---
title: "The Morning Brief — June 13, 2026"
date: 2026-06-13T00:00:03-05:00
draft: false
description: "The US government orders Anthropic to pull Claude Fable 5 offline, Meta's AI unit is in open revolt, Siri apparently got good, and Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire — it's a big Saturday in AI."
tags: ["Morning Brief", "AI", "artificial intelligence", "tech news"]
---

## [Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 Pulled Offline — By Government Order](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/12/anthropics-safety-warnings-may-have-just-backfired-the-government-has-pulled-the-plug-on-its-most-powerful-ai/)

This is the one that'll keep AI policy people up at night. The US government has ordered Anthropic to take Claude Fable 5 offline, citing awareness of a jailbreak method — and Anthropic is publicly pushing back, writing that "a narrow potential jailbreak should not be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people." There's a brutal irony here: Anthropic built its entire brand on being the safety-focused AI company, spent years warning regulators that these models needed oversight — and now that same safety-first credibility may have given the government exactly the framework it needed to pull the trigger. Be careful what you ask for.

---

## [Meta's AI Unit: 6,500 People, Zero Morale](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/12/metas-months-old-ai-unit-is-a-soul-crushing-gulag-say-the-engineers-stuck-inside-it/)

Wired and TechCrunch are both reporting that Meta's months-old centralized AI unit — 6,500 employees strong — is [on the verge of revolt](https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-meta-employee-meeting-interrupt-ai/), with engineers describing it as a "soul-crushing gulag" and internal forums lighting up with complaints about Zuckerberg's companywide AI hackathon mandate. One employee apparently posted, "I'm not sure that this company supports a hackathon culture anymore," which is the corporate equivalent of a distress flare. When you're paying people $100M to poach them and they're *still* miserable, you might have a management problem that no amount of Llama weights can fix.

---

## [Siri Is... Good Now?](https://www.theverge.com/podcast/949079/siri-ai-good-vergecast)

The Verge is asking the question none of us expected to be asking in 2026. Apple's new Siri apparently works — and Apple's Craig Federighi is already drawing [a pointed contrast with the competition](https://www.theverge.com/tech/948890/siri-wont-be-your-ai-girlfriend), explicitly saying Apple built Siri *not* to be sycophantic like OpenAI's and Google's chatbots. Look, I'll believe it when I stop getting "I found something on the web for that" in response to a simple question, but if Apple has actually cracked this after fifteen years of embarrassing also-ran status, that's a genuinely significant shift in the consumer AI landscape.

---

## [Elon Musk Becomes the World's First Trillionaire](https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/948409/elon-musk-trillionaire-spacex-ipo)

SpaceX went public Friday, shares opened at $150, and the combined effect of his SpaceX stake plus Tesla plus everything else has pushed Musk's net worth past $1 trillion — more than the GDP of Ireland, Sweden, or South Africa. Wired's [more sobering take](https://www.wired.com/story/you-probably-wont-get-rich-off-the-spacex-ipo/) reminds retail investors that an unusually high share allocation for the public doesn't mean you're getting anything other than crumbs. One man crossing the trillion-dollar threshold is either an inspiring testament to compounding bets on the future or the most vivid illustration yet of how AI and tech wealth concentrates — probably both.

---

## [Google Sues Chinese AI-Powered Scam Operation](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/12/chinese-cybercrime-operation-that-used-ai-to-scam-hundreds-of-thousands-of-victims-sued-by-google/)

Google has filed suit against a group called "Outsider Enterprise," accusing it of using AI to send 2.5 million scam text messages in two weeks, defrauding hundreds of thousands of victims. This is the other side of the AI productivity story — the same tools that help you draft emails faster help criminal enterprises scale fraud operations to industrial size. Google suing is good; the fact that it took 2.5 million texts and mass victimization before the hammer came down is the part worth sitting with.

---

## [OpenAI Acquires Ona to Expand Codex](https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-ona)

OpenAI is acquiring Ona, a startup focused on secure, persistent cloud environments, with the explicit goal of bolting its capabilities onto Codex to enable long-running AI agents in enterprise workflows. This is a quiet but telling move — the race to build agents that don't just answer questions but *do things* over extended periods requires serious infrastructure, and OpenAI is buying rather than building here. Every week the agent story gets a little more real and a little less theoretical.

---

## [Amazon's AC Cuts and Electricity Hikes: The Data Center Bill Comes Due](https://www.404media.co/amazon-data-centers-in-mississippi-have-already-raised-electricity-rates-for-local-customers-report-suggests/)

Two separate stories this week put Amazon in an uncomfortable spotlight: a software update is [automatically cutting AC in delivery drivers' vans](https://www.404media.co/software-update-automatically-turns-off-amazon-delivery-drivers-ac-during-dangerous-summer-heat/) during summer heat, and Mississippi residents are already paying at least $10.60 more per month on electricity bills for data centers that aren't even open yet. The AI buildout has real costs, and right now they're being distributed very unevenly — to the delivery driver sweating in June and the rural ratepayer who never asked to subsidize a hyperscaler's GPU cluster.

---

## Bottom Line

The week ends with a government shutting down an AI model, a trillion-dollar IPO, and workers inside the world's biggest AI company calling it a gulag — the technology is scaling faster than anyone's ability to manage what it creates.