---
title: "The Morning Brief — May 5, 2026"
date: 2026-05-05T00:00:02-05:00
draft: false
description: "The Musk v. Altman trial heats up in Oakland, Sierra pulls in nearly $1B, Nature retracts a ChatGPT study, and Microsoft quietly stops letting Copilot take credit for your work."
tags: ["Morning Brief", "AI", "artificial intelligence", "tech news"]
---

## [Live updates from Elon Musk and Sam Altman's court battle over the future of OpenAI](https://www.theverge.com/tech/917225/sam-altman-elon-musk-openai-lawsuit) / [Week one of the Musk v. Altman trial: What it was like in the room](https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/04/1136826/week-one-of-the-musk-v-altman-trial-what-it-was-like-in-the-room/)

Week one is in the books, and it's already a lot — Greg Brockman's personal journal apparently making a stronger case for Musk than Brockman himself did on the stand, Musk's lone expert witness warning of an AGI arms race, and two of tech's most powerful egos fighting over the soul of an organization one of them left a decade ago. The core question — whether OpenAI betrayed a founding mission to benefit humanity or simply grew up — is genuinely important, and it deserves a better courtroom than this circus is providing.

## [Sierra raises $950M as the race to own enterprise AI gets serious](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/04/sierra-raises-950m-as-the-race-to-own-enterprise-ai-gets-serious/)

Sierra, the enterprise AI agent platform co-founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, just pulled in $950 million — giving it over a billion in total capital to chase what it calls the "global standard" for AI-powered customer experiences. That's a lot of runway for a company that most consumers have never heard of, which tells you exactly where the real AI money is flowing right now: not into chatbots you talk to, but into agents quietly handling calls and tickets on behalf of the brands you already deal with. Whether "global standard" is a vision or just good fundraising copy remains to be seen.

## ['Nature' Retracts Paper on the Benefits of ChatGPT in Education](https://www.404media.co/nature-retracts-paper-on-the-benefits-of-chatgpt-in-education/)

*Nature* has retracted a paper touting ChatGPT's educational benefits, with a critic noting that "what educators, parents and policy officials really needed was high quality data — what they got was substandard research." This is the part of the AI-in-education discourse that keeps me up at night: policy moves at the speed of hype, and the retractions come later, quietly, after the decisions are already made. Meanwhile, OpenAI and Google are backing a congressional bill to fund "AI literacy" in schools — which sounds great, unless the literacy curriculum is built on the same shoddy foundation.

## [Microsoft fixes VS Code after app gives Copilot credit for human's work](https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/05/04/microsoft_reverses_ai_credit_grab/)

Microsoft shipped a VS Code update that quietly added Copilot as a co-author to git commits — even when Copilot had nothing to do with the code. Developers were, predictably, not thrilled about a robot getting credit for their work, and Microsoft reversed the change after the backlash. I'll give them credit for walking it back quickly, but the fact that "default to claiming AI involvement" was the choice someone made in the first place is a revealing little window into the incentives at play here.

## [OpenAI's cozy partner Cerebras is on track for a blockbuster IPO](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/04/openais-cozy-partner-cerebras-is-on-track-for-a-blockbuster-ipo/)

Cerebras — the AI chip maker with a wafer-scale processor the size of a dinner plate and a very cozy relationship with OpenAI — is reportedly heading for an IPO that could value it north of $26 billion. After a rocky prior IPO attempt, the timing here is better: AI infrastructure demand is real, the Nvidia alternative narrative is compelling, and having OpenAI as your marquee customer doesn't hurt. The question is whether "compelling narrative" and "defensible moat against Nvidia" turn out to be the same thing.

## [Shadow IT has given way to shadow AI. Enter AI-BOMs](https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/05/04/ai_bom_supply_chain/)

We spent years trying to get enterprises to track their software dependencies with SBOMs; now the same problem is back with a vengeance in the form of AI agents and models embedded throughout the stack that nobody has a complete inventory of. AI Bills of Materials — AI-BOMs — are the proposed solution, and the underlying logic is sound: you can't protect what you can't see. This is the unglamorous, essential work of the AI era, and it's going to matter a lot more than most of the stuff getting headlines.

## [As workers worry about AI, Nvidia's Jensen Huang says AI is 'creating an enormous number of jobs'](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/04/as-workers-worry-about-ai-nvidias-jensen-huang-says-ai-is-creating-an-enormous-number-of-jobs/)

Jensen Huang, whose company sells the shovels in this gold rush, would like you to know that AI is creating enormous numbers of jobs — not destroying them. He's probably not wrong that new categories of work are emerging, and he's also not exactly a neutral observer when the narrative shifts from "transformative" to "scary." The honest answer is that both things can be true simultaneously, and anyone telling you it's simple — in either direction — is selling something.

## [Image AI models now drive app growth, beating chatbot upgrades](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/04/image-ai-models-now-drive-app-growth-beating-chatbot-upgrades/)

New data from Appfigures shows that image AI model launches generate 6.5x more app downloads than chatbot upgrades — but most of those spikes don't convert to sustained revenue. The attention economy loves a visual trick, which explains every "turn your photo into a Ghibli character" moment of the past two years; the business model, less so. It's a useful reminder that virality and viability are still two very different things in AI consumer apps.

## Bottom Line

The AI industry is simultaneously fighting over its founding ideals in a federal courtroom, raising a billion dollars to automate your customer service call, and quietly figuring out that nobody actually knows what AI is running inside their own company.