All news with #autonomous agents tag

Cortex AgentiX: Agentic AI Platform for Autonomous SOC

🤖 Palo Alto Networks introduces Cortex AgentiX, an agentic AI platform designed to build, deploy and govern autonomous security and IT agents. The vendor says AgentiX extends the Cortex foundation and leverages 1.2 billion playbook executions to deliver end-to-end agentic workflows and drive up to a 98% reduction in Mean Time to Respond with 75% less manual work. It ships with prebuilt agents for threat intelligence, email, endpoint, network, cloud and IT, and highlights full transparency, role-based controls and human-in-the-loop approvals. AgentiX is embedded in Cortex XSIAM and Cortex Cloud today; a standalone platform and Cortex XDR integration are slated for early 2026.

AI 2030: The Coming Era of Autonomous Cybercrime Threats

🔒 Organizations worldwide are rapidly adopting AI across enterprises, delivering efficiency gains while introducing new security risks. Cybersecurity is at a turning point where AI fights AI, and today's phishing and deepfakes are precursors to autonomous, self‑optimizing AI threat actors that can plan, execute, and refine attacks with minimal human oversight. In September 2025, Check Point Research found that 1 in 54 GenAI prompts from enterprise networks posed a high risk of sensitive-data exposure, underscoring the urgent need to harden defenses and govern model use.

Google Migrates ISAs with AI and Automation at Scale

🔧 Google details how its custom Axion Arm CPUs and a mix of automation and AI enabled large-scale migration from x86 to multi-architecture production across services such as YouTube, Gmail, and BigQuery. The team analyzed 38,156 commits (about 700K changed lines) and reports migrating more than 30,000 applications to Arm while keeping both Arm and x86 in production. Existing automation like Rosie, sanitizers, fuzzers, and the CHAMP rollout framework handled much of the work, while an LLM-driven agent called CogniPort fixed build and test failures, showing a 30% success rate on a 245-commit benchmark. Google plans to default new apps to multiarch and continue refining AI tools to address the remaining long tail.

Agentic AI and the OODA Loop: The Integrity Problem

🛡️ Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan argue that agentic AIs run repeated OODA loops—Observe, Orient, Decide, Act—over web-scale, adversarial inputs, and that current architectures lack the integrity controls to handle untrusted observations. They show how prompt injection, dataset poisoning, stateful cache contamination, and tool-call vectors (e.g., MCP) let attackers embed malicious control into ordinary inputs. The essay warns that fixing hallucinations is insufficient: we need architectural integrity—semantic verification, privilege separation, and new trust boundaries—rather than surface patches.

CISOs Brace for an Escalating AI-versus-AI Cyber Fight

🔐AI-enabled attacks are rapidly shifting the threat landscape, with cybercriminals using deepfakes, automated phishing, and AI-generated malware to scale operations. According to Foundry's 2025 Security Priorities Study and CSO reporting, autonomous agents can execute full attack chains at machine speed, forcing defenders to adopt AI as a copilot backed by rigorous human oversight. Organizations are prioritizing human risk, verification protocols, and training to counter increasingly convincing AI-driven social engineering.

Google Cloud Marketplace for Enterprise and AI Agents

🤖 Google Cloud Marketplace offers a vetted path for organizations to deploy, buy, or build AI agents that integrate with Gemini Enterprise, simplifying procurement and deployment. Listings are pre-validated for A2A integration and allow consolidated billing, while administrators can enforce governance using IAM and Private Marketplace controls. For partners, the Marketplace provides global reach, co-selling, and flexible monetization (subscription, usage-based, private offers, outcome-based) plus automated provisioning via Pub/Sub and the Cloud Commerce Partner Procurement API.

Autonomous AI Hacking and the Future of Cybersecurity

⚠️AI agents are now autonomously conducting cyberattacks, chaining reconnaissance, exploitation, persistence, and data theft at machine speed and scale. In 2025 public demonstrations—from XBOW’s mass submissions on HackerOne in June, to DARPA teams and Google’s Big Sleep in August—along with operational reports from Ukraine’s CERT and vendors, show these systems rapidly find and weaponize new flaws. Criminals have operationalized LLM-driven malware and ransomware, while tools like HexStrike‑AI, Deepseek, and Villager make automated attack chains broadly available. Defenders can also leverage AI to accelerate vulnerability research and operationalize VulnOps, continuous discovery/continuous repair, and self‑healing networks, but doing so raises serious questions about patch correctness, liability, compatibility, and vendor relationships.

Salesforce launches AI security and compliance agents

🔒 Salesforce introduced two AI agents on its Agentforce platform that monitor security activity and streamline compliance workflows for the Security Center and Privacy Center. The security agent analyzes event logs to detect anomalous behavior, accelerates investigations by assembling context and remediation plans, and can autonomously freeze or isolate suspicious accounts when authorized. The privacy agent maps metadata and policies against frameworks like GDPR and CCPA, surfaces exposures, and can reclassify or apply erasure policies to reduce compliance risk.

Autonomous AI Hacking: How Agents Will Reshape Cybersecurity

⚠️ AI agents are increasingly automating cyberattacks, performing reconnaissance, exploitation, and data theft at machine speed and scale. In 2023 examples include XBOW's mass vulnerability reports, DARPA teams finding dozens of flaws in hours, and reports of adversaries using Claude and HexStrike-AI to orchestrate ransomware and persistent intrusions. This shift threatens accelerated attacks beyond traditional patch cycles while presenting new defensive opportunities such as AI-assisted vulnerability discovery, VulnOps, and even self-healing networks.

DeepMind's CodeMender: AI Agent to Fix Code Vulnerabilities

🔧 Google DeepMind has unveiled CodeMender, an autonomous agent built on Gemini Deep Think models that detects, debugs and patches complex software vulnerabilities. In the last six months it produced and submitted 72 security patches to open-source projects, including codebases up to 4.5 million lines. CodeMender pairs large-model reasoning with advanced program-analysis tooling — static and dynamic analysis, differential testing, fuzzing and SMT solvers — and a multi-agent critique process to validate fixes and avoid regressions. DeepMind says all patches are currently human-reviewed and it plans to expand maintainer outreach, release the tool to developers, and publish technical findings.

OpenAI Tests ChatGPT-Powered Agent Builder Tool Preview

🧭 OpenAI is testing a visual Agent Builder that lets users assemble ChatGPT-powered agents by dropping and connecting node blocks in a flowchart. Templates like Customer service, Data enrichment, and Document comparison provide editable starting points, while users can also create flows from scratch. Agents are configurable with model choice, custom prompts, reasoning effort, and output format (text or JSON), and they can call tools and external services. Reported screenshots show support for MPC connectors such as Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, and Dropbox; OpenAI plans to share more details at DevDay.

Blending AI and Human Workflows for Secure Automation

🔍 Join The Hacker News for a free webinar, "Workflow Clarity: Where AI Fits in Modern Automation," featuring Thomas Kinsella, Co‑founder & Chief Customer Officer at Tines. The piece argues that human-only processes are slow, rigid rule engines break when reality changes, and fully autonomous AI can create opaque, unauditable paths. Attendees will learn practical mapping of tasks to people, rules, or AI, how to spot AI overreach, and patterns for building secure, auditable workflows that scale without sacrificing control.

Agent Payment Protocol: Enabling Trusted Agent Commerce

🔐 Agent Payment Protocol (AP2) is an open trust layer that enables AI shopping agents to complete purchases without ever handling raw payment credentials. AP2 enforces a role-based separation—shopping agent, merchant endpoint, credential provider, and payment processor—and relies on verifiable credentials to produce cryptographic proof of intent and approval. It defines three mandate types (Cart, Intent, Payment) to support both human-present and human-not-present flows. Developers can adopt AP2 as an extension to A2A and MCP to reduce PCI scope and improve accountability.

Okta Launches Identity Security Fabric for AI Agents

🔒 Okta introduced an Identity Security Fabric to secure AI agents and unify identity, application, and agent management across enterprises. The platform combines AI agent lifecycle management, a Cross App Access protocol, and Verifiable Digital Credentials (VDC) to enforce least privilege, discover and monitor agents, and replace fragmented point solutions. Early access features begin in fiscal 2027.

Critical ForcedLeak Flaw Exposed in Salesforce AgentForce

⚠️ Researchers at Noma Security disclosed a critical 9.4-severity vulnerability called ForcedLeak that affected Salesforce's AI agent platform AgentForce. The chain used indirect prompt injection via Web-to-Lead form fields to hide malicious instructions within CRM data, enabling potential theft of contact records and pipeline details. Salesforce has patched the issue by enforcing Trusted URLs and reclaiming an expired domain used in the attack proof-of-concept. Organizations are advised to apply updates, audit lead data for suspicious entries, and strengthen real-time prompt-injection detection and tool-calling guardrails.

OpenAI Is Testing GPT-Alpha, a GPT-5-Based AI Agent

🧪 OpenAI is internally testing a new AI agent, GPT-Alpha, built on a special GPT-5 variant and briefly exposed to users in an accidental push. A screenshot shared on X showed an 'Agent with Truncation' listing under Alpha Models, and the agent's system prompt outlines capabilities to browse the web, generate and edit images, write, run, and debug code, and create or edit documents, spreadsheets, and slides. OpenAI says the agent uses GPT-5 for advanced reasoning and tool use and may initially be offered as a paid feature due to increased compute demands.

Enabling Data Scientists to Become Agentic Architects

🧭 Google outlines an AI-native stack to transform data scientists into agentic architects, unifying development, real-time data access, and production-grade agent deployment. Enhancements to Colab Enterprise notebooks add native SQL cells, editable visualizations, and an interactive Data Science Agent that can orchestrate BigQuery ML, DataFrames, and Spark workflows. The Lightning Engine is now generally available to accelerate Spark, while previews for stateful BigQuery continuous queries and autonomous embedding generation bring real-time streaming and vector search into analytics. A 'Build-Deploy-Connect' toolkit, including the Agent Development Kit, MCP Toolbox, and Gemini CLI extensions, helps move notebook prototypes into secure, scalable agent fleets.

Self-Driving IT Security: Preparing for Autonomous Defense

🛡️ IT security is entering a new era where autonomy augments human defenders, moving beyond scripted automation to adaptive, AI-driven responses. Traditional playbooks and scripts are limited because they only follow defined rules, while attackers continuously change tactics. Organizations must adopt self-driving security systems that combine real-time telemetry, machine learning, and human oversight to improve detection, reduce response time, and manage risk.

Amazon Nova Act IDE Extension for Agent Development and Testing

🤖 Amazon Web Services announced the Nova Act extension, embedding the agent development workflow directly into popular IDEs such as Visual Studio Code, Kiro, and Cursor. The extension unifies natural-language script creation, fine-grained scripting controls, and integrated browser testing into a single interface, reducing context switching across tools. Built on the Nova Act SDK (research preview since March 2025), the extension is available today from IDE extension marketplaces and the project’s GitHub repository includes documentation and examples to get started.

Mind the Gap: TOCTOU Vulnerabilities in LLM-Enabled Agents

⚠️A new study, “Mind the Gap,” examines time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) flaws in LLM-enabled agents and introduces TOCTOU-Bench, a 66-task benchmark. The authors demonstrate practical attacks such as malicious configuration swaps and payload injection and evaluate defenses adapted from systems security. Their mitigations—prompt rewriting, state integrity monitoring, and tool-fusing—achieve up to 25% automated detection and materially reduce the attack window and executed vulnerabilities.