---
title: "The Morning Brief — April 18, 2026"
date: 2026-04-18T06:43:07-05:00
draft: false
description: "OpenAI sheds Sora and two executives, Claude Opus hacks Chrome for under $3K, and Sam Altman wants to scan your face before your next Tinder date — it's Saturday in AI."
tags: ["Morning Brief", "AI", "artificial intelligence", "tech news"]
---

[**OpenAI's former Sora boss — and its chief product officer — are both leaving**](https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/17/kevin-weil-and-bill-peebles-exit-openai-as-company-continues-to-shed-side-quests/) OpenAI is on a ruthless "side quest" purge: Sora is dead, Bill Peebles (who ran the Sora team) is out, and Kevin Weil (chief product officer, ex-Instagram) is packing up too. The company is folding its science application team into Codex and pivoting hard toward enterprise. The pivot away from consumer moonshots is either shrewd focus or a sign that the fun part of OpenAI is quietly leaving through the same door as its people.

[**Claude Opus wrote a working Chrome exploit for $2,283**](https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/04/17/claude_opus_wrote_chrome_exploit/) While everyone was panicking about the (still-unreleased) Claude Mythos, turns out Claude Opus — the publicly available one you can use right now — already knows how to find and exploit real vulnerabilities in Chrome. A researcher paid $2,283 in API costs and got back a working exploit. Anthropic's response to Mythos concerns was essentially "don't worry, the scary one is locked up." Opus disagrees.

[**Anthropic won't claim ownership of the MCP design flaw that puts 200K servers at risk**](https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/04/16/anthropic_mcp_design_flaw/) Security researchers found a design-level flaw in Anthropic's own Model Context Protocol that exposes up to 200,000 servers to full takeover. Anthropic's position is that it's "expected behavior based on the design" — which is a very sophisticated way of saying "that's a feature." When the company that invented the protocol won't own the problem, the 200K server operators get to own it instead.

[**Stare into Sam Altman's orb, get five free Tinder boosts**](https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/914385/world-id-tinder-identity-verifying-orb) World (Sam Altman's iris-scanning identity project) has partnered with Tinder: prove you're human by visiting an orb, unlock premium perks in the app. I've tried to think of a more dystopian sentence than "get your eyeball scanned to improve your dating profile" and I've come up empty. At least we know the orb is finally useful for something.

[**Cursor in talks to raise $2B+ at a $50 billion valuation**](https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/17/sources-cursor-in-talks-to-raise-2b-at-50b-valuation-as-enterprise-growth-surges/) A16z and Thrive are reportedly leading a new round that would value the AI code editor at $50 billion. For comparison, that's more than Twitter sold for. Cursor is, at its core, a text editor with good autocomplete. The fact that it might be worth $50B tells you everything you need to know about where enterprise spending is right now.

[**Anthropic launches Cowork — Claude Code, but for the rest of us**](https://venturebeat.com/technology/anthropic-launches-cowork-a-claude-desktop-agent-that-works-in-your-files-no) Anthropic released Cowork, a Claude Desktop agent that works directly in your files without requiring any coding knowledge. The kicker: the team built the whole thing in about a week and a half, mostly using Claude Code itself. AI eating its own tail is now a product launch strategy.

[**'Tokenmaxxing' is making developers less productive than they think**](https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/17/tokenmaxxing-is-making-developers-less-productive-than-they-think/) New research coins "tokenmaxxing" — the practice of throwing massive context windows at AI coding tools and calling it productivity. The result: more code, higher costs, and a lot more rewriting. Turns out dumping your entire codebase into a prompt and hoping for the best is not, in fact, a workflow.

[**Google drops Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS: "the next generation of expressive AI speech"**](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-3-1-flash-tts/) Google quietly released a new text-to-speech model in the Gemini family, promising more expressive, natural-sounding audio generation. In a week dominated by OpenAI layoffs and Anthropic security drama, Google just… shipped a thing. Respect.

## Bottom Line

AI is eating itself — the same models writing exploits, shipping agents, and scanning eyeballs for Tinder are also being used to build the next version of themselves, and the humans in the loop are increasingly just paying the API bills.
