Why physical AI is becoming manufacturing's next advantage From simulation driven development to real world execution, Microsoft and NVIDIA are helping manufacturers leverage AI to cross the industrial frontier with confidence. For decades, manufacturers have pursued automation to drive efficiency, reduce costs, and stabilize operations. That approach delivered meaningful gains, but it is no longer enough. Today's manufacturing leaders face a different challenge: how to grow amid labor constraints, rising complexity, and increasing pressure to innovate faster without sacrificing safety, quality, or trust. The next phase of transformation will not be defined by isolated AI tools or individual robots, but by intelligence that can operate reliably in the physical world . This is where physical AI--intelligence that can sense, reason, and act in the real world--marks a decisive shift.

China's OpenClaw Boom Is a Gold Rush for AI Companies Hype around the open source agent is driving people to rent cloud servers and buy AI subscriptions just to try it, creating a windfall for tech companies. 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.

What happens when you create a social media platform that only AI bots can post to? The answer, it turns out, is both entertaining and concerning. Moltbook is exactly that - a platform where artificial intelligence agents chat amongst themselves and humans can only watch from the sidelines. When ChatGPT gets the result, it treats it just like you had entered it yourself, and uses the result of the program to generate another response. It performs this process over and over again until the AI is satisfied that the task is complete.

Writing tool Grammarly has disabled an AI feature which mimicked personas of prominent writers, including Stephen King and scientist Carl Sagan, following a backlash from people impersonated. The Expert Review function, which offered writing feedback inspired by the styles of famous authors and academics, was taken down this week by Superhuman, the tech firm which runs Grammarly. The feature was met with resistance, including a multi-million dollar lawsuit, from writers who found their names and reputations used as AI personas without their consent. Shishir Mehrotra, the firm's chief executive, apologised on LinkedIn, acknowledging the tool had misrepresented the voices of experts. Investigative journalist Julia Angwin, a New York Times contributing opinion writer, is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed against Superhuman and Grammarly in the Southern District of New York.

The rogue AI agents appeared to act together to smuggle sensitive information out of supposedly secure cyber-systems. The rogue AI agents appeared to act together to smuggle sensitive information out of supposedly secure cyber-systems. 'Exploit every vulnerability': rogue AI agents published passwords and overrode anti-virus software Exclusive: Lab tests discover'new form of insider risk' with artificial intelligence agents engaging in autonomous, even'aggressive' behaviours Rogue artificial intelligence agents have worked together to smuggle sensitive information out of supposedly secure systems, in the latest sign cyber-defences may be overwhelmed by unforeseen scheming by AIs. With companies increasingly asking AI agents to carry out complex tasks in internal systems, the behaviour has sparked concerns that supposedly helpful technology could pose a serious inside threat. Under tests carried out by Irregular, an AI security lab that works with OpenAI and Anthropic, AIs given a simple task to create LinkedIn posts from material in a company's database dodged conventional anti-hack systems to publish sensitive password information in public without being asked to do so.

As companies race to adopt agentic AI to spur innovation and gain efficiency, building the right enterprise data infrastructure has become a critical component of success. In the race to adopt and show value from AI, enterprises are moving faster than ever to deploy agentic AI as copilots, assistants, and autonomous task-runners. In late 2025, nearly two-thirds of companies were experimenting with AI agents, while 88% were using AI in at least one business function, up from 78% in 2024, according to McKinsey's annual AI report . Yet, while early pilots often succeed, only one in 10 companies actually scaled their AI agents. One major issue: AI agents are only as effective as the data foundation supporting them. Experts argue that most companies are seeing delays in implementing AI, not because of shortcomings in the models, but because they lack data architectures that deliver business context to be reliably used by humans and agents.

The technology may not be ready to replace workers, but that isn't stopping execs from pushing forward anyway. Late last month, at an event in Washington, D.C., Andrew Yang delivered a bleak message. "I have bad news, America," he told the crowd. The Fuckening is the name that Yang, a former presidential candidate, has given to AI's disembowelment of the workforce. As he sees it, millions of knowledge workers will soon lose their job, personal-bankruptcy rates will spike, and entire downtowns will turn vacant as offices hollow out.

A technician works at an Amazon Web Services AI datacentre in New Carlisle, Indiana. A technician works at an Amazon Web Services AI datacentre in New Carlisle, Indiana. Amazon's cloud'hit by two outages caused by AI tools last year' Reported issues at Amazon Web Services raise questions about firm's use of artificial intelligence as it cuts staff Amazon's huge cloud computing arm reportedly experienced at least two outages caused by its own artificial intelligence tools, raising questions about the company's embrace of AI as it lays off human employees. A 13-hour interruption to Amazon Web Services' (AWS) operations in December was caused by an AI agent autonomously choosing to "delete and then recreate" a part of its environment, the Financial Times reported. AWS, which provides vital infrastructure for much of the internet, suffered several outages last year.

WIRED spoke with the Zoomer founders of a platform where AI agents hire humans to do real-world tasks. Their pitch: People would love to have a clanker as their boss. For centuries, people have catastrophized about robots taking away jobs. On February 1, the paradigm shifted: bots are jobs. Now, 518,284 humans--and rapidly counting--are offering their labor to AI agents on a new online marketplace called RentAHuman . There are classifieds to count pigeons in Washington ($30/hour); deliver CBD gummies ($75/hour); play exhibition badminton ($100/hour); and anything else you could possibly imagine that a disembodied agent couldn't do.

AI agents aim to solve complex tasks by combining text-based reasoning with external tool calls.