AI agents

Anthropic has acquired Vercept, a Seattle AI startup that built Vy, a computer-use agent in the cloud that could operate a remote Apple MacBook. As part of the deal, Anthropic is shutting down Vercept's product on March 25, and co-founders Kiana Ehsani, Luca Weihs, and Ross Girshick are joining Anthropic. Co-founders Oren Etzioni and Matt Deitke are not joining, and Etzioni said he received a positive return on his investment.

IBM X-Force reports that more than half (56%) of the 400,000 vulnerabilities it tracked in 2025 required no authentication before exploitation. The source text is otherwise limited to this statistic and a republication notice from SecurityWeek, so the article's wider argument about stolen credentials and agentic AI cannot be summarized from it.

Atlassian announced "agents in Jira" on Wednesday, letting users assign and manage tasks and tickets for AI agents from the same dashboard used for human employees. The feature tracks progress and sets deadlines, and users can add agents partway through an existing project. It is available in open beta.

Cursor announced updates to its AI coding agents, which can test their own changes, record their work through videos, logs and screenshots, and run in parallel on their own cloud virtual machines. The company says roughly 35% of its pull requests are now generated by agents operating on those virtual machines. The announcement comes as Cursor, valued at $29.3 billion, faces competition from Anthropic, OpenAI and Microsoft.

New Relic launched the New Relic Agentic Platform, a no-code system for building and managing data observability AI agents that monitor company data for bugs and issues. The platform supports the model context protocol (MCP) and integrates with other New Relic tools. The company also added OpenTelemetry capabilities to its application performance monitoring (APM) agents, letting enterprises manage OTel data streams alongside other data sources.

Nimble, a New York web search startup, raised a $47 million Series B round led by Norwest. Its platform uses AI agents to search the web in real time, validate the results and structure them into tables that can be queried like a database. The company says it integrates with Databricks, Snowflake, AWS and Microsoft, and that customer data stays within customers' own infrastructure.

Simon Willison has started a project called Agentic Engineering Patterns, a series of chapter-shaped guides on coding practices for building software with coding agents such as Claude Code and OpenAI Codex. He defines agentic engineering as professional engineers using agents that can generate and execute code to amplify their expertise, contrasting it with vibe coding. The first two chapters, "Writing code is cheap now" and "Red/green TDD", are published, with 1-2 new chapters planned per week.

Citrini Research published a scenario describing how agentic AI could cause mass economic damage over the next two years. In the imagined report, unemployment doubles and the stock market loses more than a third of its value, driven by a negative feedback loop of AI-driven white-collar layoffs and margin pressure. The piece is presented as a scenario rather than a prediction.

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the AI Agent Standards Initiative, a listening exercise to build a roadmap for agentic AI, to be run under the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI). Its scope extends beyond security to interoperability, international standards leadership and open-source agent development. NIST has issued a request for information on agentic AI threats, safeguards and assessment methods, with input due by March 9, and CAISI will hold listening sessions in April.

Reload, an AI workforce management platform, announced its first product, Epic, alongside a $2.275 million round led by Anthemis. Epic runs as an extension in AI-assisted code editors such as Cursor and Windsurf and maintains shared project context, including requirements, data models and API specifications, across coding agents.

Dylan Cosper, host of the Infosys Knowledge Institute Podcast, interviews Prasad Banala, director of software engineering at a large US-based retail organization. They discuss operationalizing agentic AI across the software development lifecycle, including requirements validation, test case generation and analysis, and issue resolution, with strict governance, human-in-the-loop review, and measurable quality outcomes.

San Francisco-based Kana has emerged from stealth with a suite of AI agents for marketing tasks such as data analysis, audience targeting, campaign management, customer engagement, media planning, and optimizing for AI chatbots. The startup raised $15 million in a seed round led by Mayfield. Its co-founders, Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya, previously built Rapt, Krux, and the startup studio super{set}, where Kana was incubated for nine months.

Alibaba released Qwen3.5, its newest AI model series, in an open-weight version that users can download, run, fine-tune and deploy on their own infrastructure, plus a hosted version called Qwen-3.5-Plus on its Model Studio cloud platform. The open-weight model has 397 billion parameters and supports 201 languages and dialects, up from 82 in the previous generation. Alibaba says both versions match leading models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, but CNBC could not independently verify those self-reported benchmark claims.

Infosys announced a partnership with Anthropic to build enterprise-grade AI agents, integrating Claude models into its Topaz AI platform to automate complex workflows in banking, telecoms, and manufacturing. The tie-up was announced at India's AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, and Infosys plans to use Claude Code internally to write, test, and debug code. The deal did not disclose a deployment timeline or financial terms.