AI Agents

The CMA, FCA, ICO and Ofcom say existing UK law already covers AI agents. There are no new rules, but they warn firms they will use their powers.

Jules shutdown: Google's coding agent goes read-only after 11 November and closes on 31 December. How to export sessions, memories and settings now.

Tencent WorkBuddy has handled over nine billion task requests since March, Tencent says, as it previews Hy4 and reports doubled overseas cloud customers.

Factory's Droid 1.0 coding-agent harness makes scripted tool calls the default. Its own Terminal-Bench 4 runs put it ahead of Codex and Claude Code.

OpenAI now monitors training, evaluations, Codex and some API use for misaligned agents, but paging is off for Codex and a replay alert took 30 minutes.

GitLab Orbit, a context graph for AI coding agents, is now GA. GitLab says its tests showed up to 45x fewer retries and 4.5x fewer tokens.

Mintive, formerly MintMCP, has raised a $7m round led by Cowboy Ventures to give each AI agent its own identity, permissions and audit trail.

Sequoia led Serval's $150m Series C at a $3bn valuation. The IT automation start-up will hire 500 people and build out its Catalyst AI agent.

DoorDash has agreed to buy Instacart for $65 a share, about $17bn, mostly in cash. It needs US, Canadian and Israeli approval and may close in 2028.

Freshworks has bought Robusta, whose AI agents investigate IT outages and suggest fixes for engineers to approve, for Freshservice. No price given.