Tag Archives: AI agents

eBay bans illicit automated shopping amid rapid rise of AI agents

On Tuesday, eBay updated its User Agreement to explicitly ban third-party “buy for me” agents and AI chatbots from interacting with its platform without permission, first spotted by Value Added Resource. On its face, a one-line terms of service update doesn’t seem like major news, but what it implies is more significant: The change reflects… Read More »

How AI coding agents work—and what to remember if you use them

This context limit naturally limits the size of a codebase a LLM can process at one time, and if you feed the AI model lots of huge code files (which have to be re-evaluated by the LLM every time you send another response), it can burn up token or usage limits pretty quickly. Tricks of… Read More »

OpenAI built an AI coding agent and uses it to improve the agent itself

Ed Bayes, a designer on the Codex team, described how the tool has changed his own workflow. Bayes said Codex now integrates with project management tools like Linear and communication platforms like Slack, allowing team members to assign coding tasks directly to the AI agent. “You can add Codex, and you can basically assign issues… Read More »

A new open-weights AI coding model is closing in on proprietary options

On Tuesday, French AI startup Mistral AI released Devstral 2, a 123 billion parameter open-weights coding model designed to work as part of an autonomous software engineering agent. The model achieves a 72.2 percent score on SWE-bench Verified, a benchmark that attempts to test whether AI systems can solve real GitHub issues, putting it among… Read More »

Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

Microsoft has lowered sales growth targets for its AI agent products after many salespeople missed their quotas in the fiscal year ending in June, according to a report Wednesday from The Information. The adjustment is reportedly unusual for Microsoft, and it comes after the company missed a number of ambitious sales goals for its AI… Read More »

Ars Live recap: Is the AI bubble about to pop? Ed Zitron weighs in.

“It’s not gonna be one Bear Stearns moment,” Zitron explained. “It’s gonna be a succession of events until the markets freak out.” The crux of the problem, according to Zitron, is Nvidia. The chip maker’s stock represents 7 to 8 percent of the S&P 500’s value, and the broader market has become dependent on Nvidia’s… Read More »

Anthropic says its new AI model “maintained focus” for 30 hours on multistep tasks

Claude 4.5 is available everywhere today. Through the API, the model maintains the same pricing as Claude Sonnet 4, at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. Developers can access it through the Claude API using “claude-sonnet-4-5” as the model identifier. Other new features Some ancillary features of the Claude family… Read More »

ChatGPT Pulse delivers morning updates based on your chat history

On Thursday, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Pulse, a new “push” feature that generates personalized daily updates for users without having to ask each time. The preview feature, available now for Pro subscribers on mobile, marks OpenAI’s latest attempt to make ChatGPT proactive rather than reactive, with the AI model conducting overnight research to deliver morning updates… Read More »

Developers joke about “coding like cavemen” as AI service suffers major outage

Growing dependency on AI coding tools The speed at which news of the outage spread shows how deeply embedded AI coding assistants have already become in modern software development. Claude Code, announced in February and widely launched in May, is Anthropic’s terminal-based coding agent that can perform multi-step coding tasks across an existing code base.… Read More »

Anthropic’s auto-clicking AI Chrome extension raises browser-hijacking concerns

The company tested 123 cases representing 29 different attack scenarios and found a 23.6 percent attack success rate when browser use operated without safety mitigations. One example involved a malicious email that instructed Claude to delete a user’s emails for “mailbox hygiene” purposes. Without safeguards, Claude followed these instructions and deleted the user’s emails without… Read More »