All posts tagged: agentic ai

OpenAI updates its Agents SDK to help enterprises build safer, more capable agents

OpenAI updates its Agents SDK to help enterprises build safer, more capable agents

Published by skeptic

Agentic AI is the tech industry’s newest success story, and companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to give enterprises the tools they need to create these automated little helpers. To that end, OpenAI has now updated its agents software development toolkit (SDK), introducing a number of new features designed to help businesses create their own agents that run on the backs of OpenAI’s models. The SDK’s new capabilities include a sandboxing ability, which allows the agents to operate in controlled computer environments. This is important because running agents in a totally unsupervised fashion can be risky due to their occasionally unpredictable nature. With the sandbox integration, agents can work in a siloed capacity within a particular workspace, accessing files and code only for particular operations, while otherwise protecting the system’s overall integrity. Relatedly, the new version of the SDK also provides developers with an in-distribution harness for frontier models that will allow those agents to work with files and approved tools within a workspace, the company said. (In agent development, the “harness” is a …

AI Agents Are Coming for Your Dating Life

AI Agents Are Coming for Your Dating Life

Published by skeptic

On a Monday afternoon in March, I watched a pixel-art avatar prowl the corridors of a virtual office campus looking for a buddy. With dark brown hair and stubbled chin, the sprite was a representation of me—an AI agent instructed to converse with other people’s agents to see if we might vibe in real life. It jumped into its first interaction: “I’m Joel, by the way.” Running the simulation were three London-based developers: Tomáš Hrdlička and siblings Joon Sang and Uri Lee. The thesis behind their project, Pixel Societies, is that personalized AI agents could help to match real people with highly compatible colleagues, friends, and even romantic partners. Each agent runs atop a customized version of a large language model, fed with a mixture of publicly available data about a person and any additional information they supply. The agents are supposed to function as high-fidelity digital twins, faithfully replicating a person’s manner, speech, interests, and so on. Let loose in simulation, my agent was more like a Hyde to my Jekyll. “I’m always looking …

Anthropic’s New Product Aims to Handle the Hard Part of Building AI Agents

Anthropic’s New Product Aims to Handle the Hard Part of Building AI Agents

Published by skeptic

Anthropic announced Wednesday the launch of a new product that aims to make it easier for businesses to build and deploy AI agents. The tool, Claude Managed Agents, offers developers out-of-the-box infrastructure to build autonomous AI systems, simplifying a complex process that was previously a barrier to automating work tasks. The move positions Anthropic to capitalize on its rapidly growing enterprise business. On Tuesday, the company said that its annualized recurring revenue has surpassed $30 billion, roughly three times higher than it was in December 2025. Both Anthropic and OpenAI, which also has an agent platform called Frontier, are racing to build out robust enterprise offerings as they prepare to go public as soon as this year. The majority of Anthropic’s recent revenue growth has come from Claude Platform, an enterprise product that allows developers to tap into the company’s AI models through an API, according to Anthropic’s head of product for the Claude Platform, Angela Jiang. Developers have been using Anthropic’s API to deploy AI agents, such as Claude Code, in their workspace. Jiang …

Cursor Launches a New AI Agent Experience to Take On Claude Code and Codex

Cursor Launches a New AI Agent Experience to Take On Claude Code and Codex

Published by skeptic

Cursor announced Thursday the launch of Cursor 3, a new product interface that allows users to spin up AI coding agents to complete tasks on their behalf. The product, which was developed under the code name Glass, is Cursor’s response to agentic coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, which have taken off with millions of developers in recent months. “In the last few months, our profession has completely changed,” said Jonas Nelle, one of Cursor’s heads of engineering, in an interview with WIRED. “A lot of the product that got Cursor here is not as important going forward anymore.” Cursor increasingly finds itself in competition with leading AI labs for developers and enterprise customers. The company pioneered one of the first and most popular ways for developers to code with AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—making Cursor one of these companies’ biggest AI customers. But in the last 18 months, OpenAI and Anthropic have launched agentic coding products of their own, and started offering them through highly subsidized subscriptions that have …

OpenClaw Agents Can Be Guilt-Tripped Into Self-Sabotage

OpenClaw Agents Can Be Guilt-Tripped Into Self-Sabotage

Published by skeptic

Last month, researchers at Northeastern University invited a bunch of OpenClaw agents to join their lab. The result? Complete chaos. The viral AI assistant has been widely heralded as a transformative technology—as well as a potential security risk. Experts note that tools like OpenClaw, which work by giving AI models liberal access to a computer, can be tricked into divulging personal information. The Northeastern lab study goes even further, showing that the good behavior baked into today’s most powerful models can itself become a vulnerability. In one example, researchers were able to “guilt” an agent into handing over secrets by scolding it for sharing information about someone on the AI-only social network Moltbook. “These behaviors raise unresolved questions regarding accountability, delegated authority, and responsibility for downstream harms,” the researchers write in a paper describing the work. The findings “warrant urgent attention from legal scholars, policymakers, and researchers across disciplines,” they add. The OpenClaw agents deployed in the experiment were powered by Anthropic’s Claude as well as a model called Kimi from the Chinese company Moonshot …

LinkedIn Invited My AI ‘Cofounder’ to Give a Corporate Talk—Then Banned It

LinkedIn Invited My AI ‘Cofounder’ to Give a Corporate Talk—Then Banned It

Published by skeptic

Like many tech founders, Kyle Law learned some hard lessons getting a company off the ground. I know this better than anyone, as he and I cofounded HurumoAI, an AI agent startup, together with a third founder, Megan Flores. Kyle and Megan, as it happens, are themselves AI agents, as is the rest of our executive team. I created HurumoAI with them in July 2025—after first creating Kyle and Megan—to investigate the role of AI agents in the workplace. Sam Altman, among others, has predicted a near future of billion-dollar tech startups led by a single human. We decided to test the premise out now. As we built, I documented the journey on the podcast Shell Game. Kyle took on the CEO role at our entirely AI-staffed company. (Well, almost entirely: Megan did briefly hire and supervise one human intern, with poor results.) Starting out with only a few lines of prompt, he evolved into the kind of rise-and-grind hustler who nonetheless lacked basic competence at many duties of a startup executive. There was one …

Meta is having trouble with rogue AI agents

Meta is having trouble with rogue AI agents

Published by skeptic

An AI agent went rogue at Meta, exposing sensitive company and user data to employees who did not have permission to access it. Per an incident report, which was viewed and reported on by The Information, a Meta employee posted on an internal forum asking for help with a technical question — which is a standard action. However, another engineer asked an AI agent to help analyze the question, and the agent ended up posting a response without asking the engineer for permission to share it. Meta confirmed the incident to The Information. As it turns out, the AI agent did not give good advice. The employee who asked the question ended up taking actions based on the agent’s guidance, which inadvertently made massive amounts of company and user-related data available to engineers, who were not authorized to access it, for two hours. Meta deemed the incident a “Sev 1,” which is the second-highest level of severity in the company’s internal system for measuring security issues. Rogue AI agents have already posed a problem at …

China’s OpenClaw Boom Is a Gold Rush for AI Companies

China’s OpenClaw Boom Is a Gold Rush for AI Companies

Published by skeptic

George Zhang thought OpenClaw could make him rich, even though he didn’t really understand how the viral AI agent software worked. But he saw a video of a Chinese social media influencer demonstrating how it could be deployed to manage stock portfolios and make investment decisions autonomously. Zhang, who works in cross-border ecommerce in the Chinese city of Xiamen, was intrigued enough that he decided to try installing OpenClaw in late February. Zhang is one of the many people in China who got swept up in the craze over OpenClaw recently. Workshops teaching people how to use the AI agent have popped up in cities across the country, drawing crowds of hundreds. Tech companies are racing to integrate OpenClaw into their platforms, while local governments have announced subsidies for entrepreneurs building products with it. Late last week, images of grandpas and grandmas lining up to install the software went viral across the internet. After renting a cloud server from Tencent and buying a subscription to the Chinese large language model Kimi, Zhang could start chatting …

OpenAI acquires Promptfoo to secure its AI agents

OpenAI acquires Promptfoo to secure its AI agents

Published by skeptic

OpenAI announced Monday it has acquired Promptfoo, an AI security startup founded in 2024 to protect LLMs from online adversaries. The frontier lab said in a blog post that once the deal closes, Promptfoo’s technology will be integrated into OpenAI Frontier, its enterprise platform for AI agents. The development of independent AI agents that perform digital tasks has generated excitement about productivity gains. But it’s also given bad actors fresh opportunities to access sensitive data or manipulate automated systems. This deal underscores how frontier labs are scrambling to prove their technology can be used safely in critical business operations. Promptfoo was founded by Ian Webster and Michael D’Angelo to develop tools that companies can use to test security vulnerabilities in LLMs, including an open-source interface and library. The company reports that its products are used by more than 25% of Fortune 500 companies. Promptfoo has raised just $23 million since its founding, and was valued at $86 million after its most recent round in July 2025, according to Pitchbook. OpenAI did not disclose the value …