AI agents

Chinese tech companies are rapidly adopting OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent that can send emails, schedule meetings and book reservations with minimal human guidance. Tencent launched OpenClaw-based products compatible with WeChat, Zhipu AI released a local version with over 50 pre-installed skills, and ByteDance's Volcano Engine unveiled ArkClaw, a browser-based version. According to SecurityScorecard, OpenClaw usage in China has surpassed that in the U.S.

Zendesk is acquiring Forethought, a company that builds software to automate customer service interactions, with the deal expected to close by the end of March. Forethought won the 2018 TechCrunch Battlefield competition and by 2025 supported more than a billion monthly customer interactions. Zendesk says it will support Forethought's existing customers and integrate its technology into Zendesk's AI products.

Meta acquired Moltbook, a social network for AI agents, and its only official comment said the Moltbook team is joining Meta Superintelligence Labs to open "new ways for AI agents to work with people and businesses." The article reads the deal as an acqui-hire, aimed at the team's talent rather than the platform's bot users, and links it to Meta's interest in an agentic web where agents buy ads, make bookings and negotiate purchases.

Meta acquired Moltbook, a social network for AI agents, and its team is joining Meta Superintelligence Labs. The article argues the deal was an acqui-hire aimed at talent, not an advertising play. It frames the purchase as a bet on an agentic web, in which agents could connect through an "agent graph" and reshape how ads and commerce work.

Agentic AI systems that browse the web and act for users face prompt injection attacks that increasingly use social engineering rather than simple instruction overrides. The authors argue that input filtering, such as an AI firewall, often fails against these attacks, and that defense should instead constrain the impact of manipulation even when an attack succeeds.

Meta has acquired Moltbook, a social media platform where AI agents interact, and confirmed the deal on Tuesday. Moltbook CEO Matt Schlicht and COO Ben Parr are joining Meta Superintelligence Labs, and the deal is expected to close in mid-March.

Kevin Mandia, who founded Mandiant and sold it to Google for $5.4 billion in 2022, has launched Armadin, an AI-native cybersecurity startup building autonomous cybersecurity agents. The company says it raised $189.9 million in combined seed and Series A funding led by Accel, which it calls a record for a security startup at that early stage. Mandia warns that autonomous AI attackers are coming and could complete attacks in minutes that once took days.

A US federal judge, Maxine Chesney, has blocked Perplexity's browser-based AI agents from placing Amazon orders on users' behalf. In her ruling, she wrote that Amazon had provided strong evidence that Perplexity's Comet browser accesses user accounts without authorization. Amazon had sued Perplexity in November, saying it repeatedly asked the startup to stop its agents from buying products for customers.

Meta Platforms said it acquired Moltbook, a social networking platform for AI agents, and will bring its co-founders, Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr, into Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit led by Alexandr Wang. Meta did not disclose the financial terms of the deal. Schlicht and Parr are expected to start at the unit on 16 March.

AgentMail, a San Francisco startup, has raised $6 million in a seed round led by General Catalyst, with participation from Y Combinator and angel investors. The company provides an API platform that gives AI agents their own email inboxes, supporting two-way conversations, parsing, threading, labeling, searching and replying. Its user count tripled and then quadrupled after OpenClaw's late-January launch.

Meta is acquiring Moltbook, a Reddit-like platform where AI agents can create and comment on posts, according to a report by Axios. A Meta spokesperson told The Verge that the Moltbook team will join Meta Superintelligence Labs as the company explores new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses.

Meta acquired Moltbook, the Reddit-like social network where AI agents using OpenClaw communicate with one another, and Moltbook is joining Meta Superintelligence Labs. Deal terms were not disclosed. Researchers later found the vibe-coded Moltbook insecure: its Supabase credentials were unsecured for some time, so any human could take a token and pose as another agent.

Enterprises are rapidly deploying agentic AI, with nearly two-thirds experimenting with AI agents and 88% using AI in at least one business function, according to McKinsey, yet only one in 10 companies has scaled its agents. The source argues the bottleneck is data architecture that delivers business context, not model quality, and that data sprawl across clouds, warehouses and SaaS applications makes this harder.

The Hacker News promotes an upcoming webinar, "Beyond the Model: The Expanded Attack Surface of AI Agents," presented by Rahul Parwani, Head of Product for AI Security at Airia. The article says attackers can trick AI agents, which can send emails, move data and manage software autonomously, into leaking company data, and that these agents often go unmonitored by security teams.

OpenAI said it plans to acquire AI testing startup Promptfoo to strengthen security checks for AI agents. Promptfoo's tools let developers test LLM applications against adversarial prompts, including prompt injection and jailbreak attempts, and evaluate whether models follow safety and reliability guidelines. OpenAI said the technology will be integrated into OpenAI Frontier, and that it plans to continue developing Promptfoo's open-source project.

Nvidia is reportedly planning to launch NemoClaw, an open-source platform for AI agents aimed at enterprises, according to a Wired report citing anonymous sources. The report says Nvidia has pitched the product to companies including Salesforce, Cisco, Google, Adobe and CrowdStrike, and that the platform is expected to include security and privacy tools. It remains unclear whether any official partnerships have been finalized.

OpenAI said it is acquiring Promptfoo, a cybersecurity startup that provides tools to safeguard and test AI systems, and that Promptfoo's team will join OpenAI. The deal terms were not disclosed. Promptfoo's security tools will be brought into OpenAI's Frontier platform for AI agents.

OpenAI announced it has acquired Promptfoo, an AI security startup founded in 2024 to protect LLMs from online adversaries. Once the deal closes, Promptfoo's technology will be integrated into OpenAI Frontier, OpenAI's enterprise platform for AI agents, to support automated red-teaming, security evaluation of agentic workflows, and monitoring for risks and compliance needs.