Gay men have long been rumored to run Silicon Valley. No one can say exactly when, or if, gay men started running Silicon Valley. They seem to have dominated its upper ranks at least the past five years, maybe more. On platforms like X, the clues are there: whispers of private-island retreats, tech executives going "gay for clout," and the suggestion that a "seed round" is not, strictly speaking, a financial term. It is an idea so taken for granted, in fact, that when I call up a well-connected hedge fund manager to ask his thoughts about what is sometimes referred to in industry circles as the "gay tech mafia," he audibly yawns. "This has always been the case." It had been the case, the hedge funder says, back in 2012, when he was raising money from a venture capitalist whose office was staffed with dozens of "attractive, strong young men," all of whom were "under 30" and looked as though they had freshly decamped from "the high school debate club." "They were all sleeping with each other and starting companies," he says. And it is absolutely the case now, he adds, when gay men are running influential companies in Silicon Valley and maintain entire social calendars with scarcely a straight man, much less a woman, in sight. "Of course the gay tech mafia exists," he continues. "This is not some Illuminati conspiracy theory. And you do not have to be gay to join. They like straight guys who sleep with them even more." Ever since I started covering Silicon Valley in 2017, I've heard variations of this rumor--that "gays," as an AI founder named Emmett Chen-Ran has quipped, "run this joint." On its face, a gay tech mafia seemed too dumb to warrant actual investigative inquiry.

The Industry OpenAI Is Losing the Big Tech Race. The Super Bowl Ads Made That Clear. If Sam Altman is annoyed at Anthropic's commercials, he has only himself to blame. Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time.

AI rivals Anthropic and OpenAI have launched a war of ads trying to court corporate America during one of the biggest entertainment nights of the year. Ahead of the Super Bowl, Anthropic has launched a series of ads going hard at its rival. For the scrawny 23-year-old who wants a six-pack, a ripped older man who is supposed to depict a chatbot suggests insoles that "help short kings stand tall" because "confidence isn't just built in the gym". And for the man trying to improve communication with his mom: his therapist prescribes "a mature dating site that connects sensitive cubs with roaring cougars" in case he can't fix that relationship. From'nerdy' Gemini to'edgy' Grok: how developers are shaping AI behaviours All four ads end with the same tagline: "Ads are coming to AI. There's no explicit mention of ChatGPT, but the subtext is clear. But he also called the ads "so clearly dishonest" before diving into a lengthy critique on X . "Our most important principle for ads says that we won't do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them," Altman wrote. "We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that." Altman stressed that OpenAI's decision to include ads, announced last month, makes the product more accessible. "We believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access," he wrote. "Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people.

The Only Thing Standing Between Humanity and AI Apocalypse Is Claude? As AI systems grow more powerful, Anthropic's resident philosopher says the startup is betting Claude itself can learn the wisdom needed to avoid disaster. Anthropic is locked in a paradox: Among the top AI companies, it's the most obsessed with safety and leads the pack in researching how models can go wrong. But even though the safety issues it has identified are far from resolved, Anthropic is pushing just as aggressively as its rivals toward the next, potentially more dangerous, level of artificial intelligence. Its core mission is figuring out how to resolve that contradiction. Last month, Anthropic released two documents that both acknowledged the risks associated with the path it's on and hinted at a route it could take to escape the paradox.

Anthropic announced its Claude AI chatbot will remain completely ad-free, contrasting sharply with OpenAI's recent decision to test advertisements in ChatGPT. PCWorld reports that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman criticized Anthropic's stance, calling Claude an "expensive product for the rich" despite Claude also offering free access. This creates a clear market divide between ad-supported and ad-free AI assistants, with Google's Gemini currently aligning with Anthropic's no-ads approach. A few weeks ago, OpenAI announced that it would begin testing display advertisements in ChatGPT responses . Shortly afterwards, Google promised no ads in Gemini (for now) .

Silicon Valley's power brokers spent the past year currying favor with President Trump. Two deadly shootings in Minneapolis are now exposing the price of that bargain. It was November 12, 2016, four days after Donald Trump won his first presidential election. Aside from a few outliers (looking at you, Peter Thiel), almost everyone in the tech world was shocked and appalled. At a conference I attended that Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was " a pretty crazy idea " to think that his company had anything to do with the outcome.

'This train isn't going to stop': shocking Sundance film shows promises and perils of AI Is AI an existential threat, or an epochal opportunity? Those are the questions top of mind for a new documentary at Sundance, which features leading AI experts, critics and entrepreneurs, including Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, with views on the near-to-midterm future ranging from doom to utopia. 'The world is hurting right now': politics and protest hit the Sundance film festival The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell and produced by Daniel Kwan (one half of The Daniels, the Oscar-winning duo behind Everything Everywhere All At Once), delves into the contentious topic of AI through Roher's own anxiety. The Canadian film-maker, who won an Oscar in 2023 for the documentary Navalny, first became interested in the topic while experimenting with tools released by OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot ChatGPT. The sophistication of the public tools - the ability to produce whole paragraphs in seconds, or produce illustrations - both thrilled and unnerved him.

Silicon Valley's top CEOs have been noticeably silent after the Minneapolis shooting. Hours after Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy showed up for a movie night at the White House. Along with other business executives and several prominent Donald Trump supporters, they attended a private screening of, a new documentary about the president's wife. The moviegoers were treated to buckets of popcorn and sugar cookies frosted with the first lady's name. Silicon Valley's top executives have seemingly taken every opportunity to cozy up to Trump.

Altman's campaigning for his company coincides with its use of enormous present resources to serve an imagined future OpenAI CEO Sam Altman poses during the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit, at the Grand Palais, in Paris, on February 11, 2025. Sam Altman has claimed over the years that the advancement of AI could solve climate change, cure cancer, create a benevolent superintelligence beyond human comprehension, provide a tutor for every student, take over nearly half of the tasks in the economy and create what he calls "universal extreme wealth". In order to bring about his utopian future, Altman is demanding enormous resources from the present. As CEO of OpenAI, the world's most valuable privately owned company, he has in recent months announced plans for $1tn of investment into datacenters and struck multibillion-dollar deals with several chipmakers. If completed, the datacenters are expected to use more power than entire European nations .

'You'll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately,' Altman said while announcing the vacancy. 'You'll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately,' Altman said while announcing the vacancy. 'This will be a stressful job': Sam Altman offers $555k salary to fill most daunting role in AI New head of preparedness at OpenAI will face unnerving in-tray amid fears from some experts that AI could'turn on us' Mon 29 Dec 2025 09.44 ESTLast modified on Mon 29 Dec 2025 10.10 EST The maker of ChatGPT has advertised a $555,000-a-year vacancy with a daunting job description that would cause Superman to take a sharp intake of breath. In what may be close to the impossible job, the "head of preparedness" at OpenAI will be directly responsible for defending against risks from ever more powerful AIs to human mental health, cybersecurity and biological weapons. That is before the successful candidate has to start worrying about the possibility that AIs may soon begin training themselves amid fears from some experts they could "turn against us". "This will be a stressful job, and you'll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately," said Sam Altman, the chief executive of the San Francisco-based organisation, as he launched the hunt to fill "a critical role" to "help the world".