Paul Sawers
Verified- Contributing Writer, The New Stack
- Contributing Writer, Resilience Media
- Writer & chief curator, Forkable
United Kingdom
-ex-TechCrunch
-Newsletter: forkable.io
-Anon tip-offs: Signal: PSTC.08.
-Bluesky: "jambo.bsky.social"
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Articles by Paul Sawers
Anthropic now lets you self-host Claude Managed Agents. The catch? 8 hours to act if it flags a safety risk
Anthropic has unveiled a self-hosted version of its platform for building and running AI agents. Self-hosted Claude Managed Agents, as it’s aptly called, is available now in private beta. Customers host both the server that coordinates the agents and the sandboxes where the agents run their tools, either in their own cloud account or in an on-premises data center. Credentials and session histories stay on their infrastructure, while requests to Claude go to the inference provider they configure.
Google’s coding agents now /swarm for one developer. Cursor’s go multiplayer so teammates’ agents can talk.
Coding agents are pretty good at working in parallel: one writes a new API endpoint, another updates the tests, while a third fixes a bug elsewhere in the codebase. However, they’re not quite so adept at knowing what their coding counterparts are doing — put several on one project and they duplicate work, trip over each other’s changes, and leave the developer firefighting the fiasco that follows.
Developers have been hacking around MCP’s file-upload problem for two years. A fix is taking shape.
Developers have been hacking around MCP’s file-upload problem for two years. A fix is taking shape. Alex Shuper for Unsplash+ The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has played an instrumental part in connecting AI assistants to external tools and data since Anthropic launched the project some two years ago. Want to have a coding agent check the status of a bug? Give it access to your issue tracker through an MCP server. Or ask an assistant how many orders your company shipped last week?
SpaceXSI quietly flips Grok API text watermarking to off by default
The thorny issue of watermarking AI-generated text took an interesting turn this past week, with SpaceXSI seemingly U-turning on plans to automatically watermark text generated by its Grok AI models. As per its updated output watermarking documentation, Elon Musk’s AI company — which recently rebranded from SpaceXAI — says the feature is now off by default, with developers able to enable it for individual models through their team’s administration settings.
Cursor and Google join OpenAI in giving coding agents a voice. Claude Code stays silent.
Cursor and Google join OpenAI in giving coding agents a voice. Claude Code stays silent. Ruliff Andrean for Unsplash+ Two of the biggest players in the AI coding space are betting that developers want to talk to their agents while they work, with both announcing a two-way voice feature that lets users ask questions and give follow-up instructions without returning to the keyboard.
“Most apps never make it off localhost”: Cursor takes on Lovable and Replit with fully managed app deployment
AI coding agents have certainly made it easier to transform an idea into a working application. However, getting that application off a local machine and into the hands of real users remains a hurdle, requiring essential infrastructure steps spanning everything from hosting and database provisioning, to critical security checks. Cursor, the AI coding platform acquired by Elon Musk’s SpaceX for $60 billion back in August, acknowledged the problem in an X post published on Thursday.
Kubernetes, mark II? Why Google’s giving away gVisor, a code sandbox used by Anthropic and OpenAI
Google wants to emulate one of its biggest ever open-source success stories, donating three core AI agent infrastructure projects to a neutral foundation in the hope they become industry standards, just as Kubernetes did for containers. In a blog post published on Thursday, Drew Bradstock, VP of product management, Kubernetes and orchestration at Google, confirmed that the company is donating gVisor, Agent Substrate, and OpenRL to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Origin and Anduril put joint counter-drone system through its first test in Latvia
Some six weeks after first announcing plans to integrate their counter-drone and command-and-control systems, Latvian robotics company Origin and US defence tech giant Anduril have confirmed the first fruits of the partnership, demonstrating the combined capability to senior Latvian military leadership.
Dropbox ditched AWS S3 for its own in-house system. Now it’s buying Tigris to sell S3-compatible storage to AI developers.
Dropbox is entering the AI infrastructure space in a big way, announcing plans on Thursday to acquire Tigris, a startup that provides object storage for AI applications. The cloud-storage giant tells The New Stack that it’s paying $350 million for Tigris, a move designed to accelerate Dropbox’s own ambitions in selling storage infrastructure to developers and businesses.
“Signing in to your company’s plugins one by one is annoying”: Anthropic’s fix puts Claude in the identity business
Anthropic is now letting businesses automatically connect employees to approved Claude plugins, saving staff from having to sign in to and authorize each service individually. The feature also allows Claude to verify users’ organizational membership directly, making it easier for companies to manage access to workplace applications. The feature builds on the Enterprise-Managed Authorization (EMA) extension to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which debuted back in June.
France is a hard defence market for startups to crack, but also one of Europe’s most valuable
France has quietly set about building one of the world’s biggest arms-export machines, overtaking Russia in 2024 to become the second-largest exporter of major arms globally. From 2021 to 2025, France accounted for 9.8% of global exports of major arms, according to recent figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Anthropic speeds up Claude Code with message threads. But your token bill stays the same.
Anthropic has announced a new feature that aims to speed up long-running Claude Code sessions by reducing the amount of conversation data repeatedly sent to its API, helping developers get responses faster as their coding sessions grow. Message threads, as it’s called, is available now in public beta for Anthropic’s Messages API and is already enabled by default for “most” Claude Code users, according to an article published by Anthropic on Monday.
OpenAI’s new shared usage limit pits ChatGPT against Codex
OpenAI has revealed plans to combine usage allowances across ChatGPT and Codex, as part of a broader effort to integrate its conversational AI and agentic capabilities into a single experience. In a help article quietly published over the weekend, the company confirmed the changes will take effect “starting in December,” affecting Plus, Pro and Business subscribers.
Five years after the fork, OpenSearch is slowly stepping out of AWS’s shadow
OpenSearch has come a long way since Amazon Web Services first announced the project back in January 2021, in response to Elastic’s decision to move Elasticsearch and its accompanying visualization tool, Kibana, away from Apache 2.0 and onto a combination of proprietary and source-available licenses.
Report: Europe’s defence boom draws industrial buyers to dual-use startups
The dual-use dividend has generated a rush of investment into European startups whose technology serves both civilian and military customers. The reason, put simply, is access to a much larger market, greater growth potential, and less dependence on any single user base.
PHP’s security scramble is just a preview: AI is digging up flaws faster than maintainers can fix them
One of the biggest security scares to hit the web is causing widespread disruption, prompting businesses, hospitals, schools, and government agencies to temporarily shut down websites and online services as they scramble to protect themselves against two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language underpinning much of the internet. The vulnerabilities, collectively dubbed PHP2Shell, could allow unauthenticated attackers to execute malicious code on affected servers.
“We are not forking TypeScript”: Cloudflare spearheads Rust port written by agents, for agents
Cloudflare is going all-out to ensure that AI coding agents can check their work without exhausting available computing resources, leading a new effort to bring Microsoft’s TypeScript compiler to Rust. But whatever you do, don’t call it a fork.
DeepSeek open-sources the inference engine behind its API. And Huawei gets equal billing with Nvidia.
DeepSeek has open-sourced the inference engine it uses to serve its models in production, a step it said last year wasn’t yet practical. Dubbed DeepInfer, the framework is designed to let developers run DeepSeek’s V4.1 Flash model on their own infrastructure, with many of the same optimizations the company uses behind its API. Support for future DeepSeek models is also planned.
DeepSeek made its name with cheap AI models. Now it’s undercutting search API rivals, too.
Not content with challenging the major frontier AI labs with lower-cost models, Chinese AI company DeepSeek is setting its sights on the search API market. On Saturday, the company announced it has opened up its internally developed search engine to outside developers through two new APIs, Search and Fetch, allowing them to retrieve live web search results and webpage content for use in their own apps and agents.
Employees are vibe-coding their own apps. Cloudflare open-sources Void to give IT a handle on them
Many companies are keen to let employees build their own applications using AI, even those with little or no programming experience. Just yesterday, Gergely Orosz of The Pragmatic Engineer highlighted the likes of Ramp and Stripe, which have developed internal tools that allow non-engineers to create software for their colleagues to use. But this newfound freedom also creates a headache for IT departments.
“Everybody with a $20 account is now a researcher”: How Akrites is tackling the flood of AI bug reports
AI is making it easier than ever to find potential security vulnerabilities in open source software. But finding something that looks like a vulnerability isn’t quite the same as finding a genuine security flaw. As such, maintainers are being inundated with AI-generated reports that are inaccurate, duplicative, or lack the information needed to deploy fixes. It’s a problem that Akrites, an initiative announced by the Linux Foundation back in June, is striving to solve.
“Take work away from frontier LLMs”: Subquadratic’s decision model claims 12x Jev’s context window
Jev has a lot to answer for. Ever since AI startup TypeSafe unveiled the decision model in mid-September, the industry has been awash with alternatives, with OpenAI, Perplexity, Cloudflare, Amazon and, most recently, Microsoft all getting involved. Decision models, it’s safe to say, are hot.
The X Subscription bundles Cursor with Grok and X Premium. But Claude now costs extra.
Elon Musk’s mission to unify his sprawling tech empire continues apace, with the news that X, Grok, and Cursor are being bundled together as a single plan dubbed The X Subscription. Taking to X late on Monday, SpaceXAI announced the new pricing structure. It has five tiers, from free up to $200 per month, with the cheapest paid option costing $8.
“A major overhaul”: OpenCode 2.0 puts its terminal, desktop, and web apps on one shared service
OpenCode 2.0 is getting a formal unpacking today, some three months after its public beta launch. The sizable architectural upgrade introduces a shared background service connecting its terminal, web and desktop interfaces, alongside a rebuilt API, a new embeddable SDK, and support for running subagents and shell commands in the background.
Cloudflare acquires Node.js creator’s startup that copied its serverless playbook
Cloudflare is buying the startup co-founded by Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, a longtime competitor that recently built its own open-source version of Cloudflare’s serverless computing platform. The company announced on Friday that the entire team behind Deno, the JavaScript and TypeScript runtime, is joining Cloudflare.
“Don’t use ‘open weight’ and ‘open source’ interchangeably”: Percona CEO on why AI terminology matters
The AI industry has enthusiastically embraced the language of open source, even as some of its most prominent “open” models offer developers only a fraction of what that term has traditionally promised. Speaking at Open Source Summit Europe in Prague on Wednesday, Peter Farkas, co-creator of the open source MongoDB alternative FerretDB and now CEO of open source database services company Percona, has a simple request: “Don’t use ‘open weight’ and ‘open source’ interchangeably,” he says.
Redis by proxy: Percona targets the last major hurdle to Valkey adoption
When Redis changed its licensing in 2024, replacing its permissive BSD license with proprietary, source-available alternatives, it prompted a major split in the community. Within days, the Linux Foundation launched Valkey, an open source fork. While Redis did subsequently change course again, adding the copyleft AGPLv3 open source license as an option in 2025, Valkey was already forging its own path for organizations that wanted a permissively licensed project with independent governance.
What’s up, Docsy? Google’s docs project joins the Linux Foundation as AI agents become readers
Technical documentation is increasingly being read by AI agents, creating a new set of demands around how that information is published and structured. Docsy, the Google-created documentation project used by major cloud native projects, is now moving to the Linux Foundation as it adds features aimed specifically at that machine audience.
Copilot tops GitHub’s own AI code review benchmark. An independent one tells a different story.
If there’s one thing the AI software engineering world doesn’t lack, it’s benchmarks. Want to know whether an agent can resolve real-world GitHub issues? There’s SWE-bench. Or how about seeing how well it can operate inside a terminal? Terminal-Bench has you covered. Now, GitHub has decided AI code review needs another yardstick. On Monday, the company unveiled ReviewBench, an open benchmark developed with Microsoft for measuring how well AI code review agents find useful problems in pull requests.
OpenAI brings text watermarking to its API — and unlike Anthropic, it’s off by default
OpenAI has announced that developers can now opt in to watermarking text generated through its API, as the company extends its existing content provenance efforts to one of the more difficult forms of AI output to reliably identify.
Defence procurement must adapt to startups for Ukraine-style warfare, NATO fund exec says
NATO countries risk being unprepared for the kind of rapidly changing warfare seen in Ukraine unless their procurement systems adapt to working with startups and new defence primes, according to NATO Innovation Fund (NIF) chief adoption officer John Ridge. Speaking at Resilience Conference in London on Monday, Ridge said much of the difficulty comes down to how procurement organisations are set up and the kinds of companies they are used to dealing with.
Nigerian defence startup Terra Industries is building a network of suppliers and technology companies across the Global South. Its mission is to support a new category of infrastructure defence aimed at threats including terrorism, cartels, and attacks on critical assets — and to create a credible alternative to China as a primary supplier. Founded in 2024, the Abuja-based company designs and manufactures autonomous defence systems spanning air, land and maritime environments.
State of Defence Tech 2026: European defence startup funding to quadruple to $10.5B
European defence startups are drawing in venture capital at a rate of knots in 2026. That’s according to Dealroom’s latest State of Defence Tech report, produced in partnership with Resilience Media. VC funding into European defence companies has already reached $7.4 billion in 2026. It projects that figure will reach around $10.5 billion by the end of the year, representing growth of more than 300% on 2025, when European defence startups raised $2.6 billion.
“No reason why everyone should have an identical Claude experience”: Anthropic’s mods let you change Claude Code’s look and behavior
Developers have long been able to customize Claude Code to their preferences, via settings, persistent instructions in CLAUDE.md, hooks, and MCP servers, alongside tweaks such as status lines and output styles. Those controls can shape the instructions Claude follows, its permissions, the tools it can use, and more — but they can’t change Claude Code’s own features or the rest of its interface.
“No human wants to look at billions of traces”: Dynatrace bought Arize because agents need a new kind of observability
Observability has long been a staple of enterprise operations, giving companies a way to understand what their applications and infrastructure are doing, where they are failing, and why. The arrival of LLMs and AI agents, however, complicates matters. An application can be running perfectly well from an infrastructure perspective while the agent sitting on top of it gives the wrong answer, calls the wrong tool, or fails to complete the task it was given.
“Think of it as Kubernetes for agents”: OpenClaw lands in the enterprise with OpenAI, Nvidia and Red Hat on board
OpenClaw has come a long way since it emerged as a viral weekend project less than a year ago. Created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger in late 2025, the self-hosted AI agent exploded in popularity and by February — when OpenAI hired Steinberger — it had already amassed more than 100,000 GitHub stars.
OpenAI makes ‘Sign in with ChatGPT’ a way to use your subscription in third-party developer tools
OpenAI has announced that it’s making it easier for ChatGPT subscribers to use their allowance inside third-party AI and coding platforms such as Amp, Devin, Lovable, and OpenClaw, alongside broader developer and productivity platforms including Notion and Vercel.
Anthropic bought Stainless and shuttered its SDK generator. Cloudflare open-sourced Forge instead.
Cloudflare has announced an open source tool that takes an API definition and automatically produces the SDKs, command-line tools, documentation, and other interfaces used to interact with it. Forge, as it’s called, is available under an Apache 2.0 license, and can be run and modified privately without paying Cloudflare a dime.
Anduril links up with Latvia’s Origin on counter-drone air defence
Origin, the Latvian robotics company building autonomous unmanned systems, has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with US defence tech juggernaut Anduril, bringing together their respective drone-interception and battlefield command technologies. The agreement was signed in Los Angeles on 24 September, during a Latvian business trade mission to the US accompanying President Edgars Rinkēvičs’ official visit.
Cursor acquired Firetiger. A month later, it launched a bot that tracks code changes from PR to production.
We all know that producing code is easier than ever thanks to the abundance of AI coding tools and agents. The harder part undoubtedly comes after that code is written: making sure changes are safe to ship, spotting regressions in production, and figuring out what went wrong. And that’s why Cursor is introducing Rollouts, a new agent that follows code changes into production and monitors whether they behave as intended.
“Impressive level of openness”: Xiaomi goes way beyond the usual open-weight playbook with MiMo-V2.6
New models are coming out thick and fast, almost on a weekly cadence, ranging from the powerful proprietary systems coming out of the major US AI labs to the more open alternatives being released by some of China’s biggest tech companies. On Tuesday alone, Anthropic debuted Claude Opus 5.5, while OpenAI launched GPT-6 Sol and Luna, each accompanied by their the usual claims about how they outperform their rivals.
“One of the most significant steps in our 26-year history”: JetBrains goes big on agentic development — and bets the IDE still matters
There’s little question that AI coding agents have changed where software development work happens. Developers can increasingly delegate work from terminals, desktop applications and remote environments, leaving question marks hanging over the future of the integrated development environment (IDE). That shift poses a particularly interesting question for JetBrains.
AWS open-sources an AI agent it says is 45% cheaper than Claude Code and Codex
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is lifting the lid on a new open source, general-purpose AI agent, designed to give developers a ready-made foundation they can run locally or deploy to the cloud. Strands Harness, as it’s called, builds on Strands Agents, which AWS debuted in May 2025 as an open source Python SDK for building AI agents.
Germany has Europe’s biggest defence budget. Startups don’t get much of it
A pattern is emerging among European defence-tech startups looking for sales: plenty of money is up for grabs, but the path to securing a contract remains rocky at best. In June, Keen Venture Partners published its inaugural guide to Dutch defence procurement, identifying recurring traps including founders engaging without knowing who controls government budgets, mistaking end-user enthusiasm for a buying signal, and leaving the company’s security screening until too late in the process.
Open-weight models now handle a majority of tokens on Vercel’s AI Gateway. But Anthropic still takes 64% of the spend.
The trend is clear: open-weight models are taking an increasingly large bite out of production AI usage. On Monday, The New Stack reported that open-weight models accounted for 60% of OpenRouter’s US token consumption in August, with Chinese-developed models making up the majority of that volume. The latest data point hails from Vercel, whose AI Gateway routes tens of trillions of tokens each month across the applications running on its infrastructure.
GitHub and Anthropic used their own agents for major Rust rewrites — but with very different playbooks
Rust is seemingly the language of the moment, with open-source projects and companies forming an orderly queue to move core software over to the general-purpose programming lingo. The draw? A pursuit of better memory safety and performance. Now, GitHub has joined the throng. On Wednesday, the company revealed that it has completely rewritten the GitHub Copilot agent runtime — previously built in TypeScript on Node.js and V8 — into more than 800,000 lines of production Rust.
“Everyone’s in a race to replace GitHub”: Zed launches Delta because agents made pull requests obsolete
Something of a consensus has emerged from the developer fraternity in 2026 — GitHub, a platform built substantively for human developers, is no longer fit for purpose. Part of the problem is sheer volume. Agents can generate, revise and submit code at a cadence GitHub wasn’t designed for, placing growing pressure on infrastructure built for humans working through commits, branches and pull requests.
Meta lets Claude and Codex configure WhatsApp Business via MCP. But the agents don’t get their own identity.
Any business worth its salt in 2026 needs to be embracing the right tools to reach its customers, and few tools carry as much weight as WhatsApp. Paid messaging on the app crossed a $2 billion annual run rate in the fourth quarter of 2025, CFO Susan Li told investors on Meta’s January earnings call. But getting a business properly set up on WhatsApp can still be a fiddly job.
Chinese AI models dominate OpenRouter’s US token consumption. It can now guarantee that traffic stays entirely in the US.
Everyone knows the open-weight model pitch by now: companies can download the weights, customize them, run them on infrastructure of their choosing, and retain far greater control over where their data is processed — often at a much lower cost than using proprietary models. Moreover, open-weight models are now thought to trail the leading frontier models by only around four to five months. Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, is betting heavily on that future.
“Same mission, bigger stage”: OpenAI hires Git AI founders to help Codex prove its ROI
OpenAI has hired the founders of Git AI, an open-source tool that tracks how much code AI writes and measures the performance and cost of coding agents. Taking to LinkedIn late Friday night, Aidan Cunniffe noted that he and his Git AI co-founder Sasha Varlamov will join OpenAI’s Codex team, where they will work on giving businesses better data on how coding agents perform and the returns they generate. “Same mission, bigger stage,” Cunniffe writes.
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