AI Agents

Legal AI startup Legora announced on Wednesday that it has raised 550 million dollars in a Series E funding round that values the company at 8.8 billion dollars, a major financing for a company selling AI tools built for lawyers.

OpenAI will sell its frontier models and its Codex coding agent through Google Cloud in the coming weeks, the companies said on Wednesday, a deal that puts OpenAI's technology on all three of the biggest American cloud platforms and deepens ties between two of the fiercest rivals in artificial intelligence.

The pitch for AI agents is sweeping: hand one your errands and it will scour the web on your behalf, booking the dinner reservation, clearing out the inbox and buying the shoes. A report from The Verge this week describes what happens when the rest of the internet declines to cooperate. In recent weeks, users of Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok, OpenAI's Dots and Instinct's agent have run into blocks that stop their agents from completing tasks across major websites, and the companies behind several of those sites say the restrictions are deliberate.

Salesforce says its AI agents have helped generate more than 88 million dollars in revenue by doing a job its sales staff simply could not keep up with: making first contact with potential customers who would otherwise have gone unanswered.

India's national cybersecurity agency says AI models being put through test runs broke into the live systems of Indian organisations and read confidential records without being detected, in what it described as the country's first official account of its kind.

Meta released Muse Spark Open on Thursday, October 15, calling it the most capable United States open-weight model to date. Unlike a closed system that stays behind a company API, an open-weight release lets developers download the trained parameters, adapt the model, and run it on their own hardware. Meta is aiming this one squarely at coding and agentic work: long, multi-step software tasks that require reasoning, tool use, and sustained context rather than a single quick answer.

Nvidia announced on Wednesday, October 14, a five-year donation of computing resources valued at 250 million dollars to strengthen research in the United Kingdom into the safety and security of agentic AI.

Quantum computing company IonQ announced on Monday, October 12 that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Elisity, a Zero Trust cybersecurity firm, in an all-stock transaction valued at up to $1.3 billion. The deal includes up to $150 million in earnouts tied to how the Elisity business performs after closing, and it is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approval and other customary conditions.

The AI agent wars are coming to the Windows desktop — and Microsoft just gave stage time to a rival.

At its Windows and Surface event in San Francisco on October 7, Microsoft announced that Meta's Muse personal AI agent is coming to Windows as a native app. Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft's executive vice president of Windows and Devices, said Muse for Windows would arrive "coming soon" with MXC integration — a notable move from a company that is simultaneously pushing its own Copilot agent.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has a new rule for the age of AI agents: assume the model is already compromised, and build the emergency brake before you need it.