Taylor Lorenz’s Power User

🚨 Apple is officially suing OpenAI and the allegations are insane. 🚨
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In what might be the most shocking Silicon Valley lawsuit of the year, Apple has accused OpenAI of corporate sabotage, trade secret theft, and orchestrating a massive campaign to poach over 400 former Apple employees to build its secret AI hardware division. From ex-employees using security bugs to access secret Apple folders, to candidates allegedly bringing physical Apple prototypes to job interviews for "show and tell", this legal battle gives us a rare, cutthroat look at the AI hardware arms race.
In this episode of Power User, I sat down with tech reporter and Big Technology founder Alex Kantrowitz to break down everything you need to know about the Apple vs. OpenAI lawsuit. Will this kill OpenAI's hardware ambitions and ruin its upcoming IPO? Will we ever actually get a ChatGPT phone? And why is Apple taking such aggressive legal action now? We break down why this isn't just another tech lawsuit, it's literally a fight over who will own the future of AI.
We discuss:
Why OpenAI hired Jony IveWhether an OpenAI phone is actually coming
The future of AI glasses, AI pins, and wearable devices
Why Apple may be trying to stop OpenAI before it can compete
The race to control the next generation of computing
Whether AI hardware is the future or another Silicon Valley flop
Why OpenAI tried to copy Apple's hardware roadmap instead of building from scratch.
How this lawsuit could cripple OpenAI's valuation and delay its IPO.
The future of AI hardware: AI pins, smart glasses, or will the iPhone remain king?

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Affiliate marketing is one of the biggest industries on the internet, and according to researcher Ben Edelman, one of Silicon Valley’s hottest AI startups may have been abusing it.
In this bonus episode of Power User I sat down with Edelman to break down what’s happening with Phia, the shopping startup co-founded by Phoebe Gates that has raised over $43 million from famed Silicon Valley investors like Kleiner Perkins Sheryl Sandberg, along with a slew of celebrities including Sydney Sweeney, Khloe Kardashian and Hailey Bieber.
We break down allegations that Phia’s browser extension secretly inserted affiliate tracking codes, how this compares to the Honey controversy, why retailers could have lost millions, and what this means for the future of AI-powered shopping.

The government is using powerful AI tools to build massive digital dossiers on everyday citizens, and it’s happening with zero oversight.
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In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I sat with Matthew Guariglia, Senior Policy Analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), to expose how generative AI has democratized mass surveillance. 
From the FBI’s massive physical paper filing hangars of the 20th century to modern AI models that scrape your social media, track your geolocation, and predict your political affiliation in seconds—the barrier to entry for government surveillance has officially collapsed.
We dive deep into Guariglia's recent congressional testimony on the AI security landscape, revealing how the Pentagon is blacklisting tech companies like Anthropic for trying to restrict AI from being used in autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.
 In this video, we cover:
How AI is automating mass surveillance at an unprecedented scale.

The secret government contracts and the battle for unrestricted AI use.

Why your social media history, geolocation, and purchases create a permanent record.

The historical lessons from Ferguson and the Japanese-American internment that prove data is vulnerability.

What you can do to protect your digital rights (hint: it starts with turning off your geolocation).

We are never going to Mars. And the billionaires selling you the dream are lying to your face. 
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The idea of living on Mars has become one of Silicon Valley's biggest promises. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other tech billionaires claim humanity's future depends on becoming a multi-planetary species. But what if nearly everything you've been told about colonizing Mars is quite literally scientifically impossible?
In this week's episode of Power User, I sat down with physicist and science journalist Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever, a fantastic book that I absolutely loved, to break down the biggest myths about Mars colonization, SpaceX, AI, and Silicon Valley's vision of the future. 
 
We discuss why Mars is far more hostile than most people realize, the scientific barriers that make permanent settlement nearly impossible, and why billionaires continue selling this vision despite knowing it will never become reality. 
We cover:
Why humans will literally NEVER live on Mars

The biggest scientific problems SpaceX can't solve

The truth about Elon Musk's Mars colony plans

Why Silicon Valley keeps selling science fiction as reality

How AI and space colonization became part of the same billionaire narrative

Why investing in Earth may matter far more than escaping it

Is social media actually destroying a generation, or are we in the middle of a massive political moral panic?
For this week's Free Speech Friday I sat down with one of the world's leading researchers studying young people, technology, and mental health to answer one question: Did social media really create a generation-wide mental health crisis?
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For years we've been told that smartphones and social media are fueling anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicide among teenagers. Politicians, bestselling authors, and news outlets have treated that idea as settled science.
But what does the actual research say?
Developmental psychologist Candice Odgers has spent decades studying how young people use technology. In this interview, we break down what the evidence actually shows, why many experts disagree with the popular narrative, and how the social media panic is influencing online safety laws, censorship, surveillance, age verification, and internet policy around the world.
 
We discuss:
The real relationship between social media and teen mental health

Why correlation is often mistaken for causation

What studies actually find about screen time

The debate around The Anxious Generation

Why many scientists reject claims that phones are driving a mental health epidemic

Online safety laws and age verification

Privacy, surveillance, and internet censorship

What parents should actually focus on

The future of social media regulation