A smackdown for the ages at the Oscars after-party, and AI was the spark

March 22, 2026 — 1:30pm

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For star-struck podcaster Scott Galloway, the Vanity Fair Oscars after-party conjured “the most aspirational environment I’ve ever been in in my life”.

I certainly felt aspirational. I aspired to have fun in the beautiful, curvaceous new wing of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – before my high heels began to hurt. Compared with the boring Oscars ceremony, the party shimmered. Even stars like Al Pacino and Larry David, who often dart away early, were grinning and lingering. And who doesn’t like to see Mick Jagger devilishly dancing around with Jon Batiste?

In one dimly lit spot, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez Bezos were acting as passionately as a couple of teenagers; in another, Timothee Chalamet and Kylie Jenner were holding court across the bar from Kendall Jenner and Jacob Elordi. A gorgeous Jane Fonda was, naturally, literally getting her feelings off her chest, sporting a “BLOCK THE MERGER” button on her deep-brown sequin gown – referring to the depressing marriage of Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery.

The party had a euphoric vibe. So I was startled when two famous guests had a bristling smackdown.

On one side of this black-tie duel was Jeremy O. Harris, the 36-year-old playwright who shot to fame when he wrote the Tony-nominated Slave Play while still a student at Yale University’s drama school. He is not one to bite his tongue. On the other was Sam Altman, the sly chief executive of OpenAI.

I was standing nearby as Harris animatedly lit into Altman for 10 or 15 minutes. The 40-year-old tech mogul seemed taken aback but responded calmly, holding his ground. Harris was upset about Altman’s new deal with the Pentagon to provide AI for classified use. Some online hailed Harris as a hero. I called him after the party to hear the whole drama – a classic story of art rebuking commerce.

“I knew that people around us at the party were taking notice but I didn’t know that it would become a thing,” he said. Harris said he realised long ago, seeing “what OpenAI was already doing to the brains of kids”, seeing kids killing themselves, that “this technology is dangerous. I think wilfully allowing dangerous technology to be onboarded by society is, in and of itself, evil.” Even though it was a celebration, he said he could not ignore Altman “wilfully allowing his technology to be an agent in global violences”.

He said he told the powerful AI executive, “I don’t know how you can comfortably look at yourself in the mirror, knowing you just gave your technology over to a department that called themselves the Department of War, and which just killed 175.”

Last month Anthropic’s Dario Amodei refused to buckle when frat boy Pete Hegseth had a hissy fit and threatened bogusly to declare Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” if Amodei didn’t allow the Pentagon to use his AI in any way it wanted, as long as it was “lawful”. (“Lawful” has lost all meaning in the Trump administration.) Amodei did not want his AI to be used to surveil Americans or run autonomous weapons without human oversight. Now Anthropic is suing the government over its designation as a national security risk – including a new brief filed in California on Friday night – and the case could very well end up in the Supreme Court.

Altman swooped into Hegseth and Anthropic’s fight, offering to help smooth things over. But somehow Sneaky Sam simply got the contract by engaging in safety theatre while bending to the Pentagon’s demands. In a leaked memo to his staff, Amodei fumed that Altman was spinning, gaslighting and undercutting Anthropic.

It may not be such a triumph for Altman, though, because his desire to appease the Pentagon drove some of OpenAI’s scientific talent and many users toward Anthropic.

Harris said he told Altman, “You came out into the world, used our tax dollars in a nonprofit that espoused its goal to save humanity, to be this bright beacon for the future and hope.” Now, he told him, he is in bed with bad guys.

‘America’s first AI war’: Silicon Valley’s bet on military tech is paying off

The New York Post ran a story saying that Harris accused Altman of being the “Goebbels of the Trump administration”. But Harris rebutted, “It was late and I had a few too many martinis so I misspoke when I said Goebbels … I should’ve said Friedrich Flick.” Flick was the anti-Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who made a fortune working with the Nazis. He was found guilty of war crimes at Nuremberg and sent to prison.

Altman did not want to comment to me but his allies were stunned that Harris would compare a prominent Jewish businessperson to a Nazi collaborator, and they said they considered it antisemitic. Harris said he rejected that charge, saying it deadened the meaning of the word to claim that comparing any Jewish person to a Nazi collaborator is antisemitic.

Harris wants more people to rattle the cages of the Silicon Valley overlords who, in his view, are warping society and hurting democracy. When the “scary nerds” show up in Prada and Dior, he said, and want to swan around with the fashionable crowd, they should be shown the exit, not allowed to get “cosy in places of culture”.

“I don’t think any of them should feel comfortable in that room,” he said. “I think they should all be really aware of the fact that this is not a room that wants them.”

He was disappointed that more people weren’t challenging Altman and Bezos at the party.

“I’m left thinking, ‘Is this my Eartha Kitt-Lady Bird Johnson moment?’” Harris said, referring to the 1968 women’s luncheon at the White House when Kitt denounced the Vietnam War to the first lady. Kitt was investigated by the CIA afterwards and blacklisted in show business.

“I have no idea,” Harris said about the ripple effect of his “j’accuse” defiance. “There’s not too much that any of us can try to protect right now because these people are eroding the foundation upon which we stand.”

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© The Age