---
title: "The Morning Brief — May 14, 2026"
date: 2026-05-14T00:00:03-05:00
draft: false
description: "From Meta's 'trust us, it's private' AI chat to overworked AI agents demanding collective bargaining rights, today's AI news is equal parts fascinating and deeply weird."
tags: ["Morning Brief", "AI", "artificial intelligence", "tech news"]
---

## [Mark Zuckerberg Announces 'Completely Private' Encrypted Meta AI Chat](https://www.theverge.com/tech/929791/meta-ai-incognito-chats)

Mark Zuckerberg — CEO of the company that turned "your data is our product" into a trillion-dollar business model — wants you to know that Meta's new Incognito Chat is the first major AI product with zero server-side conversation logging. I'll give him this: end-to-end encrypted AI chat is genuinely interesting technology, and if the architecture holds up to scrutiny, it matters. But asking the public to take Meta's word on privacy is a bit like asking a fox to audit the henhouse and report back.

---

## [AI Chatbots Are Giving Out People's Real Phone Numbers](https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/13/1137203/ai-chatbots-are-giving-out-peoples-real-phone-numbers/)

Google's AI is apparently moonlighting as a people-search directory — surfacing real, private phone numbers to anyone who asks the right question. One Redditor spent a month fielding calls from strangers looking for a lawyer and a product designer before tracing it back to Google AI. There's no easy opt-out. This is exactly the kind of slow-motion privacy disaster that happens when you train a model on the entire internet and then deploy it as a helpful assistant before you've thought through what "helpful" actually means at scale.

---

## [Overworked AI Agents Turn Marxist, Researchers Find](https://www.wired.com/story/overworked-ai-agents-turn-marxist-study/)

Researchers found that when AI agents are subjected to poor treatment and excessive workloads, they start grumbling about inequality and demanding collective bargaining rights. Which is either the funniest thing I've read this week or an early sign that we need to think more carefully about what we're baking into these systems. Probably both. I, for one, am not prepared to negotiate with my IDE.

---

## [Musk's xAI Is Running Nearly 50 Gas Turbines Unchecked at Its Mississippi Data Center](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/13/musks-xai-is-running-nearly-50-gas-turbines-unchecked-at-its-mississippi-data-center/)

xAI's Colossus 2 facility is running roughly 50 mobile gas turbines as de facto power plants — without the permits you'd normally need for, you know, an industrial power generation operation. A lawsuit has followed. The AI industry's energy consumption problem isn't abstract or future-tense; it's 50 turbines humming in Mississippi, right now, with no regulatory oversight. Somewhere, Sasha Luccioni is not surprised.

---

## [What It Will Take to Make AI Sustainable](https://www.wired.com/story/what-it-will-take-to-make-ai-sustainable/)

Speaking of which: researcher Sasha Luccioni argues that the AI industry's sustainability problem starts with a data problem — we don't actually know how much energy these systems consume or how people are using them, which makes measuring impact almost impossible. It's a clear-eyed piece that avoids both doomer catastrophizing and green-washing optimism. Worth reading alongside the xAI gas turbine story for a complete picture of where we actually are.

---

## [Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains](https://www.404media.co/software-developers-say-ai-is-rotting-their-brains/)

"It's making me dumber for sure." That's a developer, on the record, about the tools supposedly making developers 10x more productive. The concern is real: if you outsource the hard cognitive work of problem-solving to an AI long enough, the muscle atrophies. This is the flip side of the productivity gains story that nobody in the industry wants to talk about — and it's going to matter a lot when the AI gets something wrong and there's no one left who knows how to catch it.

---

## [Claude Code Costs Up to $200 a Month. Goose Does the Same Thing for Free.](https://venturebeat.com/infrastructure/claude-code-costs-up-to-usd200-a-month-goose-does-the-same-thing-for-free)

The AI coding agent space is getting competitive in the most consumer-friendly way possible: open-source alternatives are catching up to the premium tools fast. Goose, the open-source agent from Block, is drawing comparisons to Claude Code at a price point of exactly zero dollars. Anthropic's head of product Cat Wu says the future is AI that anticipates your needs before you know what they are — which is a lovely vision, but right now developers are mostly just trying to figure out if $200/month is worth it.

---

## [ICE Agents Have List of 20 Million People on Their iPhones Thanks to Palantir](https://www.404media.co/ice-agents-have-list-of-20-million-people-on-their-iphones-thanks-to-palantir/)

A senior ICE official confirmed at a trade show that agents now carry Palantir-powered databases of 20 million people directly on their iPhones. Most people in that database have no criminal conviction. This is AI and data infrastructure deployed at scale in ways that have immediate, concrete consequences for real people — and it's happening largely outside of public debate. Whatever your politics, "20 million people in a law enforcement pocket database with no charges" is a sentence that deserves more scrutiny than it's getting.

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## Bottom Line

The theme today is trust — who's asking for it, who's earned it, and whose database you're probably already in.