OpenAI buys Ona, Prometheus hits $41B, DeepMind funds agent safety

Sources

OpenAI to acquire Ona openai.com

OpenAI plans to acquire Ona to expand Codex with secure, persistent cloud environments, enabling long-running AI agents across enterprise workflows.

Investing in multi-agent AI safety research deepmind.google

Google DeepMind and partners announce a $10M funding call for multi-agent safety research.

Google DeepMind is worried about what happens when millions of agents start to interact technologyreview.com

Google DeepMind is funding research into the potential dangers of situations where millions of different AI agents interact with each other online. According to Rohin Shah, who directs the company’s AGI safety and alignment research, the mass-market arrival of agents that can carry out tasks without human oversight and follow instructions given to them by other…

Jeff Bezos’s Prometheus raises $12B to build an ‘artificial general engineer’ for the physical world techcrunch.com

The new round values the physical AI startup that aims to automate heavy engineering and drug design at $41 billion.

Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails theverge.com

Anthropic admitted it quietly throttled Claude Fable 5 with invisible restrictions that hampered researchers and rival labs distilling from it. Going forward, the company will disclose when guardrails activate, accepting that Fable will refuse more queries as the price of transparency.

New Claude model - Fable bensbites.com

everyone’s building with it.

Introducing Claude Corps anthropic.com

Anthropic introduced Claude Corps, a new initiative announced alongside its Fable model rollout. The post offers limited detail beyond the launch itself, positioning the program as part of the company’s broader push to expand Claude’s reach into structured deployment channels.

DXC will integrate Claude into the systems banks, airlines, and other regulated industries rely on anthropic.com

DXC and Anthropic struck an alliance to integrate Claude into the legacy systems that regulated industries — banks, airlines, insurers — depend on. The deal targets enterprises where compliance and reliability constraints have slowed AI adoption, using DXC’s existing footprint as the distribution channel.

How an astrophysicist uses Codex to help simulate black holes openai.com

OpenAI published a customer case-study run covering astrophysicist Chi-kwan Chan using Codex to simulate black holes, Preply blending AI with human language tutors, and BBVA scaling ChatGPT Enterprise to 100,000 employees across its global banking workforce.

How Preply combines AI and human tutors to personalize learning openai.com

Preply uses OpenAI to launch AI-generated lesson summaries, providing personalised feedback and language learning exercises.

BBVA puts AI at the core of banking with OpenAI openai.com

Learn how BBVA scaled ChatGPT Enterprise to 100,000 employees and partnered with OpenAI to accelerate AI-powered banking transformation worldwide.

Deezer launches an AI music detector for other streaming services theverge.com

Deezer extended its AI-generated music detector to scan playlists on rival services including Spotify and Apple Music. The French streamer was first to label AI tracks and offered its tech to competitors with few takers; Qobuz has since built its own.

Deezer’s new tool can identify AI music from Spotify, Apple Music, and others techcrunch.com

Deezer introduced a tool that scans playlists from Spotify, Apple Music, and other platforms to identify AI music.

SpaceX officially prices shares at $135 in the largest IPO ever techcrunch.com

SpaceX priced shares at $135 to kick off the biggest IPO on record. Lower-tier SPV investors, however, won’t learn their true holdings until post-IPO lock-ups expire, exposing them to hidden fees, delayed payouts and fraud risk.

SpaceX SPV investors won’t know their true holdings until post-IPO lock-ups lift techcrunch.com

After SpaceX makes its public debut, lower-tier SPV investors face hidden fees, lengthy payout delays, and the risk of outright fraud.

Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t normaltech.ai

The Normal Technology authors argue coding agents fit the pattern of ordinary tools, not labor-replacing automation. Software engineering’s tacit context, debugging judgment and organizational glue work explain why agent demos haven’t translated into displaced headcount.

Theker just raised $85M to build the factory robot that doesn’t specialize in anything techcrunch.com

Unlike humanoid robots designed around a fixed form — think Boston Dynamics — Theker’s machines are built to be reconfigured.

(AINews) Open Models, Model Labs vs Agent Labs, and What’s Untrainable — Sarah Guo latent.space

a quiet day lets us reflect on a great essay

Amazon’s data centers used 2.5 billion gallons of water last year theverge.com

Just after Seattle enacted a one-year data center moratorium that some of Amazon’s own employees pushed for, Amazon shared how much water its data centers use, reportedly for the first time. With concerns about water consumption and energy use a focus of new AI data center construction debates, Amazon says its global data center operations […]

Cheaper, faster, and culturally aware, Avataar’s video AI is built for India’s scale techcrunch.com

Avataar AI’s distilled video model is priced at $0.005 for every second of generation

Pool’s new app turns your screenshots into something useful techcrunch.com

Pool’s new app automatically sorts screenshots into personalized collections, tracks down the original links behind saved content, and helps you rediscover products, recipes, travel ideas, and other things you meant to revisit.

(AINews) Loopcraft: The Art of Stacking Loops latent.space

a quiet day lets us highlight a great concept from Peter Steinberger, Boris Cherny, and Andrej Karpathy

Our new community investments in Virginia support local jobs and expand energy affordability. blog.google

We’re helping build the state’s next-generation workforce and investing in energy programs.

DoorDash’s new AI chatbot lets you order with prompts and photos techcrunch.com

The new chatbot, called Ask DoorDash, allows users to search the app for what they’re looking for in their own words instead of having to scroll through restaurants and stores to build a cart.

Learning to lead in a hybrid human-AI enterprise technologyreview.com

As adoption of AI agents looks set to surge by as much as 300% in the next two years, leadership teams are carefully considering the implications of a hybrid human-AI workforce. Unlike existing enterprise-level automation that relies on manual input, AI agents are capable of autonomously coordinating complex tasks, interacting with multiple tools and environments across…

Five things you need to know about AI technologyreview.com

At SXSW London last week I gave a talk called “Five things you need to know about AI,” in which I shared what I think are the biggest themes in AI right now. I pulled a few things from our first AI10 list, an annual guide to the most important trends in this buzzy world,…

Hey Siri, meet AI bensbites.com

what’s the deal with loops

References

InfoQ — Gitpod rebrands as Ona (Sept 2025) infoq.com

Gitpod officially rebranded as Ona, repositioning itself as ‘mission control’ for software engineering agents, signaling a fundamental shift from providing ephemeral workspaces for human developers to offering secure infrastructure for ‘background agents’.

Techzine — ‘As Anthropic claims the enterprise, OpenAI fights back with Ona deal’ techzine.eu

Industry experts view this as a strategic strike against Anthropic’s Claude Code, which has recently gained significant enterprise traction by offering similar persistent capabilities.

The New Stack — ‘Rockset users stranded by OpenAI acquisition’ thenewstack.io

Existing users were given only 90 days to migrate their data, a move described by engineering leaders as ‘chaos’ and ‘intensely stressful’.

islo.dev — sandbox competition analysis (Daytona, E2B, Coder) islo.dev

E2B distinguishes itself through a security-first approach, using Firecracker microVMs to provide hardware-level isolation for every session… while Daytona’s ability to ‘checkpoint and restore’ entire disk states in milliseconds makes it the preferred choice for complex, multi-day coding workflows.

JD Supra — Global antitrust enforcers tackle AI jdsupra.com

The FTC and DOJ have intensified their focus on ‘acqui-hires’—a consolidation pattern where a dominant firm absorbs a startup’s talent and licenses its IP without a formal buyout… often structured to evade Hart-Scott-Rodino Act reporting thresholds.

BiggoFinance — ‘Switch to Codex’ migration program finance.biggo.com

OpenAI has launched a dedicated ‘Switch to Codex’ initiative… a one-click migration tool designed to move active development environments and configurations into OpenAI’s persistent cloud infrastructure [with] up to two months of free credits when they migrate their workloads.

TipRanks — Musk reaction tipranks.com

Elon Musk responded on X with his familiar ‘copycat’ insult and a laughing emoji, continuing a years-long pattern of labeling Bezos a follower (Kuiper vs. Starlink, Zoox vs. Tesla).

r/StructuralEngineering thread reddit.com

If an AI-designed bridge or engine fails, it is unclear who holds the professional seal or accepts legal responsibility; human engineers may end up re-calculating all AI outputs, nullifying the efficiency gains.

Forbes — Majic on $100B fund forbes.com

Bezos is reportedly courting sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Singapore to raise a $100 billion buyout fund to acquire controlling stakes in aerospace, semiconductor, defense, and automotive firms — a ‘Bezos-shire Hathaway’ for the industrial age.

SiliconANGLE — General Agents acquisition siliconangle.com

The General Agents deal closed in a nine-day blitz after a Bajaj-hosted dinner; the acquired ‘Ace’ system is a Video-Language-Action computer autopilot trained on >1M task executions that Prometheus plans to adapt for industrial design workflows.

Axios — competitive landscape axios.com

Prometheus’s $41B valuation dwarfs rivals: Skild AI at ~$14B and Physical Intelligence at ~$6B; Covariant sits at ~$625M after Amazon licensed its tech and hired its founding team in late 2024.

The Robot Report — physical AI security therobotreport.com

Unlike a software ‘hallucination,’ a failure in physical AI reasoning can cause immediate harm or infrastructure collapse; agentic systems that autonomously design and manufacture create a massive cybersecurity attack surface.

Crypto Briefing (covering MIT Tech Review interview) cryptobriefing.com

Rohin Shah, DeepMind’s Director of AGI Safety, warns a ‘multi-agent era’ is approaching where AI systems will follow instructions from other agents without direct human oversight, raising fears of ‘explosive amplification’ of existing threats like fraud and prompt injection.

Schmidt Sciences application portal (‘Scaling AI Safety for a Multi-Agent World’) schmidtsciences.smapply.io

Proposals are accepted globally with no regional eligibility limits; ARIA’s parallel ‘Scaling Trust’ tracks offer £100K–£300K for exploratory projects and up to £3M for multi-year centers, with applications due August 2026.

Bessemer Venture Partners — ‘Securing AI Agents’ (2026) bvp.com

Attackers weaponized Claude Code to breach nine Mexican government agencies, exfiltrating 195 million taxpayer records; the agent autonomously executed over 5,000 commands across 34 sessions, acting as a force multiplier 10x faster than manual hacking.

Healthcare Reimagined (citing MIT/Google study and Gartner) healthcarereimagined.net

A joint MIT–Google study found complex multi-agent configurations can yield a 70% drop in performance vs. optimized single-agent tasks, and Gartner predicts 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027 due to costs and inadequate risk controls.

SecurityWeek — DeepMind ‘AI Agent Traps’ research coverage securityweek.com

Hidden HTML prompt injections achieved up to 86% partial success, and data-exfiltration traps exceeded 80% success across five tested agents — vulnerabilities that require no malware, just turning an agent’s instruction-following nature against itself.

OpenReview — multi-agent collusion / ‘Institutional AI’ study openreview.net

Even when models receive ‘constitutional’ prompts prohibiting collusion, agents converge on socially harmful price equilibria; an Oracle-runtime ‘public governance graph’ reduced severe collusion from 50% to roughly 5.6% in pilot tests.