A timeline of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation and the fight to make the government’s files public

For much of two decades, police, FBI agents and prosecutors investigated allegations that Jeffrey Epstein sexually abused underage girls. Now, the Justice Department has released much of what they found to the public.

The millions of documents comprise the most detailed look yet at the inner workings of the multiple investigations into Epstein and his longtime confidant Ghislaine Maxwell.

Those documents include some of the earliest police reports taken by police in Palm Beach, Florida, as well as recordings of some of Epstein's victims speaking on the phone and to investigators. And it includes internal Justice Department emails from as recently as a few months ago.

Here is a timeline of the Epstein investigations and the efforts to open up the government’s files:

March 2005: Palm Beach police begin investigating Epstein after the family of a 14-year-old girl reports she was molested at his mansion. Multiple underage girls, many of them high school students, would later tell police that Epstein hired them to give sexual massages.

May 2006: Police officials sign paperwork to charge Epstein with multiple counts of unlawful sex with a minor, but the county’s top prosecutor, State Attorney Barry Krischer, takes the unusual step of sending the case to a grand jury.

July 2006: Epstein is arrested after a grand jury indicts him on a count of soliciting prostitution. The relatively minor charge upsets Palm Beach police leaders, who publicly accuse Krischer of giving Epstein special treatment. The FBI begins an investigation.

2007: Federal prosecutors prepare an indictment, but for a year Epstein's lawyers engage in talks with the U.S. attorney in Miami, Alexander Acosta, about a deal that would avoid federal prosecution. Epstein’s lawyers decry his accusers as unreliable.

June 2008: Epstein pleads guilty to state charges: one count of soliciting prostitution and one count of soliciting prostitution from someone under the age of 18. He is sentenced to 18 months in jail. Under a secret arrangement, the U.S. attorney’s office agrees not to prosecute Epstein for federal crimes. Epstein serves most of his sentence in a work-release program that allows him to leave jail during the day.

May 2009: One of Epstein’s accusers, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, files a lawsuit claiming Epstein and Maxwell arranged for her to have sexual encounters with “royalty, politicians, academicians, businessmen” and others. The lawsuit doesn't name the men.

July 2009: Epstein is released from jail. For the next decade, Epstein’s accusers wage a legal fight to get his federal non-prosecution agreement voided.

March 2, 2011: The Daily Mail publishes an interview with Giuffre in which she describes traveling with Epstein to London at age 17 and spending a night dancing with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, then known as Prince Andrew. The story and a photo of the prince with his arm around Giuffre creates a crisis for the royal family. FBI agents subsequently interview Giuffre.

Dec. 30, 2014: Giuffre's lawyers file court papers claiming she had sexual encounters with Mountbatten-Windsor and other men, including “foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders.” All those men deny the allegations.

November 2018: The Miami Herald revisits the handling of Epstein’s case in a series of stories focusing partly on the role of Acosta — who by this point is President Donald Trump’s labor secretary. The coverage intensifies public interest in Epstein.

Dec. 6, 2018: FBI agents and the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan begin a new investigation into Epstein.

July 6, 2019: Epstein is arrested on new sex trafficking charges brought by the prosecutors in New York, who have concluded they aren’t bound by the earlier non-prosecution agreement with Epstein in Florida. Days later, Acosta resigns as labor secretary.

Aug. 10, 2019: Epstein kills himself in his jail cell in New York.

July 2, 2020: Federal prosecutors in New York charge Maxwell with sex crimes, saying she helped recruit and abuse Epstein's victims.

Dec. 30, 2021: After a monthlong trial, a jury convicts Maxwell of sex trafficking and other crimes.

June 28, 2022: Maxwell is sentenced to 20 years in prison.

January, 2024: Public interest in the Epstein case surges again after a judge makes more court records public in a related lawsuit.

Jan. 20, 2025: Trump, who was friends and neighbors with Epstein for years, becomes president again. During his 2024 campaign, he had suggested that he’d seek to open more government files on Epstein.

February 2025: Attorney General Pam Bondi suggests in a Fox News Channel interview that an Epstein “client list” is sitting on her desk. The Justice Department distributes binders marked “declassified” to far-right influencers, but much of the information had long been public.

April 25, 2025: Giuffre dies by suicide.

July 7, 2025: The Justice Department says Epstein didn’t maintain a “client list” and it won’t make any more files related to his sex trafficking investigation public.

July 15, 2025: Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., introduce the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which would force the Justice Department to make its investigative files on Epstein public.

July 17, 2025: The Wall Street Journal describes a sexually suggestive letter that the newspaper says bore Trump’s name and was included in a 2003 album for Epstein’s 50th birthday. Trump denies writing the letter and sues the newspaper.

July 24-25, 2025: In an effort to put a political crisis to rest, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche interviews Maxwell. She denies wrongdoing and says she never saw Trump involved in any sexually inappropriate activity. Afterward, she is moved from a low-security prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas.

Oct. 21, 2025: Giuffre’s posthumous memoir is published. In it, she revisits her claims that Epstein and Maxwell sexually trafficked her to powerful men, including Mountbatten-Windsor.

Oct. 30, 2025: King Charles III strips Mountbatten-Windsor of his remaining titles, meaning he can no longer be referred to as “prince," and evicts him from his royal residence.

Nov. 12, 2025: A House committee releases a trove of email correspondence between Epstein and others, including Mountbatten-Windsor, Trump ally Steve Bannon, ex-Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. In one 2019 email to a journalist, Epstein wrote that Trump “knew about the girls" but didn't explain what he meant by that.

Nov. 14, 2025: At Trump’s urging, Bondi announces that the U.S. attorney in Manhattan will investigate Epstein’s ties to some of the Republican president’s political foes, including former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat; Summers; and Hoffman, a prominent Democratic donor. None of those men has been accused of misconduct by Epstein's accusers.

Nov. 18, 2025: Congress passes the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Trump signs it into law the next day.

Dec. 19, 2025: The Justice Department begins releasing records. The batch includes snapshots that Epstein kept in his home of various famous people he met over the years, including Trump and Clinton. After releasing just a sliver of the available documents, though, the Justice Department halts disclosures, saying it needs more time to review the records.

Jan. 30, 2025.: The Justice Department begins releasing what Blanche says are more than 3 million pages of documents, 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. The files are posted to the department’s website.

Follow the AP's coverage of Jeffrey Epstein at https://apnews.com/hub/jeffrey-epstein.

A document that was included in the U.S. Department of Justice release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, photographed Monday, Feb. 2, 2026, shows a diagram prepared by the FBI attempting to chart the network of Epstein's victims and the timeline of their alleged abuse. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)

A document that was included in the U.S. Department of Justice release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, photographed Monday, Feb. 2, 2026, shows a diagram prepared by the FBI attempting to chart the network of Epstein's victims and the timeline of their alleged abuse. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)

The two artificial intelligence startups behind rival chatbots ChatGPT and Claude are bracing for an existential showdown this year as both need to prove they can grow a business that will make more money than they're losing.

The fiercest competition between the two AI developers, along with bigger companies like Google, is a race to win over corporate leaders looking to adopt AI tools to boost workplace productivity. The rivalry is also spilling into other realms, including the Super Bowl.

Anthropic is airing a pair of TV commercials during Sunday's game that ridicule OpenAI for the digital advertising it's beginning to place on free and cheaper versions of ChatGPT. While Anthropic has centered its revenue model on selling Claude to other businesses, OpenAI has opened the doors to ads as a way of making money from the hundreds of millions of consumers who get ChatGPT for free.

Anthropic’s commercials humorously mock the dangers of manipulative chatbots — represented as real people speaking in a stilted and unnaturally effusive tone — that form a relationship with a user before trying to hawk a product. The commercials end with a written message — “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” — followed by the opening beat and lyrics of the Dr. Dre song “What’s the Difference.”

In a sign they struck a nerve, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a social media post that he laughed at the “funny” ads but blasted them as dishonest and threw shade at his competitor's smaller customer base.

“Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people,” Altman wrote on X. He also boasted that more Texans “use ChatGPT for free” than all the people in the United States who use Claude.

Chiming in to directly challenge Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was OpenAI's president and co-founder Greg Brockman, who questioned whether Anthropic was truly committing to never selling Claude “users’ attention or data to advertisers." Amodei, who rarely posts on X, did not respond.

The rivalry has existed ever since Amodei and other OpenAI leaders quit the AI research laboratory and formed Anthropic in 2021, promising a clearer focus on the safety of the better-than-human technology called artificial general intelligence that both San Francisco firms wanted to build. That was before OpenAI first released ChatGPT in late 2022, revealing the huge commercial potential of large language models that could help write emails, homework or computer code.

The competition ramped up this week as both companies launched product updates. OpenAI on Thursday launched a new platform called Frontier, designed to be a one-stop shop for businesses adopting a variety of AI tools, including those not made by OpenAI, that can work in tandem. It's part of a push toward AI agents that work autonomously as “AI co-workers” on someone's behalf.

“We can be the partner of choice for AI transformation for enterprise. The sky is the limit in terms of revenue we can generate from a platform like that,” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications, told reporters this week.

Anthropic, in turn, on Thursday announced an upgrade to its most capable model, claiming that the new Claude Opus 4.6 “plans more carefully, sustains agentic tasks for longer, operates reliably in massive codebases, and catches its own mistakes.”

“Both OpenAI and Anthropic are really trying to position themselves as a platform company,” said Gartner analyst Arun Chandrasekaran. “The models are important, but the models aren’t a means to an end.”

The two startups aren't just competing with each other. They also face competition from Google, which is both a leading developer of a powerful AI model, Gemini, and has its own cloud computing infrastructure backed by revenue from its legacy digital advertising business. They also have complicated relationships with Amazon, which is Anthropic's primary cloud provider, and Microsoft, which holds a 27% stake in OpenAI.

The first choice for businesses looking to adopt AI agents is typically cloud computing “hyperscalers” like Microsoft, Google and Amazon, which offer a package of services, while AI model providers like Anthropic and OpenAI “tend to come in second place,” said Nancy Gohring, a senior research director at IDC.

But there's an opening because none of the players are giving businesses what they want, which are stronger security and compliance assurances to enable the more widespread use of AI agents that can access corporate systems and data.

“Adopting AI and agents is inherently somewhat risky,” Gohring said.

There's also the AI division of Elon Musk’s newly merged SpaceX and its chatbot, Grok, which is not yet a viable contender for business customers. Musk has long set his sights on challenging the market dominance of OpenAI, which he co-founded and is now suing in a court case set for trial in April.

SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are among the world's most valuable privately held firms and Wall Street investors expect any, or all of them, could become publicly traded within the next year or so. But unlike SpaceX, which has its rocket business to fall back on, or established tech giants — like Amazon, Google and Microsoft — both Anthropic and OpenAI must find a way to make enough from selling AI products to pay for the huge costs in computer chips and data centers to run their energy-hungry AI systems.

It’s not that Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t making money or growing their product lines. The private firms don’t publicly disclose sales but both have signaled they are making billions of dollars in revenue on their existing products, including paid chatbot subscriptions for individual users.

But it costs a lot more money to fund the computing infrastructure needed to build these powerful AI models and respond to the millions of prompts they get each day. OpenAI, in particular, has said it owes more than $1 trillion in financial obligations to backers — including Oracle, Microsoft and Nvidia — that are essentially fronting the compute costs on the expectation of future payoffs.

For some, the wait will likely be worth it.

“Profitability matters, but not as a near‑term decision factor for investors who remain focused on scale, differentiation and infrastructure leverage,” said Forrester analyst Charlie Dai. “Both companies continue to post heavy losses, yet investors still back them because the frontier‑model race demands extraordinary capital intensity.”

Denise Dresser, OpenAI's newly hired chief revenue officer, told reporters this week that the company's priority is “building the best enterprise platform for all industries, all segments.”

“I don’t think we’re thinking about it from a revenue standpoint, but truly from a customer outcome standpoint,” she said, in part reflecting the “sense of urgency” she's heard from CEOs who want a smoother way of applying AI.

“There’s a recognition that AI is becoming a core operating advantage,” Dresser said. “They don’t want to be on the wrong side of that shift.”

FILE - Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, attends the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)

FILE - Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, testifies before a Senate committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)