The Download: Musk v. Altman, smart glasses for warfare, and Google I/O

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This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against OpenAI, which centered on whether the company breached its founding contract as a nonprofit. A jury found that he sued too late, meaning his claims are barred by statutes of limitations.

But the verdict didn’t judge if OpenAI violated its nonprofit mission—only whether Musk brought the case in time. The dispute centers on when OpenAI began shifting toward a for-profit structure. The company argued that signs of a shift were visible as early as 2017, while Musk said he only discovered the change in 2022.

The defense-tech company Anduril has shared new details about the augmented-reality headset for the military it’s prototyping with Meta, including a vision for ordering drone strikes via eye-tracking and voice commands. Quay Barnett, who leads the effort at Anduril following a career in the Army’s Special Operations Command, says he aims to optimize “the human as a weapons system.” When Google opens its doors today for its annual developer conference, I/O, it will do so as a clear third place in the foundation model race. A foundation model’s reputation these days rests largely on its coding capabilities, and for months Google’s coding tools have been outgunned by Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex.

But the company still shapes the cutting edge in areas such as AI for science. At I/O this week, it will try to prove it can compete on both fronts. As the limits of LLMs become clearer, researchers are developing a new kind of AI designed to understand the physical environment: world models.

Recent developments from Google DeepMind, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, and Yann LeCun’s new startup have pushed these systems to the forefront of AI.