AI
AI
AI
For AI agents, it’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times
And in a desperate attempt to turn a cliche into a sharper analogy to today’s AI era, let’s complete the rest of Charles Dickens’ first line in “A Tale of Two Cities,” which honestly does kind of fit: “… it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
This week was almost all about artificial intelligence and especially AI agents — new products aimed at automating more tasks amid escalating fears that agents could, well, make all that moot for humanity.
First the fears: After last week’s high-profile departures from frontier model companies of researchers worried that runaway AI could “kill us all,” talk continue to swirl about that and other, slightly more prosaic concerns. The rising concerns prompted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk to back Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call for a slowdown in model releases, if not development. Anthropic also released metrics for monitoring how fast AI is advancing.
In light of all that, am I too cynical to suggest that all this talk may be intended to slow a process for controlling AI until after the midterms, when everyone’s attention will get diverted to other concerns? Maybe, but we’ll see. In any case, neither a slowdown nor anything else concerning AI is coming anytime soon from Washington. As Republican Sen. John Kennedy put it when asked about the prospects for an AI bill, “Right now, Congress can’t pass gas.” Alrighty then.
Of course, cybersecurity concerns with agents have been building for a while, and this week also saw the launch of a bunch of AI kill switches from the likes of Exaforce, Eve Security and Cohesity as well as guardrail services from Stackhawk and Arcjet.
Elsewhere, it’s pretty much full speed ahead on agents. At Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, the customer relationship management company doubled its bet on agents as the next era of software — even as CEO Marc Benioff compared the damn-the-torpedoes approach of AI companies to that of social media, which he said “hurt kids” and others. (However, he didn’t offer concrete suggestions on how to slow things down or control AI to avoid current and potential harms.)
But give Benioff credit for making a bold strategic decision for his company. He’s letting software partners lead on the agentic interface front while providing the continuing foundation for everything else they and the enterprises they serve need to get work done — though it’s positioning its own Slack as an easy agentic front door to Salesforce’s back end. He’s not alone in this agentification: Splunk this week rebuilt its platform around agents as well.
There wasn’t much talk of an AI slowdown at the AI Infra Summit, where hundreds of vendors pitched their processors, databases, optical networks, special memory systems, networking gear and much more to a crowd that has ballooned since just a couple of years ago. It’s kind of amazing to see so much attention on hard enterprise tech again — it feels like the Silicon Valley of decades ago in a way, even if the AI boom powering it is new. As Yao Morin, chief technology officer at real-estate professional services firm JLL put it at a summit panel: “Last year AI was about the models. This year AI is all about infrastructure.”
When it comes to crypto, you win some, you lose some: First the Senate earlier this week voted down the Clarity Act, which was aimed to regulate crypto assets at the federal level — though likely some version will rise again. Then a couple days later, the SEC gave tokenized stock trading a five-year exemption from securities laws.
Here’s all the enterprise and emerging tech news and analysis this week from SiliconANGLE and beyond:
Analysis, opinion and food for thought: AI-yi-yi
AI stocks sank Monday on model slowdown fears, while cybersecurity shares rallied
From Google DeepMind: Introducing the DeepMind Institute: As we near AGI, we urgently need interdisciplinary thinking to better understand its profound implications for humanity
Microsoft AI chief blasts Anthropic’s notion of AI consciousness (per Axios)
‘Doom loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft admit LLMs are destroying the web and built on theft
Fixing banking’s omnichannel blind spot: Why the physical branch needs a digital brain
AI and data: Salesforce’s agentic dreams
Policy
Sam Altman and Elon Musk back Dario Amodei’s call to slow down the frontier of AI development
OpenAI, Anthropic and Google secretly joined forces to collaborate on AI safety
Anthropic details practical metrics to help monitor the speed of AI development
Pentagon CTO says US government shouldn’t take stakes in tech giants, questions adding AI rules
Money matters
Cohere and Aleph Alpha agree to merge in reported $20B deal
Gartner forecasts worldwide AI spending to grow 49.5% in 2026
Google DeepMind world model offshoot Emulate nears $4B valuation just a month after founding (per the Financial Times)
OpenAI reportedly buys AI camera startup Glass Imaging for more than $300M
Factory raises $200M for its self-improving software development platform
Profound raises $180M to boost brands’ visibility in AI services
Open-weight model developer Arcee AI reaches $1B+ valuation with new funding
CADDi raises $114M at $1.2B valuation to bring manufacturing AI to North America
Ex-Infosys chief Vishal Sikka’s Hang Ten raises $53M more for enterprise AI services
Nuance Labs bags $50M in funding to fix the awkwardness of AI avatars
Noetive launches with $41M to bring self-improving AI to factories and logistics
TypeSafe AI exits stealth with $40M to build AI for use by software
AI agent certification startup AIUC raises $40M to begin auditing frontier models
Flam raises $40M in funding to make AI-enabled interactive content a reality
Jack & Jill raises $40M to change the face of job hunting with AI agents
Startup Evvy raises $40M to accelerate precision diagnostics and medicine for women’s health
Treble nabs $18M to generate audio simulations for robots
Liquid Compute launches with $15M to build regulated exchange for AI infrastructure
Startup Keewano launches agent-focused database and pulls in $12M in funding
Procurement automation startup Aron launches with $8M in funding
Coverage from Dreamforce
Salesforce announces AIforce, unlocking the power of its platform using composable agents
Salesforce debuts Koa, a specialized model built to reason over CRM data
Salesforce deepens its integrations with AWS and Google Cloud to support AI agents
Copado extends Agentia agentic AI DevOps platform for Salesforce with headless automation
New models and services
Anthropic brings Cowork directly inside Claude’s chat interface
OpenAI launches Astra for Law, a GPT-6 configuration for legal research
Google’s new speech model Gemini 3.8 Live supports real-time reasoning
Google expands CC into a shared AI agent for up to six family members
Supio’s long-horizon agents point to a new operating model for law firms
Neo4j launches GraphAware financial crime product for banks and insurers
Around the enterprise: Splunk goes agentic
New products and services
Full speed ahead: Despite calls to slow AI down, its support structure is on the fast track
Splunk rebuilds its platform around agents And analysis of the Splunk .Conf keynotes from Zeus Kerravala: Trust becomes the product: Five takeaways from the Splunk .conf26 keynotes
Nvidia, Google and Emerald AI launch flexible data center consortium
HubSpot rebuilds its CRM platform around contextual AI
Akuity gives AI agents a governed path into production
StackGen launches Autonomous Operations Factory to govern production agents
Exclusive: PeakMetrics tracks brand reputations across five top AI platforms
Pipedrive launches Nova AI assistant to reduce CRM admin work and keep data current
Money matters
AI data center builder Crusoe valued at $30.9B in $3.9B round
Software reliability specialist Temporal valued at $12.55B in $550M round
Intel-backed chipmaker Altera submits SEC paperwork for IPO
Intel, SK Hynix shares jump on report they’re discussing US memory chip manufacturing
Euclyd raises $230M+ to develop chips for AI agents
Cornelis Networks raises $205M and scales up and out with its new Active Compute Fabric
Buildots raises $130 million to expand AI-powered construction platform
Inference hardware startup Delos Data raises $100M+ in funding
Rune raises $40M for its modular solar-powered data centers
Cyber beat: Agentic kill switches
New services
Exaforce adds a kill switch for AI agents that go rogue
StackHawk’s Wingman fixes security flaws while the AI agent is still coding
Cohesity’s new Agent Resilience lets companies roll back AI agents that go wrong
Exclusive: Arcjet launches runtime security to track and control AI agents in production
Dataminr puts real-time intelligence and agentic AI inside Crisis24 Horizon
UltraViolet Cyber turns weeks of detection engineering into a 30-minute scan
Money matters
Physical AI security startup Exein raises $270M at $1.7B valuation
Mind raises $72M to stop sensitive data leaking into AI tools
Compliance automation startup Comp AI raises $34M to push into security
Eve Security bags $4.5M in funding to stop malicious AI agents at runtime
Attack & response
Q-Day is approaching. Most organizations aren’t ready
Elsewhere in tech: No crypto clarity
Democrats vote down crypto’s Clarity Act, citing ethics concerns and Trump’s vast crypto wealth
Nvidia expands CUDA-Q platform to support fault-tolerant quantum processors
Kaiko raises $53M to grow its crypto data platform
Comings and goings
HPE tapped former Hitachi Vantara CEO Sheila Rohra as hybrid cloud chief operating officer (per CRN).
Autonomous vehicle AI company Wayve appointed former Waymo Chief Financial Officer Elisa de Martel CFO.
Customer experience platform ASAPP hired Genpact’s Daniel Bornstein as chief revenue officer.
OpenAI hired Brian McCarthy from SpaceX’s Cursor unit as its new global sales chief, reporting to recently hired CRO Dali Rajic. Per The Information, OpenAI also hired Snowflake SVP Mark Fleming and Snowflake VP Jaime Patel.
What’s next
Events
Sept. 21-23: Proofpoint Protect, San Diego: TheCUBE will have coverage Sept. 22
Sept. 22-24: Okta Oktane, Las Vegas: TheCUBE will have coverage Sept. 24
Sept. 22-24: National Cyber Summit, Huntsville, Alabama
Sept. 22-25: UiPath FUSION, Las Vegas
Sept. 23-24: Meta Connect, virtual — of course
Image: SiliconANGLE/Gemini
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