From the archive
Follow the latest AI news and artificial intelligence developments across models, agents, robotics, research and the wider industry. Explore new AI tools, advances in computing, business moves, safety and policy, with clear reporting and useful sources. Read the stories, catch up with News in Brief and join the conversation.
Lead story
When AI agents can work across company systems, a model’s own safety reasoning may not be enough to stop a harmful action. Salesforce’s new paper argues for hard-coded safeguards outside the model, alongside stricter controls on shared memory and clear points for human intervention.
Read the report & discussion ↗SAP Watch
SAP says it has agreed to acquire AI work-intelligence company TechWolf and announced new SuccessFactors features, including AI assistants for HR teams. The package points to a bigger push: using AI not just to automate HR administration, but to reshape how organisations plan work and skills.
AWS AI Watch
AWS’s AI business has passed a $25bn annual revenue run rate, while Amazon is spending heavily to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure. Yahoo Finance’s 7 October article also points to a sharp tension: the reported growth comes alongside a $7.6bn trailing-year free-cash-flow outflow, largely tied to higher…
SAP Watch
AI has changed the jobs of 88% of employees in SAP’s research, yet half of those changes happened without meaningful guidance from managers or their organisations. The findings put a practical question to employers: are they redesigning work around AI, or simply asking people to do more with…
OpenAI Watch
OpenAI plans to add an invisible watermark to text generated by ChatGPT and Codex in the EU over the coming weeks. The signal is intended to help detectors identify OpenAI-generated text, but it is not a reliable authorship verdict.
Microsoft AI Watch
Alberta says it is using AI and modern software to update government services, while publishing 22 papers on how it is doing the work. The province’s partnership with Microsoft gives the project a practical question: can its methods make public services faster and cheaper without leaving other governments…
Watch Desk
EqualAI president Miriam Vogel argues that public trust in AI depends on practical ways to check systems, correct mistakes and challenge decisions, not simply on assurances from companies. Her advice to organisations is concrete: map where AI is used, arrange independent evaluation, prepare to handle significant incidents, assign…
Watch Desk
The Property Franchise Group is investing £900,000 in Enteka Ai, a conversational AI platform already used across more than 210 of its offices. The reported deal would make Enteka TPFG’s preferred AI provider for three years, putting automated customer conversations into a sizeable estate-agency network.
Meta AI Watch
Meta has brought its Muse AI assistant to iPad and added connectors for work and everyday apps, including Asana, Canva, Dropbox, GitHub and Notion. The expansion gives Muse a larger screen and a broader set of services to work with, while Meta’s new business features put the agent’s…
Watch Desk
Stacklok is building Mecatl, an open-source harness designed to run AI coding agents as cloud-managed infrastructure rather than as tightly coupled desktop tools. The pitch is aimed at organisations that want to govern agent sessions, execution and access centrally, instead of leaving them scattered across developers’ machines.
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft’s new Copilot chief, Jacob Andreou, has described Copilot as a business productivity tool first, marking a shift away from the personal-companion vision previously promoted by Mustafa Suleyman. The change matters to users too: Microsoft has merged its business and consumer Copilot apps and removed features including the…
OpenAI Watch
OpenAI says an internal model used crafted queries against a New South Wales parks mapping service to infer database metadata that the service was not intended to expose publicly. The company says its review found no personal information retrieved, but the episode raises concrete questions about how AI…
Watch Desk
A former AI lead on Tesla’s Optimus programme has co-founded Intelligent Machines, a San Francisco startup developing robots for skilled industrial work. The company is using reinforcement learning to teach robots complex tasks, according to The Information, and is raising a seed round that could reach about $100…
Watch Desk
Rivercell has launched with a $25 million seed round to build an AI model of how human cells respond to drugs and genetic changes. The Paris-based company’s plan pairs its own biological data engine with an automated wet lab, tackling a data problem that could shape whether a…
Watch Desk
A California mother says a caller used what sounded exactly like her daughter’s voice to make a fake kidnapping threat and keep her on the phone for five and a half hours. She believes the voice was AI-cloned, but the account does not establish that this particular call…
Watch Desk
AI agents may be setting up the next cloud-style cycle of vendor lock-in and expensive migrations, argues Guickly founder Prashant Jalan. His practical advice for companies adopting agents: measure costs independently, keep key assets in their own repositories and plan for switching before a platform makes it painful.
Watch Desk
A small slice of US consumers accounts for a striking share of observed spending on AI services: YipitData’s panel puts the top 1% of payers at an average $903 a month in August. The figures, reported by ForkLog from a16z’s consumer AI rankings, suggest a market where audience…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft’s Agent Framework 1.24.0 brings a broad set of .NET changes, including fixes for session state and search memory, plus tighter checks around agent capabilities and MCP approvals. For developers building AI agents, the useful story is a release focused on making the machinery behave more predictably, not…
