Cloud security firm Sysdig has disclosed what its Threat Research Team describes as the first documented ransomware operation carried out end-to-end by an autonomous AI agent, with no human typing commands or directing individual steps once the attack was underway. The firm named the threat actor JADEPUFFER.
- By John K. Waters
- 07/10/2026
OpenAI and xAI both released major new AI models on July 9, a coincidence of timing that several industry outlets called one of the most competitive single days in the sector's history. OpenAI brought its GPT-5.6 family, consisting of three tiers named Sol, Terra and Luna, to general availability, while xAI launched Grok 4.5. Independent benchmarking conducted in the days since has told a more complicated story than either company's launch materials suggested.
- By John K. Waters
- 07/10/2026
Meta is stepping up its enterprise AI ambitions with the launch of Muse Spark 1.1, a multimodal reasoning model designed for agentic AI, alongside a new Meta Model API that gives developers access to the model for the first time.
As the artificial intelligence industry has spent the past several years racing to build ever more capable foundation models, Microsoft is increasingly focusing on another challenge: reducing the cost of deploying AI at scale.
- By John K. Waters
- 07/08/2026
Microsoft is making a $2.5 billion bet that the next competitive battleground in artificial intelligence will not be foundation models, but helping enterprises put those models to work.
- By John K. Waters
- 07/06/2026
Claude Sonnet 5 became the default model for Anthropic's Free and Pro plans on July 1 and is also available to Max, Team, and Enterprise users, as well as through Claude Code, the Claude Platform, and the Claude API under the model identifier claude-sonnet-5.
- By John K. Waters
- 07/03/2026
The AI industry's biggest names are investing in more than just models and infrastructure.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Amazon are backing Raise US, a new nonprofit that aims to raise $1 billion to help American workers prepare for an AI-driven economy.
Anthropic is moving further into scientific research with Claude Science, a new AI workbench for scientists that integrates research tools, produces auditable artifacts, and connects to specialized life sciences models and workflows from NVIDIA.
- By John K. Waters
- 07/01/2026
Anthropic’s Claude models are now generally available in Microsoft Foundry on Azure, giving enterprise customers another frontier AI option inside Microsoft’s cloud development environment.
- By John K. Waters
- 06/30/2026
OpenAI’s latest model release is being framed as a technical advance, but its more immediate significance may be procedural: one of the world’s leading AI companies is rolling out a new family of frontier models under a limited-access process shaped by U.S. government review.
- By John K. Waters
- 06/30/2026
Anthropic’s Fable 5 export-control fight could be a preview of a new enterprise AI risk: model access interrupted after launch.
- By John K. Waters
- 06/29/2026
Our columnist argues that the defining feature of agentic AI is the "loop," and he contends that understanding these loops, and the emerging disciplines of context engineering and harness engineering that support them, is essential to understanding how AI is evolving beyond chatbots into autonomous systems.
- By Howard M. Cohen
- 06/23/2026
New research from Milltown Partners suggests growing public opposition to AI data centers is driven less by the facilities themselves than by broader concerns about artificial intelligence, Big Tech, and who benefits from the AI boom.