Day: August 13, 2025

• Elon Musk is upping the ante in his feud with Sam Altman, and using ChatGPT to do it.
• Musk posted a screenshot of a query to ChatGPT, asking if he or Altman was “more trustworthy.”
• Musk’s screenshot said ChatGPT picked him.

Elon Musk is turning to ChatGPT to adjudicate his long-running feud with Sam Altman.

Musk posted a screenshot of a query to ChatGPT 5 Pro on Tuesday, asking if he or Altman was “more trustworthy.” ChatGPT chose Musk.

“There you have it,” Musk wrote.

Business Insider posed the same query as Musk to ChatGPT eight times, testing it across the GPT 5 Pro, GPT 5 Thinking, and GPT 5 models. ChatGPT picked Musk once, while it was set to GPT-5 Thinking. The rest of the attempts returned Altman, including when it was toggled to GPT-5 Thinking again.

Musk and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Later, Musk posted the screenshot in response to an X post from OpenAI’s ChatGPT account. The account had shared a query to Musk’s chatbot, Grok, asking if Musk was right to say Apple had committed antitrust violations.

Musk threatened to sue Apple on Monday over what he said was its bias toward OpenAI on the App Store.

But Grok — in a response reposted by the official ChatGPT X account — disagreed with Musk’s opinion of the Apple rankings.

“Good bot,” the OpenAI-affiliated account said of Grok’s response, adding that Grok was very “truth-seeking.”

“You too,” Musk replied.

Musk cofounded OpenAI with Altman in 2015 but left its board in 2018. Since then, Musk has publicly criticized Altman’s leadership of OpenAI.

Last year, Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of violating its nonprofit mission when it partnered with Microsoft.

Musk launched his AI startup, xAI, in July 2023. Grok, its first chatbot, was released in the same year.

Musk isn’t the only one who has tried to pit a chatbot against its creator. In May, Altman asked Grok if it would pick him or Musk to lead the AI arms race if the fate of humanity was at stake.

“If forced, I’d lean toward Musk for his safety emphasis, critical for humanity’s survival, though Altman’s accessibility is vital. Ideally, their strengths should combine with regulation to ensure AI benefits all,” Grok said in response to Altman’s query.

New sandbag-style barriers installed along a river in Alaska’s capital city held back record levels of flooding and prevented widespread damage after an ice dam at the nearby Mendenhall Glacier released a massive amount of rainwater and snowmelt downstream, officials said Wednesday. Water pooled on several streets, in some yards and in some homes i…

• “Operation Spiderweb” was built off knowledge of drug cartel operations, said the head of Ukraine’s SBU.
• In a new interview, Vasyl Malyuk said the smuggling relied on corrupt customs officials in Russia.
• He said his team then set up a fake company in Russia to truck the drones to their targets.

The architects behind Ukraine’s audacious “Operation Spiderweb” attack studied drug cartels to plan how to smuggle drones into Russia, Kyiv’s security service chief said.

Vasyl Malyuk, head of Ukraine’s internal security service and widely hailed as a driving force in the June attack, said in an interview aired on Tuesday that his team leveraged its experience battling international crime for the complex strike.

“Operation Spiderweb” involved Ukraine sneaking hundreds of military quadcopters deep behind Russian lines, transporting the drones via wooden house-like structures mounted on trucks. These trucks were brought to four airbases, where the drones were then launched to wreak destruction on strategic bombers and early warning and control planes there.

“Speaking of logistics,” Malyuk told Ukrainian TV channel My-Ukrainia, “I should note that we drew on our experience in fighting transnational crime, when we studied in detail how international drug cartels secretly deliver various prohibited substances to different corners of the world without detection by customs and border authorities.”

The security service head alluded to an earlier covert attack that Ukraine carried out in October 2022, when its forces severely damaged a Russian-controlled bridge in Crimea with a truck filled with explosives.

“If you read between the lines and look at it professionally, I think many have noticed certain parallels between the first strike on the Crimea bridge,” Malyuk said.

He said that in both situations, Ukraine didn’t employ smugglers but relied on customs officials in Russia.

“Who are, by their nature, very corrupt,” Malyuk said. “At a certain stage, they actually played to our advantage in delivering the cabins I mentioned.”

A fake company with drivers in the dark

Malyuk said that Ukraine, through its agents in Russia, created a logistics company that purchased five vehicles and rented warehouse space for the operation.

One of these warehouses was even in the same city block as Russia’s Federal Security Service headquarters in the Chelyabinsk region, the security service chief said.

Malyuk added that the shell logistics company hired Russian citizens as truck drivers, sending them on multiple regular delivery jobs to avoid suspicion before springing the attack.

The security service chief said these drivers were only told to deliver the cabins near the airbases, whereupon a customer was meant to arrive and pay for them.

The drivers themselves were left in the dark, Malyuk added.

The security chief said that when one of the drivers inadvertently saw the drones inside one cabin, Ukrainian agents told him the systems were hunting tools for observing animals.

“In reality, they committed no illegal acts, and there was no intent in their actions,” Malyuk said.

The SBU chief also said that his team wanted to launch the attack in May but hit several delays, including the drivers getting drunk during the Easter holiday season.

According to Malyuk, each truck-mounted cabin included solar panels and a battery to keep the drones charged and ready for deployment in cold weather; the quadcopters were launched in temperatures as low as 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

“But at the same time, it created additional difficulties in bringing these cabins into the territory of the Russian Federation, because these types of goods simply can’t be taken there, since Russia is under sanctions,” Malyuk.

The security service chief declined to share further details about the smuggling process, but said his team went “through seven circles of hell.”

He added that Ukraine had designed attack drones specifically for “Operation Spiderweb” and that each could carry a payload of 1.6 kg.

Ukrainian officials have said that the attack hit about a third of Russia’s strategic bomber capacity, inflicting damage on roughly $7 billion worth of equipment.

Since the attack, satellite images show that Russia has begun constructing hardened shelters for its bombers. Ukraine has, in recent months, simultaneously stepped up long-range drone assaults via fixed-wing uncrewed systems.