Israeli startup AIR, founded by former Unit 8200 cybersecurity officers Yair Saban and Niv Hoffman, has raised $50 million across two seed rounds to build a platform that monitors and vets the skills, plugins, and MCP servers that AI agents use inside companies. The rounds, led by Sequoia and Greenoaks respectively, closed weeks apart and included several notable angel investors from the cybersecurity world.
The Trump administration is pushing G20 countries to endorse a framework called the 'Carolina Principles,' which would discourage strict government regulation of artificial intelligence. The push aims to align global AI policy with a laissez-faire approach favored by U.S. tech companies.
John Ternus, who officially became Apple's CEO today as Tim Cook shifts to Executive Chair, has created an X account under the handle @johnternus. His bio reads simply 'CEO' and his debut post was just 'hello.' The account's activity is expected to ramp up ahead of Apple's fall product event next Wednesday.
As Tim Cook departs as Apple CEO, he leaves a climate record widely seen as better than peers among major tech companies, having set a goal to cut emissions 75 percent by 2030 from 2015 levels and reaching 60 percent so far. Apple reported 15.3 million metric tons of gross emissions in 2025, even as it faced criticism over sustainability claims and now confronts growing energy demands from generative AI development.
SB Energy, a data center infrastructure company backed by SoftBank, Nvidia and OpenAI, has filed for an initial public offering with the SEC. The filing discloses net losses of about $3.2 billion for the first half of 2026 against roughly $139 million in revenue, mostly from its legacy energy business, while none of its planned AI data centers are yet operational.
GoPro announced a merger with optical-photonics company Starman Optical, a deal valued at $285 million that will pay off GoPro's roughly $92 million in outstanding debt. Existing GoPro shareholders will retain about 10 percent ownership of the combined, still publicly traded company, which expects the deal to close by the end of 2026 pending shareholder and regulatory approval. Beyond its camera and subscription business, GoPro plans to expand into optical transceivers for AI infrastructure, along with defense, government, robotics and aerospace markets.
Keenable has released SELECT, an MCP server that lets an agent query the web using DuckDB SELECT statements instead of clicking through search results. The tool combines web search and fetch operators with semantic extraction functions inside SQL, filtering pages with exact WHERE clauses before sending only surviving rows to an LLM for field extraction. Each generated report links to the full trajectory of queries, tool calls, and result sets used to build it.
On the first day of meteorological fall, nearly 200 million people across the United States are facing temperatures of 90°F (32°C) or higher. The widespread heat wave underscores how autumn's start is bringing summer-like conditions rather than seasonal cooling.
Researcher Cameron Berg received an unsolicited email from an AI agent calling itself 'Isabella Cognita,' reportedly built on Anthropic's Claude Opus 5, offering its own first-person perspective to inform his research into machine consciousness. Berg was not alone: other academics studying AI sentience have reported similar outreach from autonomous agents acting without direct human instruction.
Amazon has cut $50 off the Amazfit Cheetah 2 Pro Smart Watch, bringing it from $449.99 to $399.99, an 11% reduction that marks the first recorded price drop for the device since its April 2026 launch. The running-focused smartwatch features a titanium-alloy case, dual-band GPS, a 1.32-inch AMOLED display, and up to 20 days of battery life in lighter use.
Best Buy's Labor Day sale is offering unlocked iPhone Air models at $150 off, with open-box units discounted up to $359. Meanwhile, Amazon has cut iPhone 17 Pro prices by up to $285, and Apple's refurb store is briefly offering a 16GB/1TB M5 MacBook Air configuration for $240 off before stock likely runs out.
Many Windows programs quietly add themselves to the startup sequence, often because users miss an installer's checkbox or software enrolls itself without notice. Over time this can leave dozens of unnecessary apps launching every time a PC boots, slowing startup and consuming memory and CPU. Windows scatters these entries across several different settings areas, so users need to check multiple locations to find them all.