conspiracy theory. Did man actually land on the moon? But very upsetting. Very upsetting, Brian. Okay, but let's take it back to something nice and joyful, then we're going to pull it back from that. Just had to mention it, had to say it. But there were some deeply human moments along the way.

24:20Emily, I know that this resonated with you as well. Astronaut Jeremy Hansen told NASA's Kelsey Young during the flight that the crew would like to name some craters on the moon that they could currently see. Again, they're seeing parts of the moon that had not been seen by human eyes, so a lot of branding opportunities, a lot of naming opportunities. For one of the craters they named, the team proposed naming it Carol. And Carol is a tribute to Artemis II Commander Reed Weissman's late wife, who died of cancer in 2020. And we can listen to that here. So we lost a loved one. Her name was Carol.

24:54The spouse of Reed, the mother of Katie and Ellie. And if you want to find this one, you look at Glushko. and it's just to the northwest of that at the same latitude as home and it's a it's a bright spot on the moon and we would like to call it carol and you spell that c-a-r-r-o-l-l it's so emotional this is yeah we needed that this week we needed this i mean part of why this feel so special is because I know, perhaps just like the Olympics, Brian, maybe thank goodness Zoe isn't here, but this is one of the increasingly rare events that can really just unify and capture imagination and attention in such a specific way.