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Hello there and welcome to The Brief. As OpenAI prepares to go public, we bring you a story about its attempt at a reboot. The report, based on dozens of hours of interviews with more than 20 company leaders, employees, investors, customers, and rivals, questions whether the company can claw back its lead in the AI race. |
We’re also covering the devastating floods in Nepal, a Trump Administration threat to demolish the Kennedy Center, and keep on scrolling to hear what a Jurassic forest sounds like. |
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IN TODAY’S BRIEF |
Flash floods in Nepal The great toilet paper debate The Kennedy Center saga Americans feel guilty spending OpenAI’s reboot Robot beats Bolt Soundscape of a Jurassic forest
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READ THIS FIRST |
Flash floods leave dozens dead and hundreds missing in Nepal |
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Houses lie partially submerged with others swept away alongside the Trishuli river following flash flooding in Nuwakot, Nepal, on Aug. 26, 2026.Prabin Ranabhat - AFP via Getty Images |
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At least 270 people have been killed and more than a thousand more are missing after devastating flash floods swept through the Himalayan region along the Nepal-Tibet border, the country's prime minister’s office said Wednesday. |
Severe flooding was reported across the regions of Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading, and Gorkha, north of the Nepalese capital Kathmandu. The majority of the flooding has occurred along the Trishuli and Bhotekoshi rivers in the north of the country. |
Nepal's Home Minister Sudhan Gurung said more than 650 foreign nationals were among the missing. |
Of the missing, from figures compiled by several travel companies, 105 are confirmed to be Indian, 12 are British, and three are from the U.S. At least one Australian was also reported missing. —Callum Sutherland |
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HEALTH CHECK |
Is toilet paper bad for you? Here’s what experts say |
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Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Image: Pakin Songmor—Getty Images) |
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Toilet paper has become a hot topic online. You don’t have to look hard to find videos of health-conscious influencers warning about supposedly harmful ingredients in toilet paper. But how concerned should you be? |
Not very, most experts agree. |
Some say that toilet paper is worth examining more closely, and studies have found some concerning chemicals in toilet paper. |
How toilet paper interacts with people’s skin and their overall health is not well studied. But the research that has been done suggests that toilet paper does not pose significant health risks, experts agree. |
Dr. Amar Rewari, chief of radiation oncology at Luminis Health in Maryland, notes that PFAS and some other industrial chemicals are under study for possible long-term health effects, “but the levels typically found in consumer products like toilet paper are very small and not clearly linked to cancer.” —Jillian Pretzel |
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HAPPENING NOW |
Trump Administration warns Kennedy Center could be demolished if it isn’t fixed |
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President Donald Trump tours the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and leads a board meeting in Washington, D.C., on March 17, 2025.Chip Somodevilla—Getty Images |
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President Donald Trump has been engaged in an ongoing legal battle to attach his name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—and a new court filing warns that the building could eventually face demolition if his renovation plans do not proceed. |
In the filing, Justice Department lawyers representing the center argued that Trump’s proposed renovations were necessary to prevent what they called "a financial and structural death spiral." They described the building as “structurally unsound, fundamentally unsafe, and embarrassing to the Nation’s Capital” and warned that without the work, it could deteriorate to the point that it would need to be demolished. |
The filing suggested that the building could be replaced by a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River. The lawyers said that “such a replacement will fail to adequately honor President John F. Kennedy, but would be simpler and more economical to build, operate, and maintain.” —Chad de Guzman |
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THE CONTEXT |
Americans feel guilty after spending on things that bring them joy |
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A consumer purchases a coffee using their credit card.The Good Brigade/Getty Images |
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Paying for a fancy coffee, a trip to the cinema, or a dinner out can trigger a burst of happiness—that is, before the guilt sets in. |
Nearly three-quarters of Americans said they feel guilty when they spend money on things that give them a little joy, according to a new Cost of Life Today report by Ally Bank. |
The YouGov survey, which polled more than 5,000 American adults, found that financial pressures are making happiness harder to afford, with the average American adult scoring 54.2 out of 100 on Ally’s “Joy Index,” which measures people’s ability to afford and prioritize happiness, how frequently they experience it, and how resilient it remains under financial stress. |
The report comes during a cost-of-living crisis that has squeezed household budgets around the world. In the U.S., home prices have risen around 45% since 2020, while outstanding credit card debt remained at near record highs at $1.26 trillion in the second quarter of this year. —Miranda Jeyaretnam |
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IN FOCUS |
Inside OpenAI’s reboot |
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Photograph by Jessica Chou for TIME |
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It’s been a difficult stretch for the company that ushered in the AI boom. “We clearly had some missteps as a company,” Sam Altman tells TIME, sitting in the tastefully appointed MB0 library for more than two hours of interviews. “Both in terms of product direction and specifically on pretraining in research, we fell behind where we wanted to be.” Over the course of the past year, OpenAI lost the lead in the AI race to archrival Anthropic, which spotted the business opportunity in AI coding, built Claude Code into a market-defining product, and surpassed OpenAI in reported annualized revenue and private-market value for the first time. Anthropic, founded by OpenAI defectors, is now expected to be the first of the two companies to go public, two people familiar with its plans say, with the IPO as early as September. (TIME has a licensing and technology agreement with OpenAI. Salesforce, where TIME owner Marc Benioff is CEO, is an investor in Anthropic.) |
As Anthropic surged, OpenAI suffered a series of setbacks, including a spate of leadership departures. Google’s Gemini products now reach more than 1 billion people per month. Apple sued OpenAI, alleging theft of trade secrets. (OpenAI has denied the charges.) OpenAI battled its co-founder Elon Musk in a lawsuit. |
Perhaps the biggest reason the vibes around OpenAI and its CEO have soured is an erosion of public trust. OpenAI is defending at least a dozen California product-liability suits, plus federal cases in which plaintiffs allege ChatGPT reinforced delusions or suicidal thinking and, in several cases, contributed to users’ deaths. (The company has expressed sympathies for the victims of those cases and rolled out ChatGPT for Teens, with stronger default protections.) |
But inside OpenAI, execs paint a more upbeat picture. The company, valued at nearly $1 trillion, remains in an enviable position. ChatGPT is one of the most popular AI products in the world, with more than a billion active users, though it is no longer the cornerstone of the company’s future. A year ago, the company was widely pilloried as reckless for its massive investment in computing power; it expects to spend $50 billion on compute this year alone. Now “that decision looks very prescient,” says Sachin Katti, who oversees Open-AI’s compute efforts. “We are still short of compute. If anything, we should have bought a lot more.” —Alex Heath |
Read the full story here. |
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ONE NUMBER |
8.64 seconds |
A humanoid robot ran the 100 meters in 8.64 seconds on Wednesday, beating the record held by Jamaican Usain Bolt by almost a second. The “Robot Olympics” in Beijing this week has seen robots breaking human records in several events. |
SOURCE: REUTERS |
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A VIRAL MOMENT |
165-million-year-old insect chirps |
Scientists have re-created the soundscape of a Middle Jurassic forest using preserved 165-million-year-old fossil insect wings and machine learning. Click below to hear the sounds, which were used in Netflix’s new series, The Dinosaurs, produced by Steven Spielberg. |
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