From VentureBeat · 40 stories
Salesforce Integrates CRM Directly into Anthropic's Claude with "Claudeforce" Plugin
Salesforce and Anthropic have expanded their partnership, introducing "Claudeforce," a plugin that embeds Salesforce's CRM platform directly within Anthropic's Claude CoWork. This integration allows users to query, update, and act on live CRM data using Claude, potentially reducing the need to open the Salesforce application directly. The plugin launches with 37 pre-built sales skills and is available to select pilot customers, with an open beta planned for September.
Mistral AI Expands Infrastructure, Commits to 1 Gigawatt European Compute by 2030
Mistral AI announced a three-part expansion of its infrastructure business, including regional inference endpoints, a "Priority Tier" with a 99.5% uptime guarantee, and commitments to build 1 gigawatt of European compute by 2030. Five European companies have made multi-year compute commitments to underwrite 200 megawatts by 2027. The company will also host third-party open models, starting with GLM-5.2 from Z.ai, to provide a unified platform for enterprises.
Hark Launches Handoff AI Agent for Autonomous Web Navigation
Hark, an AI startup founded by Brett Adcock, has released Handoff, a computer use agent designed to autonomously navigate the open web for tasks like ordering food or booking flights. Hark claims Handoff achieved the highest score on the Online-Mind2Web benchmark and offers lower token pricing compared to competing models. The company raised $700 million in Series A funding in May.
Hush Security Raises $30 Million to Secure Enterprise AI Agents
Hush Security, a Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity startup, secured $30 million in Series A funding, bringing its total raised to $41 million. The funding will be used to expand its platform for securing enterprise AI agents, focusing on identity and access management for autonomous AI within sensitive systems.
Model Context Protocol Receives Major Update, Adopting Stateless Architecture
The Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for AI agents, has received its largest update since its launch, transitioning to a fully stateless architecture. This revision removes sessions and the initialization handshake, deprecates three core features, and graduates two capabilities into official protocol extensions, simplifying deployment for large-scale enterprise AI agent applications.
Black Forest Labs Launches FLUX 3 Multimodal AI for Image and 20-Second Video Generation
Black Forest Labs (BFL) released FLUX 3, a multimodal AI model capable of generating images and video clips up to 20 seconds with audio from a single prompt. This release marks BFL's first public video generation model and aims to connect creative generation, simulation, computer use, and robotics through a single visual intelligence capability.
Canva Introduces Code 2.0 for AI-Driven Website and App Creation
Canva has introduced Code 2.0, an AI-powered tool enabling users to create interactive websites and apps through plain-language prompts and templates. Available to over 265 million users, including those on free accounts, it adds features like HTML import and real-time collaboration. This highlights Canva's strategic expansion into the vibe coding market, where design complexity accompanies functional AI coding.
Google Research Launches TabFM for Efficient Tabular Data Predictions
Google Research has introduced TabFM, a zero-shot foundation model for tabular data that simplifies classification and regression tasks without manual tuning. It reduces the need for extensive feature engineering and retraining pipelines, allowing predictions from unseen tables in a single step. This advancement highlights a shift from traditional models, significantly speeding up enterprise data processing.
Z.ai Launches ZCode to Compete in AI Coding Tool Market
Beijing-based Z.ai has launched ZCode, a free desktop application designed for its GLM-5.2 model. Available on multiple platforms, ZCode is positioned as a competitive alternative to established AI coding tools. This launch includes new pricing plans tailored to varying workload levels.
Perplexity's Personal Computer AI Agent Now Available on Windows
Perplexity has expanded its Personal Computer feature, an agentic AI designed for multi-step tasks, to Windows 10 and 11. This feature, previously Mac-exclusive, allows the AI to access local files, native applications, and cloud services like OneDrive and Google Drive, requiring a paid Perplexity subscription.
Browser Security Gap Widens as Enterprise Work and AI Shift to Web Interfaces
Enterprise work increasingly occurs within web browsers, making them a primary target for cyberattacks. Traditional endpoint and network security architectures are insufficient for protecting browser sessions, especially with the rise of AI-assisted hacking and the use of third-party AI models.
China-linked hackers used USBs to backdoor executive laptops at agricultural conference
A Chinese state-linked hacking group, OVERCAST PANDA, compromised executive laptops at an agricultural conference by physically accessing hotel rooms and installing malware via USB drives. This method bypassed typical network and phishing defenses, highlighting a vulnerability in physical security protocols that many organizations have fixes for but do not implement.
Anthropic Claude accounts compromised by infostealer malware replaying session cookies
Anthropic notified users that infostealer malware compromised their Claude accounts by replaying stolen session cookies, bypassing two-factor authentication and SSO. This incident highlights a vulnerability where session cookies, once stolen, grant access to accounts without needing login credentials, posing a risk to data accessible through these sessions.
Visa releases AI-powered security harness that automatically patches code in production
Visa has open-sourced a security AI, the Visa Vulnerability Agentic Harness (VVAH), that identifies vulnerabilities, writes fixes, and tests patches in production code without human review by default. This release comes after recent demonstrations of AI agent vulnerabilities and sparks debate about the safety of autonomous AI in critical systems.
Serval launches Catalyst AI agent for automated IT issue identification and resolution
Serval has made its Catalyst AI agent generally available, allowing it to automatically identify recurring IT issues and build automation workflows to resolve them. Catalyst also creates background agents that proactively inspect systems for problems and propose fixes before tickets are filed, differentiating it from other AI-assisted workflow tools.
Block open-sources Berd, a desktop AI agent workspace for multiple models
Block has open-sourced Berd, a desktop application designed to provide a unified environment for working with various AI agents and models. This release allows developers and companies to use, modify, and redistribute the tool, addressing the fragmentation issues Block employees faced when using different AI interfaces.
LTX Releases LTX-2.5 Open-Weights Video Model with ComfyUI Integration
LTX, an open world model company, released LTX-2.5, an open-weights video and world model, with native integration into ComfyUI. This update includes a new diffusion video decoder, native multishot generation, and a custom Gemma 4 language backbone, aiming to improve video generation quality and consistency.
Brex develops CrabTrap for securing AI agents by monitoring network activity
Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi announced CrabTrap, a new network-level security layer designed to secure AI agents like OpenClaw in production environments. This development addresses the challenge of safely deploying AI agents that can self-bootstrap and maintain their own codebases, which traditional security models struggled to control.
Thinking Machines Releases Inkling-Small AI Model, Nearing Predecessor's Performance at 1/4 Size
Thinking Machines released Inkling-Small, a new open-source AI language model that achieves performance comparable to its larger predecessor, Inkling, while being significantly smaller. This development matters because it offers enterprises a more efficient AI model with reduced compute requirements and inference costs, making advanced AI more accessible for organizations with limited GPU resources.
Mastercard Adapts Fraud Detection Systems for AI-Driven Transactions
Mastercard is re-evaluating its fraud detection systems to accommodate purchases made by bots, a shift from its traditional focus on preventing bot-driven fraudulent transactions. This change is necessary as AI increasingly facilitates legitimate transactions, requiring an update to Mastercard's risk framework.
Bright Machines Introduces Hybrid Robotic Cell to Integrate Human Operators into Automated Production
Bright Machines launched the Hybrid BRC (Bright Robotic Cell), an expansion of its Bright Factory platform, which allows human operators to perform assembly steps within a sensor-monitored robotic cell without disrupting the digital production record. This development addresses a challenge in high-stakes electronics manufacturing where manual intervention typically breaks the data thread, leading to low initial production yields for complex products like AI servers.
Visa open-sources vulnerability agentic harness after using Anthropic's Mythos to find bugs
Visa used Anthropic's Mythos AI model to identify vulnerabilities in its payment network infrastructure and subsequently open-sourced the "Visa Vulnerability Agentic Harness" used in the process. This initiative provides a reference implementation for other security teams to inspect, adapt, and extend their own vulnerability discovery efforts using AI.
New Ransomware Targets AI Model Weights, Lacks Exfiltration or Payment Mechanism
Sysdig's Threat Research Team documented a new ransomware, ENCFORGE, specifically designed to destroy AI model weights and training data, which was deployed after exploiting a Langflow vulnerability. This ransomware is unusual because it lacks network code for exfiltration or payment, focusing solely on data destruction, making recovery costly and complex for organizations.
Microsoft launches MAI-Image-2.5-Pro and MAI-Voice-2-Flash AI models
Microsoft AI released two new in-house models, MAI-Image-2.5-Pro for high-fidelity image generation and MAI-Voice-2-Flash for high-volume speech, into public preview. These models demonstrate Microsoft's commitment to powering its products with its own AI infrastructure, reducing reliance on external models like OpenAI's.
Inflection AI returns to consumer market with Pi Journeys and new research division
Inflection AI launched Inflection AI Labs and Pi Journeys, an experimental product focused on relational AI experiences. This move marks the company's return to the consumer market, emphasizing long-term user relationships over transactional interactions. The strategy aims to differentiate Inflection AI by addressing what it perceives as a flaw in current AI assistants.
Poolside launches Laguna S 2.1, an efficient 118B-parameter coding model
Poolside released Laguna S 2.1, a 118-billion-parameter open-weight coding model that activates 8 billion parameters per token. The model demonstrates competitive performance against larger models, addressing the growing demand for transparent open-weight AI solutions in the West.
Weka launches NeuralMesh 6 to enhance GPU memory via flash storage caching
Weka has unveiled its NeuralMesh 6 platform, which uses affordable flash storage to cache AI model tokens, reducing dependency on expensive GPU memory. This innovation could lower costs and speed up AI deployments, particularly benefiting organizations with high GPU utilization demands.
Expedia's AI chief proposes evals as a replacement for PRDs
Xavi Amatriain, Expedia's AI chief, introduced the concept of using evals instead of traditional PRDs for product development at VB Transform 2026. This shift emphasizes incorporating security and evaluation criteria from the outset, impacting how companies might approach product design and AI integration.
Brex develops CrabTrap for AI agent governance by analyzing real agent behavior
Brex created an internal platform named CrabTrap to enhance AI agent governance by analyzing actual agent behavior rather than relying solely on predefined rules. This shift utilizes an open-source proxy to intercept and evaluate network requests, addressing security challenges at the transport layer.
1Password introduces AI Spend Management to tackle new enterprise budgeting challenges
1Password has launched AI Spend and Consumption Management, offering real-time insights into AI service spending. This new capability addresses the rising budget pressures from AI usage as enterprises shift to consumption-based pricing models.
Study Reveals Enterprises Misjudging AI Model Failure Rates by 2.25x
A study of 67 AI models shows enterprises are miscalculating failure risks due to ignoring the 'co-failure ceiling.' This oversight results in ineffective multi-model strategies, leading to unnecessary complexity and costs.
Slackbot integrates with Salesforce for CRM and analytics via chat
Slack has launched an integration allowing Slackbot to access Salesforce CRM data and generate analytics charts through chat. This move enhances productivity for sales teams by enabling them to perform multiple tasks without switching applications.
Tencent releases Apache-licensed Hy3 model, outperforming rivals
Tencent has launched the Hy3 model with 295 billion parameters under an Apache 2.0 license, removing previous deployment restrictions. This change aims to enhance accessibility for enterprises, particularly in regions previously excluded from similar technologies.
AI-Powered Debate Explores America's Innovations for 250th Birthday
On America’s 250th birthday, 250 randomly selected participants used hyper-communication AI to deliberate on the nation's top innovations. This technology facilitates large-scale discussions, highlighting how AI can enhance collective intelligence in addressing significant topics.
Trunk Tools Reduces Document Review Time from 60 Days to 10 with Specialized AI Stack
Trunk Tools has developed a specialized AI architecture that reduces document review times from 60 days to 10 by addressing the challenges posed by general-purpose models in the construction industry. This tailored approach allows for more accurate automation and could serve as a model for other sectors facing similar data management issues.
Alibaba's SkillWeaver AI framework reduces tool token usage by 99%
Alibaba researchers developed SkillWeaver, a new framework that optimizes AI agent tool selection, reducing token consumption by 99%. This allows for greater accuracy in executing complex workflows by integrating a feedback loop to route tasks more efficiently.
Square launches ChatGPT and Claude ordering integration for restaurants
Square has launched a ChatGPT app and Claude plugin that allows consumers to order from restaurants directly within these AI platforms. This integration eliminates traditional marketplace fees while maintaining standard transaction fees, addressing high commission rates imposed by major delivery services.
Morgan Stanley reduces P&L reconciliation time by 50% with AI integration
Morgan Stanley has deployed an AI system, FIXR, to enhance profit and loss reconciliation, reducing the time required from six hours to two to three hours. The approach emphasizes human involvement over autonomy, increasing accuracy and efficiency in a critical workflow.
Cursor Launches Origin, a Code Hosting and Collaboration Platform
Cursor has launched Origin, a new code hosting and collaboration platform available in early beta for paid plan users. Origin provides repositories, pull requests, code browsing, and GitHub synchronization, aiming to integrate code management with Cursor's AI agent capabilities.
Ox Alpha Reasoning Model Released by Anonymous Third-Party Provider via OpenRouter
A new reasoning model named Ox Alpha, designed for coding and agentic work, has been released by an anonymous third-party provider through OpenRouter. The model is free, offers a 1M context window, and its prompts and completions are not used for training.