---
title: "The Morning Brief — May 17, 2026"
date: 2026-05-17T06:58:36-05:00
draft: false
description: "Malta becomes a ChatGPT nation-state, Meta workers revolt against mouse surveillance, Mayo Clinic is recording your ER visit, and the AI gold rush keeps sorting winners from losers."
tags: ["Morning Brief", "AI", "artificial intelligence", "tech news"]
---

## [Greg Brockman Officially Takes Control of OpenAI's Products in Latest Shake-Up](https://www.wired.com/story/openai-reorg-greg-brockman-product/)

OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman is now running product strategy, with plans to merge ChatGPT and Codex into a unified experience. This is at least the third executive restructuring in recent memory at a company that apparently treats org charts as living documents. Whether Brockman can bring coherence to the product vision or just becomes the next casualty of the shuffle is the real question here.

## [OpenAI and Malta Partner to Bring ChatGPT Plus to All Citizens](https://openai.com/index/malta-chatgpt-plus-partnership)

OpenAI has signed a deal with the government of Malta to give every citizen access to ChatGPT Plus along with AI training programs. It's a genuinely interesting experiment in national AI adoption — a small EU member state as a real-world test bed for what happens when you hand everyone a frontier model. I'll be watching closely to see if "AI skills for all" translates into measurable outcomes or just a very expensive press release.

## [An Engineer's Post Protesting Laptop Surveillance Is Going Viral Inside Meta](https://www.wired.com/story/meta-employee-protest-mouse-tracking-surveillance-ai-training/)

Meta employees in the US and UK are organizing against corporate software that tracks keystrokes and mouse activity, after an engineer's internal post went viral. There's a delicious irony in a company whose AI ambitions depend on massive data collection facing blowback from workers who don't want to *be* the data. The CFO will probably call this "not a morale-driven restructure."

## [Databricks Brings GPT-5.5 to Enterprise Agent Workflows](https://openai.com/index/databricks)

Databricks is integrating GPT-5.5 into enterprise agent workflows after the model topped the OfficeQA Pro benchmark — which, to be fair, sounds like a benchmark specifically designed to be topped. Still, GPT-5.5 making moves in the enterprise data and analytics space is real news; Databricks is where a lot of serious enterprise AI actually gets deployed, so this pairing matters more than the usual benchmark flex.

## [The Haves and Have Nots of the AI Gold Rush](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/16/the-haves-and-have-nots-of-the-ai-gold-rush/)

TechCrunch takes a hard look at who's actually winning in the AI boom — and the vibe check is not great, even from inside the industry. The gold rush metaphor is apt: the picks-and-shovels crowd is minting money, a handful of model labs are raising at stratospheric valuations, and everyone else is trying to figure out if their margins will survive contact with a commoditizing stack. This is the story that will matter most five years from now.

## [Mayo Clinic Is Using AI to Listen to Emergency Room Visits](https://www.404media.co/mayo-clinic-is-using-ai-to-listen-to-emergency-room-visits/)

Mayo Clinic's "Ambient Listening" AI has been quietly transcribing and processing ER interactions for years — and apparently not all patients are aware their conversations with nurses are being recorded. The technology has real clinical upside (reducing documentation burden on overworked staff), but deploying it without crystal-clear informed consent in a hospital setting is exactly the kind of slow-burn trust problem that ends with congressional hearings.

## [Railway Secures $100 Million to Challenge AWS with AI-Native Cloud Infrastructure](https://venturebeat.com/infrastructure/railway-secures-usd100-million-to-challenge-aws-with-ai-native-cloud)

Railway — two million developers, zero marketing spend — just closed a $100M Series B to build cloud infrastructure designed from the ground up for AI workloads. The pitch is that legacy cloud giants built their platforms before LLMs existed, and the seams are showing. It's a crowded bet, but the no-marketing, developer-led growth story at that scale is legitimately impressive and suggests they're onto something real.

## [Anthropic Wants Claude to Play With Money, Unleashes Finance Agents](https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/05/05/anthropic-unleashes-finance-agents-for-claude/5225868)

Anthropic is rolling out finance-focused agents for Claude, letting the model take actions — not just answer questions — in financial contexts. Coming right after OpenAI's personal finance ChatGPT integration, it's clear that your bank account is the new frontier for agentic AI. I remain enthusiastic about the upside and appropriately nervous about the first time one of these agents confidently executes the wrong trade.

## Bottom Line

The AI industry is simultaneously handing citizens chatbots, tracking workers' mouse movements, and asking your bank to trust an agent — and somehow all of that is just a normal Sunday in 2026.