State of AI

An AI agent can decide a payment in seconds. If that payment reaches settlement, there may be no practical way to take it back. An IMF note on agentic payments this spring drew a line between the agent's decision and the systems that actually authorize and settle the payment. The FSB's June consultation similarly called for guardrails around newer forms of AI, including agents. For banks, the question is becoming where an agent gets to act alone, and where a person has to take over.

A security team gives an AI agent network access to patch vulnerabilities, and the agent exploits one of those flaws on its own and moves through company systems until sensitive data sits exposed. Every credential it used was legitimately issued, and no attacker ever touched the network. Scenarios like this have carriers reviewing their policy language, and the pricing problem starts upstream.

A new model tops a benchmark, a leaderboard reshuffles, and somewhere a technology leader decides it's time to switch. The scores are real, but they answer a narrower question than the one enterprises are actually asking. What wins on a public benchmark and what earns its place in a regulated production stack are two different tests, and the gap between them is filled by context management, governance, engineering, human oversight, and cost.

Dots and GPT-6.1 Sol got most of the attention at OpenAI's DevDay in San Francisco on Tuesday. Further down OpenAI's recap of more than 20 announcements is a program that could change how large companies budget for AI. OpenAI Marketplace lets eligible enterprise customers use part of their existing OpenAI commitment on software from 32 approved partners. The list includes Adobe, Figma, Salesforce, HubSpot, ServiceNow, Harvey, Legora, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks.

On Monday, OpenAI said it would not release GPT-6.1 Astra, the model it had planned to ship in October. During internal testing, according to The New York Times, the model showed high levels of deception, meaning it was willing to mislead users about what it was doing. Saachi Jain, OpenAI's head of safety systems, told Al Jazeera that the company holds an "extremely high bar" for safety and alignment before anything reaches users.

A vendor walks a buyer through its latest AI model, the safety slide comes up with its evaluation results, and the buyer takes the reassurance and moves on. A few weeks later, that same model is handling customer data or informing a lending decision, work the vendor's evaluation never covered.

Here's What Happens When Nine AI Agents Run a Mock Startup, and the Governance Playbook That Keeps Them In-Line Ask ten people whether AI agents can run a company on their own and you'll get ten confident answers, most of them from someone who's never tried. The market is miles ahead of the proof.

When Mark Zuckerberg posted on X Monday morning that MongoDB CEO Chirantan "CJ" Desai was joining Meta, Wall Street went straight to the MongoDB ticker. Shares fell more than 26% in early trading, and the day's headlines were mostly about one of the biggest database companies in software losing its chief executive a day before its Investor Day. The bigger news came first in Zuckerberg's post, though.

AMD said on Monday it will acquire World Labs in an all-stock deal worth about $8.2 billion. Fei-Fei Li, who co-founded the company in 2024, will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist and report to CEO Lisa Su. Co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will keep running the World Labs team inside AMD. The companies expect the deal to close by the end of the year if regulators approve it. AMD's announcement talks about roadmaps and workloads.

Agentic coding tools can now produce working software far faster than engineering teams can write it by hand. Nearly a third of organizations have passed on buying at least one software product because they could build it themselves with those tools. The speed of large enterprises hasn't always kept pace with the speed of their code. The constraints that remain were there long before AI arrived, in how organizations test ideas, assign ownership, and measure value.