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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. Im Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. This week, Im focusing on a new court filing that sheds more light on the reasons for Sam Altmans ouster from OpenAI two years ago. I also look at Amazons kerfuffle with Perplexity over AI shopping agents, and at another court ruling that using copyrighted data for AI training is fair use. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X (formerly Twitter) @thesullivan. Two years after OpenAI boardroom drama, a lot is riding on Altmans trustworthiness OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has done more than anyone else to whip up faith and trust that the next industrial revolutionAIis imminent and inevitable. That faith and trust have already loosed hundreds of billions of investment in infrastructure needed to support the transition. Some say the infusion of cash is single-handedly propping up the U.S. stock market, and, by extension, the economy. The faith and trust have moved Washington to all but abandon its oversight role in favor of acting as enabler and cheerleader. But questions of Altmans trustworthiness wont go away. Some troublesome details about Altmans famous 2023 firing by his board (and subsequent rehiring and board reshuffle) came to light with the recent (unsealed) court filing of part of a deposition of OpenAI cofounder and ex-chief scientist Ilya Sutskever in a case brought against the company by Elon Musk. At the time of Altmans ouster, the board said that he had kept key facts about the business from them. The board had also considered reports that Altman undermined his executives and pitted them against each other. Sutskever confirmed to attorneys during the seven-hour deposition that he believes Altman lied habitually. He testified that Altman had been pitting Mira Murati, the CTO at the time, against Daniela Amodei, who eventually left with her brother Dario Amodei and others to form Anthropic. We learn that Altmans alleged behavior wasnt short-term or a reaction to a crisis, but part of a pattern. Sutskever said he and fellow board member Murati had been documenting Altmans indiscretions and preparing to oust him for more than a year before proposing it to the board. (They delayed the firing until Altman loyalists on the board were too few to stop it, Sutskever said.) One board member, Helen Toner, said a year after departing that OpenAI executives (likely Sutskever and Murati) began talking to the board about the Altman problems in the month before the November 2023 dustup. The two of them suddenly started telling us . . .how they couldnt trust him, about the toxic atmosphere he was creating, Toner said during a TED AI podcast. They used the phrase psychological abuse, telling us they didnt think he was the right person to lead the company to AGI, telling us they had no belief that he could or would change. Sutskever, in fact, wrote a 52-page-long memo describing Altmans indiscretions (at the request of fellow board member Adam DAngelo, and possibly board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley). He wrote another memo about then-president and board chair Greg Brockman, who resigned after Altman was fired. Toner has offered other examples of Altmans lies of omission, including a failure to tell the board about plans to launch ChatGPT, or that he personally owned the OpenAI startup fund even though he constantly was claiming to be an independent board member with no financial interest in the company, Toner said. Toner added that Altman gave the board inaccurate information about the small number of formal safety processes OpenAI had in place, so the board had no way of knowing how well those safety processes were working. (Toner is an AI safety expert.) People say that political infighting happens within every company. Thats probably true. People say that CEOs are like politicians; they have to balance competing priorities and personalities within the company, so a certain amount of finessing of the truth is expected. Ill buy that too. And the context is important. OpenAIs history, and the recent history of generative AI, had a lot to do with setting up the conflict. OpenAI started out as an idealistic little AI lab, but a few years later it made a breakthrough discovery that AI models got predictably smarter as they were supersized and given massive amounts of computing power. Developing frontier AI models became a very expensive undertaking, requiring massive capital. OpenAI had to spend massively to maintain its lead in the frontier model arms race that ensued, and needed consumer and enterprise revenue streams to help pay for it. (CFO Sarah Friar said Wednesday that OpenAI may look to the government to guarantee its infrastructure loans.) Its not easy to run a business like a nonprofit in that situation. Yet Altman was answering to a nonprofit board of directors. Toner said as much on the TED AI podcast. The board is a nonprofit board that was set up explicitly for the purpose of making sure that the companys public good mission was primary, was coming firstover profits, investor interests, and other things, Toner said on the podcast. Maybe something had to give. But . . . But if the CEO was (or is) hiding truths from the board, something is wrong. Given the potential risks of AI, its disturbing that one of Altmans lies of omission, according to Toner, concerned safety measures. Superhuman AI doesnt care about the corporate structure of its creators. If not responsibly aligned and governed, its potential for doing harm is the same. Amazon to Perplexity: Keep your agents out of our market Amazon is apparently not ready for the AI agent revolution. Amazon accused Perplexity of computer fraud after the AI company’s Comet browser allowed users to search for and purchase items on Amazon’s platform. Amazon believes Perplexity needs permission from the e-commerce giant to let users do that. Its attorneys sent Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas a cease-and-desist, saying, in effect, that the Comet shopping agents are no longer welcome on Amazon. Were in the early innings of AI agents. Some of the first consumer agents, Perplexity included, can navigate e-commerce websites and even make purchases. In the future agents may routinely do our business by interacting with other agents using a secure agent-to-agent interfaceno need for a traditional web interface at all. Perplexity says Amazon sent an “aggressive legal threat” via a cease-and-desist letter dated October 31, demanding the company stop enabling purchases through its Comet Assistant. Amazon’s lawyers say that Perplexity lacks authorization to access Amazon user accounts or account details using what they described as “disguised or obscured” AI agents. Amazon has already taken steps in recent months to block external AI agents from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and others from crawling product information at its website. Perplexity accused Amazon of “bullying,” and argued that a tool that makes shopping easier for the consumer can only benefit the e-commerce giant. Perplexity suggested that Amazon is more focused on manipulating shopper decisions by showing ads, injecting upsells and confusing offers, and pushing sponsored products in search results. Amazon says Perplexity’s agents hurt shoppers by skipping over personalized product recommendations, and potentially not displaying the fastest available delivery speeds for customers. Amazon and Perplexity did not respond to a request for comment. In theory, Amazon could change its terms of service to more explicitly ban third-party shopping agents from its site. But what if such agents create real value (time savings) for consumers? Can Amazon easily ban some agents but not others? U.K. court says AI companies can use copyrighted material to train models The AI industry has notched another legal win for its practice of scraping copyrighted digital content from the web and using it to train AI models. Getty Images filed suit in the High Court of Justice of England and Wales, claiming that Stability AI violated copyright when it downloaded millions of Getty photos without permission for the purpose of training its Stable Diffusion image generator. Judge Joanna Smith ruled this week that since the Stable Diffusion model didnt store or reproduce the Getty images it cant be said to have copied the images under U.K. copyright law. The court also declared that Getty would have to drop the copyright claim in the U.K. court because the training didnt physically happen within its jurisdiction. Getty also filed its complaint in the U.S., in the Southern District of New York, but that trial is still ongoing. Neil Chilson, former chief technologist for the FTC and currently head of AI Policy with the Abundance Institute, called the decision “consistent with the nature of the technology and a successful result for continued AI innovation. More AI coverage from Fast Company: AI is going to be a game changer for Black Friday AI hardware is reinventing the humble dictaphone Here are the best mobile AI apps Stability AI largely wins U.K. court battle against Getty Images Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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Drilling for minerals deep in the ocean could have immense consequences for the tiny animals at the core of the vast marine food web and ultimately affect fisheries and the food we find on our plates, according to a new study.Deep-sea mining means drilling the seafloor for “polymetallic nodules” loaded with critical minerals including copper, iron, zinc and more. While not yet commercialized, nations are pursuing deep-sea operations amid rising demand for these minerals in electric vehicles and other parts of the energy transition, as well as for technology and military use.The researchers examined water and waste gathered from a deep-sea mining trial in 2022. What the study discovered University of Hawaii researchers studied an area of the Pacific Ocean called the “twilight zone,” about 650-5,000 feet (200-1,500 meters) below sea level. Their peer-reviewed findings, published Thursday in the Nature Communications scientific journal, say mining waste could affect anything from tiny shrimp smaller than .08 inches (2 millimeters) long to fish 2 inches (5 centimeters) long.That’s because, after mining companies bring the mineral-rich nodules up to the surface, they have to release excess sea water, ocean floor dirt and sediment back into the ocean. That creates a murky plume of particles about the same size as the naturally occurring food particles normally eaten by the zooplankton that swim at that depth.That’s a little more than half of the zooplankton in the ocean. If those organisms eat the waste particles what senior study author Brian Popp called “junk food” then that affects 60% of micronekton that eat the zooplankton.And that undernourishment is a problem because these tiny organisms are the food source up the chain ultimately affecting commercially important fish such as mahi mahi or tuna.“Surface fish can dive down deep into the water, they feed on organisms down at depth,” said Michael Dowd, study lead author and oceanography graduate student. “If these organisms down at depth are no longer present because their food web has collapsed, then that can impact higher food webs and more commercial interests.” Impact on the water and alternative sources While other research has highlighted the negative environmental impacts from deep-sea mining of nodules, the focus is often the seafloor. This study looks at mid-water.The researchers said more work needs to be done to assess the appropriate quality and depth at which dirty water and sediment from sea mining could be returned to the ocean. But they said returning the excess directly to the ocean floor or at other depths could be just as environmentally disruptive as in the “twilight zone,” only in different ways.Popp said digging up the deep sea might not be necessary, and instead noted alternative sources of metals, including recycling batteries and electronics, or sifting through mining waste and tailings.“If only a single company is mining in one single spot, it’s not going to affect a huge fishery. It’s not going to affect a huge amount of water. But if many companies are mining for many years and outputting a lot of material, this is going to spread across the region,” Dowd said. “And the more mining occurs, the more a problem it could be.” Where deep-sea mining stands It might not be viable to simply halt ocean mining. The International Seabed Authority that governs mineral activity beyond national jurisdiction has already granted several contracts for exploration.In the U.S., President Donald Trump has expressed interest in deep-sea mining operations amid tense trade negotiations with China that have limited U.S. access to China’s wide swath of critical minerals. In April, Trump signed an executive order directing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to expedite the permitting process for companies to mine the ocean floor, and in May, the administration said it would consider selling leases to extract minerals off the South Pacific island of American Samoa. Last month, NOAA sent a draft rule to the White House to streamline operations.Environmental groups have advocated against deep-sea mining, citing not only the direct harm to wildlife and parts of the sea, but also the disturbance of planet-warming carbon dioxide that is currently sequestered in the ocean and on its floor.“It was well laid out in the study that the impacts wouldn’t necessarily be just the depth that the plume is released,” said Sheryl Murdock, a deep-sea postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University who was not involved in the study. “The question being: Is it worth a few minerals to potentially destroy the way that the oceans function?”Diva Amon, a marine biologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, praised the research for examining potential consequences.“All of this could lead to species illness, species movement, species death. And depending on the scale of this, that could have graver repercussions, like species extinctions,” said Amon, who wasn’t involved in the study but has previously worked with some of the researchers.“There’s a lot more research that needs to be done to be able to make an informed decision about how to manage this industry, if it does start, in a way that will prevent, essentially, serious harm to the ocean and ocean ecosystem.” Alexa St. John is an Associated Press climate reporter. Follow her on X: @alexa_stjohn. Reach her at ast.john@ap.org. Read more of AP’s climate coverage. The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. Alexa St. John, Associated Press
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Over the last two years, the value of content has collapsed. Thanks to the LLM revolution, the internet is drowning in an avalanche of indistinguishable output: an endless parade of fast-food writing, recycled reports, and SEO-bait fluff optimized for algorithms instead of people. Thats why the only competitive moat left is the human story. For business leaders, this creates an urgent mandate: Storytelling is no longer a marketing tactic. Its a strategic business imperativethe only reliable engine for changing minds and shifting behaviors. If your brands narrative isnt uniquely human and demonstrably ownable, it will vanish in the churn. Heres how to find the stories only your company can tell, and why theyre your last true moat. RECOGNIZE THE NEW DISCOVERY REALITY Its tempting to see generative AI as a shortcut to content volume. But when every competitor can churn out a thousand posts, the value of each piece approaches zero. Audiences know this, and theyre tuning out. Trust in the media is near-historic lows. Our Brand Expectations Index shows that 81% of the general public and 84% of knowledge workers trust direct communication from companies, whether in podcasts, videos, or in-depth articles, nearly as much as they trust local news. Even the best SEO playbooks or algorithm hacks are no longer enough. The only thing that cuts through is a story that sparks a gut-level connection. Your mandate: Stop publishing for the algorithm. Start crafting narratives so bold, so human, that your audience chooses to pay attention. EMBRACE THE WHITE SPACE MANDATE This isnt creativity for creativitys sake. Its about strategic differentiation. The first step is proving your story has true, ownable value. Thats the white space mandate: Use data and rigorous analysis to find the strategic gaps your competitors havent filled. Technology for insight, not content. Audit the media and competitor landscape. Map where theyre over-indexing and identify the questions audiences are still asking but not getting answered. Thats the white spacethe open territory where a new conversation can take root. The power of the pivot. This process often forces a shift. The narrative your CEO thinks is critical may be saturated. White space analysis reveals the sharper angle, the uncomfortable, or the unexpected perspective thats necessary to stand out. Ive seen companies discover that the message they were clinging to was indistinguishable from five rivals, while the story that truly set them apart was hiding in plain sight. FIND THE UN-GENERATABLE NARRATIVE Once youve identified white space, the real work begins: filling it with something AI cannot generate. Thats the un-generatable narrativea story born of lived experience, not scraped data. You uncover it through what I call story-mining, deliberate conversations with leaders, employees, and stakeholders to unearth personal conviction, anecdotes, and hidden ambition. The anecdote as anchor. AI can summarize your mission statement; it cannot recreate the founders pivotal failure or the late-night insight that led to a breakthrough. These details are specific, emotional, and unforgettable. They create a narrative that is impossible for a machine to fabricate. Conviction is contagious. When a story is proven to be unique through data and delivered with authentic conviction, it stops being mere communication. It becomes a persuasive argument capable of moving markets and shifting behaviors. THE ONLY FOUNDATION FOR TRUST In an era of content saturation, brands can no longer compete in volume. They must compete with meaning. The stories that will power your business forward arent the ones easily generated. Theyre the ones painstakingly discovered, strategically proven, and deeply human. Because in a world of infinite content, meaning is your only engine for trust. Tyler Perry is the co CEO of Mission North.
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