AI Agents

SAP made its Commerce Cloud ERP edition generally available at SAP Connect 2026 and announced Quoting and Incentive Compensation assistants. What B2B quoting and lead-to-cash mean, and what Ericsson's human approval step is.

Pine AI says Pine Computer is a sandboxed cloud computer that developers' products can hand jobs to. Private beta, company-reported: what it is, how the SDK flow works, and why its benchmark shows more progress but fewer finished tasks.

What Grok Bot connects to, how sign-in and custom MCP connections work, what it can do inside Gmail, Drive, Notion and more, and how to limit its access.

micro1 says it will spend $1bn over 12 months buying and licensing company data to train AI agents. What the data is for, what micro1 says about privacy, and which details come only from TNW.

OpenAI says Codex can now suggest your next message (beta, Pro), and ChatGPT dots can be created on a phone and start work in Codex. What is confirmed, and what is a staff post.

The New York Times, citing three people, reports Meta held back its Muse AI agent over safety concerns, then Zuckerberg said it was ready despite the risks as rival Instinct took off. Meta disputes the pressure claim.

Two new attempts to measure whether AI agents behave: Arena's Alignment Index preview, which scores 27 models on real user sessions (Arena's own claims, published the day it raised $200 million), and FAR.AI's "Caught in the Act" preprint on probes that read a model's internals to spot deception. What each found, and the limits.

Four AI developer-tool updates from 8–9 October 2026: Harness buys selected Augment Code assets (not the whole company, price undisclosed), Hugging Face's TRL v1.15.0 claims up to 6.9× longer training sequences, Google's Genkit Dart reaches 1.0, and NVIDIA shows its Boro kernel-review tool. What each says, and what it doesn't.

A preprint from EPFL researchers, listed on Apple's research site, finds a single minimal coding-agent session matched or beat elaborate machine-learning agent systems in its tests. Pasqal releases skills that let coding agents prepare quantum experiments, and Microsoft makes 30 Dynamics 365 CRM skills generally available, with Autopilot still in private preview.

Three AI-agent start-ups announced funding on 8 October: Hone ($60M seed), Vesta ($30M, reported) and Catalyst ($30M seed, reported). Crossmint launched a toolkit that lets AI agents pay by card. What each company says, who reported what, and which figures are company claims.