---
title: "The Morning Brief — May 13, 2026"
date: 2026-05-13T00:00:02-05:00
draft: false
description: "The Musk vs. Altman trial gets stranger by the day, Meta won't let you escape its AI, and a UCF commencement crowd told an AI booster exactly what they thought — all in today's Morning Brief."
tags: ["Morning Brief", "AI", "artificial intelligence", "tech news"]
---

---

## [Sam Altman was winning on the stand, but it might not be enough](https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/929129/sam-altman-testimony-elon-musk-openai-trial)

Sam Altman took the stand and did what Sam Altman does best: made himself sound reasonable in a room full of people who think he isn't. His lawyer wrapped things up with a soft-toss about how it felt to be accused of stealing a charity, which — credit where it's due — is a pretty good closing image. Whether the jury buys the whole "we built something great through hard work" narrative after two weeks of damaging testimony is the $84 billion question.

---

## [Elon Musk Had 'Hair-Raising' Idea of Passing OpenAI On to His Kids, Sam Altman Says](https://www.wired.com/story/sam-altman-testifies-musk-v-altman-trial/)

Altman testified that Musk floated the idea of passing control of OpenAI — a nonprofit ostensibly dedicated to the benefit of all humanity — to his children. The organization explicitly exists to prevent advanced AI from being controlled by any one person, which makes this particular anecdote either darkly ironic or a perfect encapsulation of everything that went wrong between these two. Musk's lawyers pushed back with allegations of deception and conflicts of interest, but "I wanted my kids to have the AI company" is going to be a tough one to spin.

---

## [Meta won't let you block its AI account on Threads](https://www.theverge.com/tech/929091/meta-ai-threads-account-block)

Meta is testing a Threads feature where users can tag a Meta AI account for answers and context — and no, you cannot block it. I'm old enough to remember when social media companies at least *pretended* your feed was yours. Forcing an AI account into your mentions that you have zero power to remove is either a bold product vision or a very confident answer to "how do we make AI feel like spam?" — and I'm not sure Meta knows the difference.

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## [xAI Adds 19 New Gas Turbines Despite Ongoing Lawsuit](https://www.wired.com/story/xai-adds-19-new-gas-turbines-despite-ongoing-lawsuit/)

While Elon Musk's lawyers argue in a San Francisco courtroom about the sanctity of nonprofit missions, his other company is quietly adding 19 gas turbines to its Colossus 2 AI data center site — in the middle of an active air quality lawsuit. There's a version of this story where you admire the audacity. This is not that version. The AI compute race is apparently so urgent that air quality concerns are just a scheduling conflict.

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## [Gemini's latest updates are all about controlling your phone](https://www.theverge.com/tech/928724/gemini-intelligence-android-io-autofill)

Google's pre-I/O showcase dropped a wave of new Gemini features aimed at having the AI run your phone for you — autofill suggestions, Chrome integration, deeper app access, the works. The pitch is convenience; the reality is that Google very much wants Gemini to be the layer between you and everything you do on Android. Whether that's a feature or a product strategy dressed up as a feature depends entirely on how much you trust Google with your digital life, which is a personal decision I'll leave to you.

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## [CUDA Proves Nvidia Is a Software Company](https://www.wired.com/story/cuda-proves-nvidia-is-a-software-company/)

Wired makes the case that Nvidia's real moat isn't its GPUs — it's CUDA, the software ecosystem that the entire AI industry has been trained on, literally and figuratively. This is the story people keep almost understanding: you can build competing chips, you can match the specs, but you cannot easily replicate 15+ years of developer habits, libraries, and institutional knowledge baked into a software platform. Jensen Huang is smiling somewhere.

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## [Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the 'Next Industrial Revolution'](https://www.404media.co/ucf-ai-commencement-speaker-booed/)

A commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida told a gymnasium full of graduating humanities students that AI is the "next industrial revolution" and was met with booing and shouts of "AI SUCKS!" I genuinely don't know who gave worse advice here — the speaker for that particular crowd read, or whoever scheduled her. The humanities grads have thesis papers to write and jobs that may or may not exist in five years; they were perhaps not in the mood for Silicon Valley optimism with their diplomas.

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## [Medicare's new payment model is built for AI, and most of the tech world has no idea](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/12/medicares-new-payment-model-is-built-for-ai-and-most-of-the-tech-world-has-no-idea/)

Quietly, without a press release or a product launch keynote, Medicare created a payment mechanism — called ACCESS — that for the first time allows reimbursement for AI agents that monitor patients between visits, coordinate care, and check medication adherence. This is potentially one of the most consequential AI policy moves in years, and it landed with almost no fanfare from the industry that should be most excited about it. When the history of AI in healthcare gets written, this footnote might turn out to be the whole chapter.

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## Bottom Line

The Musk-Altman trial is delivering more surreal testimony by the day, but the real AI story quietly shaping the future might be a Medicare payment rule nobody's talking about.