---
title: "The Morning Brief — July 3, 2026"
date: 2026-07-03T00:00:03-05:00
draft: false
description: "OpenAI floats giving Trump a 5% equity stake, Zuckerberg admits AI agents are behind schedule, companies throttle AI spending, and Netflix resurrects Gene Wilder's voice — your July 4th weekend AI news roundup."
tags: ["Morning Brief", "AI", "artificial intelligence", "tech news"]
---

**[OpenAI floats giving Trump administration 5 percent cut of AI boom](https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/960588/openai-government-5-percent-stake-trump)**

Sam Altman has reportedly proposed handing a 5% equity stake to the US sovereign wealth fund as a way to defuse political tension and sell the public on having a "financial interest" in AI's upside. It's either a genuinely clever piece of political judo or the most expensive lobbying strategy in history — probably both. Either way, when your plan to avoid government scrutiny is to make the government your investor, you've entered a very interesting era.

---

**[Mark Zuckerberg tells staff that AI agents haven't progressed as quickly as he'd hoped](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/02/mark-zuckerberg-tells-staff-that-ai-agents-havent-progressed-as-quickly-as-hed-hoped/)**

In an internal meeting, Zuckerberg apparently admitted that Meta's AI agent ambitions are running behind expectations — which is notable because "behind Zuckerberg's expectations" is a very specific kind of humbling. This is actually worth taking seriously: when the company with some of the deepest AI pockets on earth says agents are harder than they thought, that's a data point, not a PR flop.

---

**[Companies Are Throttling Employees' AI Use Because It's Too Expensive](https://www.404media.co/companies-are-throttling-employees-ai-use-because-its-too-expensive/)**

404 Media got the receipts from Amazon, Adobe, Atlassian, Citi, and others: enterprises are quietly putting the brakes on AI usage because token costs are spiraling out of control. This is the story that punctures the "AI will pay for itself immediately" narrative that vendors have been selling to CFOs. Turns out "unlimited potential" and "unlimited budget" are two very different things.

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**[Anthropic is discussing a new custom chip with Samsung](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/02/anthropic-is-discussing-a-new-custom-chip-with-samsung/)**

One week after OpenAI announced its Broadcom chip partnership, Anthropic is apparently in talks with Samsung about its own custom silicon. The AI chip race is officially entering the "everyone needs their own hardware" phase, and Nvidia is somewhere counting its money while this all plays out. The question of whether any of these custom chips actually close the cost gap is one we won't have a real answer to for years.

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**[Netflix is using an AI-generated Gene Wilder voice in its Willy Wonka reality show](https://www.theverge.com/streaming/959684/netflix-wonka-golden-ticket-gene-wilder)**

Netflix is bringing back the iconic Gene Wilder voice — synthetically — to narrate a Willy Wonka-themed reality competition show premiering September 23rd. Wilder died in 2016, and his estate reportedly approved the use, which makes this slightly less ghoulish than it sounds and only slightly. We are now firmly in the era where the dead can be cast, which is a sentence I was not prepared to type today.

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**[Jersey Mike's IPO illustrates how bad the AI hype has become](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/02/jersey-mikes-ipo-illustrates-how-bad-the-ai-hype-has-become/)**

A sandwich chain's IPO documents apparently mention AI, because of course they do. At this point I'd be more surprised to find a public filing that *doesn't* invoke artificial intelligence somewhere between "customer experience" and "supply chain optimization." Jersey Mike's doesn't need AI — it needs bread, meat, and oil (Mike's Way). The hype bubble has officially reached the deli counter.

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**[Can Cursor Remain a Platform for OpenAI and Anthropic's Models Inside SpaceX?](https://www.wired.com/story/can-cursor-remain-an-open-platform-inside-of-spacex/)**

With SpaceX acquiring Cursor, the AI coding tool suddenly finds itself inside an organization with deep ties to Grok and xAI — which raises genuinely interesting questions about whether Cursor can stay model-agnostic when its new parent company has a horse in the race. Developers who picked Cursor precisely for its flexibility to run different frontier models are watching this one closely. Corporate acquisition logic and "open platform" ideals have a historically rocky relationship.

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**[Google built a great smart speaker, but Gemini isn't ready for it](https://www.theverge.com/tech/959503/google-home-speaker-review-gemini-for-home)**

The Verge's review of Google's new AI-powered smart speaker lands with a verdict that will sting: great hardware, underbaked AI. Gemini, for all its capability in a browser or on a phone, apparently still stumbles when it has to function as a reliable, always-on home assistant. Amazon ran into similar growing pains with its revamped Alexa — which suggests the smart speaker's AI-powered second act is still being written, and the premiere keeps getting pushed.

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## Bottom Line

Whether it's Zuckerberg admitting agents are behind, companies throttling AI spending, or Gemini fumbling in a speaker, the gap between AI hype and AI reality is having a very loud week.