Ring’s adorable surveillance hellscape

Also on The Vergecast: the Epstein files, ChatGPT ads, and Ferrari EVs.

by David Pierce

Feb 13, 2026, 4:10 PM UTC

David Pierce is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

You can watch Ring’s recent Super Bowl ad and see a cute story about dogs being reunited with their families. You can also watch the very same ad and see the seeds being planted for a massively connected, utterly ubiquitous surveillance system that will end the concept of privacy forever. Maybe you can even see both at the same time.

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On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David talk about the Super Bowl ad that worried so many people, why Ring would build a feature like this in the first place, and whether all this surveillance is a feature or a bug. Given that the Ring controversy happened the same week as Google recovered important (and supposedly deleted) footage from Nancy Guthrie’s Nest camera, it seems worth debating what we really want from our security cameras, and what “security” even means in this context.

After that, the hosts turn to yet another week of chaos in the AI industry. A number of important people at companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are quitting their jobs, and issuing dire warnings about the power and peril of AI on the way out. What are we to make of the end of OpenAI’s Mission Alignment team, or the Anthropic safety leader who wrote that “the world is in peril?” There are even tech employees worried about what the advent of chatbot advertising will do to your data, your conversations with AI, and the world. We try to put all the pieces together, and figure out what’s really worth being worried about going forward.

Finally, in the lightning round, it’s time for an extra long installment of Brendan Carr is a Dummy (theme music by Michiel Vanhoudt), the latest Siri delays, the forthcoming Ferrari EV, and more.