---
title: "The Morning Brief — May 25, 2026"
date: 2026-05-25T00:00:02-05:00
draft: false
description: "AI chatbot jailbreaks get sophisticated, Google's search stumbles on its own word, Amazon's creepy new wearable, quantum computing gets a $2B federal bet, and robots feed San Francisco's hungry — it's a busy Monday in AI."
tags: ["Morning Brief", "AI", "artificial intelligence", "tech news"]
---

[**Hackers are learning to exploit chatbot 'personalities'**](https://www.theverge.com/column/935545/hackers-ai-chatbots)

Early chatbot jailbreaks were basically just typing "ignore your previous instructions" and watching the thing comply like an eager intern. Now, according to The Verge, attackers are mapping the psychological architecture of AI personas and finding the seams where safety guardrails and character consistency don't quite line up. This is the inevitable arms race — and the concerning part is that the attack surface isn't just code, it's vibes.

---

[**Everyone is navigating AI security in real time — even Google**](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/24/everyone-is-navigating-ai-security-in-real-time-even-google/)

TechCrunch frames this charitably as a "transition period," but let's be honest: the companies deploying AI at planetary scale are figuring out the security implications *after* the fact, not before. When your defense strategy is essentially "we're all learning together," that's not a philosophy — it's a disclaimer. The stakes are just a little higher than a college group project.

---

[**Google's AI search is so broken it can 'disregard' what you're looking for**](https://www.theverge.com/tech/936176/google-ai-overviews-search-disregard)

When you searched "disregard" on Google last Friday, the AI Overview responded as if someone had just issued it a system prompt override — exactly what a jailbreak looks like. Google's entire pitch right now is that AI search is ready to replace the traditional results box, and its system can't handle a single English word without having an existential crisis. Bold rollout strategy.

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[**I tried Amazon's Bee wearable and am both intrigued and slightly creeped out**](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/24/i-tried-amazons-bee-wearable-and-am-both-intrigued-by-it-and-also-slightly-creeped-out/)

Amazon's Bee is an always-listening AI wearable that captures your day so you can, presumably, ask it what you had for lunch and whether you seemed engaged in that meeting. TechCrunch's reviewer lands on "intrigued and slightly creeped out," which is the correct and only honest response to a device whose core value proposition is that Amazon knows your life better than you do. The convenience is real. So is the data harvest.

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[**US government takes $2 billion equity stake in nine quantum computing firms**](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/05/us-government-takes-2-billion-equity-stake-in-nine-quantum-computing-firms/)

The federal government just bought into nine quantum computing startups for $2 billion, framing it as a strategic investment in next-generation computing infrastructure. One of the beneficiaries is a startup with ties to the Trump family, which Ars Technica notes with the kind of practiced understatement that does a lot of heavy lifting. Quantum computing is genuinely important — the political economy around it is going to be genuinely messy.

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[**These Robots Are Making Meals for a Nonprofit in San Francisco's Tenderloin**](https://www.wired.com/story/these-robots-are-making-meals-for-a-nonprofit-in-san-franciscos-tenderloin/)

A nonprofit serving one of San Francisco's most vulnerable communities turned to robotic meal prep because human volunteers simply aren't showing up in sufficient numbers. This is the version of the automation-and-jobs story that doesn't fit neatly into either the utopian or dystopian narrative — robots filling gaps that humans aren't filling, for people who genuinely need the help. Worth sitting with that for a moment.

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[**How Virgin Atlantic ships faster with Codex**](https://openai.com/index/virgin-atlantic)

Virgin Atlantic used OpenAI's Codex to hit a hard holiday travel deadline on its revamped mobile app, achieving near-total unit test coverage and zero P1 defects in the process. It's a legitimately impressive case study, even accounting for the fact that it comes directly from OpenAI's own blog. AI-assisted coding delivering real results under real constraints is the quiet story that keeps accumulating evidence while everyone debates the flashier stuff.

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[**OpenAI advances Education for Countries**](https://openai.com/index/the-next-phase-of-education-for-countries)

OpenAI is expanding its Education for Countries initiative with new national partnerships, teacher training programs, and classroom tools — essentially positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for how the next generation learns. This is the kind of long-game move that looks like philanthropy and functions like market capture. Not saying it won't help students. Just saying it'll also help OpenAI.

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## Bottom Line

The theme of the day is the gap between deployment speed and everything else — security, honesty, accountability — and that gap is not closing on its own.