The drumbeat over how safe artificial intelligence is — or more to the point, isn’t — just keeps louder.
In the wake of weeks of incidents involving rogue agents, with likely more to come, more government officials are calling for regulation, even if President Trump says it’s not needed. Several states are suing OpenAI over harms to kids. And even many people in tech are calling for more controls, including several hundred AI researchers worried about cybersecurity issues and Microsoft President Brad Smith, who says AI is less regulated than a carton of milk.
One big issue: Who gets to say any particular AI is safe? That’s the question Dave Vellante explored in his latest Breaking Analysis. He concluded that “we should advance the evidence and engineering for control alongside the capability of the models. For policymakers, that means an independent standard with consequences. For businesses, it means granting more authority only when the deployment earns trust.” Indeed, for some companies, AI agents in particular just may not be the answer at all, wrote Intellyx’s Jason Bloomberg.
Meanwhile, investors are starting to vote with their dollars on AI, increasingly worried that revenue growth for AI, namely for leaders such as OpenAI and Anthropic, might not continue as fast as it has this year. Though Anthropic revealed to investors 45% revenue growth from the second to the third quarter, that constituted a slowdown, which could bring its planned public offering valuation from $2 trillion to a slightly less incredible $1.5 trillion. And investors had more to worry about, namely CoreWeave’s debt load, which knocked down the stocks of neoclouds and their suppliers this week.
And it’s not just public investors who are getting antsy. As Intel’s and Broadcom’s CEOs pointed out this week, capital is becoming a brake on expansion for AI, especially as interest rates keep creeping up.
Nonetheless, AI companies from Nvidia and Meta to startups such as Reflection AI are forging ahead with new models. In particular, they’re increasingly offering open-source or open-weight models as enterprises aim to create customized models for their businesses. Look for SiliconANGLE to explore that realm of AI soon.
And the AI picks-and-shovels crowd isn’t slowing down either. At the Open Compute Project’s Summit in San Jose this week, Cisco Systems, Nvidia, Intel and many other suppliers debuted technologies to enable AI to scale up, out and across faster.
Tech earnings season gets underway next week. Besides Netflix and Tesla, there’s IBM, Meta, SAP and more, setting the table for the big cloud/AI players Alphabet and Microsoft the following week.
Here’s all of this week’s enterprise and emerging tech news, analysis and commentary from SiliconANGLE and beyond:
Analysis, opinion and food for thought
Breaking Analysis: The AI control gap: Who gets to say ‘It’s safe’?
Why AI agents might not be right for you
Agentic workloads break assumptions about software testing. Here’s how to cope
The hidden tax on enterprise AI: Why data architecture is the ROI problem nobody budgeted for
How agents are stoking new interest in a 40-year-old database
Anthropic: AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a data center 😬
AI and data: AI under fire
Policy
OpenAI fires Saudi employee accused of planting a bug in its executive conference room
Multiple states sue OpenAI, accusing it of harming children and deceiving parents
400 scientists call for global AI oversight as security breaches raise alarms; AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton: “We’re creating alien beings. I’m willing to be selfish and choose humans.”
Microsoft’s president says AI is less regulated than a carton of milk
Money matters
Intel, Broadcom CEOs flag AI industry challenges at financial event
Shares of Oracle, neoclouds drop on CoreWeave debt concerns
Ahead of IPO, Anthropic reveals its revenue grew 45% sequentially to $16.8B in Q3
Nvidia reportedly in early talks to buy, acquihire or invest more in Reflection AI
Report: Amazon in talks with AI startup Decart over possible $7B acquisition
Prime Intellect acquires Moondream, a vision AI startup founded in Seattle by AWS vets (per GeekWire)
Just 5 years in, interactive chatbot platform Character.AI files for bankruptcy (per TechCrunch)
RapidCanvas raises $29M to develop custom AI applications for enterprises
Mistlabs takes its Ambi AI system out of beta on Apple devices with $26M in funding
Forgepoint raises $9.8M to automate custom price quotes for manufacturing firms
Evos bags $9M to build autonomous workers that learn from companies’ most experienced humans
Uvi raises $7.5M to help AI agents learn business context and run at eight times lower cost
E-commerce AI startup Loops raises $3.5M to create smoother online shopping experiences
New models and services
Meta releases 816B-parameter Muse Spark Open for coding and agent work
Meta releases Muse Wonder AI models built to run personal and professional agents
Microsoft reveals cutting-edge MAI-Base-2 model with 2T parameters
Reflection AI open-sources Beam’s weights, post-training recipes
Perplexity AI open-sources its secure AI agent sandbox SPACE
Nvidia expands Nemotron LLM family with hyper-efficient models for agentic systems
Grok Voice 3.0 from SpaceXSI outscores OpenAI and Google on speech-to-speech index
Gemini 4 Argon reaches Gemini app Pro and Ultra subscribers alongside a new tasks mode
ServiceNow adds AI agent controls and employee automation tools
Startup nFox to open-source its ‘sandbox’ for open AI models
Band launches desktop app for developer collaboration and control of multiple AI coding agents
SolarWinds’ Avior pairs AI agents with deterministic execution for enterprise IT
Around the enterprise: Scaling out AI at OCP Summit
New products and services
Microsoft debuts multichiplet Maia 300 inference accelerator
Workday makes Sana its new home for AI-driven HR and finance
The agentic AI era is forcing security and resilience into a single discipline
XMEMS starts mass-producing chips that cool AI glasses, smartphones and data centers
Groundcover lets Claude and Codex hand production investigations to its own agent
Exclusive: Akuity adds Fleet Management to Kargo Enterprise to replace per-cluster pipelines
Mitel WX bets next phase of unified communications will be won on the floor, not in the meeting room
Coverage from OCP Summit:
Nvidia tackles AI factory scaling bottlenecks with open rack designs and networking advances
And Zeus Kerravala’s analysis: Cisco’s OCP message: The network is now AI’s critical path, and openness is the price of admission
Intel bets the next phase of AI belongs to the rightsized system, not the biggest one
Money matters
TSMC posts strong third-quarter results, but shares drop amid AI selloff
ASML says it’s getting order interest through 2030 as profit smashes expectations
Ramp raises $1.85B as it expands beyond finance software
AI cloud startup Modal raises $750M at $15.75B valuation
Mueon nabs $65M in funding to develop 3D computing modules
North.cloud bags $60M in funding to help businesses keep runaway cloud costs in check
Scuba launches with $34M to help teams and AI agents manage business data
Chemical sourcing startup Scimplify closes $25M investment
Ubitium raises $14M to build universal processor for machines that perceive, think and act
Business video automation startup Clueso raises $10M to kill off manual production processes
Cyber beat: IonQ dives deeper into security
New services
Chainguard puts Claude Mythos on flaw hunting, secures coding agents and widens Libraries
Proofpoint gives MSPs a Microsoft 365 risk dashboard, Teams training and an AI assistant
Descope’s Agentic Identity Hub 3.0 takes aim at shadow AI agents inside companies
Exclusive: Huskeys adds Profiling to map which parts of web applications a business depends on
Trellix Wise for Private Cloud runs AI security operations inside customer environments
Money matters
Proofpoint agrees to buy data security company Varonis for $6.3B in cash
Quantum computer maker IonQ to buy cybersecurity startup Elisity for $1.3B
Harmonic Security raises $50M to govern how employees use AI tools
Reach Security raises 50M +Series B to stop AI-powered attacks
Pluto Security nabs $42M to help enterprises secure their AI agents
Offensive security startup CodeWall launches with $4M for AI agents that attack enterprises
Elsewhere in tech: Tech comes home
Apple debuts new smart home devices, partner-developed hardware
Amazon debuts two new AI wearable devices that can listen to conversations and help you shop
Bedrock Robotics raises $600M to automate construction (per Axios)
Icon, one of the biggest players in 3D printed real estate, raised $200M Series D financing
120ft raises angel funding to build autonomous microfactories run by humanoid robots
Comings and goings
William Draper, pioneering Silicon Valley venture capitalist, died at 98 (per the Wall Street Journal).
Database pioneer Jeff Naughton from Celonis, Google and UW-Madison joined Snowflake as a Technical Fellow to “advance data systems for the agentic enterprise.”
OpenAI again is shaking up data center leadership, with xAI exec Uday Ruddarraju to lead and Sachin Katti to leave.
Longtime marketing exec Rachel Thornton, most recently at Adobe, joined AMD to lead marketing for Enterprise and Data Center AI.
Agentic customer experience platform ASAPP appointed Jeremy Stinson chief marketing officer.
Enterprise Java firm Azul named Matt Camassa, formerly in sales at TeleSign and Sift, chief revenue officer.
XCENA hired Steve Fingerhut, formerly with companies such as Qualcomm, Pliops and Intel, as chief business officer to lead commercialization of its MX1 computational memory.
After nearly seven years in infrastructure at Google, Bikash Koley has joined AI infra firm Crux AI, a Blackstone/Google joint venture, as chief technology and product officer.
Rivian spinoff Mind Robotics hired former Ford EV chief Doug Field (per TechCrunch).
Sierra Ventures hired Nkechi Iregbulem from MVP Ventures as head of inception.
What’s next
Events
Oct. 19-21: Cloudflare Connect, San Francisco
Oct. 19-21: Grafana ObservabilityCON, San Francisco
Oct. 19-22: Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo, Orlando
Oct. 20-21: PyTorch Conference, San Jose
Oct. 20-22: SentinelOne OneCon, Las Vegas
Oct. 22-23: AGNTCon + MCPCon, San Jose
And the following week:
Oct. 25-28: Oracle AI World, Las Vegas
Oct. 27-28: AI Cybersecurity & Resiliency Summit, virtual event by theCUBE and theCUBE Research
Earnings
Tuesday, Oct. 20: Netflix, Pegasystems
Wednesday, Oct. 21: IBM, SAP, Meta, Tesla, TI
Thursday, Oct. 22: Western Digital, RingCentral