Well, do you trust Sam Altman?

Equity

TechCrunch

Business, News, Technology, Business News, Entrepreneurship

4.2 • 372 Ratings

🗓️ 15 May 2026

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Musk v. Altman trial came to a close this week, and the final arguments kept circling back to one question: can we trust the people in charge of AI? All of this is playing out as SpaceX charges toward what could be one of the largest IPOs in American history, with a whole generation of founders already spinning out of the Musk empire. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane break down the trial's closing stretch and what the growing Elon Musk founder ecosystem actually looks like on the ground, and the other deals that caught our eye this week. Listen to the full episode to hear about: How Anduril landed a $5 billion Series H, more than doubling the valuation it landed just under a year ago Why investors just can’t say no to RJ Scaringe, who’s raked in over $1 billion for Rivian spinout Mind Robotics How voice AI startup Vapi beat out over 40 other companies to secure a contract handling all of Ring's customer support What an Anthropic report about an AI agent blackmailing its own developers says about where the industry actually is Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:21.8	dot UK slash podcast to learn more. Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's podcast about
0:27.8	the business of startups. Today is Friday, May 15th. I'm Kirsten Koresak, transportation editor
0:33.9	here at TechCrunch, and I'm joined, as always, by our weekend editor Anthony Ha,
0:38.6	and senior reporter, Sean O'Kame.
0:41.2	Well, I wanted to start with something that happened kind of at the end of last week,
0:44.6	and I'm curious if you caught this.
0:46.2	This was a report that Anthropic put out about issues that they had last year with
0:50.9	AI agents blackmailing developers in some testing. And they basically are now
0:56.4	blaming that on how the internet describes AI and that there's so many evil portrayals of
1:03.5	AI. I'm curious. What did you guys make of that? I thought it was hilarious in like, you know,
1:08.4	an ominous way. I don't know. I mean, I guess AI has always been kind of mysterious, right? So the way it's portrayed because it has been sort of this sci-fi throughout our history and now it's real. So, I mean, I don't know. I guess it's plausible. Listen, this is like that torment nexus tweet, right? Like you go and you make the torment nexus,
1:29.0	you got to expect that the torment nexus is going to come back and bite you a little bit.
1:33.8	Yeah, I think in Silicon Valley, there's always this sort of tension between the future as
1:38.2	imagined in science fiction and the future that we're actually building. And then that
	...

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