AI Agents - Page 17

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.

Nous Research has raised $90 million to build Hermes for Businesses, a company version of its MIT-licensed Hermes agent. The raise is confirmed; the valuation is reported, mostly at $1.5B, with one $1.2B figure in circulation. Nous's "2.5% of global token usage" is its own estimate.

Step-by-step how-tos for Personal Bots, Marketplace templates, Team vs Template choices, group-chat handoffs, skills and routines, and a newsroom Research→Writer→Reviewer pattern—plus the full Marketplace catalog with implementation ideas as of 7 October 2026.

Meta, Walmart, Stripe and Sierra published an open “personal agent protocol” so businesses can tell AI agents from people and see what agents do on their sites. Coverage via CNBC; Muse user counts are Meta-stated.

Open weights, serving runtimes and agents now fit together. Why open-source AI adoption is compressing from years of glue work to months.