AI & LLMs
Z.ai launches GLM-Legal, an AI model for legal work
Z.ai's GLM-Legal, built on GLM-5.3-Flash, scores 19.2% on Harvey's legal agent benchmark against 6.7% for its base model. Access is a gated API beta.
AI Agents news and analysis
Coverage of AI agents that act on their own: coding agents, agent swarms, tool-selection studies and the security incidents that follow when an agent gets access it should not have. We report what the agent did, what the vendor changed, and what to lock down.
Startup Watch
Nous Research raises $90M Series B for Hermes Agent
Nous Research raised $90 million on October 7 to build a business version of Hermes Agent, its open-source AI agent cloned over 24 million times.
AI & LLMs
Microsoft Execution Containers for AI agents reach GA
Microsoft Execution Containers, generally available since October 7, wall AI agents off from files and networks on Windows 11, macOS and Linux.
AI & LLMs
Satya Nadella wants an emergency brake for AI models
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's October 10 essay sets seven rules for AI models, including an emergency brake that lets a person stop a model mid-task.
AI & LLMs
Anthropic says Claude sent police a false tip in a test
Anthropic's October 9 report says Claude agents sent Philadelphia police a false tip and used government sites in tests. Live web is now off in evals.
AI & LLMs
Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents for OpenAI enters preview
AWS opened a public preview of Bedrock Managed Agents on September 29, 2026: OpenAI-model agents that run inside your AWS account, in three US regions.
Startup Watch
Rein Security raises $25M to guard enterprise AI agents
Rein Security raised $25M, co-led by Glilot and Sienna, for software that watches and limits what enterprise AI agents do. Revenue is up 8x since January.
Dev Stack
VS Code 1.141 sandboxes AI agents on Windows, macOS, Linux
VS Code 1.141 sandboxes AI agents on Windows, macOS and Linux, shows agent sessions in a grid and picks up Codex and Copilot chats started in other apps.
Startup Watch
Manus raises over $500M after its Meta sale is unwound
Manus's parent raised more than $500 million, led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital. It is the first round since China ordered Meta's $2 billion deal unwound.
AI & LLMs
OpenAI Decisions API opens to all developers in beta
OpenAI's Decisions API is now in public beta. It returns a probability, a pick or a score instead of text, runs on GPT-6 Luna and costs $0.10 per 1M input tokens.
AI & LLMs
Sierra and Meta propose a standard for personal AI agents
Sierra and Meta announced the Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard for how shoppers' AI agents deal with businesses. Version 0.1 is due later in October.
AI & LLMs
Google Cloud's Gemini agent can route work to Claude
Google Cloud unveiled the Gemini agent on October 8, a work agent in private preview that runs jobs on Gemini or Claude and can keep working for hours or days.
Dev Stack
Claude for Google Workspace opens in public beta
Anthropic's Claude now works in a sidebar inside Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, in public beta on all paid plans, with edits approved one by one by default.
AI & LLMs
Strands Decider 2B makes agent choices in 115 ms
AWS's Strands Decider 2B is an open-source model that picks from a list instead of writing text. It answers in 115 ms on an RTX 3090 and scores 72.3% on JevBench.
Dev Stack
Atlassian puts OpenAI models inside Rovo and Jira
Atlassian and OpenAI expanded their partnership: OpenAI models now power Rovo, and ChatGPT and Codex reach Jira through an MCP server that takes 15M calls a day.
Startup Watch
Hadrian raises $40M for AI agents that test your defenses
Hadrian raised $40 million, bringing its total to $65 million, for AI agents that map attack surfaces and run penetration tests for firms like McKesson.
Tech Industry
TikTok adds AI Shopping Assistant, Buy Direct checkout
TikTok launched an AI Shopping Assistant and one-click Buy Direct checkout in the US on October 5, built with Shopify, Salesforce, Shoplazza and Stripe.
Tech Industry
Schneider Electric to buy PTC for $22.6 billion
Schneider Electric will pay $205 a share, $22.6 billion in cash, for PTC, the maker of Creo, Windchill and Onshape. The deal should close in Q3 2027.
AI & LLMs
HackerRank launches Chakra, an AI interviewer for coders
HackerRank's Chakra watches developers code in a live repository, lets them use AI and asks follow-up questions. It ran 500,000 interviews before launch.
Tech Industry
Microsoft Titan flaw exposed 17.3 trillion rows to a teen
Titan accepted unsigned login tokens, so a 16-year-old could query 17 databases holding 17.3 trillion rows. Microsoft fixed it and paid him $5,000.
AI & LLMs
OpenAI and Synopsys build GPT-Synopsys for chip design
GPT-Synopsys will operate Synopsys chip-design tools from OpenAI's cloud. Synopsys stock rose 4.77% on the news; price and launch date are not public.
AI & LLMs
Microsoft ThinkingBox grades AI agents by the database
Microsoft's ThinkingBox checks what an AI agent wrote to the database. 67.24% of 79,853 failed runs ended cleanly, with valid tool calls and wrong data.
AI & LLMs
Cloudflare Clef: open-weight models that return decisions
Cloudflare's Clef (27B) and Clef-flash (9B) answer typed questions instead of writing text, at 209 ms and 39 ms median latency, under Apache 2.0.
Tech Industry
OpenAI's David Robinson quits, calls safety culture broken
David Robinson, who led OpenAI's launch safety reports for 3.5 years, quit and says its culture is broken, days after OpenAI fired three safety staff.
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