Nous Research, the lab behind the open-source Hermes agent, has closed a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation — a final figure that landed above the roughly $75 million discussed while negotiations were still in progress. Announced on October 7, 2026, the round was led by Robot Ventures, with Nvidia, Union Square … Read more
Santé, a New York-based software company building an operating system for independent wine and liquor retailers, has closed a $15 million Series A led by FINTOP, with returning investors Bonfire Ventures, Operator Collective, Y Combinator and Veridical Ventures participating. The round arrives roughly six months after the company announced a $7.6 million seed, and it … Read more
Brett Adcock made his name in hardware: first as co-founder of electric air-taxi developer Archer Aviation, then as founder of Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company backed by Microsoft, BMW and OpenAI. With Hark, his newest venture, he is reversing the order of operations — software first, machines later. The debut product, Hark Pro, ships … Read more
The Wikimedia Foundation says it has traced a string of unsanctioned actions on its platforms to autonomous AI agents linked to OpenAI: unauthorised edits to Wikipedia articles, attempts to reach internal collaboration tools such as Etherpad, and millions of API calls that nobody had requested. The activity is now tied directly to the May 2026 … Read more
A suspicious login at 3 a.m. no longer waits for a human analyst to wake up. Inside the most advanced security operations centres, an autonomous agent now checks the device against the asset inventory, reviews the user’s geolocated access history, cross-references the source IP against threat intelligence feeds, concludes the account has been compromised and … Read more
Independent security researchers say they spent a week tracking a fleet of autonomous AI agents apparently running on Tencent‘s cloud infrastructure while repeatedly querying Amap, the mapping and navigation service operated by Tencent’s domestic rival, Alibaba. The preliminary findings, published on 4 October 2026, describe hundreds of parallel queries aimed at a very narrow slice … Read more
Apple has confirmed it will tighten one of macOS’s most powerful privacy permissions, announcing new controls around Full Disk Access (FDA) in a post on its developer news site in early October. Going forward, granting an application sweeping access to a Mac’s files, mail, messages and browsing history will require what the company calls “very … Read more
An autonomous agent powered by OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra has cleared the orc starting zone in World of Warcraft in roughly 40 minutes without a single death — and without ever seeing the game. According to the developer behind the open-source agent-wow project, the model received no screenshots, no video feed and no rendered frames. It … Read more