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Google on Monday released security updates for its Chrome browser to address two security flaws, including one that has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-13223 (CVSS score: 8.8), a type confusion vulnerability in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine that could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution or program crashes. "Type Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

It didn’t take long for some IT leaders who last month started paying to get Windows 10 security updates to face their first support problem.

Microsoft said the update issued last week on November Patch Tuesday — KB5068781 for Windows 10 22H2 builds 19044.6575 and 19045.6575 —  might fail to install on some commercial Windows 10 devices enrolled to receive Extended Security Updates (ESU).

When attempts are made to install this patch, screens may show “error 0x800f0922 (CBS_E_INSTALLERS_FAILED).

“This issue is isolated to devices activated via Windows subscription activation through the Microsoft 365 admin center,” Microsoft said in a status statement on its support site.

The patch is in part a cumulative update, and includes security fixes and improvements from the October Patch Tuesday releases.

However, on Monday (Nov. 17) Microsoft said the issue has been fixed by the update KB5072653: Extended Security Updates (ESU) Licensing Preparation Package for Windows 10. “Once you install the preparation package (KB5072653), you will be able to deploy this November 11, 2025 security update (KB5068781),” the company said .

Jack Bicer, director of vulnerability research at patch automation provider Action1, said IT leaders who encountered this error before Microsoft issued the November 17 fix should check that they have the latest servicing stack update (SSU) installed. If not, install that and try to install the patch again. Running Windows Update Troubleshooter may also help detect and reset components if needed.

To repair system files, he said, admins should:

• Temporarily disable non-Microsoft services/startup apps (Clean Boot) to eliminate third-party interference.
• If the update still fails, download the .msu package for KB5068781 from the Microsoft Update Catalog and install manually (run wusa.exe .msu /quiet /norestart). Ensure you match architecture and version.
• If you installed the update but still face issues: verify the build number via winver to ensure it reached 19045.6575 (22H2) or 19044.6575 (21H2). 

This article originally appeared on CSOonline.

When reports came out on Monday that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is pouring $6.2 billion into another AI startup, to be called Project Prometheus, analysts and practitioners disagreed about what the move means for the near term future of AI and IT.

The company will initially focus on manufacturing systems and engineering, as well as, of course, spacecraft. The idea is to move AI efforts from LLM models to more concrete physical systems. Bezos will hold the title of Co-CEO.

However, given the fact that AI in various forms has dominated in such environments for more than a decade, particulars are needed to see what, if anything, new is planned.

Thomas Randall, a research lead at Info-Tech Research Group, said the lack of details about the project means that it could mean many different things, or perhaps very little.

“While the rest of the market keeps chasing compute and data infrastructure, Bezos seems to be targeting AI that moves, builds, or interacts with the real world, and that shift could hold stronger long-term value. There is even a philosophical thread here about intelligence itself, that true understanding may only emerge when an AI is embodied in a physical form that senses where it ends and the external world begins,” Randall said.

“The secrecy around the company is also intriguing. It’s a perfect way to spark speculation, which might be intentional, and there might be serious proprietary ambitions behind the scenes that require total confidentiality. It also makes it impossible to judge what they’re building, what advantages they might have, or how long it could take. If they’re focusing on AI systems tied to physical processes, the development curve will be slow, and any return on investment would likely be years away. Then again, secrecy can also hide the opposite: that there is not yet much to show.”

Sanchit Vir Gogia, the chief analyst at Greyhound Research, was more optimistic, and saw much to be positive about in the Bezos move. 

“Project Prometheus stands out not just because Jeff Bezos is returning to an operational role, but because it is entering a segment of AI that remains largely underdeveloped and technically demanding. These are areas where most generative AI models struggle because they rely on text patterns rather than real-world physics, controlled experimentation, or industrial tolerances. Prometheus appears to be building systems that learn from physical experimentation instead of simply modelling digital information. That direction is credible, but it is early,” Gogia said.

“Meaningful progress in materials science and factory optimization requires long research cycles, specialized automation infrastructure, and the ability to tolerate slow, iterative gains,” he added. “The $6.2 billion in capital gives Prometheus the freedom to explore this space at a scale few others can, yet the technical feasibility will depend on whether AI can consistently accelerate discovery beyond what conventional engineering already delivers.”

Longer and more complicated

This attempt is going to take a lot longer and will be far more infrastructure demanding than many of today’s genAI and agentic efforts, Gogia noted.

“Its capital structure immediately elevates expectations for what early-stage physical AI companies can attempt, but it also places the venture inside a domain that moves more slowly and is vastly more capital-intensive than software-led AI,” Gogia pointed out.

“Scientific breakthroughs, new materials and aerospace innovations do not follow the rapid product cycles that defined the generative AI boom,” he said. “For CIOs and CTOs, Prometheus should be viewed as a long-term signal of where AI innovation may next migrate. It is a bold attempt to push AI deeper into hard engineering challenges, but its impact will unfold over the years and will be shaped by scientific constraints, industrial realities, and the complexity of scaling AI beyond the digital world.”

Gogia added that this is the most recent move by a multi-multi-billionaire in the AI space, and it’s starting to change the nature of how these companies are managed. 

“When an individual can fund a multi-billion-dollar research engine outright, the conventional cadence of staged venture oversight is replaced by a founder-driven agenda that can move faster but also concentrates strategic control,” Gogia observed. “For enterprise technology leaders, Prometheus should be tracked not for immediate disruption but for the direction it signals. It represents a shift toward AI that serves scientific and industrial progress rather than digital convenience, and that evolution will shape the next decade of enterprise innovation.”

Different technical hurdles for physical AI

The company’s LinkedIn page provides next to no details about the effort, other than saying that Project Prometheus currently has between 51 and 200 employees.  

“Project Prometheus has already hired nearly 100 employees, including researchers poached from top AI companies such as OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta,” said the New York Times, which broke the story. “Mr. Bezos’ co-founder and co-chief executive is Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who worked closely with Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin at Google’s X, a research effort often called ‘The Moonshot Factory.’”

Info-Tech’s Randall said that Bezos’ ties to Blue Origin and Amazon “could also give this venture a real advantage, and between logistics, robotics, and manufacturing hardware, the overlap could create some powerful partnerships.”

Kirsten Osolind, CEO of enterprise AI vendor Substratos, added that the technical hurdles for physical AI are dramatically different than software models on their own.

“The challenge for AI in manufacturing isn’t visibility, it’s alignment. Plants are flooded with sensor data and reports, but throughput, quality, staffing, and cost all shift at different speeds. Even small gaps turn into lost margin fast,” Osolind said. “For Prometheus to deliver value, the platform has to pull these signals together and turn them into one coordinated decision loop. Sensor readings, operator notes, shift behavior, and output targets all need to point to the same conclusion. When the operation drifts off plan, the system has to call it out and guide teams to the fix before losses spread across the line.”

All that said, can this make a viable business? Osolind thinks it could.

Can Bezos pull this off?

“Can Bezos pull this off? Probably. Bezos lives and breathes systems thinking. He’s one of the few leaders who understand how to build large, integrated operations that stay tightly aligned under pressure. If Prometheus focuses on operational coherence instead of chasing model size, it can raise the bar for manufacturing performance,” Osolind said. “If it skips that step, the investment won’t translate into margin movement. I’d say definitively yes — after all, it’s Bezos — but assembly lines and fate both love humbling billionaires.”

However, Susanna Cox, CEO of AI security vendor Bermuda Hundred Strategies, said she was hesitant to read too much into Bezos’ co-CEO title until more details emerged. 

“The co-CEO title is intended to give the sheen of his involvement at some level, but I would like to know what that involvement would actually mean,” Cox said. 

But Cox did have a strong objection to the company’s name, saying that the Greek mythology background to the name was a bit much. “I think the name is bananas, shows absolute arrogance,” she said.

Info-Tech’s Randall agreed, and said that the name speaks of Bezos’ “hubris.”

“Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give to humanity, an act of rebellion motivated by compassion. Prometheus suffered for it, chained to a rock for eternity. The myth is about sacrifice: Prometheus risks divine wrath to elevate humankind. Bezos’ project, by contrast, positions itself as Prometheus, the bringer of a new fire in the form of artificial intelligence, but without the humility or self-sacrifice that define the myth,” Randall said. 

“The name implies benevolence: ’I’m bringing the next great gift to humanity,’ but also hints of hubris in trying to simulate Prometheus. If we follow Greek myth further with Achilles or Icarus, we can follow the road to downfall.”

Microsoft has released an emergency Windows 10 KB5072653 out-of-band update to resolve ongoing issues with installing the November extended security updates. [...]

Seven packages published on the Node Package Manager (npm) registry use the Adspect cloud-based service to separate researchers from potential victims and lead them to malicious locations. [...]

Elon Musk-owned xAI has started rolling out Grok 4.1, which is an upgrade to the existing Grok 4 model, and it delivers some incremental improvements. [...]

The RondoDox botnet malware is now exploiting a critical remote code execution (RCE) flaw in XWiki Platform tracked as CVE-2025-24893. [...]

Nvidia hopes that its new open-source AI model for physics, Apollo, will find application in a wide variety of high-tech scientific and industrial fields.

It unveiled the new model family at SC25, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, just a month after unveiling four others: Nemotron for agentic AI, Clara for biomedical AI, Isaac GR00T for robotics, and Cosmos for other physical AI applications.

Nvidia said that the Apollo family of models will allow developers to integrate real time capabilities into their simulation software in areas such as defect detection, computational lithography, and electrothermal and mechanic design for electronic devices and semiconductors, structural analysis, weather forecasting and simulation, computational fluid dynamics, electromagnetics, and simulation in nuclear fusion, plasma simulation, and fluid structure interaction.

Apollo will provide pretrained checkpoints and reference workflows for training, inference and benchmarking, allowing developers to customize them for their applications. It is, said Nvidia, “coming soon,” and will be available on HuggingFace, build.nvidia.com, and as Nvidia NIM microservices.

Sanchit Vir Gogia, CEO of Greyhound Research, said that Apollo stands out as the intellectual centerpiece of SC25. “Nvidia has turned AI-driven physics into a fully industrialized model family spanning semiconductors, structural mechanics, materials science, weather, climate, automotive aerodynamics, and more. These are not research curiosities. When tsunami forecasting models run billions of times faster, or when petabytes of materials data are folded into real-time inferences, the scientific method itself shifts. Apollo ensures that this shift occurs inside Nvidia’s ecosystem. Once engineers, climate researchers, and materials scientists base their workflows on these models, the surrounding software, hardware, and infrastructure decisions become inevitably Nvidia-aligned. This is the most powerful form of lock-in: dependency created through genuine breakthrough performance.”

Yet more Nvidia supercomputers

Some of those models could perhaps be put to use in new supercomputers being built with Nvidia chips.

Japanese research institute RIKEN is building two of them, one providing AI for scientific research, and the second dedicated to research in quantum algorithms, hybrid simulation and quantum-classical computing methods. Both use the GB200 NVL4 platform and are interconnected by NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking.

Dion Harris, senior director, HPC and AI infrastructure solutions at Nvidia, said the second system will integrate GPUs directly into RIKEN’s quantum HBC hybrid infrastructure, linking quantum computers with accelerated computing systems and classical supercomputers like Fugaku.

In the US, Dell and the Texas Advanced Computing Center are announcing the 300 petaflop Horizon supercomputer, which will, Nvidia said, be “America’s largest academic supercomputer.“ Due to come online in 2026, it will contain 4,000 Nvidia GB200 GPUs and 9,500 Nvidia Vera CPUs.

Lock-step launches lead to lock-in

However, Gogia expressed concerns over the plethora of new Nvidia-based supercomputers — more than 80 announced this year alone. “This is not market success; it is architectural dependence,” he said. “National science agencies are aligning their multi-year roadmaps with Nvidia’s cadence, effectively transitioning from vendor selection to vendor reliance.”

Overall, he was impressed with Nvidia’s featured technologies, although he worries about the future as its dominance continues to increase.

“The breakthroughs showcased at SC25 are extraordinary,” Gogia said, but, “They come with a governance cost. When the entire lifecycle of scientific computation, spanning simulation, AI, data movement, networking, storage, orchestration, and quantum control, becomes anchored to a single vendor’s architecture, autonomy diminishes. CIOs, national labs, and research agencies must now decide whether they are comfortable with a future where the acceleration of science is extraordinary, but the ecosystem shaping it is extraordinarily narrow. Nvidia has offered the world a path to unprecedented capability. It is up to the world to decide whether that path should also be the only one.”

Gemini 3, which could be Google's best large language model, could begin rolling out in the next few days or hours, as the model has been spotted on AI Studio. [...]

Eurofiber France disclosed a data breach it discovered late last week when hackers gained access to its ticket management system by exploiting a vulnerability and exfiltrated information. [...]

Over the next few years, agentic AI is expected to bring not only rapid technological breakthroughs, but a societal transformation, redefining how we live, work and interact with the world. And this shift is happening quickly. “By 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024, enabling 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously,” according to research firm Gartner.

Unlike traditional AI, which typically follows preset rules or algorithms, agentic AI adapts to new situations, learns from experiences, and operates independently to pursue goals without human intervention. In short, agentic AI empowers systems to act autonomously, making decisions and executing tasks — even communicating directly with other AI agents — with little or no human involvement.

Agentic AI will enable machines to interact with the physical world with unprecedented intelligence, allowing them to perform complex tasks in dynamic environments, which could be especially useful for industries facing labor shortages or hazardous conditions.However, the rise of agentic AI also brings security and ethical concerns. Ensuring these autonomous systems operate safely, transparently and responsibly will require governance frameworks and testing.

Follow this page for ongoing agentic AI coverage from Computerworld and Foundry’s other publications.

Agentic AI news and insights From chatbots to colleagues: How agentic AI is redefining enterprise automation

November 17, 2025: A new wave of agentic AI is taking shape: systems that not only converse but also reason, plan, and act within enterprise workflows. These agents are not assistants that talk; they are digital colleagues that think.

The enterprise IT overhaul: Architecting your stack for the agentic AI era

November 10, 2025: For the CIO, the conversation has officially moved past the large language model (LLM). The next critical chapter is agentic AI — autonomous systems capable of reasoning, planning and executing multi-step tasks across your enterprise. Agentic AI is here. Now, CIOs must orchestrate

October 23, 2025: Agentic AI is about to change how companies create value. Yet, most enterprises aren’t ready. The problem isn’t the technology — it’s the planning and execution. Too many pilots stall out because CIOs haven’t built the AI systems, guardrails and culture to move beyond experiments.

AI agents might smooth some of retail’s worst data problems

October 21, 2025: So many retail challenges hinge on unreliable product data. Can agentic AI clean up that data enough to make a difference? Can it do the same for other verticals?

The impact of agentic AI on SaaS and partner ecosystems

October 16, 2025: The enterprise technology landscape is entering a critical pivot point as agentic AI transforms partner ecosystems from human-mediated, application integration networks into autonomous, self-orchestrating and intelligent ecosystems.

Salesforce updates its agentic AI pitch with Agentforce 360

October 13 2025: Salesforce announced a new release of Agentforce that, it says, “gives teams the fastest path from AI prototypes to production-scale agents” — although with many of the new release’s features still to come, or yet to enter pilot phases or beta testing, some parts of that path will be much slower than others.

Gemini Enterprise is Google’s new ‘front door’ for agentic AI access at work

October 9, 2025: Google introduced an AI assistant to serve as a platform so users can access and coordinate AI agents that automate work tasks. Gemini Enterprise, which replaces the Agentspace app launched last year, also features new enterprise search functions to help customers tap into data from across an organization’s business apps. 

Oracle’s agentic AI push in Fusion Cloud CX offers embedded automation for CX leaders

October 7, 2025: Oracle is adding new pre-built agents to its Advertising and Customer Experience Cloud (Fusion Cloud CX) to help enterprises increase operational efficiency by automating sales, service, and marketing processes.

IBM touts agentic AI orchestration, cryptographic risk controls

October 7, 2025: IBM watsonx Orchestrate offers more than 500 tools and customizable, domain-specific agents from IBM and third-party contributors. Among the additions to watsonx Orchestrate are AgentOps capabilities that offer real-time monitoring and policy-based controls for observability and governance.

How self-learning AI agents will reshape operational workflows

October 6, 2025: Google’s recent whitepaper, “Welcome to the Era of Experience,” signals a shift in the way AI agents are trained. Google hypothesizes that allowing AI agents to learn from the experience of agents rather than solely from human-generated training data will enable autonomous AI to surpass its current capabilities.

Are your agentic AI projects driving toward success?

October 3, 2025: Anushree Verma, Gartner senior director analyst, says most agentic AI projects today are early-stage experiments or proofs of concept, fueled primarily by hype and often misapplied.

Microsoft unveils framework for building agentic AI apps

October 3. 2025: Microsoft has introduced the Microsoft Agent Framework, an open-source SDK and runtime for building, orchestrating, and deploying AI agents and multi-agent workflows, with full framework support for .NET and Python.

Salesforce Trusted AI Foundation seeks to power the agentic enterprise

October 2, 2025: As Salesforce pushes further into agentic AI, its aim is to evolve Salesforce Platform from an application for building AI to a foundational operating system for enterprise AI ecosystems. 

ServiceNow’s AI Experience is an agentic AI UI for the Now Platform

September 30, 2025: ServiceNow today launched the AI Experience (AIx), a contextually aware multimodal AI-driven use UI for its Now platform. Building on the ServiceNow AI Platform and with a foundation in Now Assist, the company describes it as “a unified, conversational front door to enterprise AI.”

How MCP is making AI agents actually do things in the real world

September 29, 2025: You’ve seen them: Those incredible large language models (LLMs) that can chat, write and even generate code. They’ve revolutionized how we interact with technology, but there’s a new, even more exciting chapter unfolding. Discover how MCP is turning chatbots into doers, and the future of work may never look the same.

Agentic AI in IT security: Where expectations meet reality

September 29, 2025: Agentic AI has shifted from lab demos to real-world SOC deployments. Unlike traditional automation scripts, software agents are designed to act on signals and execute security workflows intelligently, correlating logs, enriching alerts, and even take first-line containment actions.

Walmart looks to cash in on agentic AI

September 19, 2025: Walmart doesn’t intend to lose its retail crown anytime soon. And, according to US EVP and CTO Hari Vasudev, the $815B company’s artificial intelligence strategy will play a key role in preventing that from happening.

5 steps for deploying agentic AI red teaming

September 17, 2025: As more enterprises deploy agentic AI applications, the potential attack surface increases in complexity and reach. But there is still hope that AI agents can be harnessed for defensive purposes too, including using traditional red teaming and penetration testing techniques but updated for the AI world.

Google unveils payments protocol for AI agents with major financial firms

September 17. 2025: Google has introduced the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open framework developed with more than 60 payments and technology companies to support secure, agent-led transactions across platforms and payment methods.

CrowdStrike bets big on agentic AI with new offerings after $290M Onum buy

September 16, 2025: At its Fal.Con conference, the cybersecurity giant launched its Agentic Security Platform and Agentic Security Workforce, aiming to outpace AI-driven adversaries with real-time intelligence, automation, and a common language for defense.

Adobe makes Agent Orchestrator and AI agents generally available

September 10, 2025: Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) Agent Orchestrator and six new AI agents are designed to build, deliver, and optimize customer experience and marketing campaigns. The company also announced Experience Platform Agent Composer for customizing and configuring AI agents based on brand guidelines and organizational policy.

Rethinking the IT organization for the agentic AI era

September 2, 2025: With the advent of agentic AI, CIOs must be poised to adjust strategic IT priorities, mitigate new security risks, and reskill staff for a new era.

How to build a production-grade agentic AI platform

September 2, 2025: Modular orchestration, fail-safe design, hybrid memory management, and LLM integration with domain knowledge are essential to agentic AI systems that reason, act, and adapt at scale.

Agentic AI: A CISO’s security nightmare in the making?

September 2, 2025: Enterprises will no doubt be using agentic AI for a growing number of workflows and processes, including software development, customer support automation, and more. But what are the cybersecurity risks of agentic AI, and how much more work will it take for them to support their organizations’ agentic AI dreams?

Microsoft researchers develop new tech for video AI agents

September 2, 2025: Microsoft researchers are developing technologies for a new class of video AI agents to explore three-dimensional spaces before making decisions.The technology framework, called MindJourney, uses a range of AI technologies to understand and analyze 3D spaces, reason about the surroundings, and predict movement

Salesforce AI Research unveils new tools for AI agents

August 27, 2025: Salesforce announced a simulated enterprise environment, benchmark, and account data unification tool that are designed to help customers transform into agentic AI enterprises.

Agentic AI promises a cybersecurity revolution — with asterisks

August 18, 2025: The hottest topic at this year’s Black Hat conference was the meteoric emergence of AI tools for both cyber adversaries and defenders, particularly the use of agentic AI to strengthen cybersecurity programs.

4 thoughts on who should manage AI agents

August 11, 2025: As AI agents proliferate, we need to turn our attention beyond AI agent builder platforms to AI orchestration and AI GRC platforms. It also raises questions about which groups within the enterprise should manage AI agents and how they should be treated.

How bright are AI agents? Not very, recent reports suggest

July 31, 2025: Security researchers are adding more weight to a truth that infosec pros had already grasped: AI agents are not very bright, and are easily tricked into doing stupid or dangerous things

Will AI agents eat the SaaS market? Experts are split

July 31,2025: As hype about AI agents reaches new heights, an emerging theory suggests that the groundbreaking AI tools will kill the SaaS business model. The claim isn’t particularly new, but is resurfacing, with people like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella voicing this position. 

How agentic AI will change database management

July 28, 2025: Generative AI has already had a profound impact on the world of database management. And now, thanks to AI’s knack for pattern-recognition, teams can use generative AI to analyze data sets, detect anomalies, and access invaluable insights with record speed and precision. 

As AI agents go mainstream, companies lean into confidential computing for data security

July 21, 2025: Companies need to stop ignoring data security as AI agents take over internal data movement in IT environments, analysts and IT execs warn. To address that issue, some tech players are embracing the concept of “confidential computing.” While it’s existed for years, it;s now finding new life with the rise of genAI.

How agentic AI will transform mobile apps and field operations

July 15, 2015: Agentic AI will usher in new mobile AI experiences. Construction, manufacturing, healthcare, and other industries with significant field operations will benefit from mobile AI agents and the resulting operational agility. 

MCP is fueling agentic AI — and introducing new security risks

July 10, 2025: Model Context Protocol (MCP) has caught fire, with several thousand MCP servers now available from a wide range of vendors enabling AI assistants to connect to their data and services. And with agentic AI increasingly seen as the future of IT, MCP will only grow in use in the enterprise. But innovations like MCP also come with significant security risks.

3 industries where agentic AI is poised to make its mark

July 4, 2024:  IT leaders from finance, retail, and healthcare lend insights into what organizations are doing with AI agents today — and where they see the technology taking their organizations and industries in the future.

IFS rolls TheLoops agentic AI into industrial ERP

June 27, 2025: IFS is adding AI agent development and management capabilities to its ERP platform with the acquisition of software startup The acquisition brings TheLoops’ full Agent Development life cycle (ADLC) platform into IFS, enabling enterprises to design, test, deploy, monitor, and fine-tune AI agents with built-in support for versioning, compliance, and performance optimization.

How AI agents and agentic AI differ from each other

June 12, 2025: With agentic AI in its infancy and organizations rushing to adopt AI agents, there seems to be confusion about the difference between “agentic AI” and “AI agents” technologies, but experts say there’s growing understanding that the two are separate, but related, tools.

The future of RPA ties to AI agents

June 10, 2025: RPA is accelerating toward a crossroads, with IT leaders and experts debating its future. Some IT leaders say that more powerful and autonomous AI agents will replace the two-decade-old AI precursor technology, while others predict that AI agents and RPA will work hand-in-hand.

MCP is enabling agentic AI, but how secure is it?

June 2, 2025: Model context protocol (MCP) is becoming the plug-and-play standard for agentic AI apps to pull in data in real time from multiple sources. However, this also makes it more attractive for malicious actors looking to exploit weaknesses in how MCP has been deployed. 

The agentic AI assist Stanford University cancer care staff needed

May 30, 2025: At Microsoft Build 2025 earlier this month, Nigam Shah, CDO for Stanford Health Care, discussed agentic AI’s ability to redefine healthcare, especially in oncology, as physicians get overloaded with the administrative tasks of medicine, he said, which lead to burnout.

Agentic AI, LLMs and standards big focus of Red Hat Summit

May 26, 2025: Red Hat, announced a number of improvements in its core enterprise Linux product, including better security, better support for containers, better support for edge devices. But the one topic that dominated the conversation was AI.

Putting agentic AI to work in Firebase Studio

May 21, 2025: Putting agentic AI to work in software engineering can be done in a variety of ways. Some agents work independently of the developer’s environment, working essentially like a remote developer. Other agents directly within a developer’s own environment. Google’s Firebase Studio is an example of the latter, drawing on Google’s Gemini LLM o help developers prototype and build applications .

Why is Microsoft offering to turn websites into AI apps with NLWeb?

May 20. 2025: NLWeb, short for Natural Language Web, is designed to help enterprises build a natural language interface for their websites using the model of their choice and data to answer user queries about the contents of the website. Microsoft hopes to stake its claim on the agentic web before rivals Google and Amazon do.

Databricks to acquire open-source database startup Neon to build the next wave of AI agents

May 14, 2025: Agentic AI requires a new type of architecture because traditional workflows create gridlock, dragging down speed and performance. To get ahead in this next generation of app building, Databricks announced it will purchase Neon, an open-source serverless Postgres company.

Agentic mesh: The future of enterprise agent ecosystems

May 13, 2025: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicts we’ll soon see “a couple of hundred million digital agents” inside the enterprise. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella takes it even further: “Agents will replace all software.”

Google to unveil AI agent for developers at I/O, expand Gemini integration

May 13, 2025: Google is expected to unveil a new AI agent aimed at helping software developers manage tasks across the coding lifecycle, including task execution and documentation. The tool has reportedly been demonstrated to employees and select external developers ahead of the company’s annual I/O conference.

Nvidia, ServiceNow engineer open-source model to create AI agents

May 6, 2025: Nvidia and ServiceNow have created an AI model that can help companies create learning AI agents to automate corporate workloads. The open-source Apriel model, available generally in the second quarter on HuggingFace, will help create AI agents that can make decisions around IT, human resources and customer-service functions.

How IT leaders use agentic AI for business workflows

April 30, 2025: Jay Upchurch, CIO at SAS, backs agentic AI to enhance sales, marketing, IT, and HR motions. “Agentic AI can make sales more effective by handling lead scoring, assisting with customer segmentation, and optimizing targeted outreach,” he says.

Microsoft sees AI agents shaking up org charts, eliminating traditional functions

April 28, 2025: As companies increasingly automate work processes using agents, traditional functions such as finance, marketing, and engineering may fall away, giving rise to an ‘agent boss’ era of delegation and orchestration of myriad bots.

Cisco automates AI-driven security across enterprise networks

April 28, 2025: Cisco announced a range of AI-driven security enhancements, including improved threat detection and response capabilities in Cisco XDR and Splunk Security, new AI agents, and integration between Cisco’s AI Defense platform and ServiceNow SecOps.

Hype versus execution in agentic AI

April 25, 2025: Agentic AI promises autonomous systems capable of reasoning, making decisions, and dynamically adapting to changing conditions. The allure lies in machines operating independently, free of human intervention, streamlining processes and enhancing efficiency at unprecedented scales. But David Linthicum writes, don’t be swept up by ambitious promises. 

Agents are here — but can you see what they’re doing?

April 23, 2025: As the agentic AI models powering individual agents get smarter, the use cases for agentic AI systems get more ambitious — and the risks posed by these systems increase exponentially.A multicloud experiment in agentic AI: Lessons learned

Agentic AI might soon get into cryptocurrency trading — what could possibly go wron

April 15, 2025: Agentic AI promises to simplify complex tasks such as crypto trading or managing digital assets by automating decisions, enhancing accessibility, and masking technical complexity.

Agentic AI is both boon and bane for security pros

April 15, 2025: Cybersecurity is at a crossroads with agentic AI. It’s a powerful tool that can create reams of code in a blink of an eye, find and defuse threats, and be used so decisively and defensively. This has proved to be a huge force multiplier and productivity boon. But while powerful, agentic AI isn’t dependable, and that is the conundrum. 

AI agents vs. agentic AI: What do enterprises want?

April 15, 2025:  Now that this AI agent story has morphed into “agentic AI,” it seems to have taken on the same big-cloud-AI flavor that enteriprise already rejected. What do they want from AI agents, why is “agentic” thinking wrong, and where is this all headed?

A multicloud experiment in agentic AI: Lessons learned

April 11, 2025: Turns out you really can build a decentralized AI system that operates successfully across multiple public cloud providers. It’s both challenging and costly.

Google adds open source framework for building agents to Vertex AI

April 9, 2025: Google is adding a new open source framework for building agents to its AI and machine learning platform Vertex AI, along with other updates to help deploy and maintain these agents. The open source Agent Development Kit (ADK) will make it possible to build an AI agent in under 100 lines of Python code. It expects to add support for more languages later this year.

Google’s Agent2Agent open protocol aims to connect disparate agents

April 9, 2025: Google has taken the covers off a new open protocol — Agent2Agent (A2A) — that aims to connect agents across disparate ecosystems.. At its annual Cloud Next conference, Google said that the A2A protocol will enable enterprises to adopt agents more readily as it bypasses the challenge of agents that are built on different vendor ecosystems not being able to communicate with each other.

Riverbed bolsters AIOps platform with predictive and agentic AI

April 8, 2025: Riverbed unveiled updates to its AIOps and observability platform that the company says will transform how IT organizations manage complex distributed infrastructure and data more efficiently. Expanded AI capabilities are aimed at making it easier to manage AIOps and enabling IT organizations to transition from reactive to predictive IT operations.

Microsoft’s newest AI agents can detail how they reason

March 26, 2025: If you’re wondering how AI agents work, Microsoft’s new Copilot AI agents provide real-time answers on how data is being analyzed and sourced to reach results. The Researcher and Analyst agents take a deeper look at data sources such as email, chat or databases within an organization to produce research reports, analyze strategies, or convert raw information into meaningful data.

Microsoft launches AI agents to automate cybersecurity amid rising threats

March 26, 2025: Microsoft has introduced a new set of AI agents for its Security Copilot platform, designed to automate key cybersecurity functions as organizations face increasingly complex and fast-moving digital threats. The new tools focus on tasks such as phishing detection, data protection, and identity management.

How AI agents work

March 24, 2025: By leveraging technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and contextual understanding, AI agents can operate independently, even partnering with other agents to perform complex tasks.

5 top business use cases for AI agents

March 19, 2025: AI agents are poised to transform the enterprise, from automating mundane tasks to driving customer service and innovation. But having strong guardrails in place will be key to success.

Nvidia launches AgentIQ toolkit to connect disparate AI agents

March 21, 2025: As enterprises look to adopt agents and agentic AI to boost the efficiency of their applications, Nvidia this week introduced a new open-source software library — AgentIQ toolkit — to help developers connect disparate agents and agent frameworks..

Deloitte unveils agentic AI platform

March 18, 2025: At Nvidia GTC 2025 in San Jose, Deloitte announced Zora AI, a new agentic AI platform that offers a portfolio of AI agents for finance, human capital, supply chain, procurement, sales and marketing, and customer service.The platform draws on Deloitte’s experience from its technology, risk, tax, and audit businesses, and is integrated with all major enterprise software platforms. 

The dawn of agentic AI: Are we ready for autonomous technology?

March 15, 2025: Much of the AI work prior has focused on large language models (LLMs) with a goal to give prompts to get knowledge out of the unstructured data. So it’s a question-and-answer process. Agentic AI goes beyond that. You can give it a task that might involve a complex set of steps that can change each time.

How to know a business process is ripe for agentic AI

March 11, 2025: Deloitte predicts that in 2025, 25% of companies that use generative AI will launch agentic AI pilots or proofs of concept, growing to 50% in 2027. The firm says some agentic AI applications, in some industries and for some use cases, could see actual adoption into existing workflows this year.

With new division, AWS bets big on agentic AI automation

March 6, 2025: Amazon Web Services customers can expect to hear a lot more about agentic AI from AWS in future with the news that the company is setting up a dedicated unit to promote the technology on its platform.

How agentic AI makes decisions and solves problems

March 6, 2025: GenAI’s latest big step forward has been the arrival of autonomous AI agents. Agentic AI is based on AI-enabled applications capable of perceiving their environment, making decisions, and taking actions to achieve specific goals. 

CIOs are bullish on AI agents. IT employees? Not so much

Feb. 4, 2025: Most CIOs and CTOs are bullish on agentic AI, believing the emerging technology will soon become essential to their enterprises, but lower-level IT pros who will be tasked with implementing agents have serious doubts.

The next AI wave — agents — should come with warning labels. Is now the right time to invest in them?

Jan.13, 2025: The next wave of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption is already under way, as AI agents — AI applications that can function independently and execute complex workflows with minimal or limited direct human oversight — are being rolled out across the tech industry.

AI agents are unlike any technology ever

Dec. 1, 2024: The agents are coming, and they represent a fundamental shift in the role artificial intelligence plays in businesses, governments, and our lives.

AI agents are coming to work — here’s what businesses need to know

Nov. 21, 2024: AI agents will soon be everywhere, automating complex business processes and taking care of mundane tasks for workers — at least that’s the claim of various software vendors that are quickly adding intelligent bots to a wide range of work apps.

Agentic AI swarms are headed your way

November 1, 2024: OpenAI launched an experimental framework called Swarm. It’s a “lightweight” system for the development of agentic AI swarms, which are networks of autonomous AI agents able to work together to handle complex tasks without human intervention, according to OpenAI. 

Is now the right time to invest in implementing agentic AI?

October 31, 2024: While software vendors say their current agentic AI-based offerings are easy to implement, analysts say that’s far from the truth.

A Princeton University database was compromised in a cyberattack on November 10, exposing the personal information of alumni, donors, faculty members, and students. [...]

The police in the Netherlands have seized around 250 physical servers powering a bulletproof hosting service in the country used exclusively by cybercriminals for providing complete anonymity. [...]

Microsoft said today that the Aisuru botnet hit its Azure network with a 15.72 terabits per second (Tbps) DDoS attack, launched from over 500,000 IP addresses. [...]

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered malware campaigns using the now-prevalent ClickFix social engineering tactic to deploy Amatera Stealer and NetSupport RAT. The activity, observed this month, is being tracked by eSentire under the moniker EVALUSION. First spotted in June 2025, Amatera is assessed to be an evolution of ACR (short for "AcridRain") Stealer, which was available under the Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Last week, Amazon and Perplexity had a major falling out when the e-commerce giant sent a sharply worded legal demand letter to the AI company, demanding changes in the way Perplexity’s shopping agent works.

The background story is that Perplexity has a function in its Comet AI browser that allows an AI “agent” to shop on Amazon, for example, on behalf of the user. The idea is that the user tells the agent to buy a bag of cat food, and the bot goes to Amazon on its own and places the order.

Amazon doesn’t like that process. The demand letter it sent to Perplexity aims to make the Comet agent identify itself as an AI agent, and not look like any other user to Amazon. This is a lack of transparency, Amazon argued. But what it really comes down to is that Amazon wants to be able to block the Comet agent and similar bots outright, in the same way media and other content owners want to be able to block AI bots from scraping their content.

The tone between the two companiesquickly became shrill. After the letter arrived, Perplexity accused Amazon of “bullying” and being anti-innovation. “Amazon just wants to sell advertising, and sell its customers unnecessary goods,” Perplexity said in a blog post.

And…that’s the real issue here. I’ve written before that AI agents, to the extent they work as promised, will reshape the entire digital economy. That’s true for the e-commerce market in general — and Amazon in particular. Call this the first battle in the War of the Agents.

After all, Amazon’s business idea is to drive revenue through its own platform and its own customer relationships. Part of that revenue comes from ads, which people don’t really think about. But Amazon has sold more than $600 billion worth of ads in the last year, including things like companies paying to get their products more visible in Amazon’s own search results and recommendations.

But beyond that, of course, upselling is incredibly important to Amazon. You constantly get recommendations related to your previous purchases, offers that fit your purchase history, and the ability to easily buy something you bought before again. And, of course, you get offers to pay for the premium service Prime.

All of this goes away if it’s an anonymous “AI agent” that pops onto Amazon, buys a specific item, and leaves. No ad exposure, no customer relationship, no additional sales. That Amazon would be against this seems like the most obvious thing in the world.

Amazon’s sheer size makes it extra important to follow the dispute, but the same is true for all other e-retailers as well. I don’t know of a single store I shop from that doesn’t sprinkle offers, “you haven’t forgotten” suggestions and customer club discounts.

I’ve heard Swedish e-retailers talk with some enthusiasm that shopping agents and purchase recommendations in, for example, Chat GPT will be able to send completely new visitors to their stores, in the same way that many today depend on customers finding them via Google.

But then it’s still about human visitors who come into the store, look around and make one or more purchases. When the visitor — the “customer” — is an AI agent, it will pull the rug out from under a significant part of the store.

How big this problem will become depends partly on the AI companies and partly on the users. The AI companies will, of course, have to respect if a platform or store doesn’t want their agents as visitors — or at least make some kind of revenue deal. (Perplexity is bad at this kind of thing and has previously been caught reading articles behind newspaper paywalls without paying for them.)

What about the users? Perplexity is adamant that this is what users want, that it’s a “natural evolution” of the demand that made Amazon so big.

I’m not so sure. Call me old-fashioned, but I appreciate a good shopping experience, where I can search and compare for myself, get good deals and collect bonuses for my loyalty. I’m happy to have a relationship with a company for whom I’m a customer, if it gives me benefits in terms of security, choice and discounts. I wouldn’t give my debit card to even to a chatbot (notoriously unreliable) to buy even a box of dog poop bags.

But, maybe others are not like me. Maybe that’s what most users want — for the AI agents to take over both the debit card and the home clicking. If that’s the case, it will have very big consequences. Or as McKinsey calls it, “opportunities.”

This column is taken from CS Weekly, a personalized newsletter with reading tips, link tips and analysis sent directly from editor-in-chief Marcus Jerräng’s desk. If you would you like to receive the newsletter on Fridays, sign up for a free subscription here.

A vulnerability in DoorDash's systems could allow anyone to send "official" DoorDash-themed emails right from company's authorized servers, paving a near-perfect phishing channel. DoorDash has now patched the issue, but a contentious disclosure dispute has erupted, with both sides accusing each other of acting in bad faith. [...]

The office of Pennsylvania's attorney general has confirmed that the ransomware gang behind an August 2025 cyberattack stole files containing personal and medical information. [...]

​Microsoft is working to resolve a known issue preventing users from installing the Microsoft 365 desktop apps on Windows devices. [...]

Once upon a time, Apple introduced a new iPhone every year. These days, in some years it introduces five of them. Have we reached saturation point? Possibly. Solution? Ship six iPhones a year. As expected, Apple is building a new market dynamic.

Think of it this way. Until now, competitors knew the pace of Apple releases, a cadence that gave them confidence in the market share struggle. By dividing iPhone releases into two, Apple creates an opportunity to move its devices in multipole directions – some will be faster, some will be thinner, others will be more advanced. It means that rather than competing with just one high-end iPhone, competitors will fight with six high-end devices, each slightly different from one another, with prices spanning mid- to high-range markets. Each iPhone will host its own powerful Apple Silicon processor, and splitting the cadence across two years will let Apple pour massive quantities of new tech into the highest-end models.

What we’re hearing

So what’s the claim? The idea is that Apple will introduce three high-end iPhones in fall 2026, with lower-end iPhones, possibly including a new edition iPhone Air 2, set to ship in 2027. (The Air is expected to gain a 2nm A20 processor, which will make for much better battery life.) In what is really just a rehash of speculation reported earlier this year, the cadence of the release, according to Bloomberg, will be like this:

• Fall 2026: iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the hotly-anticipated new folding iPhone.
• Spring 2027: iPhone 18, iPhone 18e, iPhone Air.

These alternating launches will then be repeated in future years, and we’ll no doubt see the difference between Apple’s Pro and other iPhone models accentuate over time. (The 20th anniversary iPhone might be part of this.) The Pro Max will likely be the most technology-packed smartphone money can buy, while the folding device is likely to be the most advanced device on the planet. It is also worth noting that — reading between the lines of the report — Apple doesn’t necessarily intend to update all of these models annually, nor will it need to as it continues to diversify the range.

Daring to be different(iated)

The decision to diversify the iPhone offer didn’t come that easily to Apple. Until now, the company has woven a delicate dance in which, while offering multiple devices, somehow all of those smartphones were seen as one iPhone. 

Moving to split the release between mid-range and high-end launches means the company is deliberately putting distance between both types of iPhone. It also means bad news for some of the other mobile manufacturers who shore up their share with mid-range sales. Even as Apple’s A-powered MacBook is coming to grab a slice of the healthiest part of the PC market (low/mid-range sales), the company is also moving to seize some of that part of the smartphone business. This will inevitably put further price pressure on others in that part of the space, and might prompt another wave of mergers and acquisitions, as that is where most mid-tier manufacturers make their business. 

The medium is the message

Beyond market dynamics, messaging could be another reason Apple might be moving to segmentalize its market. Think about the most recent iPhone launch and how many of the nuances of each model were buried by more generalized reporting across all of them. The iPhone 17 I’m using myself maintains everything about the iPhone range, but the vast majority of reports on the new models focused on the higher-end devices.

With that in mind, it makes sense for Apple to put partition between its iPhone families. Doing so will enable it to explain the benefits of each product better. It gains freedom, flexibility, and the opportunity to build an iPhone range that encompasses a variety of different forms, builds, and features. Diversification, it thinks, is power.

I believe the move will help Apple sell more iPhones. It’s also worth noting that this is not actually a major departure from what the company already does, with some devices already usually appearing in spring. Apple is setting the scene for change, and as the company does everything for a reason, that means it has plenty more planned.

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