---
title: "The Morning Brief — June 24, 2026"
date: 2026-06-24T00:00:02-05:00
draft: false
description: "Hollywood ghosts a Sam Altman biopic, Oracle fires 21,000 to fund AI bets, Midjourney pivots to dunk-tank medicine, and AI super PACs drop $27M on a local election — Wednesday's AI news is a lot."
tags: ["Morning Brief", "AI", "artificial intelligence", "tech news"]
---

## [Hollywood Is Bending the Knee to OpenAI](https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/954899/luca-guadagnino-artificial-sam-altman-amazon-a24-neon-mubi-chatgpt)

Netflix, A24, Focus Features, and Warner Bros. have all reportedly passed on distributing *Artificial*, director Luca Guadagnino's biographical drama about Sam Altman — the man whose company's tools these studios are now eagerly licensing for their own productions. The irony is almost too neat: Hollywood would rather use OpenAI than make a movie about its founder, which tells you everything about whose leverage is whose right now. Two indie distributors, Neon and Mubi, are still circling — which is fitting, since "films the majors were too scared to touch" is kind of their whole thing.

---

## [Why Corporate AI Super PACs Spent $27 Million on a Local Election](https://www.theverge.com/policy/954970/ai-super-pacs-alex-bores-new-york-12th-district)

AI-backed super PACs dropped $27 million into a single New York congressional district race — not a Senate seat, not a swing state governor's race, a *local* district election. This is what regulatory capture looks like at the retail level: the industry isn't just lobbying in Washington, it's trying to hand-pick who *goes* to Washington in the first place. If you wanted a concrete example of why AI governance debates feel so tilted, this is a pretty good one.

---

## [Something's Off With Midjourney's Pivot to Body Scanners](https://www.theverge.com/report/954826/midjourney-medical-ai-ultrasound-body-scanner-lacks-evidence)

Midjourney — the company that makes AI-generated images of fantasy castles and suspiciously six-fingered hands — has announced a medical-grade ultrasound body scanner that involves submerging users in a vat of water to produce results "as powerful as MRI." The Verge notes the claims lack supporting evidence, which is a polite way of saying a generative image startup has pivoted to dunk-tank diagnostics without apparent clinical backing. I'm sure the transition from "hallucinating pixel art" to "hallucinating medical results" will go smoothly.

---

## [Oracle's 21,000 Layoffs Help Drive Its Debt-Fueled AI Investments](https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/oracles-21000-layoffs-help-drive-its-debt-fueled-ai-investments/)

Oracle fired 21,000 people and is now using that savings — plus a mountain of new debt — to fund its AI data center ambitions. The formula is becoming distressingly familiar: announce AI pivot, cut human workforce, call it "efficiency," borrow heavily, repeat. At some point someone is going to have to reckon with whether "AI investment" is a genuine strategic transformation or a Wall Street narrative that lets you do layoffs without the bad press.

---

## [Anthropic's Claude Tag Is Learning Your Company, One Slack Message at a Time](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/23/anthropics-claude-tag-is-learning-your-company-one-slack-message-at-a-time/)

Anthropic's new Claude Tag feature embeds an always-on AI assistant into Slack that passively absorbs your company's communications, institutional knowledge, and workflows — essentially turning every message thread into model training fodder. It's a smart enterprise play disguised as a productivity feature, and it puts Anthropic in direct competition with Microsoft Copilot and Google Workspace AI for the most coveted real estate in knowledge work: the place where actual decisions get made. The Register, characteristically, called it a "nosy, always-on agentic AI coworker," which is accurate and not particularly reassuring.

---

## [Madison Square Garden Made a Dossier on Activists Who Opposed Facial Recognition](https://www.404media.co/madison-square-garden-made-dossier-on-activists-who-opposed-facial-recognition/)

MSG compiled a file called "Facial Recognition Activists.docx" tracking individuals who publicly criticized its facial recognition program — their comments, their tweets, their opposition. So to be clear: the people who said "this surveillance technology could be misused" are now in a surveillance document. The meta-irony is so thick you could cut it with a hot dog from the $22 concession stand.

---

## [White House Drastically Shortens Deadline for Dropping Quantum-Vulnerable Crypto](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/06/executive-order-bumps-up-deadline-to-move-off-quantum-vulnerable-crypto/)

A new executive order has compressed the timeline for federal agencies and critical infrastructure to migrate away from encryption algorithms that quantum computers could eventually crack. This is genuinely important and underreported: post-quantum cryptography isn't science fiction anymore, and the window for "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks — where adversaries collect encrypted data today to crack it once quantum hardware matures — is very much real. The fact that the White House is accelerating the deadline suggests the threat assessment has quietly gotten more urgent.

---

## [How GPT-5 Helped an Immunologist Solve a 3-Year-Old Mystery](https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-immunology-mystery)

Immunologist Derya Unutmaz used GPT-5 Pro to crack a puzzle about T cell behavior that had stumped him for three years, with the breakthrough potentially opening doors for cancer and autoimmune research. Yes, this is a company blog post, and yes, OpenAI has every incentive to showcase this story — but the underlying result appears to be legitimate, peer-reviewed science. Whatever your feelings about the hype cycle, "AI accelerates serious immunological research" is exactly the kind of thing we should be tracking carefully, because it's where the real long-term stakes lie.

---

## Bottom Line

The AI industry is simultaneously funding political candidates, scanning bodies in water tanks, compiling activist dossiers, and cracking immunology puzzles — and somehow all of that is just a normal Tuesday.