Amazon announced that its Alexa for Shopping AI agent, previously accessible only through the app and website, can now be used via text message. Users can text Alexa to order groceries, reorder past purchases, track price drops, compare products, and manage personalized shopping lists, with Alexa requiring approval before completing purchases. The feature launches Friday for a small group of US users via text invitation, with wider availability planned in coming months.
cnet.com
· 2026-11-06
Meta has launched a voice feature for its Muse AI agent, letting US users make phone calls or video chats with the assistant. The update offers hundreds of voice options and is now available to the general public rather than a limited test group.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-11-06
Palo Alto Networks is negotiating to acquire Clutch Security, a three-year-old startup that secures AI agents' access to corporate systems, for $500 million in cash plus milestone payments, according to a person familiar with the talks reported by TechCrunch. Clutch was valued at $85 million during a $20 million Series A round led by Lightspeed and SignalFire in January 2025, and is nearing $10 million in annual recurring revenue.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-11-06
Researchers gave an AI agent a list of 19 gene therapy vectors, an epilepsy mouse model, and access to a motorized surgical rig with cameras, tasking it with reducing seizures. The agent selected the therapeutic vector and target brain region, calculated injection coordinates from published papers, then controlled stereotaxic arms to deliver a 250 nanolitre injection while monitoring the site for bleeding via camera. A licensed veterinarian supervised each irreversible step and held a physical kill switch as a safety override.
twitter.com
· 2026-11-02
Researchers from Y Combinator and Olam Labs ran experiments putting swarms of AI agents into Minecraft, including a 'Civ50' test where 50 GPT-6.1 Sol agents were given three hours to build a thriving civilization. Instead of flourishing, the colony stalled after zombie attacks thinned their numbers, with agents abandoning ambitious plans and spending long stretches on trivial bureaucratic tasks, such as four agents taking 11 minutes to appoint a 'sole fertilizer operator' for one piece of bone meal. The team also tested adversarial multi-agent scenarios, including the PvP mode Bed Wars.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-11-01
Biotech startup Exin Therapeutics says an AI agent built on Anthropic's Sonnet model independently selected a gene therapy vector, dosage and brain target from 19 candidate treatments to address seizures in a mouse model of epilepsy, then operated a motorized stereotaxic rig to inject the therapy while monitoring for bleeding via camera. CEO Gabriel Ocana-Santero documented the procedure on X, noting a licensed veterinarian supervised with a physical kill switch at every irreversible step, and the mouse reportedly recovered and was seen moving normally afterward.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-31
Exin Therapeutics CEO Gabriel Ocana Santero built a surgical rig linking an AI agent to a motorized mouse restraint, camera, and injection needle, letting the AI control a brain injection procedure on a live mouse. The team used the setup to test a gene therapy aimed at reducing seizures in a mouse with epilepsy, with the agent directing needle placement and compound delivery rather than just analyzing data.
wired.com
· 2026-10-31
Zest, the restaurant discovery app that launched this year, has released an AI-powered concierge accessible via text message. The feature recommends restaurants based on a user's past dining transactions and their friends' history, and can check availability and book reservations on the user's behalf.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-30
Researchers partnered with Olam Labs to study multi-agent coordination by deploying 50 GPT-6.1 Sol-powered agents into a Minecraft survival world for three hours, tasked only with building a civilization. The team built and open-sourced a new agentic harness, combining a scripting-based Mineflayer toolset with a reasoning loop called Pi, since no suitable long-running Minecraft agent framework existed before.
labs.ycombinator.com
· 2026-10-29
A new open-source library called phpClaw was released on Show HN, offering PHP developers a ready-made runtime for building AI agents. It includes tool integration, memory, security guards, and a ReAct reasoning loop, and works with multiple LLM providers including Anthropic, OpenAI, Groq, Gemini, Mistral, DeepSeek, and Ollama without requiring any framework dependencies.
github.com
· 2026-10-29
Wabi, the startup founded by Replika creator Eugenia Kuyda, has raised $55 million in new funding at a $1.25 billion valuation, led by IVP with participation from a16z, Forerunner, and the Amazon Alexa Fund. The company recently pivoted from a prompt-based app-building tool into an AI messenger that acts as a personal agent, capable of generating mini apps for tasks like meal planning or fitness tracking.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-29
Meta has introduced Muse, a personalized AI agent that operates on users' devices to perform tasks like sending emails, ordering groceries, and negotiating bills on their behalf. According to the report, Muse is so effective at mimicking human behavior that websites struggle to distinguish it from an actual human user.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-10-29
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