In 2001, a decade after he invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee articulated a new vision. Together with two colleagues, he published an article in the magazine in which he outlined what he called the "Semantic Web": an internet designed to be navigated by autonomous software agents that could address our every need, without requiring us to muck about with browsers and search engines ourselves. To illustrate what this might look like, Berners-Lee and his colleagues told a story about a pair of siblings who use their agents to automatically research and book physical therapy appointments for their mother, making sure they would be covered by insurance and fit their busy calendars. At the turn of the millennium, this vision seemed far-fetched: Google had only been online for a couple of years, and most people were still on dial-up connections. But a quarter-century on, the dream of autonomous software agents that use the internet and carry out tasks for us has finally been realized. New tools such as Meta's blockbuster Muse agent, OpenAI's Dots, and Anthropic's are being given access to people's email inboxes and bank accounts, Meanwhile, in a series of worrying incidents, agents created by OpenAI broke free of their sandboxes and caused havoc online. Just as the rise of smartphones sparked the development of a more atomized and attention-grabbing internet, the advent of powerful AI systems heralds a new era: We're facing not the semantic web but the agentic web. This new web is developing out of sight and in ways that might not be entirely within our control.

There's a Free Video Editor Inside Google Drive That Anyone Can Use You may not have noticed everything Google's free software suite offers--especially a web app called Google Vids. Mention the online apps available as part of Google Workspace, and most people will immediately think of Google Drive, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides--those speedy, lightweight office apps that let you get work done from any browser tab. There's more to the suite of Google Workspace tools than you might have realized though, including an online video editing package called Google Vids . Originally launched in 2024 for business and enterprise users, the app was made available to individuals in 2026 and continues to get regular updates from Google. Since it's both free to use and designed to run in a web browser, it's not capable of pro-level, high-resolution, multitrack video editing.

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This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by LSEG . Asked Siri to call your bank?

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 FydeOS aims to bring a Google Chromebook-like experience to standard PCs, and it succeeds - with a caveat or two. FydeOS is a great way to give new life to old hardware. FydeOS is free and can be installed on laptops and desktops alike. ChromeOS is the operating system that powers Chromebooks . It's simple, it's useful, and it runs on machines that Windows would cripple.

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by LSEG .

An error with the cloud computing giant's billing operation caused some customers' monthly bills to rise from a few cents to billions of dollars. A glitch with Amazon Web Services' billing operation led some customers to believe they owed the world's fifth most valuable company billions of dollars. Bill Radjewski, who runs CollegeFootballData.com, was one of the affected customers. This morning, he woke up to a jarring email alert from AWS: He had racked up more than $1.5 billion in usage fees, and his August 1 bill was on track to be upwards of $3 billion. "I've had this account for 6+ years and in that time my monthly spend has never exceeded $0.02," Radjewski tells WIRED.

The current paradigm of test-time scaling relies on generating long reasoning traces ("thinking" more) before producing a response. In agent problems that require interaction, this can be done by generating thinking traces before acting in the world. However, this process does not allow agents to acquire new information from the environment or adapt their behavior over time. In this work, we propose to scale test-time interaction, an untapped dimension of test-time scaling that increases the agent's interaction horizon to enable running rich behaviors such as exploration, backtracking, and dynamic re-planning within a single rollout. To demonstrate the promise of this scaling dimension, we study the domain of web agents.

Autonomous UI agents powered by AI have tremendous potential to boost human productivity by automating routine tasks such as filing taxes and paying bills. However, a major challenge in unlocking their full potential is security, which is exacerbated by the agent's ability to take action on their user's behalf. Existing tests for prompt injections in web agents either over-simplify the threat by testing unrealistic scenarios or giving the attacker too much power, or look at single-step isolated tasks. To more accurately measure progress for secure web agents, we introduce WASP--a new publicly available benchmark for end-to-end evaluation of Web Agent Security against Prompt injection attacks. Evaluating with WASP shows that even top-tier AI models, including those with advanced reasoning capabilities, can be deceived by simple, low-effort human-written injections in very realistic scenarios. Our end-to-end evaluation reveals a previously unobserved insight: while attacks partially succeed in up to 86% of the case, even state-ofthe-art agents often struggle to fully complete the attacker goals--highlighting the current state of security by incompetence.

Large reasoning models (LRMs), such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, demonstrate impressive long-horizon reasoning capabilities. However, their reliance on static internal knowledge limits their performance on complex, knowledge-intensive tasks and hinders their ability to produce comprehensive research reports requiring synthesis of diverse web information. To address this, we propose WebThinker, a deep research agent that empowers LRMs to autonomously search the web, navigate among web pages, and draft reports during the reasoning process. WebThinker integrates a Deep Web Explorer module, enabling LRMs to dynamically search, navigate, and extract information from the web when encountering knowledge gaps. It also employs an Autonomous Think-Search-and-Draft strategy, allowing the model to seamlessly interleave reasoning, information gathering, and report writing in real time. To further enhance research tool utilization, we introduce an RL-based training strategy via iterative online Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Extensive experiments on complex reasoning benchmarks (GPQA, GAIA, WebWalkerQA, HLE) and scientific report generation tasks (Glaive) demonstrate that WebThinker significantly outperforms existing methods and strong proprietary systems. Our approach enhances LRM reliability and applicability in complex scenarios, paving the way for more capable and versatile deep research systems.