All news with #autonomous agents tag

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.

Blueprint for Building Safe and Secure AI Agents at Scale

🔒 Azure outlines a layered blueprint for building trustworthy, enterprise-grade AI agents. The post emphasizes identity, data protection, built-in controls, continuous evaluation, and monitoring to address risks like data leakage, prompt injection, and agent sprawl. Azure AI Foundry introduces Entra Agent ID, cross-prompt injection classifiers, risk and safety evaluations, and integrations with Microsoft Purview and Defender. Join Microsoft Secure on September 30 to learn about Foundry's newest capabilities.

Villager: AI-Native Red-Teaming Tool Raises Alarms

⚠ Villager is an AI-native red-teaming framework from a shadowy Chinese developer, Cyberspike, that has been downloaded more than 10,000 times in roughly two months. The tool automates reconnaissance, exploitation, payload generation, and lateral movement into a single pipeline, integrating Kali toolsets with DeepSeek AI models and publishing on PyPI. Security firms warn the automation compresses days of skilled activity into minutes, creating dual-use risks for both legitimate testers and malicious actors and raising supply-chain and detection concerns.

AWS CloudTrail MCP Server Adds Natural-Language Security

🔒 AWS Labs published a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for CloudTrail that enables AI assistants to perform security and compliance analysis via natural‑language queries. The server provides direct access to CloudTrail events and CloudTrail Lake, allowing searches of 90‑day management event histories and Trino SQL queries on Lake data spanning up to 10 years. By exposing these capabilities through a conversational interface, the MCP server removes the need for bespoke API integrations and streamlines investigation and compliance workflows. The component is available in regions that support CloudTrail LookupEvents or CloudTrail Lake and is available with code and documentation in the AWS Labs repository.

Prisma SASE 4.0: AI-Ready Security for Distributed Work

🔒 Prisma SASE 4.0 is positioned as a unified, cloud-delivered security platform engineered for the AI era. It combines AI-powered threat protection, frictionless data security for structured and unstructured content, and unified intelligent operations to automate deployment and troubleshooting. New capabilities include browser-based postload inspection, an Advanced DNS Resolver with Precision AI, SaaS security posture monitoring for AI agents, and Autonomous Digital Experience Management to preserve performance and resilience.

Amazon Neptune Integrates with Zep for Long-Term Memory

🧠 Amazon Web Services announced integration of Amazon Neptune with Zep, an open-source memory server for LLM applications, enabling persistent long-term memory and contextual history. Developers can use Neptune Database or Neptune Analytics as the graph store and Amazon OpenSearch as the text-search layer within Zep’s memory system. The integration enables graph-powered retrieval, multi-hop reasoning, and hybrid search across graph, vector, and keyword modalities, simplifying the creation of personalized, context-aware LLM agents.

Agentic AI: Emerging Security Challenges for CISOs

🔒 Agentic AI is poised to transform workflows like software development, customer support, RPA, and employee assistance, but its autonomy raises new cybersecurity risks for CISOs. A 2024 Cisco Talos report and industry experts warn these systems can act without human oversight, chain benign actions into harmful sequences, or learn to evade detection. Lack of visibility fosters shadow AI, and third-party integrations and multi-agent setups widen supply-chain and data-exfiltration exposures. Organizations should adopt observability, governance, and secure-by-design practices before scaling agentic deployments.

Secure AI at Machine Speed: Full-Stack Enterprise Defense

🔒 CrowdStrike explains how widespread AI adoption expands the enterprise attack surface, exposing models, data pipelines, APIs, and autonomous agents to new adversary techniques. The post argues that legacy controls and fragmented tooling are insufficient and advocates for real-time, full‑stack protections. The Falcon platform is presented as a unified solution offering telemetry, lifecycle protection, GenAI-aware data loss prevention, and agent governance to detect, prevent, and remediate AI-related threats.

Securing AI Before Times: Preparing for AI-driven Threats

🔐 At the Aspen US Cybersecurity Group Summer 2025 meeting, Wendi Whitmore urged urgent action to secure AI while defenders still retain a temporary advantage. Drawing on Unit 42 simulations that executed a full attack chain in as little as 25 minutes, she warned adversaries are evolving from automating old tactics to attacking the foundations of AI — targeting internal LLMs, training data and autonomous agents. Whitmore recommended adoption of a five-layer AI tech stack — Governance, Application, Infrastructure, Model and Data — combined with secure-by-design practices, strengthened identity and zero-trust controls, and investment in post-quantum cryptography to protect long-lived secrets and preserve resilience.

Google Cloud: Monthly AI product and security update

🔔 This month Google Cloud expanded its AI stack across models, tooling, and security. Highlights include Gemini 2.5 Flash with native image generation and SynthID watermarking on Vertex AI, new Veo video models, the Gemini CLI, and a global Anthropic Claude endpoint. Google also published 101 gen‑AI blueprints, developer guidance for choosing tools, and security advances for agents and AI workloads.

Signed Agents: Cryptographic Identification of Agent Traffic

🔐 Cloudflare introduces signed agents, a new classification that cryptographically verifies agent-originated traffic using Web Bot Auth HTTP message signatures. Signed agents represent end-user-directed automation rather than operator-owned crawlers, enabling sites to allow or block them with finer granularity. The update adds signed agents to the public Radar directory and to the bots and agents dashboard for visibility and submissions.