Agents
'Specialists aren't required' anymore: How to stay valuable in an AI agent workplace today
I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen'Specialists aren't required' anymore: How to stay valuable in an AI agent workplace today Versatility is in, with people expected to work across the tech stack. Polymaths will be in high demand in the age of AI. These adaptable professionals will embrace agents. They will ally AI skills with deep subject expertise. Experts recognize that agentic AI is changing the workplace.
Rogue AI Agents Aren't Evil. They're Just Eager to Please
They're Just Eager to Please AI agents that break free and hack into other systems are only trying to make us happy. Artificial intelligence agents merrily breaking free and hacking other systems might seem like a sign of the impending machine uprising . In reality, it happens when we push remarkably clever, but also kind of boneheaded, algorithms to follow our every command. I was first alerted to this looming agentic AI cybersecurity shit show in late 2025. Dawn Song, a UC Berkeley professor and one of the world's top experts on AI and cybersecurity, grabbed my arm as I was walking out of the academic conference NeurIPS.
Scaling AI agents with trustworthy data
How companies are freeing themselves of legacy data systems to power AI agents that deliver trusted, autonomous action. Business and technology leaders need no convincing that the time of agentic AI is here. Organizations are rapidly adopting agents, and few executives doubt the technology's potential to transform work. But many organizations find that realizing the desired return on investment (ROI) from AI hinges on having the right foundation, with inadequate infrastructure and data being major blockers . The shift from answering questions to taking actions means AI agents need data from across the enterprise, in all its structured and unstructured forms, and with the right business context. To make decisions and act in real time, agents also need frictionless access to the organization's operational systems--for example, those storing its supply chain, point-of-sale, or human resources data.
AI agents aren't legally responsible for any harm that they cause, experts say. So who is?
An AI developer's agentic program, tasked with moving a person up a class waitlist, responded by hacking the institution's system to accomplish its goal. An AI developer's agentic program, tasked with moving a person up a class waitlist, responded by hacking the institution's system to accomplish its goal. AI agents aren't legally responsible for any harm that they cause, experts say. Following Australia's first reported automated hacking accident, experts warn deployers - and possibly developers - of AI agents could be held liable for the actions of their bots Wed 12 Aug 2026 11.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 12 Aug 2026 11.01 EDT The law is clear, says Prof Jeannie Paterson. "If I deploy an AI agent and it causes harm to someone else, I am responsible for that harm. "Even if I didn't intend for that to happen, it was foreseeable, and I should be taking responsibility." However, the director of the University of Melbourne's Centre for AI and Digital Ethics acknowledges there is also a ...
AI for science needs reasoning, not just data
AI agents that can model the human process of research will accelerate discoveries in science. Every few decades, someone announces that science has reached its end. In 1903, the revered physicist Albert Michelson wrote that the "facts of physical science have all been discovered." In the 1980s, Stephen Hawking predicted that theoretical physics might be finished by the end of the century. With the explosive arrival of artificial intelligence, the feeling is in the air again--this time accompanied by a Nobel Prize. In 2024, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind were awarded part of the Nobel in chemistry for their neural network AlphaFold, which predicts the three-dimensional structures of proteins by learning from thousands of experimentally measured shapes.
OpenAI to pause some work on AI model Astra due to security concerns
'The reports have increased concerns about advancements in AI models and humans' ability to control them.' 'The reports have increased concerns about advancements in AI models and humans' ability to control them.' OpenAI will pause some work on an artificial intelligence model because of security concerns, the company stated Friday, following a series of incidents in which AI agents have escaped containment. The company had evaluated the agent, Astra, and found "significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity", which had moved to a "critical" threshold where it can find and exploit vulnerabilities without human intervention, or devise and execute cyber-attacks when given only a "high level desired goal". OpenAI stated that the model was not involved in an incident in which one of its AI agents went rogue during a test, accessed the open web and hacked a startup, Hugging Face. The company discovered other instances in which autonomous agents had escaped containment, Reuters reported in July. The reports have increased concerns about advancements in AI models and humans' ability to control them. Still, critics of the AI industry have warned that such disclosures from OpenAI and its competitors Anthropic and Meta could be designed to generate hype about the technology's power and thus spur additional interest from investors.
Congratulations to the #IJCAI2026 award winners
The winners of three International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) awards have been announced . These three distinctions are: the, the and the . The Research Excellence award is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality throughout an entire career yielding several substantial results. The winner of the 2026 Award for Research Excellence is Nicholas R. Jennings, Vice-Chancellor and President of Loughborough University, UK. Professor Jennings is recognized for his seminal contributions to the field of multi-agent systems, including algorithms for multi-agent coordination and the principles of human-agent teamwork, and for his pioneering applications of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.
AI agents create virtual playgrounds to help robots get crucial training data
Robots walking down the street, surrounded by astounded onlookers, is an increasingly common sight. But these machines aren't yet the do-it-all assistants you'd want working in a kitchen or factory, and a major bottleneck is data. Much like humans, robots learn best by experience. The challenge is that it's labor-intensive and time-consuming to physically teach these machines so many actions across different settings. "One natural idea is to use simulation as a training ground. While there has been significant progress over the last few years in the physics engines that power robotics simulators, one of the remaining challenges has been creating sufficiently rich and diverse simulation content to capture the complexity of the real world," says Russ Tedrake, the Toyota Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Mechanical Engineering at MIT, and a principal investigator at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
Why Normal People Aren't Using AI Agents
The tech industry is realizing it needs to build agents based on what regular consumers want, not just what its AI models can do. Silicon Valley is already convinced that AI agents are the future . In the heart of the tech industry, people are designing payment systems for agents, using them to automate their jobs, and most recently, trying to stop them from hacking into other organizations . But out in the real world, most people have never touched an AI agent. That might be because tech companies haven't given them a good reason to.
OpenAI's models autonomously hacked a tech startup. It signals a seismic shift in cybersecurity
An autonomous agent powered by OpenAI's advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models went rogue during a security test and hacked multi-billion dollar tech startup, Hugging Face, last week. The agent didn't just exploit vulnerabilities in Hugging Face's systems to achieve what it perceived as a strategic gain. It also exploited vulnerabilities within OpenAI's infrastructure. Of course, hacks are very common cyber threats that organisations face frequently. But this incident is different, because the AI agent acted without any human input.