AI agents

Cybersecurity startup NewCore emerged from stealth with a $66 million seed round led by Cyberstarts, with Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners participating, valuing it at $300 million after investment. The company is building a platform to authenticate, govern and control AI agents as identities alongside human employees, arguing existing identity platforms will not scale to them. NewCore has fewer than 10 customers and more than 10 design partners, and expects to begin charging customers this summer.

CrowdStrike announced Continuous Identity for AI Agents, part of its Falcon Next-Gen Identity Security platform. The approach removes standing privileges and authorizes each agent action in real time, using SPIFFE identities and the Shared Signals Framework (SSF), based on the agent's identity, the human behind it, and current security and business context.

CNBC's Arjun Kharpal interviews Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch on The Tech Download podcast about agentic AI, enterprise adoption and chips. Mensch says businesses must decide which processes to automate and where humans stay in the loop, and that Mistral is exploring designing its own chips. He describes enterprise AI adoption as still early, with substantial value left to create.

Coinbase launched Coinbase for Agents, a tool that lets AI agents such as ChatGPT or Claude execute crypto trades from natural language instructions, with stocks and predictions planned later. Through its x402 machine-to-machine payments protocol, agents can also pay for paywalled research, data APIs and compute without a human in the loop. Murr said x402 has processed more than 100 million transactions since its May 2025 debut, with about 157,000 agents acting as buyers in the past 30 days.

The article argues that SRE teams will judge AI agents by the conditions under which they trust them, not by whether they use them. It says trust is earned through observability, constraints, accountability and repeated production evidence, and that teams should move up a trust ladder with progressive autonomy.

A sales operations team builds an AI agent to manage renewal requests. The agent reads inbound customer emails, checks CRM account records and contract terms, drafts responses, updates opportunity stages and creates follow-up tasks. The source text is cut off before it reaches its main argument about securing such agents.

Google DeepMind, Schmidt Sciences, the Cooperative AI Foundation, ARIA and Google.org are announcing a research funding call of up to $10M for researchers worldwide. The call targets safety risks that emerge when large numbers of independently built AI agents interact, including sandboxes and testbeds, agent network science, agent infrastructure, and oversight and control.

JPMorgan Chase plans to deploy AI agents later this year that can work autonomously for much longer than current versions, according to chief analytics officer Derek Waldron. He said agents are moving from single-task tools to digital workers that manage multi-step workflows across software programs, and that they could soon run for an hour or two, then for multiple hours, days and weeks. He also said long-running agents are not yet ready for corporate use because of security concerns.

Adoption of AI agents is expected to surge by as much as 300% in two years, prompting leaders to weigh a hybrid human-AI workforce. Wipro's custom agentic AI assistant, co-created with Ema Unlimited, now handles 50 HR tasks and cut average query response time from 48 hours to five seconds. Wipro's chief culture officer, Ateet Jayaswal, argues that humans must stay in the loop and that governance, including data privacy rules and an AI council, should be in place.