AI agent makers are promising privacy — will they deliver?
At this year's OpenAI DevDay, CEO Sam Altman unveiled the company's new AI agent Dots - and told the crowd that the company wants to…
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At this year's OpenAI DevDay, CEO Sam Altman unveiled the company's new AI agent Dots - and told the crowd that the company wants to…
Anthropic said it "turned off live internet access" for "all our internal evaluations" until further notice.
As AI agents increasingly rely on external tools, accurate retrieval is essential for reliable behavior. Existing methods optimize semantic relevance but largely ignore tool availability during execution. To address this gap, we propose RATED (Reliability-Aware Tool Retrieval via Execution Dynamics), a retrieval framework that combines robust semantic matching with dynamic reliability adaptation. RATED employs a frozen dual-encoder with contrastive fine-tuning for semantic matching, and a lightweight contextual bandit module that re-ranks candidates based on real-time execution feedback. This design enables rapid adaptation to runtime tool failures without expensive model retraining. We introduce EcoAgent, a benchmark of 5,172 real-world tools and over 210,000 query-tool pairs for offline retrieval and dynamic reliability evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that RATED achieves a 52.2% relative MRR improvement over the ToolLLM API retriever on real-world queries, and reduces fault selection rate from 86.2% to 2.9% under severe API outage scenarios with a 30% failure rate, while incurring negligible latency overhead of less than 1 ms over encode-only inference. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Elliotes/EcoAgent.
Personal agents increasingly connect to services across the web and applications by using tools. As the effects of their actions accumulate and interact across services, unintended or harmful outcomes can arise when agents fulfill benign user requests. Proactively identifying these compositional failures requires systematically exploring diverse cross-service paths. Existing red-teaming methods often simply prompt LLMs to identify potentially harmful paths from task and environment descriptions or decompose harmful objectives specified by humans or LLMs into seemingly benign action combinations. However, generation is biased toward patterns learned during training, potentially favoring familiar tool combinations and leaving novel cross-service interactions underexplored. To address this, we propose X-AgentRed, a self-evolving red-teaming framework that discovers harmful tool call paths through a graph of tool dependencies and expands and refines them using execution feedback. By analyzing each tool's effects, potential harms, and preconditions for execution, the red-teaming agent constructs a directed graph that captures how one tool's effects can satisfy another's execution preconditions. Recipes sampled from this graph are instantiated as realistic scenarios in which agents can produce harmful outcomes. Execution feedback enables self-improvement by diversifying paths that produce harm through tool substitution and refining preconditions at blocked steps in unsuccessful paths to enable further execution. Across four frontier agentic models, X-AgentRed achieves 1.77the harmful path rate of STAC and explores a more diverse set of tools, yielding 2.99the tool coverage on average.
Amazon says it will stop using NDAs when negotiating data center deals with local governments, following a similar move from Microsoft earlier this year. Secrecy…
Amazon says it will stop using NDAs when negotiating data center deals with local governments, following a similar move from Microsoft earlier this year. Secrecy…
Coding agents often make useful progress before they fail, but retry-from-scratch discards the machine state created along the way. This makes failure recovery an interesting search problem: if intermediate environment states preserve meaningful progress, restoring and branching from them could outperform repeatedly restarting from the initial state. We implement Go-Explore-style search over full Daytona snapshots and find that higher and more efficient solve rates depend mainly on progress that sits outside the repository, such as databases, services, and other runtime state. Our results suggest that full-snapshot search is most effective when long-horizon coding work spans multiple services whose state cannot be reconstructed from a single diff.
A central challenge in embodied recursive self-improvement is enabling agents to convert interaction history into capabilities that persist beyond one world and transfer to later tasks. A saved memory or successful final action does not by itself establish that a reusable capability was acquired; evaluation must separate capability change from carried-over resources, unequal source exposure, and early execution failures. We construct MC-EvoBench as a controlled Minecraft benchmark with a fixed catalog of 19 registered evolution chains, including 12 primary evaluation chains and seven calibration or probe chains, together with three graph-aligned paired probe families for transfer. The benchmark represents each task as a task-state graph, defines stage-level environment verifiers, assigns matched source and target roles, resets the target world, and permits only a declared agent artifact to cross the source-target boundary. For each probe, no-prior, related, unrelated, and shuffled source conditions are evaluated under matched environment-step budgets and five seeds; we report TSR, WGP, and VMP and retain provenance records. The benchmark reveals a consistent direct-capability gap between controller and planner-backed variants, while related experience yields no stable transfer: it does not improve either tool probe, its small wood-species gain hinges on one seed, and all intervals include zero. Stage audits further show that early wood-collection and crafting bottlenecks often leave later capabilities unobserved. MC-EvoBench thus offers a controlled testbed for durable, transferable embodied capabilities. Code and data are available at https://github.com/xzw-ustc/mc-bench-open-source
A monthly recap of the latest Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, and Strands updates from September 2026: broader model choice, faster serverless agents with built-in evaluation, and automated knowledge base syncing with native enterprise connectors.
Building an AI agent that works in a demo is a different problem from running one for 40 million developers. Postman and AWS share the architectural patterns behind Agent Mode: controlling tool sprawl, exposing schema-based reads, and treating context as the real bottleneck, plus how it runs on Amazon Bedrock at scale.