---
title: "The Morning Brief — May 2, 2026"
date: 2026-05-02T00:00:02-05:00
draft: false
description: "Musk's week in court went about as well as you'd expect, the Pentagon picks its AI favorites, OpenAI plays hypocrite on model access, and a dark-money campaign tries to make you scared of Chinese AI."
tags: ["Morning Brief", "AI", "artificial intelligence", "tech news"]
---

---

## [Musk v. Altman Week 1: Everything You Need to Know](https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/01/1136800/musk-v-altman-week-1-musk-says-he-was-duped-warns-ai-could-kill-us-all-and-admits-that-xai-distills-openais-models/)

Elon Musk spent three days on the stand in a crisp black suit, arguing he was deceived into funding OpenAI, warning that AI could destroy humanity, and — in perhaps the trial's most spectacular own-goal — admitting under oath that xAI distills OpenAI's models. The man suing Sam Altman for betraying the nonprofit mission of AI safety is, it turns out, training his competing AI product on OpenAI's outputs. Prosecutors don't usually hand you the punchline, but here we are.

## [Elon Musk Seemingly Admits xAI Has Used OpenAI's Models to Train Its Own](https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-distill-openai-models-partly-xai/)

Musk's defense was that "everyone does it" — distilling competitor models is standard industry practice, so no big deal. That's probably true! But it's a genuinely awkward thing to say when you're simultaneously arguing that OpenAI's models are so important and so improperly commercialized that you deserve damages over them. You can't claim the crown jewels were stolen and also that you've been borrowing them on weekends.

## [A Dark-Money Campaign Is Paying Influencers to Frame Chinese AI as a Threat](https://www.wired.com/story/super-pac-backed-by-openai-and-palantir-is-paying-tiktok-influencers-to-fear-monger-about-china/)

Build American AI — a nonprofit linked to a super PAC bankrolled by OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz executives — has been quietly paying TikTok influencers to spread pro-American-AI messaging and stoke fears about China. Nothing says "we're the trustworthy AI company" quite like funding an undisclosed influence campaign on the same platform everyone's been trying to ban for being a Chinese influence operation. The irony is so thick you could train a model on it.

## [Pentagon Strikes Classified AI Deals with OpenAI, Google, and Nvidia — but Not Anthropic](https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/922113/pentagon-ai-classified-openai-google-nvidia)

The Defense Department has signed agreements with OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, xAI, and a startup called Reflection to deploy AI in classified settings — conspicuously leaving out Anthropic, which previously held that access. The Pentagon's falling-out with Anthropic apparently isn't thawing anytime soon, with the DOD's CTO pushing back on any suggestion of a reconciliation. Getting excluded from the classified AI club by your own government customer is a very specific kind of bad week.

## [OpenAI Locks GPT-5.5-Cyber Behind Velvet Rope Despite Slamming Anthropic for Doing Exactly That](https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/05/01/openai_locks_gpt55cyber_behind_velvet/)

OpenAI is rolling out its new GPT-5.5-Cyber model to a curated group of "cyber defenders" only — a limited, gated release that is, functionally, identical to what Anthropic did recently when OpenAI publicly mocked them for it. The hypocrisy turnaround time here is measured in weeks, not years. At least they're efficient.

## [Meta Buys Robotics Startup to Bolster Its Humanoid AI Ambitions](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/01/meta-buys-robotics-startup-to-bolster-its-humanoid-ai-ambitions/)

Meta has acquired Assured Robot Intelligence to strengthen its AI models for humanoid robots, the latest signal that every major tech company has decided the future is a bipedal one. Mark Zuckerberg building humanoid robots feels like either the most natural thing in the world or the setup to a very long joke — possibly both.

## [Christian Content Creators Are Outsourcing AI Slop to Gig Workers on Fiverr](https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/920881/ai-generated-bible-videos-christian-creators-fiverr-slop)

The pipeline is now: content creator pays Fiverr worker to generate AI Bible videos at scale, no human artistry required at any step. What started as a platform for skilled freelancers has become an assembly line for algorithmic spiritual content — which raises a genuinely interesting theological question about whether God cares if your ministry was auto-generated at $12 a video.

## [CIOs Ready for Another Role-Change as AI Becomes Agent of Chaos](https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/05/01/cios_ready_for_another_rolechange/)

Forrester is predicting that the agentic AI rollout will get so chaotic by decade's end that CIOs will be forced to reinvent themselves as enforcers of order — essentially traffic cops for autonomous software eating the enterprise. "Systematic failure at scale" is a phrase that appears in this report, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes a CIO's eye twitch at 2am. The jobs AI is creating are increasingly just jobs cleaning up after AI.

---

## Bottom Line

Between Musk's courtroom self-immolation, OpenAI's influence campaigns, Pentagon lineup calls, and AI agents threatening enterprise stability, it's becoming clear that the biggest threat to the AI industry right now is the AI industry.