AI Agents - Page 17

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.

Google Cloud's Gemini agent, in private preview, takes on whole tasks and can get its own Workspace email and calendar. Coworker pricing is not yet set.

Three agent-security stories from 8 October. Zenity says one prompt to an exposed AWS AgentCore agent could lead to control of every agent in the same account and region, and AWS disputes it. Claude Code adds an option that blocks an action when a safety hook fails. Cisco Talos finds malware that writes to AI analysts. What each shows, and what it does not.

An unreleased "Additional sandbox options" setting found in Google's Gemini desktop app for Mac would let the AI reach files, apps and network connections beyond the folders users connect today. It is hidden, unconfirmed by Google and arrives just as Apple is tightening Full Disk Access.

Manus raises more than $500m after Beijing blocked Meta's takeover. Tab emerges at a $300m valuation. Nvidia reportedly discusses another $1bn for Figure. ElevenLabs says it has passed a $600m run rate, and Synthesia launches Syren in beta. A Reuters/Ipsos poll finds most Americans think government is not taking AI risks seriously enough.

Cognition has given its Devin coding agent a memory: short notes kept in a Git repository and tidied each night by a "dreaming" session, with the format open-sourced. Separately, Hark has released Hark Pro, a free assistant built on a model trained to use computers. What each launch is, and which claims are the companies' own.

A critical Langflow flaw let MCP server settings run any command. Researchers say GitHub's Copilot CLI followed encrypted instructions that it refused in plain text; GitHub says that is not a vulnerability. Meanwhile Atlassian has split its 220+ agent tools into read, write and destructive tiers, and OpenAI has made Codex Auto-review free. What each one confirms.

A hijacked release of the tensorlake npm package stole tokens and AI-tool config files, and booby-trapped the stolen GitHub token so that revoking it wipes the victim's home folder. The same week, GitHub made local sandboxing for Copilot generally available, Bitdefender released a free agent guard for macOS, and Citadel AI opened early access to agent monitoring. LangChain and past.dev shipped agent tooling with access controls built in. What each one confirms.

Google launched Playground, an experimental site that turns text prompts into playable browser games (US, 18+), with Unity tools to come. Meta brought its Muse agent to iPad a month after its phone launch; Sensor Tower estimates 6.6M+ installs. What each does and what to watch.

Microsoft made its Execution Containers generally available on Windows 11 as it rebuilds Windows for local and cloud "hybrid" AI, and opened Surface Laptop Ultra pre-orders from $2,599. AWS open-sourced Strands Box, a sandbox that enforces rules such as "no git push" whatever the agent decides. What an enforced sandbox does, in plain words.