The Looting of Cambodia, Part 2

 

[This is the second part of the transcript of a 60 Minutes (CBS News) segment originally broadcast on 17 December 2023 and rerun on 28 June 2026.  As readers of Rick On Theater know, I have a strong interest in art in general, and in the preservation of art in particular.

[Other ROT posts on that subject include: “‘How High-Tech Replicas Can Help Save Our Cultural Heritage‘“ by Jeffrey Brown of PBS News Hour (28 May 2017); “Conserving Modern Art“ (11 December 2018); “‘Smithsonian and U.S. Army join forces to save works of art and culture threatened by war‘“ by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport of PBS News Hour (15 September 2022); “Greenwood Pond: Double Site“ (22 February 2024); ”Two Restorations“ (4 November 2024); and “Replicating Classic Art Works“ (21 February 2026).] 

“HOW CAMBODIAN ARTIFACTS STOLEN FROM TEMPLES
ENDED UP IN AMERICAN MUSEUMS, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS”
(continued)
by Anderson Cooper

[Cooper’s 60 Minutes report, with video, is posted on the CBS News website.  I have split it into two parts for republication on ROT, with Part 1 posted on Wednesday. 8 July.  As always, I recommend that ROTters go back and read the beginning of the transcript before turning to Part 2, below.  (There’s a brief précis of Cambodian history in the afterword to Part 1.)]

Cambodia tracking down thousands of priceless looted antiquities

It’s taken a team of Cambodian investigators led by Brad Gordon, an American lawyer, more than 10 years to document the theft of thousands of ancient statues and relics by a British collector named Douglas Latchford. As we reported in 2023, they’ve managed to get some of what he stole back, but many of Cambodia’s greatest treasures are still out there, hidden away in the mansions of millionaires and billionaires, and hiding in plain sight, on display in some of the most prestigious museums around the world.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has one of the most important collections of Cambodian antiquities in the world. But many of the finest pieces on display here in the Southeast Asian art wing [the South and Southeast Asian Art collection, housed in the Florence and Herbert Irving Asian Wing] . . . are stolen. Like this one. And this one . . . This as well – all passed through the hands of Douglas Latchford. 

Latchford sold this one to the Met in the early 1990s . . . This one he donated. 

Anderson Cooper: Do you think people visiting the Met, know that these were looted? 

Brad Gordon: I think most people walk through the Met, they have no idea those are blood antiquities. They have no idea what– what the history is behind those pieces. They don’t know– the temples they came from. They don’t know the people who were killed to get them here.

Anderson Cooper: The dirt has been brushed off. There’s a little note that says where it came from. Should people believe what’s on that little note?

Brad Gordon: No. Absolutely not.

In 2023, we went with Brad Gordon to see where in Cambodia the Met and other museums’ collections really did come from. 

Anderson Cooper: This is incredible.

This seven-story pyramid is more than 1,000 years old . . . and rises out of the jungle in Koh Ker in northeast Cambodia . . . It’s one of dozens of temples in what was once the capital [928-944 CE] of an ancient Khmer empire.

Anderson Cooper: –looters have been all over this site for– for decades.

Brad Gordon: Correct. 

Anderson Cooper: Douglas Latchford loved the statuary . . .

Brad Gordon: In love with the beauty, in love with the artistic–

Anderson Cooper: The statues from here are–

Anderson Cooper: –have a distinctive style that he particularly loved?

Brad Gordon: Correct. 

And perhaps the most famous statues in that distinctive style that Latchford stole from Koh Ker were nine stone warriors once arranged together in a battle scene [10th century; stolen from the Prasat Chen temple at Koh Ker]. When we were there, seven had been returned to the National Museum in Phnom Penh, including this 500-pound sandstone sculpture — it’s the one Sotheby’s tried to sell in 2011. They’re back on their original pedestals, their ankles reunited with their feet, hacked off by looters.

Anderson Cooper: This was at Sotheby’s. This is at Christie’s.

Hab Touch: Norton Simon’s.

Anderson Cooper: Norton Simon Museum [Pasadena, California]–

Hab Touch [b. 1965] is the secretary of state in Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture [2019-present]. He is working with Brad Gordon to bring back the two Koh Ker statues who’s empty pedestals sit in the museum.

Anderson Cooper: So do you know what are supposed to be on–

Anderson Cooper: You know what are supposed to be here, and you know what’s–

Hab Touch: We know–

Anderson Cooper: –supposed to be here?

Hab Touch: Among nine sculpture, we have seven already. Only two missing.

One of those missing sculptures was discovered in the glossy pages of Architectural Digest in 2008 . . . this mythical army commander and a stunning number of other stolen works . . . were all together in the Palm Beach mansion of the late billionaire George Lindemann [1936-2018; businessman; CEO of a fossil fuel infrastructure and pipeline company] and his wife Frayda [b. 1939]. 

[The referenced article and photo spread was “Striking a New Note in Palm Beach” by Judith Thurman in the January 2008 issue of AD. (nb: The link to the slide show that includes the Cambodian statues seems to be broken. Some views are shown on the 60 Minutes video. If a reader is a subscriber to AD, or wishes to become one, back articles are available on the magazine’s website.) There are two later articles that comment/report on this one: Spencer Woodman, Malia Politzer, Peter Whoriskey and Nicole Sadek, “Hidden Treasures: Magazine spread of ‘most beautiful house in America’ conceals allegedly stolen Cambodian relics,” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (website) 15 Aug. 2022,  <https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/lindemann-cambodia-relics-altered-photo-magazine/>, 12 July 2026, and Sarah Cascone, “An ‘Architectural Digest’ Spread About Two Art Collectors Was Photoshopped to Obscure Potentially Looted Cambodian Statues in Their Home,” artnet 16 Aug. 2022, <https://news.artnet.com/art-world/looted-cambodian-art-architectural-digest-2160490>, 12 July 2026.]

Anderson Cooper: The ancient treasures of Cambodia were sitting in the living room of an incredibly wealthy family in America, in Florida, on display, while people were having cocktails and–

Brad Gordon: The one thing that I’m always struck by is how many people witnessed it and have been silent and continue to be silent today.

The Lindemann’s spent an estimated $20 million building the collection with the help of Douglas Latchford . . . Frayda Lindemann didn’t respond to our request for an interview.

But in Koh Ker . . . we showed her home to two former looters.

Anderson Cooper: What do you think of this house?

It’s a beautiful house, he said, it looks like it belongs to a king.

The former looters pointed out another statue in the Lindemann’s living room they said they helped steal . . . this reclining figure of the Hindu God Vishnu. They said it was dug out of the ground from this exact spot in late 1995.

Anderson Cooper: You’re 100% sure this was taken from here by you and others in 1995?

Lida (translated): Yeah, I’m sure. 

They also identified a number of other statues they say they stole that appear in books published by Douglas Latchford. They say they found this copper statue using a metal detector.

Anderson Cooper: This is Bodhisattva at Ease [late 10th century to the early 11th century; looted from the Koh Ker temple complex]? 

[In Buddhism, a bodhisattva is a person who has attained, or is striving towards, bodhi (meaning ‘awakening’ or ‘enlightenment’) or Buddhahood. In this sculpture, the word refers to a class of powerful, semi-divine savior deities (here, specifically, Avalokiteshvara, a celestial being of infinite compassion and mercy) who forgo or delay personal liberation (nirvana) or bodhi in order to help other individuals reach Buddhahood.]

Brad Gordon: Yeah. 

They dug it out of the ground here in 1990. J.P. Labbat, former special agent with Homeland Security, found photos of the statue covered in dirt on Douglas Latchford’s computer. Latchford sold it to the Met in 1992. When we visited, it was still on display.

Anderson Cooper: You were able to get access to some of Latchford’s– emails?

J.P. Labatt: Yes. And in there– there are d– detailed– stories about the manner in which he obtained pieces, the fact that he was having them reassembled– and repaired, that dirt and– and crustaceans were being– cleaned off of them.

Anderson Cooper: They were freshly dug out of the ground?

J.P. Labatt: Fresh. The– these were fresh pieces that he would describe in his emails that needed a level of restoration before he could even attempt to sell them. 

Douglas Latchford was indicted in 2019 but died [of complications of Parkinson’s disease in Bangkok at 89] before he could be put on trial. Federal prosecutors in New York however continued tracing his looted artifacts . . . they believe at least 18 of them have landed up at the Met.

Andrea Bayer: I am very involved in our work on provenance.

Andrea Bayer [b. 1957] is deputy director for Collections and Administration at The Met.

Anderson Cooper: The Met has said that they will return objects based upon rigorous evidentiary review. What rigorous evidentiary review was done before acquiring these pieces?

Andrea Bayer: Not enough.

Anderson Cooper: It seems like the Met had a don’t ask, don’t tell policy. They wanted to build up their collection. And nobody was really asking questions where it came from.

Andrea Bayer: For people, many people in the art world, there was a sense of protecting great objects that stood a chance of being destroyed. We no longer feel about it that way.

Under pressure 13 years ago, the Met did return two statues called Kneeling Attendants [10th century; stolen from Koh Ker during the civil war of the 1970s], which had been donated to them by Douglas Latchford. 

Anderson Cooper: In 2013, when you returned the kneeling attendants, did you investigate the other items that Douglas Latchford had brought to this museum?

Andrea Bayer: I don’t know the answer to that question. I can only pick up the story several years later, when Doug– Douglas Latchford was indicted in 2019, when we immediately and proactively went to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and offered our full cooperation.

Anderson Cooper: Well, I can pick up the story actually in 2013, because a spokesman for the Met, said that “No special effort was gonna be made to check the provenances of any other Douglas Latchford donated work.” Why wouldn’t the Met want to look into everything else that Douglas Latchford had brought to this museum?

Andrea Bayer: I can’t speculate about why that didn’t happen.

Anderson Cooper: But no one investigated all the other items that Douglas Latchford gave?

Andrea Bayer: Not to my knowledge.

The Met is not the only major museum with looted Cambodian artifacts, but its collection is one of the largest in the world. In 2023, the museum announced it would create a research team to examine the provenance or acquisition history of all its collections. 

Anderson Cooper: It’s taken 10 years since Douglas Latchford was shown to have given stolen property to the Met, for the Met to set up this provenance team. Why has it taken 10 years?

Andrea Bayer: It was a slow process, I’ll grant you that. It was a slow process, but– I think that the fact that we are– fully engaged now, fully cooperative now is– is our only answer to this really. it’s a moment of reckoning, and we’re ready to do what it takes now– to right whatever the wrong is. 

Anderson Cooper: Four years ago, when Douglas Latchford was indicted by prosecutors, did you set up a team to check the provenance of every Latchford work–

Andrea Bayer: Yes. We started, absolutely we started to dig in right then and there. It’s not easy. I mean the fact that we don’t have much information has to do with the fact that it’s very hard to find the information–

Anderson Cooper: But there’s enough information for federal prosecutors- to charge Douglas Latchford with stealing and looting and trafficking in smuggled items. How much more evidence do you need? You haven’t–

Andrea Bayer: We need–

Anderson Cooper: –returned any of the– any Douglas Latchford-related items since he’s been indicted, and that was four years ago.

Andrea Bayer: But we are on the verge of– of– of returning a number of them.

Anderson Cooper: All of them?

Andrea Bayer: That I can’t say.

Four months after that interview, just two days before we went to air in 2023, prosecutors announced the Met would return 13 antiquities that came through Douglas Latchford.

But the Met has not returned this statue, which was specifically cited in the indictment of Latchford, or this one, which Latchford sold to the Met in 1992.

Cambodia’s Culture Minister called the Met’s announcement a “first step” and says she looks “forward to the return of many more of our treasures.”

Anderson Cooper: Shouldn’t museums have thought twice about buying things that were coming out of Cambodia in– during the genocide and civil war and decades of strife?

J.P. Labatt: And this question that you raise is really– the– the crux of– of what we’re wrestling with. 

J.P. Labatt: You– acquired pieces from a known smuggler who– used a team of looters that the government has interviewed and taken statements from. They have emails which refute the information in your own provenance at the museum. You have items in the museum which were named in the indictment of Latchford that are still there. And so these pieces should go back.

Anderson Cooper: There’s no question.

J.P. Labatt: It’s the right thing to do.

In 2023, the Lindemann family, whose collection was showcased in Architectural Digest, struck a deal with federal authorities . . . voluntarily agreeing to return 33 stolen treasures. In a statement to the New York Times [Tom Mashberg, “Lindemann Family Returns 33 Looted Artifacts to Cambodia,” 12 Sept. 2023 (online only)], the Lindemann’s said: “Having purchased these items from dealers that we assumed were reputable, we were saddened to learn how they made their way to the market in the United States.”

Anderson Cooper: Why did the Lindemanns agree to return their collection to Cambodia?

J.P. Labatt: The pieces were dirty. I– I think they finally came around to the– the fact that– Latchford was dirty, their collection was– was all looted pieces. It was obvious. And– and so they– they– decided to surrender them.

We got a peek at what was the Lindemann collection shortly after the deal was done. It was sitting in a warehouse in upstate New York. A nation’s living gods and ancestors waiting for a ride home.

Brad Gordon: This is like a whole wing of a museum.

A wing of a museum that only the Lindemann’s and their friends had access to. 

Anderson Cooper: If the Lindemann’s hadn’t published these in Architectural Digest back in 2008?

Brad Gordon: I think there’s a good chance we maybe never would have found it. 

Brad Gordon: We always say, the gods want to come home. We feel like the gods have spoken today. They want to come home.

As one of the biggest crates was being opened . . . waiting eagerly was Muikong Taing and Thyda Long . . . two members of Brad Gordon’s investigative team. This would be their first look at the mythical army commander taken from Koh Ker . . . they were likely the first Cambodians to set eyes on it since Douglas Latchford stole it more than 50 years ago.

Thyda Long: He’s here.

Anderson Cooper: There’s a look in his eyes and on his face.

Thyda Long: It’s much bigger than I expected it to be.

Anderson Cooper: His presence is extraordinary.

Thyda Long: I did not expect to feel this way. 

Even the commander seemed to be smiling. 

Then it was time to see the rarest piece in the Lindemann’s collection. The Cambodian team knelt in reverence as the Hindu god Vishnu [10th century; looted from the Prasat Krachap temple in Koh Ker] was uncrated. Despite all the fuss, he appeared unperturbed . . . reclining in a cosmic slumber. When this statue arrived in Cambodia, it was welcomed as one of the most important ever returned.

Earlier this month, the Met returned two more artifacts to Cambodia following a seizure by the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit. The Cambodian government is still demanding the repatriation of 30 others in the Met’s possession.

Produced by Michael H. Gavshon and Nadim Roberts. Associate producer, Eliza Costas. Broadcast associate, Grace Conley. Edited by Patrick Lee. 

[With respect to restoration of the ancient artifacts in the Cambodian temples about which Anderson Cooper reports above, looting, aside from its desecration, is an act of vandalism—the willful and malicious damaging of the sculptures. 

[In my coverage of art conservation and preservation on ROT, there are other forms of damage and potential damage against which art conservators and restorers must struggle.  I want to offer a look at another kind of conservation and restoration with which I had personal experience.

[Back in 2007, there was an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., on the conservation and preservation of experimental and innovative art that doesn’t age well or lend itself easily to cleaning.  

[As artists were experimenting with new media and techniques, they never considered how those elements would change over time.  This created sometimes immense challenges for museums and conservators, as well as private owners with fewer resources, long after the artists had probably died. 

[Some years earlier, in 1985, the Hirshhorn had mounted another exhibit in which works modern artists from the museum’s own collection that had undergone conservation treatment were shown.  The conserved pieces were accompanied by photographs depicting what they’d looked like before the treatment.  

[A later Hirshhorn display, in 2003-2004, was “intended to address the interaction of principle, practice, materials, techniques and ideas, which characterizes the preservation and care of contemporary and modern art.”

[I had a serious problem of this nature with a painting from 1958 that began to deteriorate because of the innovative technique the artist used to create it.  The fate of my little Abstract Expressionist painting, Intermezzo by Norman Carton (1908-80), is a simple, but perfect example of this issue.  

[The 18-inch-by-16-inch, heavily impastoed, multi-colored work in oil on canvas, a 14th-birthday gift for me from my parents, is one of the most cherished pieces I have and, except when I went to college and the army, I took it with me every time I moved. 

[In the 1980s, the painting began to deteriorate.  The oil paint—Carton made the painting before new pigments like acrylics were invented—had just begun to dry on the inside of the thick gobs the artist had applied to the canvas with a palette knife.  Who knew it would take three decades for oil paint to dry inside large clumps?  

[As the paint dried, the globs shrank and pulled away from the canvas, not only threatening to come off, but causing cracks and flakes (called “cleavage,” “flaking,” “blistering,” or “scaling”) in the primer (known as “ground”) and flatter areas of paint on the canvas.  I knew that if I didn’t do something, I’d lose the painting.  

[I was frantic.  I even went so far as to write to the administration of New York’s New School for Social Research (now just The New School), where Carton had exhibited and taught, because on the third floor of the old main building, the school displayed a larger Carton canvas in the same style as my small one.  I asked if they had encountered the same problem and, if so, what they did about it, but I never received an answer.

[At the time, my father was a docent at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, so I asked him to use his contacts at the museum to find a conservator who might be able to save Intermezzo and he did.  In 1987, I ended up paying five times the painting’s 1960 purchase price—but a quarter of its estimated value at the time—to stabilize it to prevent further deterioration.  To this day, I don’t regret the expenditure for a New York second.]

The Looting of Cambodia, Part 1

[This post is the transcript of a 60 Minutes (CBS News) segment originally broadcast on 17 December 2023 and rerun 28 June 2026.  Apparently, I didn’t deem Anderson Cooper’s report worth republishing on Rick On Theater two-and-a-half years ago, but on watching it again last week, I decided it is.  Given my interest in art in general, and in the preservation of art in particular, I can’t explain my first decision.]

“HOW CAMBODIAN ARTIFACTS STOLEN FROM TEMPLES
ENDED UP IN AMERICAN MUSEUMS, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS”
by Anderson Cooper

[Anderson Cooper’s 60 Minutes report, with video, is posted on the CBS News website.  I have split it into two parts for republication on ROT.  The second installment will be posted on Saturday, 11 July. 

[Other posts on ROT that deal with the conservation or preservation of art and antiquities include: “‘How High-Tech Replicas Can Help Save Our Cultural Heritage‘“ by Jeffrey Brown of PBS News Hour (28 May 2017); “Conserving Modern Art“ (11 December 2018); “‘Smithsonian and U.S. Army join forces to save works of art and culture threatened by war‘“ by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport of PBS News Hour (15 September 2022); “Greenwood Pond: Double Site“ (22 February 2024); “Two Restorations“ (4 November 2024); and “Replicating Classic Art Works“ (21 February 2026).]

Cambodia tracking down thousands of priceless looted antiquities

The theft of Cambodia’s cultural treasures . . . thousands of sacred stone, bronze and gold artifacts from religious sites across the country . . . might just be the greatest art heist in history. It began nearly a century ago when Cambodia was colonized by France [the French protectorate lasted from 1863 until 1953, interrupted from 1941 to 1945 during the World War II occupation by Japan] . . . but in the 1970s, 80s and 90s amidst genocide, civil war, and political turmoil – the looting became a global business, much of it run by a British man named Douglas Latchford [1931-2020]. He kept some of it for himself, but much of what his gang of thieves stole, Latchford then sold to wealthy private collectors and some of the most important museums around the world. As we first reported in 2023, Cambodia’s government has spent the last 14 years trying to track it all down . . . and bring their history and heritage home.

Angkor Wat [Khmer for ‘City (or ‘Capital’) of Temples’], with its towering spires, is the glory of Cambodia. Nearly a thousand years old, it’s one of the biggest and most extraordinary religious temples in the world — sprawling across 400 acres. Originally built [1122-1150 CE] to honor the Hindu god Vishnu, it then became a Buddhist temple [ca. 1181 CE], and remains a place of worship today. You can wander here for weeks, lost in a labyrinth of ancient stone corridors and sacred chambers. But the scars of plunder run deep: looters have hacked off the heads of many statues . . . they’ve stolen bodies as well . . . empty pedestals mark where gods and deities once stood . . . on some, only the feet remain.

It’s worse in the rest of Cambodia’s 4,000 temples. Nearly all have been looted. This one is a hundred miles northeast of Angkor Wat . . . on a remote mountain . . . called Sandak [established late 9th century CE].

Brad Gordon: This was hit very heavily by the looting gangs.

Brad Gordon: They found gold, they found statues, they found many, many things.

That’s Brad Gordon, an American lawyer, who’s been working for the Cambodian government for 14 years, tracking down its stolen treasures . . . he brought us to Sandak with his team of investigators, archeologists and art scholars.

Anderson Cooper: This is so cool.

In the temple’s crumbling courtyard, little remains . . . mostly empty pedestals scattered among the Sralao trees.

Anderson Cooper: It’s remarkable to me just how much stuff is just scattered on the ground. 

Brad Gordon: Yes.

Brad Gordon: It’s like a pedestal graveyard.

Anderson Cooper: We’ve all seen in museums these statues with no feet on them, and I don’t think people realize the feet were hacked off. Because in order to steal them, that’s the easiest way to– to get them off the pedestal.

Brad Gordon: And we know when the looters came to sites like this, the first thing they took was the heads. That was the easiest to grab. And then later on maybe they come back and get the torso. But they were not very careful, so they left behind pieces.

For Cambodians, these statues are not just works of art . . . they are sacred deities that hold the souls of their ancestors to whom they ask for guidance and pray . . .

Anderson Cooper: This is incredible. Th– these were all looted.

Phoeurng Sackona: Yes, all looted.

Anderson Cooper: All of these heads, like, cut off–

Phoeurng Sackona: And the head was cut off, yes.

Phoeurng Sackona [b. 1959], Cambodia’s minister of culture [2013-present], is in charge of the government’s efforts to track down their stolen gods. We met her in a closely guarded warehouse not far from Angkor Wat . . . ––where more than 6,000 pieces from temples across the country are stored for safekeeping . . . each one sculpted by an artisan from an ancient Khmer Empire . . . that lasted for more than five centuries [802-1431 CE] and spanned Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. 

Anderson Cooper: So the statues have a soul? The statues are– are they living?

Phoeurng Sackona: For us, yes.

Phoeurng Sackona: And we believe that we can talk with them. They will hear. They will see. What do you want? What do you see? What do you do in your life, in your house, outside in the society, also? So that–

Anderson Cooper: They’re watching.

Phoeurng Sackona: They’re watching, everywhere . . .

Phoeurng Sackona’s entire family was killed in the genocide that began in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge, a radical communist group took over, forcing millions of Cambodians into labor camps. Some 2 million people, nearly a quarter of the population, were slaughtered or starved to death. The Khmer Rouge lost power in 1979 [to the invading army of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam], but fighting and instability continued for decades, leaving Cambodia’s temples unprotected and vulnerable . . . easy targets for unscrupulous antiquities dealers like Douglas Latchford.

Anderson Cooper: Who was Douglas Latchford?

Brad Gordon: I would say that he was, in many ways, the mastermind behind the greatest art heist in history.

Anderson Cooper: The greatest art heist in history?

Brad Gordon: Yes, in terms of scope and multitude of crime sites and the enormous amount of statues that were taken out.

Latchford lived in Thailand . . . an enigmatic British businessman . . . he began collecting in the 1960s. He had, it seems, two great loves: Cambodian antiquities and . . . Thai bodybuilders . . . He sponsored Bangkok’s biggest bodybuilding competition, the Latchford Classic [from ca. 2004].

Anderson Cooper: How would you describe him?

Brad Gordon: He was extremely deceptive, I think in many ways, was ruthless. But he hid that behind this incredible façade of charm.

Latchford portrayed himself as a scholar and protector of Cambodia’s culture, a reputation he burnished by donating sculptures to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other prestigious institutions. He also published three books filled with the finest examples of Cambodian antiquities [Adoration and Glory: The Golden Age of Khmer Art (Art Media Resources, 2004); Khmer Gold Gifts for the Gods (Art Media Resources, 2008); Khmer Bronzes: New Interpretations of the Past (Art Media Resources, 2011)] . . . many of them, it turns out, Latchford had stolen.

Brad Gordon: He was using the books as sales catalogs. You know, he was handing them out. He was using them to sell pieces. And– and he understood a certain psychology of collectors out there that if they see something in a beautiful book, they think it’s legitimate.

Those books have been an invaluable guide for Brad Gordon and his team, helping them compile a database of thousands of missing artifacts. Many of which they didn’t know existed until Latchford published photos of them. 

Gordon’s team got their big break when they met this man in 2012. He was a former Khmer Rouge child soldier and leader of a gang of looters. His name was Toek Tik [ca. 1959-2021; pronounced day duck].

Brad Gordon: That first meeting, I– I didn’t really know who we had met. You know, I knew– I knew that he was important. I knew that many people were telling me he was the best. And I knew that he was feared. 

Anderson Cooper: Why were people afraid of him?

Brad Gordon: You know, over the years, he had killed many people. 

It turned out Toek Tik had worked for decades supplying Douglas Latchford with thousands of treasures . . . and he was amazed to see them again in Latchford’s books.

Brad Gordon: He kept opening the book and going back to the front cover and– and going through and tapping and saying, “I know this one. I know this one. I know this one.” 

Anderson Cooper: And when he says he knew this one, means he– he helped loot the– those ones.

Brad Gordon: That’s what we learned later, yeah.

Toek Tik became a key confidential source for Gordon’s team. They gave him a code name, Lion, to protect his identity. And followed him to dozens of temples where he confessed what he’d found, and how he’d stolen it.

Brad Gordon: He would say to us, “I’m gonna transfer everything in my head to you. I’m gonna tell you everything. Every secret.”

Anderson Cooper: You felt like his memory was very good. It was accurate.

Brad Gordon: Oh it was unbelievable. He remembered the size of everything. Measured against his body. He would use his arm to show us how long a statue was.

Anderson Cooper: Why do you think he wanted to cooperate?

Brad Gordon: You know, he felt tremendously guilty about many things he had done in his life, about the killing, about the looting. And we offered him a road of redemption– a way to do something really good at the end of his life.

They recorded hundreds of hours of Lion’s testimony . . . he explained how gangs of looters would spend weeks at remote temples . . . using shovels, chisels, metal detectors . . . even dynamite . . . to find and dig out treasures. Dozens of men would hoist heavy stone statues onto oxcarts before transporting them across the border . . . into Thailand . . . and into the hands of Douglas Latchford. Lion never met Latchford, but he’d send him photographs of artifacts he could choose from.

Brad Gordon: We hear about them saying, “Oh we had to go to this temple and take a photo. And then sending it back.” You know, my sense is he was shopping. He had a list. The looters knew his priorities.

Like these . . . which came from a temple complex called Koh Ker [koh kay]. The statues from there had a distinctive style that Latchford loved.

It was, however, a dangerous business. Most looters only made enough to buy food for their families. And fighting between rival gangs was common. 

Anderson Cooper: People were killed over these– these antiquities. Do you look at these as blood statues?

Brad Gordon: For sure. They’re blood antiquities. Whenever I see a statue I think about, you know, who died to– to get this out of the ground or get it out of a temple and to– to move it here? So, so much of this looting was done in the shadow of the war, shadow of the genocide. 

It was this 500-pound sandstone warrior from Koh Ker that appeared in a Sotheby’s auction catalog in 2011 that put Douglas Latchford on the radar of U.S. law enforcement. Its feet were missing. And the price tag? An estimated $2-3 million.

J.P. Labbat: When it appeared in the market– there were a number of archaeologists, a number of people who immediately recognized the– the source of the statue as being a specific temple in Cambodia.

Anderson Cooper: It c– came from Koh Ker?

J.P. Labbat: That’s right.

Until he retired in 2023, J.P. Labbat was a special agent on the cultural property, art and antiquities unit with Homeland Security. 

J.P. Labbat: A team from the U.S. Attorney’s Office at the Southern District of New York traveled to Cambodia– to inspect the site where the statue had been removed.

J.P. Labbat: And so the base– was still there with it with the feet still in the ground. And so– they were able to match that base and feet to the statue.

Anderson Cooper: And that was enough evidence to get the statue pulled off the market?

J.P. Labbat: That’s right. 

After years of legal wrangling, Sotheby’s finally agreed to send this stolen warrior back to Cambodia . . .

A ceremony was held welcoming it home . . . and investigators were able to trace its original sale back to Douglas Latchford . . . who was asked about its repatriation in a German documentary in 2014 [Die Spur der Tempelräuber (‘The trail of the temple robbers’; known in English as The Stolen Warriors; nb: film databases like IMDb list the release date as 2015)].

Wolfgang Luck: Is it a good day for Cambodia, or is it a bad day for the art market if these things are coming back? 

Douglas Latchford: It’s a good day for Cambodia, it’s a bad day for the art market.

Law enforcement in New York was closing in on Latchford, but he claimed prosecutors had him all wrong. 

Douglas Latchford: Their imagination has gone wild. They’ve seen too many Indiana Jones films. As far as I know there is no such thing as a smuggling network and I certainly don’t belong to any smuggling network.

Anderson Cooper: The attempted sale of this statue in 2011, was that a turning point in the unraveling of Douglas Latchford?

J.P. Labbat: I would say yes. That case put more of a– focus and a spotlight on him. And then efforts were– were then doubled to, like, really peel back the onion and look into Latchford’s activities.

The testimony of former looters found by Brad Gordon and his team was critical for the U.S. attorney’s case against Latchford. 

Anderson Cooper: How rare is it to actually have access to the looters? To people who actually stole these things 10, 20, 30 years ago.

J.P. Labbat: I know of no other case where– where that’s happened. And– it– it’s quite remarkable to have looters actively assisting a team of investigators to recover artifacts that they had a firsthand in helping remove from the country.

Douglas Latchford was finally indicted by U.S. authorities in 2019 for smuggling, conspiracy, wire fraud and other charges, but he died before he could be put on trial. Brad Gordon eventually convinced Latchford’s family to return his personal collection of stolen treasures . . . Among the first pieces to come home in 2021 was this statue from Koh Ker. Lion, weakened by cancer, came to inspect it in Cambodia’s National Museum to verify it was the same one he’d dug out of the ground.

Brad Gordon: And then he turned to me and he said, “It’s the real statue.” You know, it was a remarkable thing to watch. And just his– his relationship, it– it was living to him.

Anderson Cooper: Do you think he was happy it was back? 

Brad Gordon: Thrilled. So happy, he knew that he had done something good. 

Lion died a few months later . . . but the secrets he revealed continue to bring statues back to Cambodia’s National Museum . . . masterpieces that left the country long before these school children were born.

Anderson Cooper: Does the return of these statues, of these Gods, help some to heal.

Phoeurng Sackona: Yes. To get back the soul of the nation.

Anderson Cooper: The soul of the nation.

Phoeurng Sackona: It’s not only for me– but all of my family who was died [sic] during the war, and for– for all Cambodian people.

There are still many more stolen Cambodian statues and artifacts in museums and private collections around the world. 

When we return, Cambodia’s fight to get those looted relics back.

Produced by Michael H. Gavshon and Nadim Roberts. Associate producer, Eliza Costas. Broadcast associate, Grace Conley. Edited by Patrick Lee. 

[I don’t want to do a history lesson here, but I think a little background and some identifications are useful.  The Khmer Empire was established in 802 CE and by the 12th century, when most of the temples in the 60 Minutes report were built, was the largest empire in Southeast Asia.  The empire prospered and grew until 1431, when wars with neighboring kingdoms led to the sack of Angkor, the imperial capital. The empire went into decline and existed under the influence of Siam and Annam (now known as Thailand and Vietnam), reduced to little more than a vassal state.

[King Norodom (1834-1904) signed a treaty of protection with France, making the Kingdom of Cambodia a French protectorate—read “colony”—from 1863 until it gained independence in 1953 under King Norodom Sihanouk (1922-2012).  In 1970, Sihanouk was ousted in a military coup by Lon Nol (1913-85), a Cambodian politician and general who proclaimed the Khmer Republic. 

[Khmer means ‘Cambodian’ in the native language, which is also called Khmer.  Khmer Rouge, French for ‘Red Cambodian,’ is the name Sihanouk gave to the Communist Party of Kampuchea led by Pol Pot (1925-98); it became the term everyone, both inside the country and abroad, used for the CPK.  Kampuchea is the anglicization of the indigenous Khmer name for Cambodia.

[On 17 April 1975, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces took Phnom Penh, the capital of the country, and the next year established the radical Marxist-Leninist state of Democratic Kampuchea.  Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge set about removing from Kampuchea all foreign and bourgeois influences by rounding up all intellectuals, professionals, capitalists, and artists and sending them to camps in the countryside; Phnom Penh, a city of 370,000 inhabitants in 1975, was almost emptied of people. 

[By 1978, only 32,000 people lived in the city; many of the Cambodians the Khmer Rouge transported died either from execution, harsh conditions and treatment, or disease.  Between 21 and 24 percent of Cambodia’s population was lost, from 1.7 to 1.9 million people. 

[After years of hostility between the two communist countries, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam—the now-united North and South Vietnam—invaded Kampuchea in 1979 in response to border raids by the Khmer Rouge.  The Vietnamese forces defeated the Khmer Rouge and established the People’s Republic of Kampuchea; Pol Pot fled and was eventually arrested by his own Khmer Rouge in 1997 and tried in Phnom Penh.  He received a life sentence to be served under house arrest, but died, likely by suicide, in 1998.

[In 1993, the monarchy was restored and the country again became the Kingdom of Cambodia.  King Sihanouk retook the throne until his abdication in 2004; his successor is his son, Norodom Sihamoni (b. 1953).  The head of government in Cambodia is Prime Minister Hun Manet (b, 1977), in office since 2023.  

[Anderson Cooper left 60 Minutes in May 2026, announcing his departure in People magazine in February 2026.  He explained, “I have little kids now and I want to spend as much time with them as possible, while they still want to spend time with me."  He remains anchor of the CNN broadcast show Anderson Cooper 360.°]

AI Art

 

[On 21 February, I reposted the transcript of a PBS News Hour report, “Replicating Classic Art Works,” that covered the use of computers to reproduce works of art.  Now I’m taking a look at the employment of computers to create art with artificial intelligence.  Among other questions this development raises, as you’ll read, is “Is it art?” 

[It’s too early for a definitive answer yet—art critic Jerry Saltz says we’ll have to wait and see where this effort takes us—but you can read about one “artist’s” work and notions and decide what you think.  (You can always change your mind later.)

[Take note that there are links to several additional CBS news stories on this subject embedded in the two 60 Minutes reports republished on Rick On Theater.  I recommend reading them as well.]

“AI ARTIST REFIK ANADOL USES MASSIVE DATASETS
AND AI TO CREATE IMMERSIVE WORKS
SHOWN AROUND THE WORLD”
by Sharyn Alfonsi, Michael Baltierra, Aliza Chasan,
Erin DuCharme, and Chrissy Hallowell

[This report was a segment on 60 Minutes (CBS News) on 22 February 2026. The online transcript has a video of the broadcast.]

Refik Anadol [b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey] paints with what he calls “a thinking brush[.]”

The 40-year-old Turkish American is not an artist in the traditional sense; he uses a computer, massive amounts of data and artificial intelligence to create immersive, ever-changing visuals. 

[Anadol attended Istanbul Bilgi University, where he received a BA in photography and video in 2009 and an MFA in visual communication in 2011. In 2014 he earned an MFA in design media arts at UCLA.]

His work, where man meets machine, has been embraced by some of the world’s most prestigious museums, auction houses and collectors and has made Anadol a darling of the tech world. He’s teamed up with Google, MIT and Microsoft to create large, public installations. Supporters call his work revolutionary. But critics question whether art created with AI can truly have meaning, arguing it’s devoid of human emotion, lived experience and intent.

“These are all, I think, true,” Anadol said. “That’s why I believe, [in] human-machine collaboration. We are really completing that bridge where I feel like most likely where we are going as humanity, and just be sure that it’s done right, that it’s shared right, and celebrate this new age of imagination.”

What is AI art

Anyone able to hop online can generate images with AI by inputting a prompt into an AI image generator. What Anadol does is different. For more than a decade, he says he’s worked to ensure his process balances human creativity and machine intelligence, driven half by man, half by machine. 

“In my mind’s eye I can compute, I can imagine geometrically what exactly the mind’s eye is looking for,” he said. 

To create his work, Anadol and his team curate enormous datasets: sometimes hundreds of millions of images. For one project, he used 200 million photos of Earth, including data from NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration, United States’ federal agency responsible for the civil space program and research in aeronautics and space exploration]. For another, he curated more than 150 million images of California landscapes.

“When I think about data as a pigment, I think it doesn’t need to dry. It can move in any shape, in any form, any color, and texture,” he said. 

The images he and his team curate are converted into data points representing color, texture and shape. They’re then plotted into multi-dimensional space. The AI system learns patterns from that data, and then creates its own images. 

The images, Anadol said, “only exist in the mind of a machine.” He then applies algorithms to blend those outputs into his signature fluid style.

Something worthy of attention, or “a half-million-dollar screensaver?”

Some in the art world have embraced Anadol’s work. His large-scale installations have been displayed on landmarks including Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Casa Batlló in Barcelona and the Sphere in Las Vegas [see Sphere (24 and 27 December 2023)]. His pieces have sold for upwards of $1 million at auction. In 2022, The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, commissioned a 24-foot installation called “Unsupervised,” which filled the museum’s lobby [19 November 2022-29 October 2023].

Visitors sat in front of “Unsupervised” for hours, transfixed by what they saw, according to recently-retired museum director Glenn Lowry [b. 1954].

Anadol trained an AI system on publicly available metadata from the museum’s entire collection[.] He says the finished work, “Unsupervised,” reimagines 200 years of art. 

“He wrote some algorithms that allowed the data from one object to evolve into the data of another object to become yet a third object or a fourth object never before seen,” Lowry said. “I think people found it deeply satisfying.”

Museum visitors typically spend about 28 seconds looking at great works of art, studies have found. Anadol said viewers spent an average of 38 minutes looking at “Unsupervised.” 

Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Jerry Saltz [b. 1951] doesn’t think the lingering crowds are evidence of artistic success. He called “Unsupervised” a “half-million-dollar screensaver.”

“How long you spend with a work of art is not a sign of success so much as your willingness to get quiet within yourself, go to uncomfortable places, become comfortable in those places, asking yourself questions,” Saltz said. “In front of a Refik Adanol, you sit down, go into a stupor, and you don’t have to think much. You go, ‘Oh, there goes a painting that looks a little like Renoir [Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919); French Impressionist artist], morphing into one that looks like Picasso [Pablo Picasso (1881-1973); Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theater designer], morphing into an amoeba.’”

Most of it is “crap,” Saltz said. But he cautioned against overreaction, noting that most art made during the Renaissance was also “crap.” 

AI, he says, is still in its infancy.

“AI is one day old. And we’re already having conversations, ‘I hate it, you love it. It’s good, it’s bad.’ It’s new, it’s young.”

Whether AI becomes a transformative artistic medium, he said, will depend less on the machine — and more on the human using it.

Lowry, who ran the Museum of Modern Art for three decades [1995-2025], said skepticism around AI mirrors the reaction to the advent of photography 200 years ago. 

“When suddenly the human hand is removed from the making of an image, what does that mean? And I think artificial intelligence is analogous to that. But I don’t think you can stop technology,” he said.

[See my post on Gres Gallery in which, in Part 1, there’s a brief discussion in 1957 of the distinction between the official customs criteria for “sculpture,” which had to be “hand-made” and “man-made” (and therefore designated “art”), and newly conceived modern abstract sculpture that was largely “machine-made” (and therefore labeled “manufactured” or “fabricated” metal or “new decorative art pieces”).]

Theft allegations 

Some artists argue AI systems are built using copyrighted works without permission from the original creators. New York-based artist and author Molly Crabapple [b. 1983] has called the training of generative AI models on copyrighted artwork “the greatest art heist in history.”

“When we talk about art heists, typically, we’re talking about one painting being taken from a museum, two, three [paintings.] They stole billions and billions of images,” she said. 

[In "AI in the Arts Is the Destruction of the Film Industry. We Can't Go Quietly" by Justine Bateman (4 June 2023), I quote a passage from “Artificial Intelligence, Real Consequences,” an article in the Spring 2023 issue of SAG-AFTRA magazine (vol 12, no. 2), that explains the TV and film actors’ position on this same issue (which is also shared by the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA), the union of television and film writers, who went on strike in 2023 in part over this matter):

As the technology [i.e., AI] improves at a dizzying speed, the laws protecting copyright and other intellectual rights will be tested. SAG-AFTRA emphasizes that governments should not create new copyright or other IP [intellectual property] exemptions that allow AI developers to exploit creative works, or professional voices and likenesses, without permission or compensation. AI that generates text and art doesn’t create it from nothing; it is trained on the hard work, brilliance, inspiration, sweat and creativity of countless artists — artists who have financial obligations and families, and who deserve to be compensated for their efforts [underscoring added].

[WGA’s sister unions either joined the writers on the picket lines or had scheduled votes to authorize doing so before the settlement with the producers was reached. Meanwhile, production in Hollywood was shut down.]

She believes museums, galleries and auction houses shouldn’t buy or display AI art that’s been trained on other artist’s work without consent or compensation. Popular AI art generators are “corporate plagiarism bots,” according to Crabapple. She said they’re trained on art, including her own, scraped from the internet. 

“No artist has been asked for their consent. No artist has received compensation,” Crabapple said. “In fact, we don’t even see credit.”

AI companies have told lawmakers that what they are doing falls under fair use, a legal doctrine which allows copyrighted works to be used without permission under certain circumstances. They claim AI is studying and learning, just as a human would. But a group of artists have filed a class action lawsuit against four of the AI companies that make art generators, accusing them of copyright infringement, among other things.

Anadol said he understands his fellow artist’s concerns with commercial AI image generators. Since 2020, he said he’s only worked with what he calls “ethically sourced” datasets 

“This is the most important part of art making with AI. It takes a lot of teamwork, a lot of thinking, research. We always start with permission, then we know exactly where information comes from,” Anadol said. 

What’s next for AI art

Anadol is now building DATALAND, a 20,000-square-foot museum dedicated to AI art, in downtown Los Angeles. 

Visitors can expect to wear devices around their necks that pump out different AI-generated scents, such as rain and flowers, to accompany what they’re seeing. Anadol says eventually, another device will monitor viewers’ vital statistics. That data will be used to change the art in real time.

When DATALAND opens this spring, it will be the world’s first museum devoted entirely to AI arts: a massive canvas to celebrate Anadol’s optimism about technology. Anadol insists AI is not a threat to art, but a tool to create works no human could create alone. 

[Sharyn Alfonsi first appeared on 60 Minutes, the CBS News flagship broadcast, in 2015.  She has been honored with numerous accolades over her career, including an Emmy for Outstanding Recorded News Program with 60 Minutes, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Silver Baton, a Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service in Television Journalism and a Gracie Award for National On-Air Talent in News or News Magazine.

[Alfonsi joined 60 Minutes from ABC News as a New York-based reporter who appeared regularly on Good Morning America, World News Tonight and Nightline.  She was the co-anchor of the ABC franchise “Made in America” where she revealed that the uniforms to be worn by U.S. Olympic athletes were made in China.  Her investigation for Nightline showed the often cruel world of the puppy mill industry, exposing factory-like breeding facilities in the Amish country of Pennsylvania.

[Aliza Chasan is a Digital Content Producer for 60 Minutes and CBSNews.com, based in New York.  She earned a master’s degree in journalism from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in 2015, focusing on urban news during her time there.  Chasan started her journalism career in New Jersey, where she reported on local news.  Before coming to 60 Minutes and CBS News, Chasan covered breaking news, politics and local news at outlets including PIX11 News, the New York Daily News, Inside Edition and DNAinfo.  Chasan won an Online News Association award for her work on The Missing with NY City News Service.]

*  *  *  *
“WHEN AI BECOMES A PAINTBRUSH, IS IT ART?”
by Brit McCandless Farmer

[Linked to the report posted above was a piece on 60 Minutes Overtime, the CBS News website on which stories broadcast on-air are discussed in further detail, posted on 22 February 2026.]

This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi stepped into a new frontier of artistic expression: the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence-generated art. She profiled Refik Anadol, the 40-year-old Turkish American artist widely regarded as a pioneer of this emerging form.

Anadol doesn’t mix acrylics or sculpt with stone. Instead, he paints with data.

For one recent work, he fed an artificial intelligence model 200 million photographs of Earth, drawing heavily from archives provided by NASA. The result is a sweeping, immersive digital installation — a living canvas of color and motion that feels at once cosmic and intimate.

“When I think about data as a pigment,” Anadol told correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, “I think it doesn’t need to dry. It can move in any shape, in any form, any color, and texture.” [See Alfonsi’s report above.]

It’s a poetic description of a process rooted in code. His installations, projected across walls and ceilings, envelop viewers in constantly shifting landscapes generated by machine learning systems trained on vast image libraries. The effect can feel, as Alfonsi put it, “a little trippy.” [See article in the first link in this post above.]

“It is trippy,” Anadol replied. “Because I think as artists we ask what is beyond reality.”

The critics weigh in

Anadol’s work has appeared in some of the world’s most prestigious museums. But as A.I. art moves from tech labs to galleries, the art world is grappling with a bigger question: How do these creations stack up?

Jerry Saltz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for New York Magazine, is both skeptical and curious.

“Right now, AI art seems to be an average of averages,” Saltz told Alfonsi. Algorithms are trained on vast datasets of existing images, themselves products of countless influences. The result, he argues, risks becoming “vaster, and more average,” rather than more profound.

For Saltz, great art emerges from something machines fundamentally lack: lived experience.

“I want the algorithm to experience death,” he said. “I want the algorithm to know the feeling of feeling like you have a fat neck, or bad hair . . . I want to train the algorithm to experience carnality.” Without sex and death, Saltz suggests, there is no art.

And yet, he doesn’t dismiss the technology.

“I like to think of it as a material,” Saltz said. “Artists use materials. A digital file is a material.” To reject A.I. outright, he argued, would be like rejecting oil paint or the novel before engaging with them. “I wish it well. And I would never, ever ignore it.”

Fear, replacement, and ethics

Part of the anxiety surrounding A.I. art is existential. Artists, like professionals in many industries, fear replacement, Saltz said.

“We all have a latent fear of being replaced by AI,” Saltz acknowledged. “I guess I think that we will be on some level.” His prescription isn’t retreat — it’s reinvention. Artists must become “better, or more useful, or more unique at what we do in order to keep our jobs.”

The ethical questions are thornier. Is it fair — or legal — to train an algorithm on the work of other artists?

Saltz thinks so. Artists have always borrowed, referenced, and reinterpreted what came before them.

“There are no laws in art,” Saltz said bluntly. “All art comes from other art.”

Is it art?

Last year, artist Refik Anadol brought his vision to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain [in situ: Refik Anadol, 7 March-10 December 2025]. For that exhibition, he built a custom A.I. model trained on open-access photographs, sketches, and blueprints from the archive of Frank Gehry [1929-2025], the legendary architect who designed the museum itself.

The system processed Gehry’s architectural legacy and reimagined it as a fluid, morphing, digital spectacle.

Saltz once dismissed a similar installation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art as a “glorified lava lamp,” dazzling but ultimately decorative [Unsupervised – see above].

Which raises the central question of this cultural moment: When a machine recombines humanity’s visual history into something new, is that art? 

[Brit McCandless Farmer is an award-winning journalist with a career spanning print, broadcast, and digital news.  As the digital producer for 60 Minutes at CBS News, Farmer extends the broadcast’s reporting online, giving the 60 Minutes audience a deeper dive into the subjects on television, and helps introduce the news magazine to a new generation of viewers.  Her work has been recognized by the Webby, Gracie, Wilbur, and Telly awards.  

[Previously, Farmer worked at the CBS Weekend Evening News and CBS This Morning, where she produced interviews with presidential candidates, elected officials, and business leaders. Before joining CBS, she worked at CNN, where she was a member of a producing and reporting team that won a Peabody Award.  She is the immediate past-president of the Carnegie Mellon Alumni Association Board, a former trustee of Carnegie Mellon University, and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.]

Robots! (Part 2)

 

[Part 2 of “Robots!” is the final installment of this short series.  As I acknowledged in Part 1, I decided to post this transcript while I was watching 60 Minutes last week.  When Bill Whitaker, the correspondent, referenced the earlier robotics report from 28 March 2021, I decided to post both transcripts.

[As I usually do with multi-part posts, I recommend reading the foregoing parts in order before jumping in in medias res.  In this case, the introduction to Part 1 contains a very brief run-down on robots and the origin of the word, itself.  (If you don’t already know how the word was coined, you might be surprised.)]

“BOSTON DYNAMICS’ AI-POWERED HUMANOID ROBOT
IS LEARNING TO WORK IN A FACTORY”
by Bill Whitaker and Marc Lieberman

[Four years and nine months after airing the report in Part 1 of this series, CBS’s, 60 Minutes ran the segment below on 4 January 2026 (this link includes the video of the segment).  It was a follow-up to the Anderson Cooper report, this time with Whitaker as correspondent, and the news magazine broadcast revisited Boston Dynamics.

[In December 2020, Hyundai Motor Group, the Korean auto-maker, made a deal to buy 80% of Boston Dynamics, and in June 2021, just after the earlier 60 Minutes report at the end of March, Hyundai completed the agreement and officially took control of BD.  It’s unknown even now what this change of hands means in terms of BD’s robotics work, though the auto-maker has launched a new division to create “walking cars” and other robots.]

Will AI-powered humanoid robots someday work alongside us?

Bill Whitaker: For decades, engineers have been trying to create robots that look and act human. Now, rapid advances in artificial intelligence are taking humanoids from the lab to the factory floor. As fears grow that AI will displace workers, a global race is underway to develop human-like robots able to do human jobs. Competitors include Tesla, startups backed by Amazon and Nvidia, and state-supported Chinese companies. Boston Dynamics is a frontrunner. The Massachusetts company, valued at more than a billion dollars, is hard at work on a humanoid it calls Atlas. South Korean carmaker Hyundai holds an 88% stake in the robot maker. We were invited to see the first real-world test of Atlas at Hyundai’s new factory near Savannah, Georgia. There, we got a glimpse of a humanoid future that’s coming faster than you might think.

Voice-over (Bill Whitaker): Hyundai’s sprawling auto plant is about as cutting-edge as it gets. More than 1,000 robots work alongside almost 1,500 humans, hoisting, stamping and welding in robotic unison. This may look like the factory of the future, but we found the future of the future in the parts warehouse, tucked away in the back corner, getting ready for work. 

Meet Atlas: A 5'9", 200[-]pound, AI-powered humanoid created by Boston Dynamics. The rise of the robots is science fiction no more.

[Atlas, which was featured in the 2021 60 Minutes report covered in Part 1 of this series, was created in 2013. Boston Dynamics released YouTube videos of Atlas at different stages of its development in 2013 (the video in this link seems to be broken), 2016, 2017, May 2018, October 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 (x 2), 16 April 2024, and 17 April 2024.]

Bill Whitaker: I have to say, every time I see it, I just can’t believe what my eyes are seeing. Is this the first time Atlas has been out of the lab?

Zack Jackowski: This is the first time Atlas has been out of the lab doing real work.

Voice-over: Zack Jackowski heads Atlas development. He has two mechanical engineering degrees from MIT and a mission to turn the robot into a productive worker on the factory floor. We watched as Atlas practiced sorting roof racks for the assembly line without human help.

Bill Whitaker: So he’s working autonomously.

Zack Jackowski: Correct

Bill Whitaker: You’re down here to see how Atlas works in the field, and you’ll be showing Atlas off to your bosses at Hyundai?

Zack Jackowski: Yeah.

Yeah, a little bit. I– and I– I think a lot of our roboticists would’ve thought that was pretty crazy five, six years ago. 

Voice-over: When 60 Minutes last visited Boston Dynamics in 2021 [this is the report from 2021, posted as Part 1], Atlas was a bulky, hydraulic robot that could run and jump. Back then, Atlas relied on algorithms written by engineers. When we dropped in again this past fall, we saw a new generation Atlas with a sleek, all-electric body and an AI brain, powered by Nvidia’s advanced microchips, making Atlas smart enough to pull off hard to believe feats autonomously. We saw Atlas skip and run with ease.

Bill Whitaker: Do you ever stop thinking, gee whiz?

Scott Kuindersma: I remain extremely excited about where we are in the history of robotics but we see that there’s so much more that we can do, as well.

Voice-over: Scott Kuindersma is head of robotics research, a job he proudly wears on his sleeve.

Bill Whitaker: You even have on a robot shirt.

Scott Kuindersma: Well, once I saw that this shirt existed, there was no way I wasn’t buying it.

Voice-over: He told us robots today have learned to master moves that until recently were considered a step too far for a machine.

Scott Kuindersma: And a lot of this has to do with how we’re going about programming these robots now, where it’s more about teaching, and demonstrations, and machine learning than manual programming.

Bill Whitaker: So this humanoid, this mechanical human, can actually learn?

Scott Kuindersma: Yes. And– and we found that that’s actually one of the most effective way[s] to program robots like that.

Voice-over: Atlas learns in different ways. In supervised learning, machine learning scientist Kevin Bergamin – wearing a virtual reality headset – takes direct control of the humanoid, guiding its hands and arms, move-by-move through each task until Atlas gets it.

Scott Kuindersma: And if that teleoperator can perform the task that we want the robot to do, and do it multiple times, that generates data that we can use to train the robot’s AI models to then later do that task autonomously.

Voice-over: Kuindersma used me to demonstrate another way Atlas learns.

Scott Kuindersma: That v– very stylish suit that you’re wearing is actually gonna capture all of your body motion to train Atlas to try to mimic exactly your motions. And so you’re about to become a 200-pound metal robot.

Voice-over: He asked me to pick an exercise. They captured the way I work as well.

Bill Whitaker: I am here at the AI Lab at Boston Dynamics. All of my movements, my walking, my d– arm gestures are being picked up by these sensors . . .

Voice-over: Then engineers put my data into their machine learning process. Atlas’ body is different from mine, so they had to teach it to match my movements virtually – more than 4,000 digital Atlases trained for six hours in simulation.

Scott Kuindersma: And they’re all trying to do jumping jacks, just like you. And as you can see, they’re just starting to learn, so they’re not very good at it.

Voice-over: The simulation, he told us, added challenges for the avatars, like slippery floors, inclines, or stiff joints, and then homed in on what works best.

Scott Kuindersma: And it can eventually get to a state where we have many copies of Atlas doing really good jumping jacks.

Voice-over: They uploaded this new skill into the AI system that controls every Atlas robot. Once one is trained, they’re all trained.

Scott Kuindersma: So that’s what you look like when you’re exercising.

Bill Whitaker: Uh-huh.

Voice-over: And what I look like doing my job.

Bill Whitaker: I am here at the AI Lab at Boston Dynamics. All of my movements, my walking, my d– arm gestures are being picked up by these sensors …

Bill Whitaker: This is mind-blowing.

Voice-over: Through the same processes, Atlas was taught to crawl, do cartwheels. It didn’t fare as well with the duck walk.

Scott Kuindersma: Oh, that was fun. And then this happens.

Bill Whitaker: And then this happens.

Scott Kuindersma: We love when things like this happen, actually. Because it’s often an opportunity to understand something we didn’t know about the system.

Bill Whitaker: What are some of the limitations you see now?

Scott Kuindersma: Well, I’d- I would say that most things that a person does in their daily lives, Atlas or– other humanoids can’t really do that yet. I think we’re start–

Bill Whitaker: Like- like what?

Scott Kuindersma: Well, just putting on clothes in the morning, or pouring your cup of coffee and walking around the house with it.

Bill Whitaker: That’s too difficult for– for Atlas?

Scott Kuindersma: Yeah, I think there are no humanoids that do that nearly as well as a person would do that. But I think the thing that’s really exciting now is we see a pathway to get there.

Voice-over: A pathway provided by AI. What stands out in this Atlas is its brain. Nvidia chips – the ones that helped launch the AI revolution with ChatGPT – process the flood of collected data, moving this humanoid robot closer to something like common sense.

Scott Kuindersma: So the analogy might be if I was teaching a child how to do free throws in basketball, if I allow them to just explore and come up with their own solutions, sometimes they can come up with a solution that I didn’t anticipate. And that’s true for these systems as well.

Voice-over: Atlas can see its surroundings and is figuring out how the physical world works.

Scott Kuindersma: So that some day you can put a robot like this in a factory and just explain to it what would– you would like it to do, and it has enough knowledge about how the world works that it has a good chance of doing it.

Robert Playter: There’s a lot of excitement in the industry right now about the potential of building robots that are smart enough to really become general purpose.

Voice-over: Robert Playter, the CEO of Boston Dynamics, spearheaded the company’s humanoid development. He’s been building toward this moment for more than 30 years. The cornerstone was this robotic dog, Spot, introduced almost a decade ago. Spots are trained in heat, cold and varied terrain, and roam the halls of Boston Dynamics.

Robert Playter: So we have some cameras– thermal sensors, acoustic sensors. An array of sensors on its back that lets it collect data about the health of a factory.

Voice-over: Spots carry out quality control checks at Hyundai, making sure the cars have the right parts. They conduct security and industrial inspections at hundreds of sites around the world. What began with Spot has evolved into Atlas.

Robert Playter: So this robot is capable of superhuman motion, and so it’s gonna be able to exceed what we can do.

Bill Whitaker: So you are creating a robot that is meant to exceed the capabilities of humans.

Robert Playter: Why not, right? We– we would like things that could be stronger than us or tolerate more heat than us or definitely go into a dangerous place where we shouldn’t be going. So you really want superhuman capabilities.

Bill Whitaker: To a lotta people that sounds scary. You don’t foresee– a world of Terminators [an allusion to the title character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1984’s science fiction film The Terminator (Orion Pictures) and its sequels]?

Robert Playter: Absolutely not. I think if you saw how hard we have to work to get the robots to just do some of the straightforward tasks we want them to do, that would dispel that– that worry about sentience and rogue robots.

Voice-over: We wondered if people might have more immediate concerns. We saw workers doing a job at the Hyundai plant that Atlas is being trained to perform.

Bill Whitaker: I guarantee you there are going to be people who will say, “I’m gonna lose my job to a robot.”

Robert Playter: Work does change. So the really repetitive, really back-breaking labor is really- is gonna end up being done by robots. But these robots are not so autonomous that they don’t need to be managed. They need to be built. They need to be trained. They need to be serviced.

Voice-over: Playter told us it could be several years before Atlas joins the Hyundai workforce fulltime. Goldman Sachs predicts the market for humanoids will reach $38 billion within the decade. Boston Dynamics and other U.S. robot makers are fighting to come out on top. But they’re not the only ones in the ring. Chinese companies are proving to be formidable challengers. They’re running to win.

Bill Whitaker: Are they outpacing us?

Robert Playter: The Chinese government has a mission to win the robotics race. Technically I believe we remain– in the lead. But there’s a real threat there that, simply through the scale of investment– we could fall behind.

Voice-over: To stay ahead, Hyundai made that big investment in Boston Dynamics.

Zack Jackowski: Four robots . . .

Voice-over: We were at the Georgia plant when Atlas engineer Zack Jackowski presented Atlas to Heung-soo Kim, Hyundai’s head of global strategy. He came all the way from South Korea to check in on the brave new world the carmaker is funding.

Bill Whitaker: What do you think of the progress that they’ve made with Atlas?

Heung-soo Kim: I think we are on track– about the development. Atlas, so far, it’s very successful. It’s a kind of– a start of great journey. Yeah.

Voice-over: The destination? That humanoid future we mentioned at the start – robots like us, working beside us, walking among us. It’s enough to make your head spin.

[Bill Whitaker is an award-winning journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent who has covered major news stories, domestically and across the globe, for more than four decades with CBS News.

[Marc Lieberman joined 60 Minutes in 2014.  Working with correspondent Bill Whitaker, he has produced more than 40 stories, including breaking news, newsmaker interviews, profiles, and in-depth investigations.  He started his career at CBS News in 1992.]