Computerworld.com [Hacking News]

Google has made a big step forward by extending end-to-end encryption to Android and iOS devices for Gmail client-side encryption (CSE) users, says an expert.

“All in all, this is a welcome update, especially in light of recent concerns surrounding WhatsApp’s encryption methods,” said Gartner analyst Avivah Litan. “Google’s approach offers verifiable customer-managed keys and ensures the provider does not have access to encrypted content.”

This, she said, addresses allegations raised in the January 2026 lawsuit against Meta regarding their internal access to customer encrypted message data.

Meta has reportedly said the claims are false, and that WhatsApp messages remain protected by default. The suit’s allegations have not been proven in court.

Litan noted that Google’s encryption update is only for organizations subscribing to its Enterprise Plus with Assured Controls edition. Messages and attachments are encrypted directly on-device, with encryption keys managed externally by the customer.

“For CSOs in regulated industries, this development is significant, as it supports secure mobile communication, compliance with regulations such as HIPAA [the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] and GDPR [the European General Data Protection Regulation], and reduces the risk of plaintext data exposure on mobile devices,” she said. “External recipients retain the ability to reply via a web portal.”

However, Litan added, the capability remains opt-in, requires premium licensing and administrative configuration, and disables several Gmail functions, including AI features and comprehensive search, on encrypted content. But, she pointed out, the limitations are consistent with those in Gmail web and desktop implementations.

It’s also a capability that Microsoft doesn’t provide. A Microsoft spokesperson said in an email that the company doesn’t currently offer end-to-end Outlook encryption on mobile, although messages can be digitally signed and encrypted. 

In its April 9 announcement, Google said Workspace users can compose and read end-to-end encrypted messages natively within the Gmail app on Android and iOS without the need to download extra apps or use mail portals. Users with a Gmail E2EE license can send an encrypted message to any recipient, regardless of their email address. If the recipient uses the Gmail app, the encrypted message will be delivered as a normal message thread to their inbox, but if not, they can seamlessly and securely read and reply in their own native browser. This, Google said, ensures that all users have a simple and secure interface, regardless of their email service or device.

Google Workspace admins will need to enable the Android and iOS clients in the CSE admin interface to give users access to the new capability. This can be done in the Admin Console.

End users also need to be taught the new process: To add client-side encryption to any message, they must click the lock icon and select ‘additional encryption’. Then they can compose a message and add attachments as they normally do.

Forrester Research Senior Analyst Andrew Cornwall noted the biggest benefit for enterprises is that Workspace admins or Google can disable the ability to take screenshots and screen recordings when users read an encrypted message in the Gmail app. That will prevent Android and iOS recipients from forwarding a message as an image, he said, noting that Google can also disable screenshots in Android Chrome for business users and presumably will do this when Android users with email programs other than Gmail open a message in a browser.

From a user’s perspective, he added, this encryption gives Gmail an advantage over third-party email programs like Outlook and Thunderbird, which won’t automatically decrypt messages that have been encrypted using Google’s encryption mechanism. Unlike some encryption methods, Gmail doesn’t require the exchange of a key in advance, so users will be more likely to use it.

However, he pointed out, Google’s client-side encryption doesn’t encrypt headers or message senders, so an attacker with access to the device can still get some potentially sensitive information even with encryption enabled.

“If you’re planning to use Gmail to commit financial crimes or plan a revolution,” he added, “you should know that Google controls the display and often the keyboard on devices they build. Even if emails are encrypted on device, your messages may still be available while being read or composed.”

And while end-to-end encryption (E2EE) is considered by experts to be an excellent protection against the hijacking of data in transit, it won’t protect data on compromised devices, stolen and hacked devices, or in unencrypted backups.

David Shipley, CEO of security awareness provider Beauceron Security, noted the extension of Gmail end to end encryption to mobile platforms will help organizations ensure compliance with privacy concerns. “On the downside,” he added, “this is going to be a powerful tool for criminals. If they spin up a Google Workspace tenant and send encrypted messages to end users who aren’t on Gmail, in those cases, users will get a link to a new portal to read the sent message which will not be intercepted by a lot of security tools like email filters.”

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.

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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?

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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.

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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. 

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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 .

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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

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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?

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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

Let Agentic AI speak unto Agentic AI — but in some kind of mathematical code.

That’s the thinking behind the MATHBAC (Mathematics for Boosting Agentic Communication) project, which aims to develop a new area of AI communication, one in which AI agents will ‘talk’ to each other to understand how they collaborate and share information.

MATHBAC is being run by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), one of the progenitors of the internet. It hopes the research will enable agentic AI models to collaborate to solve complex problems, and increase understanding of the mathematics that lies behind the ways that they function.

A key element of the project is discovering fundamentally new ways of working: Research that results only in incremental improvements in existing methods and models that already exist is specifically excluded from MATHBAC funding.

The project has been divided into two phases. The first will consider the derivation of the mathematics behind agentic AI and look at ways of improving communication between systems. The second, much more ambitious, will look to create tools to enable development of a new science, solving “fundamental scientific and mathematical problems underpinning collective agentic intelligence.”

DARPA expects to achieve all that in just 34 months, and is accepting proposals from organizations wishing to work on the project.

Though I reviewed Apple’s recently-introduced MacBook Neo, M5 MacBook Air, and M5 Max MacBook Pro, I didn’t look at Apple’s new displays. But it is noteworthy that even these products open up new opportunities for the company.

That’s because Apple this week gained FDA clearance for the Medical Imaging Calibration feature introduced in the Studio Display XDR. Just as the affordable MacBook Neo opens up a fresh mass market opportunity, this specialized product feature forges space in a new niche. 

Apple opens a new growth market

That niche will only become even more important once specialized AI medical tools to support treatment and diagnosis appear in the radiology space, as such tools inevitably will. (Inevitably? I mean, just look at this December research announcement from the Institute of Cancer Research, which demonstrated that combining artificial intelligence (AI) with state-of-the-art MRI imaging can revolutionize prostate cancer treatment.)

The combination means you don’t need a dedicated radiology workstation costing in excess of $15,000; you need only a Mac and a $2,899 Apple display. 

Once those things are in place, you can select your choice of imaging software — probably something like Visage Imaging 7, OsiriX MD, Falcon MD, or another of the solutions available for Mac. Even better, while privacy and data confidentiality concerns do exist, the Mac you use for this work can also be used for other tasks, like any other Mac. This democratizes access to tools of this kind; gives the medical profession all the Apple advantages around product resilience, TCO, and tech support; cuts budgets; and enables medical tech purchasers to get more for less.

On-device AI, an Apple advantage

Then we get to think about AI, and that’s where Apple’s strategic sensibility seems to be coming into play. I see it like this: it is obvious that AI for medical imaging will need to run on something. And what Apple has done with Apple Silicon, its approach to on-device AI, and this new medical image calibration feature on its displays all mean it now offers a trusted, highly usable, incredibly flexible solution to run future AI-augmented MRI imaging packages. Apple’s processors can simply shrug their way through that kind of work, while its new displays can give radiologists and other medical examiners the precise accuracy they need.

The new display feature also gives Apple an impressive story to tell in the $42.6 billion global market for medical imaging devices. That tale is tempered by Apple’s cast-iron commitment to privacy and the impressive capacity of Apple Silicon to run on-device LLMs. Apple’s introduction of MLX means you can easily imagine medical imaging deployments that rely on a new Studio Display and four Mac minis clustered via a single Thunderbolt 5 cable. Total cost? Not $15,000. 

Apple is cheap

Apple is cheap. That’s not an illusion. Look at the ecosystem. The entry level $599 MacBook Neo shows this, while all the TCO and tech support and security studies I’ve seen across the last decade show that once you begin using these platforms you end up spending a lot less keeping your investments going.

That matters in any business, of course. But when it comes to the kind of industries Medical Imaging Calibration is meant for, that can be life-saving. Who wants urgent surgery to be delayed by an operating system crash or another Crowdstrike-like moment?

There might be problems getting this message through to every medical provider across the planet, but check out Emory University and its Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences. There, you can peruse a white paper explaining most of the steps radiologists and imaging practices must take to integrate Apple’s displays and systems into their clinical workflows. 

As explained here, the paper praises the CPU/GPU performance of Macs used in the test, which rival or exceed traditional workstations at a fraction of the cost. The white paper also opens a second dimension in medical practice, thanks to visionOS and the capacity to create new workflows that have the headset using new surgical apps from the likes of Stryker and Storz. Add AI to that equation and you can see that Apple has raised a very, very large flag depicting a very large Apple logo on part of the future of medical care. 

Please follow me on Twitter, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe. Also, now on Mastodon.

When voters in the forthcoming Hungarian election assess the current government, its record on internet security will not be one of its proudest achievements.

An analysis by open source investigation organization Bellingcat has revealed that the passwords for almost 800 Hungarian government email accounts are circulating online, many of them associated with national security. These breaches in security are not down to high-tech attacks but rather are the result of poor email hygiene among government employees. The security leaks were widespread: 12 out of 13 government departments were affected.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s administration likes to present itself as firm protector of Hungarian borders, resisting foreign interference, but this doesn’t seem to apply to its computing prowess. Among those whose details were revealed were an officer responsible for information security and a counter-terrorism expert.

Bellingcat found that government officials have been using weak passwords such as variations of the word “Password” or the number sequence “1234567, while another simply used his surname.

The Hungarian government is not alone in its laxity.  Earlier this year, Specops found that 6 billion logins had been exposed online and found that number sequences and ‘password’ featured highly in the list of the most compromised logins.

The vulnerabilities inherent in the Hungarian example are a warning to all CSOs that they should be reminding their staff to tighten their security credentials. Many choose simple, short memorable passwords because they’re easy to remember but using a password manager or deploying passkeys will immediately strengthen employees’ ability to protect data.

This article first appeared on CSO.

Microsoft Windows Insider members will soon have an easy way to select which new features they test. Until now, Windows Insiders have had to wait for Microsoft to randomly assign them news features for testing through its Controlled Feature Rollout program or enable the features themselves through third-party software such as ViVeTool.

The new Windows setting, Feature Flags, will be a boon for administrators of Microsoft products who want to get a handle on the innovations relevant to their enterprise. Microsoft has not officially announced the new functionality, but an eagle-eyed user spotted the Feature Flags setting buried in the latest Windows Insider software build.

Microsoft Windows design and research leader Marcus Ash responded congratulating the spotter on their speed, adding that he would be “Excited to share more about WIP settings next week.”

He followed that up with a post to a Microsoft blog that changes were on the way, saying that users will “ have more control” over features they care about.

The Windows Insiders who wish to delve into the new settings are out of luck for now: They are not enabled yet. But messages contained in the latest build of the software say “these features are still in development and may change” and that “turning them on or off could affect performance or stability.”

So, while there are plenty of hints about the forthcoming release, users will still have to wait for an official announcement from Microsoft and there is no indication as to when that will be.

Meta Platforms is reportedly pulling top software engineers from across the company into a newly created AI unit on a mandatory basis, with the stated goal of eventually having autonomous agents perform the bulk of the work of building, testing, and shipping its products, and human engineers serving only to monitor them.

The development was based on an internal company memo authored by Maher Saba, a vice president in Meta’s Reality Labs division and a longtime associate of Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, who leads the new Applied AI (AAI) Engineering organization, reported Reuters. According to the report, Saba created AAI last month and initially sought volunteers to join. This week, he told selected employees their transfers are no longer a choice.

“AAI is one of the company’s highest priorities and we’re resourcing it by moving our strongest talent to address it. Therefore, the transfers aren’t optional,” Saba wrote in the memo, the report added.

The unit’s mandate goes significantly beyond building AI productivity tools. According to the memo AAI’s stated end goal is for autonomous AI agents to perform the bulk of the work required to build, test, and ship Meta’s products and infrastructure with human engineers monitoring rather than executing.

Gartner predicts that AI agents will require 80% of the engineering workforce to upskill by 2027, and separately forecasts that 40% of enterprise applications will embed task-specific AI agents by year-end 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025.

“Meta’s move signals that AI is now being fundamentally positioned within engineering as a core execution infrastructure, rather than just as a productivity layer,” said Ishi Thakur, senior analyst at Everest Group. “Competitive advantage will hinge less on access to models and more on how deeply organizations can embed AI into real-world engineering workflows.”

But analysts caution that the path there is far from straightforward. “For Meta-scale firms, agent-led engineering is achievable only in tightly scoped domains today,” said Charlie Dai, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. “Before reducing hands-on developer responsibility, enterprises must establish robust evaluation harnesses, policy-as-code controls, deterministic build pipelines, and explicit human escalation paths.”

What AAI is building

AAI will work alongside Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, headed by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, to build what Saba described as “the data engine that helps our models get better, faster,” according to the report. The organization consists of two teams: one focused on interfaces and tooling, and a second responsible for executing tasks, generating data, and providing evaluations that feed back to Meta’s modeling teams.

“This reflects a growing belief that traditional management layers will become less relevant as AI absorbs coordination and execution tasks,” said Thakur. “Value is concentrated in high-skill individual contributors augmented by AI.”

Dai cautioned that the structure carries significant governance risk. “If provenance tracking, gated approvals, and automated security testing are not mandatory, AI-generated code can overwhelm oversight and erode accountability for quality, compliance, and audits,” he said.

On Meta’s Q4 2025 earnings call in January, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said 2026 would be “the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work.” Susan Li, Meta’s chief financial officer, said on the same call that output per engineer had already risen 30% since the start of 2025, driven largely by AI coding agents, with power users recording an 80% year-over-year productivity increase.

For Meta, AAI is the next step in embedding that trajectory deeper into its engineering infrastructure.

Workforce reductions ongoing

Separately, Meta has been reducing its overall headcount in 2026. The company has already cut approximately 10% of its Reality Labs division in January, affecting around 1,000 employees, and laid off several hundred more in late March across recruiting, sales, global operations, and Facebook social teams.

Meta’s capital expenditure for 2026 is projected between $115 billion and $135 billion, nearly double its 2025 spend, driven by investments in data centers, chips, and AI infrastructure. The company formalized that infrastructure drive with the launch of Meta Compute, consolidating its global data center and network operations under a single leadership structure.

“The dominant barrier is organizational,” said Dai. “Enterprises have not yet redefined ownership, incentives, and liability when software is produced by agents. Until accountability frameworks catch up, leadership caution will continue to slow adoption.”

Thakur put it plainly: “The real constraint is no longer technological capability, but whether organizations can evolve their operating models fast enough to responsibly absorb this level of autonomy.”

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the first quarter of 2026, 65.6 million PCs were sold worldwide, according to data released this week by IDC. That represents a 2.5% increase compared to the same quarter a year ago. The research firm attributed the increase to customers moving to buy PCs now ahead of expected significant price hikes.

The fact that computer sales are rising despite the uncertain global situation and a worldwide shortage of RAM is seen as a positive sign, but the industry faces uncertainty in the months ahead.

“The conflict in the Middle East has introduced a new layer of volatility to the fragile computer market, which is weighing on global logistics with a double-edged sword of rising energy and transportation costs,” Isaac Ngatia, senior research analyst, IDC Devices Research, said in a statement.

As usual, Lenovo, HP, and Dell were the top PC sellers, followed by Apple and Asus. The latter accounted for the largest increase — specifically, up 17.1%.

I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of time offline. And not by choice. That’s why I love new tools that work offline like the great one Google just launched. 

I know, I’m an outlier. As a full-time digital nomad who travels constantly, I have unusual connectivity problems. Right now, I’m living on a farm in Tuscany. It’s amazing. I love it. But for two days recently, the connectivity got so bad I could barely work. There was little I could do except drink Chianti and gaze at the rolling green hills. (On Easter Sunday and the day after — a local day off — everybody was at home stressing their internet connections, which made connectivity close to impossible.)

I often find myself in this position. My wife and I tend to favor old houses in old neighborhoods, usually in Europe or Latin America, and the connectivity can be bad to nonexistent. 

I lose connections while driving, while in or near very old stone buildings, while flying in airplanes, and while driving through remote areas. 

But even for people who don’t travel and move around like I do, being offline can also be a choice. It’s much more secure to disconnect, especially in public spaces like coffeeshops and airports and when using one of the many untrustworthy cloud-centric companies. Sometimes you need desperately to save battery life. Sometimes it can feel healthy psychologically to know you’re offline. 

Tools can and should work better offline. I have an expensive iPhone that would have been considered a supercomputer just 10 years ago. A modern smartphone is powerful enough to do a lot of the work that’s currently performed in the cloud. 

Cloud computing is necessary for chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini because all-purpose AI models require hundreds of billions of parameters, massive amounts of RAM, and huge amounts of electricity to be ready to do anything and everything very quickly. Forcing these workloads onto a mobile device fundamentally caps the intelligence and capability of general-purpose AI. But breaking down individual tasks (like transcription) doesn’t require massive data centers. 

The biggest problems for me are two of the tools I use most: MyMind and Lex. 

I wrote about MyMind in August. It’s a lifelogging, bookmarking, remember-everything tool that makes it very fast at recalling information. It uses AI to auto-tag and takes the work out of both saving and recalling information. 

Unfortunately, without a connection, I lose MyMind. It simply has no offline capability. So when I’m disconnected and want to save or recall something, I can’t. The more I rely on this prosthetic memory tool, the more being offline gives me amnesia. This is my biggest complaint about MyMind. 

I’ve also told you about Lex. Lex is essentially a word processor with built-in AI tools designed not to write for you (and make you worse at writing), but instead to point things out and advise you in ways that make your writing better. 

Lex also doesn’t work offline. Which is a shame, because its major alternatives like Google Docs and Apple Pages do. You can simply use them offline, and later when you get a connection they sync to the cloud. Lex’s lack of offline support is the main reason I often think about cancelling my subscription and going back to Pages. (Note that I use a Bluetooth keyboard with my phone to do real writing of columns, newsletters, blog posts and even books.)

Both MyMind and Lex use AI and I expect that in the very near future we’ll see a shift away from all-purpose chatbots to smaller, special-purpose AI-based tools like these running on the edge or on our phones. 

One great example of this shift is a new tool from Google called AI Edge Eloquent. 

Talk to the handheld

Google launched its free, iOS-only, English-only offline dictation app on Monday. While dictation doesn’t sound very interesting, Google has built in several features that make it really great. 

Firstly, it uses AI, with Gemma-based speech recognition models running locally on the phone. It doesn’t just capture what you say, but what you meant to say. Which is to say that it ignores your ums and ahs and repetitions, capturing only the clean words you intended. (If you toggle on cloud processing, it works even better.) It’s very good at adding punctuation automatically. 

When you’re done talking, the app automatically loads the clean text to the clipboard. That means you can talk to the app, then just switch over to your word processor, social media app, email app or other app and simply paste in the results. 

The app can re-write your transcripts using one of four default style options: 

1. Key points (condenses speech into a bulleted list)
2. Formal (shifts the text into a professional tone)
3. Short (summarizes the message)
4. Long (expands on the initial text)

(For most writing, I don’t recommend these kinds of stylistic shortcuts; I recommend communicating in your own style.) 

After you dictate something, you can press a stop button or a pause button. This is a great pair of choices because if you’re working on a longer piece, the pause button lets you gather your thoughts, do a bit of research, then resume, ending up with the whole screed in the clipboard. 

The most surprising feature is that it can learn custom words. For example, it learns from your edits, from the manual addition of words or — wait for it — from your Gmail conversation history (a button asks your permission, and you need to choose to explicitly log in to Gmail). The Gmail option brings in not only jargon, but also names, brand names you’ve talked about, abbreviations, foreign words, place names, and others. 

And, finally, the app prominently displays “usage stats,” including how many words, how many words per minute, average dictation speed, total number of words dictated, and the total number of “polishing edits” made by the app. 

AI Edge Eloquent sherlocks Wispr Flow and Willow, which each cost $15 per month. It also sherlocks SuperWhisper, priced at $85 per year. (In Silicon Valley parlance, “sherlocking” is when a major company copies a major feature of a competitor’s product, thereby rendering the competitor’s product obsolete.)

In short, AI Edge Eloquent is kind of perfect and extremely useful for anyone who wants to dictate anything. 

The slow rise of offline AI

I’m seeing a few other tools emerge that are based on the idea that AI should be on the edge and offline. 

One interesting new tool released this week is called WarClaw from a Bellevue, WA-based startup called Edgerunner AI. The company calls the tool a “digital adjutant” (an adjutant is a military officer who serves as an assistant to a military commander). 

The company claims WarClaw was built by former soldiers for use by active-duty military personnel. It’s a secure operating layer built on top of OpenClaw, according to the company. (I talked about OpenClaw earlier this year, as did my colleague Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who explained about how incredibly insecure OpenClaw is. 

The software is designed to work during combat in what they call DDIL settings (Denied, Disconnected, Intermittent, and Low bandwidth).

WarClaw runs on a disconnected mobile device and was trained on specific military data. It automates mission planning, scheduling, and the analyzing of information. Surprisingly, it can directly control office tools like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Slack, web browsers, and email. 

The company has already won contracts to supply WarClaw to three US military branches. 

While WarClaw is for soldiers, I think business people could benefit from such a tool. For example, it would be great to have an offline assistant while traveling on business to data-insecure places (like China) and environments (like airports). 

I’d love to see nearly all the AI jobs currently requiring a connection to be turned into an app that runs locally, disconnected on the phone. Beyond the obvious convenience, that also represents a big opportunity for Google and Apple: they can match their AI tools to increasingly powerful smartphones, which gives phone buyers a powerful reason to upgrade their hardware more frequently. 

AI disclosure: I don’t use AI for writing. The words you see here are mine. I do use a variety of AI tools via Kagi Assistant (disclosure: my son works at Kagi) — backed up by both Kagi Search, Google Search, as well as phone calls to research and fact-check. I use a word processing application called Lex, which has AI tools, and after writing use Lex’s grammar checking tools to find typos and errors and suggest word changes. Here’s why I disclose my AI use and encourage you to do the same.

Why bother paying for your own generative AI (genAI) tokens when you can have the computations done for free using a competitor’s AI-powered customer service bot? That question is at the heart of a CIO.com report that explores the trend and various ways to block it.

It’s possible the best response to this kind of computational chicanery is to ignore the thieves and stay focused on delivering the best service for customers — hopefully boosting revenue by doing so. 

The CIO.com story offers a detailed look at how to combat the problem  — options that include limiting the number of tokens that can be used for a single answer and layering on AI to validate that questions are legitimate. 

But all the proposed approaches have major downsides. For one, the frequency of these inappropriate “queries” might be limited — and the costs of tokens used to handle them might not break the bank. 

My argument — to ignore the issue — includes both good and bad facets. On the positive side, genAI-based chatbots, when properly deployed, have the potential to be more efficient than human customer service people, and far better.

Specifically, genAI tools can handle highly-complex queries. Consider Amazon. With its various partner programs, it has an astoundingly large number of products in a massive number of categories. No human could have deep understanding of all of those SKUs and certainly wouldn’t be able to answer technical or detailed questions about them. GenAI, properly trained, can.

Or consider a customer who chats with a high-end restaurant bot, saying: “We have a reservation for 12 at your restaurant tomorrow night. The problem is that seven of those people have dietary issues, including one vegan, one who is strictly kosher, one gluten-free and several others who have rare allergies to specific ingredients. I am pasting a detailed description of the dietary issues for all 12 people. Can you review the full ingredients for all of your menu items and recommend to us several entrees, side orders, soups, salads and desserts that would accommodate all of our guests? That way, we don’t have to pepper the waitstaff with questions such as ‘Is the sugar you use vegan?’ or ‘Have you segregated the cookware for strict kosher?’”

GenAI is especially well suited to handle that kind of question and an accurate answer might win customers for life (though it might use up a large number of tokens). But if it buys the loyalty of new customers, that’s a powerful win.

That said, there remains a serious concern. I have argued that AI can be a powerful tool, but its hallucinations make it a bad choice for direct customer interactions. It’s the same reason I don’t back enterprise use of autonomous agents. Agents are great, but they are not nearly ready to function autonomously. 

For some companies, “GenAI can sometimes make things up and do so in a highly confident manner” is going to remain a deal killer. And it’s not like there’s a reasonable chance hallucinations will be eliminated anytime soon. (Indeed, the more sophisticated these models get, the more they hallucinate. Lovely.)

But if a company can set the hallucination issue side for now  — I know. It’s like that line, “Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” — genAI customer service chatbots have serious potential. And if a few stray coding and recipe requests rob you of some tokens while gaining you new customers, it’s a trade-off worth considering. 

Microsoft 365 (and Office 365) subscribers get more frequent software updates than those who have purchased Office without a subscription, which means subscribers have access to the latest features, security patches, and bug fixes. But it can be hard to keep track of the changes in each update and know when they’re available. We’re doing this for you, so you don’t have to.

Following are summaries of the updates to Microsoft 365/Office 365 for Windows over the past year, with the latest releases shown first. We’ll add info about new updates as they’re rolled out.

Note: This story covers updates released to the Current Channel for Microsoft 365/Office 365 subscriptions. If you’re a member of Microsoft’s Office Insider preview program or want to get a sneak peek at upcoming features, see the Microsoft 365 Insider blog.

Version 2603 (Build 19822.20168)

Release date: April 9, 2026

This build fixes several bugs, including one in Outlook in which users could not close the Copilot chat pane using a keyboard. Users can now close the pane by navigating to the Close button using a keyboard or by using the assigned keyboard shortcut.

Get more info about Version 2603 (Build 19822.20168).

Version 2603 (Build 19822.20142)

Release date: March 31, 2026

This build includes “various fixes to functionality and performance,” according to Microsoft.

Get more info about Version 2603 (Build 19822.20142).

Version 2603 (Build 19822.20114)

Release date: March 24, 2026

This build fixes a single bug in which PowerPoint sometimes closed unexpectedly when opening a newly created empty file from the OneDrive folder.

Get more info about Version 2603 (Build 19822.20114).

Version 2602 (Build 19725.20190)

Release date: March 18, 2026

This build fixes an Outlook bug in which updating a single instance of a recurring meeting in a Microsoft 365 group calendar updated the entire series.

Get more info about Version 2602 (Build 19725.20190).

Version 2602 (Build 19725.20172)

Release date: March 10, 2026

This build introduces agent mode in Word, which adds a conversational chat experience that helps create, edit, and refine document content as you work. In addition, the build fixes a bug that impacted the rendering of extended characters in calendar items, causing certain characters to appear as question marks.

The build also plugs a number of security holes. For details, see Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2602 (Build 19725.20172).

Version 2602 (Build 19725.20152)

Release date: March 3, 2026

This build fixes a bug in which closing a document sometimes remained in progress indefinitely after the Office app resumed from sleep or hibernation.

Get more info about Version 2602 (Build 19725.20152).

Version 2602 (Build 19725.20126)

Release date: February 24, 2025

This build fixes several bugs, including one that caused OneNote to close unexpectedly upon startup.

Get more info about Version 2602 (Build 19725.20126).

Version 2601 (Build 19628.20214)

Release date: February 17, 2025

This build includes, in Microsoft’s words, “various fixes to functionality and performance.”

Get more info about Version 2601 (Build 19628.20214).

Version 2601 (Build 19628.20204)

Release date: February 10, 2026

This build fixes a bug that sometimes prevented users from opening emails with the Encrypt Only label in Outlook.

It also plugs a number of security holes. For details, see Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2601 (Build 19628.20204).

Version 2601 (Build 19628.20166)

Release date: February 3, 2026

This build includes, in Microsoft’s words, “various fixes to functionality and performance.”

Get more info about Version 2601 (Build 19628.20166).

Version 2601 (Build 19628.20150)

Release date: January 27, 2025

In this build, OneNote applies your chosen proofing language more consistently, so you don’t have to reset it for every paragraph when writing in multiple languages. In addition, the build fixes several bugs, including one that caused Office applications to become unresponsive when profile card-related activities were performed.

Get more info about Version 2601 (Build 19628.20150).

Version 2512 (Build 19530.20184)

Release date: January 21, 2025

This build includes, in Microsoft’s words, “Various fixes to functionality and performance.”

Get more info about Version 2512 (Build 19530.20184).

Version 2512 (Build 19530.20144)

Release date: January 13, 2026

This build fixes a number of bugs, including one that caused Excel, PowerPoint, and Word to become unresponsive when profile card-related activities were performed.

It also plugs a number of security holes. For details, see Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2512 (Build 19530.20144).

Version 2512 (Build 19530.20138)

Release date: January 8, 2025

This build offers, in Microsoft’s words, “Various fixes to functionality and performance.”

Get more info about Version 2512 (Build 19530.20138).

Version 2511 (Build 19426.20218)

Release date: December 16, 2025

This build offers, in Microsoft’s words, “Various fixes to functionality and performance.”

Get more info about Version 2511 (Build 19426.20218).

Version 2511 (Build 19426.20186)

Release date: December 9, 2025

This Patch Tuesday build offers, in Microsoft’s words, “Various fixes to functionality and performance.” The build also has a variety of security updates (see details).

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2511 (Build 19426.20186).

Version 2511 (Build 19426.20170)

Release date: December 3, 2025

This build includes, in Microsoft’s words, “Various fixes to functionality and performance.”

Get more info about Version 2511 (Build 19426.20170).

Version 2510 (Build 19328.20244)

Release date: November 20, 2025

This build fixes a bug in Outlook that caused users to see “Contacting the server for information” repeatedly when loading some emails.

Get more info about Version 2510 (Build 19328.20244).

Version 2510 (Build 19328.20232)

Release date: November 18, 2025

This build includes, in the words of Microsoft, “various fixes to functionality and performance.”

Get more info about Version 2510 (Build 19328.20232).

Version 2510 (Build 19328.20190)

Release date: November 11, 2025

This Patch Tuesday build fixes a bug in Outlook that caused some recipients to be unable to access OneDrive links shared with them via email. The build also has a variety of security updates (see details).

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2510 (Build 19328.20190).

Version 2510 (Build 19328.20178)

Release date: November 4, 2025

This build fixes a single bug, in which @mention searches produced no results in Office apps.

Get more info about Version 2510 (Build 19328.20178).

Version 2510 (Build 19328.20158)

Release date: October 30, 2025

This build introduces a new Get Data dialog in Windows that simplifies finding and using external data, and adds Analyze Data to the Data tab.

The build also fixed an bug in Outlook that prevented users from downloading web add-ins in some virtualized environments.

Get more info about Version 2510 (Build 19328.20158).

Version 2509 (Build 19231.20216)

Release date: October 21, 2025

This build has, in Microsoft’s words, “various fixes to functionality and performance.”

Get more info about Version 2509 (Build 19231.20216).

Version 2509 (Build 19231.20194)

Release date: October 14, 2025

This build has a variety of security updates (see details), along with various fixes to functionality and performance.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2509 (Build 19231.20194).

Version 2509 (Build 19231.20172)

Release date: October 7, 2025

This build has, in Microsoft’s words, “various fixes to functionality and performance.”

Get more info about Version 2509 (Build 19231.20172).

Version 2509 (Build 19231.20156)

Release date: October 1, 2025

This build fixes two bugs, one in Excel in which ribbon controls were not rendered when rejoining Office sessions in a virtual machine, Azure Virtual Desktop, or remote desktop environment, and another that caused Outlook to terminate unexpectedly when starting.

Get more info about Version 2509 (Build 19231.20156).

Version 2508 (Build 19127.20264)

Release date: September 23, 2025

This build has, in Microsoft’s words, “various fixes to functionality and performance.”

Get more info about Version 2508 (Build 19127.20264).

Version 2508 (Build 19127.20240)

Release date: September 16, 2025

This build has, in Microsoft’s words, “various fixes to functionality and performance.”

Get more info about Version 2508 (Build 19127.20240).

Version 2508 (Build 19127.20222)

Release date: September 9, 2025

This build has multiple security updates (see details), along with various fixes to functionality and performance.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2508 (Build 19127.20222).

Version 2508 (Build 19127.20192)

Release date: September 3, 2025

This build fixes a bug in which some Outlook add-ins were getting “Office.auth.getAccessToken is not a function” errors.

Get more info about Version 2508 (Build 19127.20192).

Version 2508 (Build 19127.20154)

Release date: August 26, 2025

This build fixes a bug that caused Outlook to terminate unexpectedly when sending a meeting invite with an encryption label. It also adds support for pixelated rendering of embedded images in SVG assets for the entire Office suite.

Get more info about Version 2508 (Build 19127.20154).

Version 2507 (Build 19029.20208)

Release date: August 19, 2025

This build fixes a variety of bugs.

Get more info about Version 2507 (Build 19029.20208).

Version 2507 (Build 19029.20184)

Release date: August 12, 2025

This build fixes a bug which required users to restart Outlook to open a .msg file after initially accessing it once. The build also includes a variety of security updates (see details).

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2507 (Build 19029.20184).

Version 2507 (Build 19029.20156)

Release date: August 5, 2025

This build fixes a single bug, in which users had to restart Outlook to open a .msg file after initially accessing it once.

Get more info about Version 2507 (Build 19029.20156).

Version 2507 (Build 19029.20136)

Release date: July 30, 2025

This build fixes a wide variety of bugs, including in which Outlook closed unexpectedly shortly after launch, and another in Word in which the word count sometimes displayed incorrectly.

Get more info about Version 2507 (Build 19029.20136).

Version 2506 (Build 18925.20184)

Release date: July 22, 2025

This build fixes two bugs, one that caused the Copilot Command Center to continue to be visible after disabling the Copilot user interface, and another in which when creating handouts in PowerPoint, certain characters (full-width numbers) couldn’t be properly transferred to the handout.

Get more info about Version 2506 (Build 18925.20184).

Version 2506 (Build 18925.20168)

Release date: July 15, 2025

This build fixes two bugs, one that caused Visio 32-bit to close unexpectedly when using the Drawing control, particularly in setups involving COM components or .NET integrations, and another in Word in which copying and pasting content between documents sometimes changed the applied style unexpectedly.

Get more info about Version 2506 (Build 18925.20168).

Version 2506 (Build 18925.20158)

Release date: July 8, 2025

This Patch Tuesday build fixes several bugs in Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, and the whole Office suite, including one that caused the Copilot icon to unexpectedly display in Outlook when Copilot had been disabled by the admin in government cloud.

The release also includes a variety of security updates (see details).

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2506 (Build 18925.20158).

Version 2506 (Build 18827.20176)

Release date: July 1, 2025

This build fixes a wide variety of bugs, including one in Word in which print preview sometimes stopped working when printing long emails.

Get more info about Version 2506 (Build 18827.20176).

Version 2505 (Build 18827.20176)

Release date: June 26, 2025

This build introduces several new features, including one in Excel in which the PivotTables dialog box interface has been replaced by a redesigned panel, making it easier to view all of your options and simpler to change your data selection before inserting a recommended PivotTable.

Get more info about Version 2505 (Build 18827.20176).

Version 2505 (Build 18827.20164)

Release date: June 17, 2025

This build fixes a bug that caused the “Try the new Outlook” toggle to be enabled when working in Classic Outlook side by side with the new Outlook.

Get more info about Version 2505 (Build 18827.20164).

Version 2505 (Build 18827.20150)

Release date: June 10, 2025

This build fixes several bugs, including one for the entire Office suite in which a Save As attempt on an existing file didn’t complete successfully, and subsequent attempts continued to encounter issues when trying to save to a file that no longer existed.

This Patch Tuesday release also includes a variety of security updates: see details.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about  Version 2505 (Build 18827.20150).

Version 2505 (Build 18827.20140)

Release date: June 3, 2025

This build offers a variety of bug and performance fixes.

Read about Version 2505 (Build 18827.20140).

Version 2504 (Build 18730.20186)

Release date: May 20, 2025

This build introduces a new PowerPoint feature: Notification emails for mentions, tasks, comments, and replies will now contain context previews even when the source document is encrypted, and the email will inherit the document’s security policies.

Get more info about Version 2504 (Build 18730.20186).

Version 2504 (Build 18730.20168)

Release date: May 13, 2025

This build fixes a bug in which users were seeing high CPU usage when typing in Outlook. It also includes a variety of security updates: see details.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2504 (Build 18730.20168).

Version 2504 (Build 18730.20142)

Release date: May 6, 2025

This build includes various bug and performance fixes.

Get more info about Version 2504 (Build 18730.20142).

Version 2504 (Build 18730.20122)

Release date: April 29, 2025

This build fixes a wide variety of bugs, including one in which PowerPoint was unable to open a file from a network mapped drive from File Explore, another in which Word closed unexpectedly when opening .doc files, and another for the entire Office suite in which large 3D files couldn’t be inserted.

Get more info about Version 2504 (Build 18730.20122).

Version 2503 (Build 18623.20208)

Release date: April 17, 2025

This build fixes a bug that could cause Excel to stop responding.

Get more info about Version 2503 (Build 18623.20208).

Version 2503 (Build 18623.20178)

Release date: April 8, 2025

This build fixes a single bug in Word in which users may have encountered an issue with saving, seeing the message “saving…” in the title bar. It  also includes a variety of security updates. Go here for details.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2503 (Build 18623.20178).

Version 2503 (Build 18623.20156)

Release date: April 2, 2025

This build lets you use Dark Mode in Excel, which darkens your entire sheet, including cells, and may reduce eye strain. It also fixes several bugs, including one in Word in which opening specific files that contain many tracked changes and comments resulted in poor performance, and one in PowerPoint in which the app was not displaying the icon for an inserted PDF object.

Get more info about Version 2503 (Build 18623.20156).

Version 2502 (Build 18526.20168)

Release date: March 11, 2025

This build fixes several bugs, including one in which some Word files with numerous tracked changes and comments were slow. It also includes a variety of security updates: see details.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2502 (Build 18526.20168).

Version 2502 (Build 18526.20144)

Release date: March 5, 2025

This build fixes a wide variety of bugs, including one in Word in which the default font size may not be 12pt as expected, and another in which PowerPoint automatically closed when the system went into hibernate or sleep mode.

Get more info about Version 2502 (Build 18526.20144).

Version 2501 (Build 18429.20158)

Release date: February 11, 2025

This build removes the option to display Track Changes balloons in left margin in Word. It also includes a variety of security updates. See “Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates” for details.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2501 (Build 18429.20158).

Ahem: My fellow Android-appreciating organisms — I’ve got a confession.

After the better part of two decades of personally using Google’s Chrome browser on both Android and every desktop computer I own, I’ve made the leap into the arms of a shiny new web-weaving seductress. Her name is Vivaldi.

Yes, it feels like a mildly geeky version of virtual adultery (especially with an exotic-sounding name like that). But I’ve long been a proponent of embracing whatever apps and services best serve your individual needs at any given moment and avoiding being beholden to any one company — no matter who that company may be. And now, after all these years, it’s become clear that Chrome is no longer the best web-wading companion for me.

Now, don’t get me wrong: Chrome is completely fine. It’s got plenty of positives, and I’ve certainly got no major beefs with it. I think that’s why it’s been so easy to stick with all this time, for so many of us — ’cause it gets the job done, and it’s familiar. There’s something to be said for that.

But as a person who’s always curious about new technology, constantly striving to optimize my digital environments, and endlessly working to make ’em all as efficient as humanly possible, I came to realize that “fine” wasn’t as good as it’d get anymore. And, lemme tell ya: Particularly if you’re a productivity-minded browser power-goober like me, stickin’ with Chrome largely just because it’s what you use and know is causing you to miss out on some incredibly interesting and advantageous upgrades.

And you know what? You aren’t alone. In fact, the vast majority of monitor-staring mammals work exclusively within the confines of Chrome. (The browser commands somewhere around three-quarters of the worldwide desktop computer browser market as of early 2026, according to some recent estimates.)

Again: It’s easy to understand why. Heck, I was one of those numbers myself — up until just a matter of months ago. I’d tried pretty much every other browser out there at some point, and I just hadn’t found anything meaningfully different and better enough for my needs to make it worth the hassle of switching over and dealing with all that adjustment.

Until now. 

And my goodness, it wasn’t an easy change to make.

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My Chrome to Vivaldi adapting adventure

I’ve got an entire separate article about what ultimately won me over with Vivaldi and which exact features I’m finding to be invaluable within it. I’d highly recommend giving it a read.

Here, I want to focus specifically on how I managed to overcome the hurdle of such a challenging change — and it isn’t about anything technical with the transition, either. In fact, Vivaldi makes it almost shockingly easy to move your data over from Chrome and import all your basic settings and history.

What I found, though, was two-fold:

1. On the Android front, moving into the Vivaldi app was actually quite painless. I started out by using it here and there, as a supplement to the standard Android Chrome browser, and quickly realized how much I enjoyed and appreciated its experience and the added niceties it gave me — including seemingly endless customization over every last element of the browser interface and a whole slew of on-demand privacy and web-clutter-cutting options. It wasn’t long before I changed my Android browser default and was using it full-time.

Vivaldi’s Android browser is powerful, pleasant to use, and incredibly customizable.

JR Raphael, Foundry

2. On the desktop front, the change presented far more friction. In fact, I’ve been using the Vivaldi Android app for months now — since sometime in the fall of 2025 — and it wasn’t until early this year that I made the leap over to Vivaldi on my workday Windows computer, too.

What changed was that I finally put my finger on the problem.

If there’s one real hurdle with Vivaldi — and one thing that kept me, personally, from fully moving into its desktop version for so long — it’s that it really can be overwhelming to adapt and get accustomed to all the new interfaces and elements it gives you, especially within the feature-rich desktop domain and with an environment so central to everything we do these days.

As I noted in my in-depth Vivaldi exploration, with as much time as most of us spend in our browsers on computers at this point, the browser essentially is our desktop — and our virtual office, too. And leaving the comfort of familiarity behind for something so unknown and unfamiliar is a daunting prospect.

Vivaldi, in particular, is quite different from Chrome on a computer at first exposure. And it has a lot of new options, features, and possibilities to ponder.

The options and features within the Vivaldi desktop browser are both amazing and — especially at first — overwhelming.

JR Raphael, Foundry

With that in mind, let me tell you what worked for me:

• First, I took advantage of Vivaldi’s immense customization potential and scaled back some of the more jarring differences. For me, that meant eliminating the on-by-default left-of-screen vertical tab bar — which was just too different of an interface for me at first, especially amidst everything else I was adjusting to — and also changing the “Tab Cycling” setting to “Cycle in Tab Order” and the “New Tab Position” setting to “After Related Tabs,” which were two subtle-seeming returns to the standard Chrome behavior that really kept throwing me off in their different-by-default implementations.
• Second, I forced myself to ignore most of the new Vivaldi features — all that good stuff I go over in that other article! — and focus on just one new feature or element at a time, for at least a few days each. There is a lot to take in with this program, and if you try to ingest all of it at once, it’s bound to overwhelm you and lead to a retreat. But if you explore one new piece of the puzzle at a time, really see how you feel about it and get in the habit of using it (or, alternatively, disabling it — if it just isn’t for you), it’s a much more manageable and enjoyable transition.
• Third, after that initial targeted series of adjustments, I mostly ignored the mountain of Vivaldi settings for a while. There’s just too much there to reasonably process at the get-go. I’m still peeking in periodically and finding something new and realizing I can customize it in a way that suits my working style better (and then sometimes realizing that a similar option also exists that I hadn’t yet tapped into on Android). Doing it all at once before you even have a feel for the browser just isn’t reasonable.

Last but not least, remember — particularly for desktop purposes — that Vivaldi is based on the same Chromium foundation as Google’s Chrome browser. That means you can use the standard Chrome Web Store to find and install extensions as needed and bring over the same tools you’ve always had in your browser setup. That, too, helps a lot with making yourself comfortable and creating an optimal environment that works for your needs (though I always recommend eliminating any extensions you aren’t actively using, and a browser change is a perfect time to perform an audit and get rid of any dead weight).

If you follow this approach and take the time to wrap your head around everything Vivaldi offers, the transition doesn’t have to be difficult. And — who knows? — you might find yourself feeling the same sense of excitement I have over a guilt-free virtual dalliance where the only lasting impact is your own happiness and efficiency.

Check out my free Android Intelligence newsletter for even more thoughtful knowledge — including three new things to try each Friday and a trio of useful Android notification tools to get you going.

With its powerful M5 chip, the latest iteration of the world’s most popular laptop keeps everything that made the MacBook Air compelling in the first place, while meaningfully boosting performance across the board. Beyond the faster processor, there’s also much quicker SSD storage and better memory bandwidth, all of which combine to make this a highly capable Mac.

In practical terms, the powerful M5 chip allows these Macs to better handle demanding data workloads than earlier models, making it an ideal machine for many creative and professional users. You also get 512GB of storage as standard (with as much as 4TB available as an option) and at least 16GB of RAM.

Big improvements to Apple’s most popular laptop

To some extent, of course, the MacBook Air has been left in the shadows by the all-new MacBook Neo. The latter costs much less, is quite capable of handling most tasks, and is a great fit for general purpose use, though the M5 Air can do all of that faster, because it is built to be a more efficient machine. Compared to the M4-powered model you can see these improvements:

• With 10CPU cores and either 8 or 10 GPU cores, the M5 chip has a 15% faster CPU and 30% faster GPU.
• It also has neural accelerators in each core, which makes the M5 MacBook Air very capable for AI-specific tasks or 3D rendering.
• The memory bandwidth hits 153GBps. (The M4 model gave us 120GBps.)
• SSD read/write speed are up to twice as fast as the M4, which you’ll feel when doing things with big files, such as when flinging video or imaging assets through apps or working/developing with on-device AI models.

The price has increased by $100 to start at $1,099, though you get twice the built-in storage to help soften the blow.

Benchmark performance

Let’s look at some of the benchmark scores I saw using Geekbench 6 with the Apple-loaned 15.3-in. MacBook Air I tested:

• Single-core: 4,103.
• Multi-core: 17,089.

For comparison, here are benchmarks for the previous generations:

• M1 MacBook Air: 2,346 single-core; 8,356 multi-core.
• M2 MacBook Air: 2,588 single-core; 9,691, multi-core. 
• M3 MacBook Air: 3,065 single-core; 11,959 multi-core.
• M4 MacBook Air: 3,833 single-core; 14,871 multi-core. 
• M5 MacBook Air: 4,103 single-core; 17,098 multi-core.
• MacBook Neo: 3,608 single-core; 9,346 multi-core.

Illustrating the extent to which the move to Apple Silicon has opened up new opportunities for Macs, the M5 MacBook Air delivers the kind of performance we once got from M3 Pro/Max MacBook Pros that shipped just over two years ago.

Apple The bigger picture

To some extent, what’s coming next doesn’t mean much when planning what to get today, but the takeaway must be that MacBook Air has plenty of power under its hood for the future.  When you choose one, you aren’t just getting the processor — you’re also getting a range of other internal improvements designed to optimize the benefits it brings.

These improvements must certainly have been the North Star to engineers when they built this Mac, which also benefits from those new neural accelerators across all its cores. Even compared to the year-old M4 MacBook Air, these systems represent a big upgrade. 

Of course, when you grab a laptop, the big thing you need is battery life. While your results will vary, the promised 18 hours of use on battery will get you through your day, every day. So will the display, which in this case is a 15.3-in. Liquid Retina P3 display with support for 1 billion colors, True Tone, and 500 nits of brightness. 

When it comes to audio output and the built-in web conferencing cameras in these Macs, nothing much has changed fromlast year’s M4 models. The song remains the same when it comes to design: you get that beautiful aluminum chassis, new colors (Sky Blue, Midnight, Starlight, and Silver), with pretty much everything we already love about these Macs the same. Connectivity relies on an Apple N1 wireless chip for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. You also get two USB-C/Thunderbolt ports, MagSafe charging and the ability of driving up to two external displays in addition to that Liquid retina screen. That’s very useful for on-the-go pros who want to use a larger display most of the time but need the convenience of a portable now and then. 

Apple What about MacBook Neo?

Some feel the arrival of the MacBook Neo will cannibalize MacBook Air sales. There’s some truth in that. And while the Neo can and will handle almost anything a regular user might want to throw at it, the M5 Air is much more capable by design. While the Neo has a 6-core CPU, the Air has up to 10; the Neo gets 5 GPU cores, the Air gets 10; Neo has a maximum 8GB memory, while the Air ships with at least 16GB — and the memory interconnect is much faster too. It means these systems are great for anyone who wants to accomplish more demanding tasks, but can’t quite justify purchasing a MacBook Pro. 

No doubt, most people will be happy with any one of these Macs most of the time. But when you need to hit a deadline or regularly tackle more demanding tasks, you’ll probably lean toward the Air, or something better. Most business users will do just that, even though more companies will be eyeing Macs thanks to the affordable Neo, which will be suitable for a whole collection of new use cases that couldn’t justify investment in Air.

Buying advice

In reviewing Apple’s latest trio of Macs, I must confess — like so many people — that I really have lost a little bit of my heart to the MacBook Neo. But I do need a bit more power for what I do. That work doesn’t involve data-wrangling, video compositing, AI model design or any high-end graphics work, so while I might want a MacBook Pro, I really only need a MacBook Air. And this iteration offers all the power and performance I’d expect from a Mac I expect to use it for the next few years.

It’s a solid improvement to the most popular consumer notebook on the planet, remains a viable upgrade for MacBook Neo users and continues to serve as an alluring gateway to inch us toward the MacBook Pro. 

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Broken laptops are not becoming easier to fix, despite the availability of public data about their repairability and growing support for right-to-repair legislation. That’s according to US PIRG Education Fund, a consumer protection nonprofit.

Its fifth annual Failing to Fix survey found Asus to be the most repairable laptop brand — although its score dropped compared to last year — and Apple the least repairable of those surveyed. Prominent enterprise PC suppliers Dell, HP, and Lenovo fell somewhere in the middle of the rankings.

While the report looks at consumer products, many of the issues highlighted by the report would apply to businesses too — particularly Apple, which sells the same models to everyone.

“We haven’t done the research, so don’t have the exact numbers,” said Nathan Proctor, senior director or Right to Repair. “But businesses buy the same products and Right to Repair issues are even more pronounced the more expensive that the device is.”

Repairability is not just about product design: It can also be affected by contract terms.

“A lot of companies will tie service to a maintenance contract, and enterprises will find themselves left short if they don’t sign up, said Proctor. “For example, they might not send the firmware needed for a repair, if the customer hadn’t signed up for such a maintenance contract.”

It is certainly the case that more enterprises will look at maintenance as part of the overall package and will not look at PCs or laptops in isolation but rather as part of a “PC as a service” (PCaaS) deal, according to market research firm IDC. In a survey from last year, it found that enterprises were paying more attention to sustainability. “We see more IT leaders considering the complete lifecycle when choosing IT products for the enterprise,” said Lara Greden, senior director market intelligence with IDC.

“In a recent IDC survey, 88% said end-of-first-life, or IT asset disposition services, are a critical or important factor in choosing PCaaS vendors, for instance. OEMs like Dell, HP, and Lenovo offer these services, often with partners, including Apto Solutions and Iron Mountain, for example,” she said.

This is also reflected in the longer laptop lifecycles that companies are implementing. The tradition approach taken by companies is to allow for three years before upgrading but that is no longer the case.

“Some companies still refresh on a fixed three-year lifecycle, but there is a trend towards lengthening lifecycles to four to five years and even more so, to replace only as needed. Services such as Dell Lifecycle Hub and Lenovo xIQ make use of device performance telemetry data to inform repair and replacement cycles,” said Greden.

The PIRG survey of 105 products revealed some to be wary of when it comes to considering whole lifecycles. Apple’s laptops scored the worst, rated C- by PIRG, just behind Lenovo. Businesses wanting to put repairability at the top of the list will look to Asus and Acer, the two top scorers in the PIRG ratings. “I think people were surprised by Apple’s ratings,” said Proctor, “but we found that they didn’t offer the same levels of software support.”

The repairability of a device is certainly a factor to be considered. “IDC research shows that the ability to repair PCs, and even to include refurbished PCs, in PCaaS contracts is a top-2 decision-making factor for choosing a PCaaS vendor,” said Greden.

This is not the first time that PIRG has had the IT industry in its sights. Last October, it was urging Microsoft to change its deadline for the end of Windows 10 support. It is now looking for the US to introduce the same sort of system for scoring system for repairability that France has introduced. Consumers there can see detailed information about how fixable consumer tech products are, with companies obliged to post an overall repair score based on standardized criteria when a product goes on sale.

Buyers elsewhere would benefit 100% from the same sort of labeling, said Proctor.

A federal appeals court in Washington has refused to suspend the Pentagon’s supply-chain risk designation against Anthropic, leaving defense contractors with conflicting legal signals over whether they can continue using Claude, and putting the ruling at odds with a separate federal court that reached the opposite conclusion last month.

“The equitable balance here cuts in favor of the government,” a three-judge panel wrote in its order Wednesday. “On one side is a relatively contained risk of financial harm to a single private company. On the other side is judicial management of how, and through whom, the Department of War secures vital AI technology during an active military conflict.”

The panel, comprising Judges Henderson, Katsas, and Rao, acknowledged that Anthropic “will likely suffer some degree of irreparable harm” but found its interests “seem primarily financial in nature” rather than constitutional.

The order states the ruling is not a final decision on the merits. Oral arguments are set for May 19.

Anthropic had asked the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to pause the supply-chain risk designation issued March 3 by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

The label, according to the company’s court filings, bars it from Pentagon contracts and requires defense contractors to stop using Claude in military work. The court denied the request, conflicting with a US District Court in California that granted Anthropic a preliminary injunction on March 26, blocking a parallel designation under a related statute.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche called the ruling “a resounding victory for military readiness” in a post on X. “Military authority and operational control belong to the Commander-in-Chief and Department of War, not a tech company,” he wrote.

Vendor risk is no longer predictable

For enterprises, the split ruling creates a compliance problem with no clean answer. The order states the Department has canceled its contracts with Anthropic, begun removing Claude from its systems, and prohibited contractors from using it as a subcontractor on Pentagon work. It also states, however, that “the Department has not prohibited contractors from using Claude for work performed for entities other than the Department.”

That distinction does not resolve the uncertainty. Following the California injunction, the government filed a compliance status report on April 6, cited in legal analysis by Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, confirming it had restored Anthropic access across federal systems. That compliance applied only to the California statute. The broader D.C. designation remains active.

Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, said enterprises are dealing with vendor risk that their procurement frameworks were not designed to handle. “It means a vendor does not have a single legal status anymore. It can be restricted under one framework and protected under another, at the same time. That is a very different world from the one enterprise procurement teams are used to operating in,” he said.

The timing mismatch compounds the problem, Gogia said. “Legal processes move on their own timelines. Procurement cycles move on to another. Architecture decisions, once made, are not easy to reverse. When those timelines fall out of sync, you end up locked into dependencies that may no longer be viable,” he said.

‘Any lawful use’ shifts governance into the contract

The case has implications beyond Anthropic, Gogia said. The “any lawful use” standard the Pentagon sought to impose is one that the General Services Administration is separately moving to codify across federal AI procurement.

If that happens, governance authority would move from vendor-defined safeguards into contract language, Gogia said. “The contract becomes the final authority, not the platform. Governance is no longer primarily enforced through design. It is enforced through legal agreement,” he said.

Large defense contractors required to operate under such terms will push equivalent requirements down their supply chains, Gogia said, meaning enterprises with no direct Pentagon exposure may still face similar obligations through their partners.

On Anthropic’s refusal to drop its ethical restrictions, he said the question enterprises ultimately ask is “not whether a vendor is ethical, but whether that vendor can remain usable across all the contexts in which the enterprise operates.”

Matt Schruers, CEO of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which filed an amicus brief in the case alongside ITI, SIIA, and TechNet, said the outcome adds to an already difficult environment. “The Pentagon’s actions and the DC Circuit’s ruling create substantial business uncertainty at a time when US companies are competing with global counterparts to lead in AI,” he said in a statement.

The D.C. court directed both parties to address three unresolved threshold questions before May 19, including whether the court has jurisdiction over Anthropic’s petition at all, according to the order. Anthropic’s opening brief is due April 22. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen announced plans to step down as CEO last month after 18 years leading software vendor through several periods of tech change from the arrival of the cloud, mobile computing, and the early days of artificial intelligence.  

For whomever is tapped next for the top job — the search is expected to take several months — the biggest priority will be reshaping Adobe’s products and strategy for the next wave of agentic AI, analysts said.

“Ultimately, Adobe must evolve from a leader in creative tools to the system that connects content, context, and commerce in a world of real-time agentic interactions,” said Gerry Murray, research director at IDC.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen (L) and Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, speak on stage at Microsoft Ignite 2025. 

Microsoft

Narayen’s resignation, will “force the Adobe board to search for a leader who is not just a master of the subscription economy, but a visionary in the ‘agentic’ AI era,” Jim Lundy at Aragon Research said in a blog post last month.   

Adobe’s next CEO inherits a business that’s fundamentally strong, but entering a “more complex phase of execution,” said Maria Bell, senior research analyst at CCS Insight. “Under Shantanu Narayen, the company not only transitioned to a cloud subscription model, but built a highly integrated platform spanning creative, document and marketing workflows. 

“The challenge for his successor is less about transformation and more about proving that Adobe’s AI-led strategy can deliver consistent, long-term growth.” 

Questions about the company’s path ahead come as it prepares for Adobe Connect later this month in Las Vegas. The event runs April 20-22.

Adobe was among the early adopters of generative AI (genAI) with the launch of its Firefly model in March 2023, positioning itself as a commercially safe tool for enterprise customers such as IBM, Pepsi and Mattel to generate content. It later expanded Firefly with the addition of multi-modal AI tools that included video, vector and audio, while embedding Firefly across its software and rolling out GenStudio in 2024 to help businesses manage AI-generated at scale. 

Those moves have yet to reassure investors that the company is on solid footing. Adobe’s stock fell following its latest earnings report, despite seeing better-than-expected revenue and a three-fold year-on-year increase in AI-related sales.

Adobe had 850 million monthly users across Acrobat, Creative Cloud, Express and Firefly, according to its most recent financial results.

The company faces competition from a number of vendors, including Canva and Figma, which also offer creative design tools. It is also must contend with AI providers such as OpenAI and Google that enable users to generate content via prompts.

“Adobe is no longer competing only with traditional design tools, but with a broader set of AI-native platforms and ecosystems that are reshaping how content is created and consumed,” said Bell. “This shifts the basis of competition from product capability to accessibility, integration and cost — putting pressure on Adobe’s historical pricing power.”

Although he will remain as chairman of the board, Narayen’s departure adds to the uncertainty around Adobe’s future. 

“While Adobe is currently in a position of strength,” said Lundy, “a leadership change of this magnitude often invites aggressive competitive maneuvers from rivals in the marketing and design tech stacks.” 

The key challenge for any successor will be “balancing Adobe’s professional-grade heritage with the increasing commoditization of creative tools driven by AI,” he said.

The most immediate pressure point for Adobe is its Creative Cloud suite, according to Murray, as competitors threaten Adobe’s dominance in the market. Adobe had 850 million monthly users across Acrobat, Creative Cloud, Express and Firefly, according to its most recent financial results. 

“AI-native tools are collapsing the value of skill, time, and complexity, especially for students and prosumers,” he said. “Adobe will need to rethink pricing and packaging around outputs rather than tools, while dramatically simplifying the user experience.” 

Nevertheless, Adobe retains a “significant structural advantage” in the strength of its product ecosystem and user base, said Bell. “Its tools remain deeply embedded among professional designers and creative teams, supported by a strong community built over decades.”

Another priority will be the need to differentiate its offerings from competitors that rely on similar AI models. This shifts competition away from engineering and towards a go-to-market strategy, Murray said, requiring Adobe to “innovate on pricing, packaging, and partners” to attract and retain users. 

Adobe has made “clear progress” embedding generative AI (genAI) tools across its portfolio, said Bell, but the move towards usage-based models — including generative credits and more flexible access models — “creates uncertainty around pricing, revenue predictability and margin sustainability.

“As such, the priority is moving from feature rollout to monetization discipline,” she said. 

There’s also the prospect that increasingly capable autonomous third-party AI agents could put pressure on Adobe’s margins. While some SaaS-pocalypse concerns are overblown — including the prospect that business customers will vibe-code their own enterprise apps – the emergence of increasingly capable AI agents could push software applications down to an infrastructure layer that agents access on behalf of humans. 

“AI is making it possible to recompose software dynamically, which threatens traditional application-layer value,” said Murray. 

At the same time, he noted that Adobe also has the opportunity to “redefine its moat” around agentic workflows and its ability to connect content and data for smarter automation.

To help Adobe adapt to these ongoing technological shifts, the next CEO will need to appoint a “central authority to align AI product strategy, platform architecture, and partnerships across business units” or lead the charge.

Adobe requires a “robust AI stack,” he said, but will have to find its place in a shifting landscape.  “… Adobe is unlikely to own the enterprise AI control plane, so success will depend on building an open, interoperable stack that integrates with hyperscalers while delivering differentiated value at the application and workflow level,” said Murray.

Nominations for the 2027 Best Places to Work in IT program will open soon! We’ll be posting the link to our nomination form here shortly.

See our Best Places to Work in IT 2026 special report for the complete list of honorees, major trends from the most recent survey, and much more.

About the Best Places to Work in IT program

Computerworld conducts an annual survey to identify the best places to work for IT professionals. We invite readers, PR professionals and other interested parties to nominate companies they consider great employers for IT workers. You may nominate your own company. We then ask those nominated companies that meet our basic criteria to participate in our survey.

Once again, we are excited to extend this program, which has a 33-year history in the United States, to companies worldwide.

The employers in the Best Places list are evaluated by company size: Large companies have 5,000 or more employees; midsize have between 1,001 and 4,999 employees; and small companies employ from 100 to 1,000.

To be eligible, companies must have a minimum of 5 IT employees and a minimum of 100 total employees. We consider IT employees to be those IT workers who provide technology support and services to their own company — or to multiple companies through their work at an IT service provider. Workers who would *not* be included are administrative support staff for the IT department, staff who work in communications or PR for the technology department, IT contractors, or those staff whose primary role is in product development for outside sales.

Best Places to Work in IT is a global program. We ask that companies submit no more than one survey within any one country. If your company operates in multiple countries and you would like to submit a survey for your location only, please note this in the company name field (e.g., “Foundry North America” or “Foundry Germany”). If no location is specified in the company name, we will assume that the entry represents all locations worldwide.

In most cases, we prefer to have the parent company, rather than subsidiaries or affiliates, apply for the Best Places to Work in IT list. However, a subsidiary or affiliate may be eligible, providing that it stands out as a separate entity from the parent company, with separate business functions, IT leadership and so on. A subsidiary may also be eligible to apply separately if its parent company is a holding company. In those cases, the parent company and subsidiary may be able to apply separately. We encourage companies to complete the nomination form or contact us at [email protected], and our Best Places research team will evaluate the submissions on a case-by-case basis.

Questions about the Best Places to Work in IT program can be emailed to [email protected].

Frequently asked questions Survey requirements and eligibility Does my company have to be nominated to complete the survey?

No. Companies may participate even if they were not nominated. In lieu of a nomination, please send an email to [email protected] with the name and contact information (including email address) of the individual who should receive the company survey and other information; we’ll take care of the rest.

Does the Best Places to Work in IT list include public companies only?

No. The survey includes private as well as public companies.

What criteria must my company meet to participate?

To be considered for our Best Places to Work in IT list:

• Companies must have a minimum of 5 IT employees.
• Companies must have a minimum of 100 total employees worldwide.
• In most cases, we prefer to have the parent company, rather than subsidiaries or affiliates, apply for the Best Places to Work in IT list. However, a subsidiary or affiliate may be eligible, providing that it stands out as a separate entity from the parent company, with separate business functions, IT leadership and so on. A subsidiary may also be eligible to apply separately if its parent company is a holding company. In those cases, the parent company and subsidiary may be able to apply separately. We encourage companies to complete the nomination form or contact us at [email protected], and our Best Places research team will evaluate the submissions on a case-by-case basis.

Who should complete the survey?

An individual familiar with employment statistics, benefits, policies and programs of your IT department and your company should complete the survey. This could be a human resources representative, a CIO or corporate PR representative — or a team of all the above.

Survey contents and procedures What does the company survey ask?

Our online survey includes questions about companies’ benefits, training and development, IT salary changes, percent of IT employees promoted, IT turnover rates, and the percentage of women employees in management in IT departments. In addition, we will collect information about company culture, workplace modernization, and company growth.

Which employees are considered “IT workers” in this survey?

Answers to the survey should be based on those IT workers who provide technology support and services to their own company — or to multiple companies through their work at an IT service provider. Workers who wouldn’t be included are administrative support staff for the IT department, staff who work in communications or PR for the technology department, IT contractors, or those staff whose primary role is in product development for outside sales.

What happens if I leave a question blank on the survey?

You can’t leave a question blank if it is required. Many of the questions on the survey are required; the survey can’t be processed if they aren’t answered. Please answer to the best of your ability for questions with lists or options included. If any open-ended/text based questions aren’t applicable to your company, please indicate “NA” for “not applicable.” If there is a question you can’t answer fully given the format of the survey, you may briefly explain your answers in an addendum field that follows each survey section.

Companies that withhold information used to rank the finalists will have points deducted from their ranking. Answers that are left blank or have unexplained N/As will be assumed to be 0 (zero).

What information will be shared publicly?

Computerworld tries to avoid printing information that a company may consider competitive. The following information may appear publicly:

• Company name
• Location
• Industry
• Website
• Total number of employees

 All other information will be used only in aggregate format or for ranking purposes, unless a featured organization explicitly grants permission.

Can I save my survey and come back to it at a later date?

Yes. You will be able to save your partially completed survey and can save a partially completed survey as many times as necessary. Please save your unique URL to re-enter the survey. When you return to the survey, you will be able to review/modify questions that you have already answered. However, we will continue to provide a printer-friendly version of the survey, and we recommend that you complete this survey, then enter your answers online.

How should I send my company’s information to Computerworld?

We accept company information from the online survey only. Please enter all data as accurately as possible. Provide company name, location, web address and other information, as you would like it to appear in print.

Can I get a copy of the survey to review before I go to the online survey and submit my company’s information?

Yes. A printer-friendly version of the 2027 Best Places company survey can be downloaded for reference. We encourage participants to complete the printer-friendly version offline before filling out the online survey.

Best Places to Work in IT 2027 Company SurveyDownload Will Computerworld provide us with a copy of our submitted survey?

Upon request, Computerworld will email you a PDF of your company’s survey responses.

Is there an employee portion to the survey?

There is no longer an employee survey portion to the survey. Computerworld decided to make this change in the 2023 program to streamline the process for global participation and to enable companies with smaller IT departments to participate. In lieu of the employee survey portion of the program, Computerworld will be inviting a panel of judges consisting of industry experts to evaluate entries and confirm this year’s honorees.

List publication and notification When will the list of honorees be published?

The Best Places to Work in IT honorees will be announced in December 2026 on Computerworld.com.

When can I find out if my company is on the list?

Computerworld will notify companies that will be honored as a 2027 Best Place to Work in IT several weeks in advance of publication. Computerworld will provide honorees with an online press kit including a sample press release and other promotional information.

Is there a timeline to which I can refer for survey action items?

Below is the 2027 Best Places to Work in IT timeline.

April 15, 2026Nominations open for the 2026 Best Places to Work in IT. Nominated companies receive an email with a unique link to the Best Places company survey from Computerworld by the end of April. Thereafter, company surveys will be sent on a rolling basis.July 15, 2026DEADLINE: Completed Best Places company survey is due to Computerworld.October 2026
Nominees are notified regarding their status as Best Places to Work in IT honorees.December 2026List of Best Places to Work in IT honorees is available online. What if I have a question that was not answered in this FAQ?

Please email your questions to the following address: [email protected].

In the subject line, please include your company name and be as descriptive as possible in the subject line as to the nature of your inquiry.

Through LinkedIn’s more than one billion business users, the Microsoft unit has access to a vast array of personally-identifiable information, including data that could identify religious and political positions. What is less clear is what LinkedIn does with all of that data.

A small European company that sells a browser extension to leverage different aspects of LinkedIn data is running a campaign, which it calls BrowserGate, that accuses LinkedIn of “illegally searching your computer” and “running one of the largest corporate espionage operations in modern history.” 

“Every time any of LinkedIn’s one billion users visits linkedin.com, hidden code searches their computer for installed software, collects the results, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers and to third-party companies including an American-Israeli cybersecurity firm,” the company claimed.

“The user is never asked. Never told. LinkedIn’s privacy policy does not mention it,” the BrowserGate site said. “Because LinkedIn knows each user’s real name, employer, and job title, it is not searching for anonymous visitors. It is searching identified people at identified companies.”

LinkedIn denies some of those accusations, and avoids addressing the remainder. 

“This [accusation] is a house of cards built entirely upon a fabrication,” said an emailed LinkedIn statement . “We do disclose that we scan for browser extensions in our privacy policy, in order to detect abuse and provide defense for site stability.” 

When asked whether it uses that data solely to do those things, LinkedIn did not reply.

Possible misuse

The key person behind the allegations calls himself Steven Morrell (not his legal name, which he asked not be published). The company he represents also has different names, including Teamfluence and Fairlinked. 

Morrell said that LinkedIn is gathering data that includes sensitive details, including information that he argued could be used to determine religious and political leanings. Gathering such data, Morrell said, could violate European privacy rules.

But Morrell is not saying that LinkedIn is in fact using the data to determine those preferences, but merely that they could. Much the same could be said for almost all large companies.

Morell isn’t exactly unbiased, however. He and LinkedIn are also involved in a legal dispute in Germany, in which Morrell said that LinkedIn violated EU rules and that it improperly kicked him, and others, off the service.

LinkedIn countered that Morell and the other plaintiffs had violated its terms of service with their plugins. Last month, a judge in Munich sided with LinkedIn, dismissing the motion for a preliminary injunction.

Might cause compliance issues

Safayat Moahamad, research director at Info-Tech Research Group, said that compliance approaches throughout the European Union and the UK could indeed have some issues with this deep a level of data collection. 

“European courts are likely to support platforms that restrict automated data harvesting, when they can plausibly link organization-level policy enforcement actions to consumer protection and regulatory compliance,” Moahamad said.

Advice for CIOs

Cybersecurity consultant Brian Levine, executive director of FormerGov, said enterprise CIOs should use these allegations, even if they prove to be untrue, to help them tweak their data strategy and privacy policies for 2026.

“Assuming the BrowserGate allegations are true, LinkedIn users should consider reducing the amount of identifiable, trackable, or sensitive data their browser exposes, and organizations should treat LinkedIn as a potentially hostile web environment until facts are verified,” Levine said. “Even if BrowserGate is exaggerated, browser fingerprinting is a real, widespread practice across the web. Treat LinkedIn like any other third-party data collector. LinkedIn has historically been treated as safe, [but] that assumption may need to be revisited.”

Levine said IT executives should “assume that LinkedIn can map your tech stack” and that, if the claims are accurate, LinkedIn could infer “which SaaS tools your employees use, which competitors you rely on, which job search tools your staff is using and which political/religious extensions appear inside your workforce.”

He added that IT should consider blocking LinkedIn on sensitive networks, or require it to only be accessed through VDI, as well as employing browser isolation techniques. Some companies might even want to use a separate isolated browser solely for LinkedIn, or, he said, “use a sandboxed browser session, such as Browserling or other cloud-isolated browsers.”

This article originally appeared on CSOonline.

We’ve reached that familiar point in Apple’s annual iPhone speculation cycle when conflicting reports insist an unreleased, unconfirmed product is both behind schedule and set to appear right on time.

As with Apple’s annual macOS system naming fable, this moment comes every year. One publication, sometimes Nikkei, might claim development is running late, while a second industry observer, usually well-connected analyst Mark Gurman, will rebut the claim. 

Apple, meanwhile, says nothing at all. How could it, when all the drama concerns a product it hasn’t even acknowledged exists? Instead, the company just sits back, quietly managing the coverage while occupying prime mental real estate without officially doing anything.

How the stories work

The details in these annual stories don’t matter much. At this stage, they usually involve technical or manufacturing process flaws related to a problem identified during the initial test manufacturing cycle, which Apple then manages to fix.

Once the device is introduced and reaches stores, Apple routinely sells through its initial product inventory rapidly. Shipping times slip, supply tightens, and sometimes weeks pass before availability stabilizes. Rarely, Apple will announce a product — but not actually ship it for a few more weeks. This is a pattern we sometimes see with the iPhone Pro models.

This year’s Big Story

This year’s Big Story concerns the mythical iPhone Fold. Nikkei reports last-minute manufacturing flaws and even speculates the device might not ship until 2027. Gurman rebuts the report, arguing Apple remains on track for its fall schedule for the still-unconfirmed product. “While supply could be limited initially, it’s also on track to go on sale at the same time — or soon after — the Pro models. Nikkei report is off base,” he wrote.

The rumor clearly rattled markets. Morgan Stanley analyst Eric Woodring weighed in with his own reporting, telling clients in a note seen by Computerworld that while early testing has identified a small engineering issue concerning the Samsung-made hinge, he hasn’t picked up news of delays. He cites an iPhone component supplier who said they had “not seen any order adjustment for the Foldable iPhone.”

Business as usual

None of this is unusual. Apple ran into similar challenges with iPhone X and iPhone 15. Picking up problems at this stage in the manufacturing process is precisely why Apple engages in test manufacturing runs. The idea is that if problems are found, there is time to get them fixed. Woodring expects Apple will do so, echoing Gurman’s view that a September announcement remains on track.

Of course, what makes all the iPhone Fold flip-flops so amusing is that right now the product doesn’t officially exist. Apple has said nothing about it, and while we know it’s worked on a folding iPhone for over a decade, it has never, ever announced one. 

Even so, we already think we know what to expect. 

What we think we know

The IPhone Fold will, perhaps unsurprisingly, fold. It might be a little squarer than a standard iPhone and folds out to be slightly smaller than an iPod mini. You’ll be able to use it folded or unfolded, it will have high-quality cameras, use premium materials and the fold will be almost invisible when used. It will boast an Apple silicon processor, plenty of memory, and be as happy taking a FaceTime call as it will be when running on-device AI. 

• It will look excellent. 
• It will feel expensive. 
• Hordes of influencers will love it. 

And it will likely cost around $2,000.

That’s what we think we know, but Apple hasn’t ever promised a folding iPhone. What it does promise, however, is that if it ships such a device it will do so on Apple’s terms, not the industry’s self-created schedule. That’s just how Apple flips its phones. 

Please follow me on Twitter, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe. Also, now on Mastodon.

Chinese AI company Z.ai has launched GLM-5.1, an open-source coding model it says is built for agentic software engineering. The release comes as AI vendors move beyond autocomplete-style coding tools toward systems that can handle software tasks over longer periods with less human input.

Z.ai said GLM-5.1 can sustain performance over hundreds of iterations, an ability it argues sets it apart from models that lose effectiveness in longer sessions.

As one example, the company said GLM-5.1 improved a vector database optimization task over more than 600 iterations and 6,000 tool calls, reaching 21,500 queries per second, about six times the best result achieved in a single 50-turn session.

In a research note, Z.ai said GLM-5.1 outperformed its predecessor, GLM-5, on several software engineering benchmarks and showed particular strength in repo generation, terminal-based problem solving, and repeated code optimization. The company said the model scored 58.4 on SWE-Bench Pro, compared with 55.1 for GLM-5, and above the scores it listed for OpenAI’s GPT-5.4, Anthropic’s Opus 4.6, and Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro on that benchmark.

GLM-5.1 has been released under the MIT License and is available through its developer platforms, with model weights also published for local deployment, the company said. That may appeal to enterprises looking for more control over how such tools are deployed.

Longer-running coding agents

Z.ai says long-running performance is a key differentiator for the company when compared to models that lose effectiveness in extended sessions.

Analysts say this is because many current models still plateau or drift after a relatively small number of turns, limiting their usefulness on extended, multi-step software tasks.

Pareekh Jain, CEO of Pareekh Consulting, said the industry is now moving beyond tools that can answer prompts toward systems that can carry out longer assignments with less supervision.

The question, Jain said, is no longer, “What can I ask this AI?” but, “What can I assign to it for the next eight hours?”

For enterprises, that raises the prospect of assigning an agent a ticket in the morning and receiving an optimized solution by day’s end, after it has run hundreds of experiments and profiled the code.

“This capability aligns with real needs such as large refactors, migration programs, and continuous incident resolution,” said Charlie Dai, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. “It suggests that long‑running autonomous agents are becoming more practical, provided enterprises layer in governance, monitoring, and escalation mechanisms to manage risk.”

Open-source appeal grows

GLM-5.1’s release under the MIT License could be significant, especially for companies in regulated or security-sensitive sectors.

“This matters in four key ways,” Jain said. “First, cost. Pricing is much lower than for premium models, and self-hosting lets companies control expenses instead of paying per use. Second, data governance. Sensitive code and data do not have to be sent to external APIs, which is critical in sectors such as finance, healthcare, and defense. Third, customization. Companies can adapt the model to their own codebases and internal tools without restrictions.”

The fourth factor, according to Jain, is geopolitical risk. Although the model is open source, its links to Chinese infrastructure and entities could still raise compliance concerns for some US companies.

Dai said the MIT license makes it easier for companies to run the model on their own systems while adapting it to internal requirements and governance policies. “For many buyers, this makes GLM‑5.1 a viable strategic option alongside commercial models, especially where regulatory constraints, IP sensitivity, or long‑term platform control matter most,” Dai said.

Benchmark credibility

Z.ai cited three benchmarks: SWE-Bench Pro, which tests complex software engineering tasks; NL2Repo, which measures repository generation; and Terminal-Bench 2.0, which evaluates real-world terminal-based problem solving.

“These benchmarks are designed to test coding agents’ advanced coding capabilities, so topping those benchmarks reflects strong coding performance, such as reliability in planning-to-execution, less prompt rework, and faster delivery,” said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia. “However, they are still detached from typical enterprise realities.”

Su said public benchmarks still do not capture the messiness of proprietary codebases, legacy systems, and code review workflows. He added that benchmark results come from controlled settings that differ from production, though the gap is closing as more teams adopt agentic setups.