The AI Wire ●

Google Cloud unveiled Agent Compute Engine on Thursday at the AGNTCon and MCPCon events. It is a compute service built specifically for running AI agents at scale, with each workload inside a hardware-isolated microVM that gets its own dedicated guest kernel and root access.

The isolation is the point: agents run code, call tools, and touch data on behalf of users, so Google is leaning on its Titanium IPU technology for added protection. The service is tuned for fast churn — agents can start quickly, pause, and resume later.

Its density trick is copy-on-write memory sharing: agents starting from the same base share memory until one changes something, which Google says has delivered benchmarks of 10 times the density on the same hardware. Google frames the service as part of its Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, with security and governance for agents at the center.

Goldman Sachs announced on Thursday a $500 million commitment to expand its 10,000 Small Businesses program, headlined by a new Goldman Sachs Small Business AI Institute. The institute is partnering with Anthropic, Google, Meta and OpenAI to give entrepreneurs training and tools to integrate AI into their operations.

The institute will work on three fronts: delivering AI education to small-business owners across the country, publishing research on AI use by small businesses, and supporting AI-enabled expansions of access to capital. The wider commitment aims to deliver education, capital access and support services to another 10,000 businesses.

Nearly 20,000 entrepreneurs across all 50 states and four US territories have completed the program since it launched in 2010. 'Every major technology shift has rewarded the businesses that adapt most quickly,' CEO David Solomon said. 'This commitment makes sure the entrepreneurs who are creating America's jobs can lead in the AI economy.'

Walmart announced on Wednesday that it is embracing agentic commerce, launching an Agent Gateway and related controls for customers who shop through AI agents. The move is the opposite of its biggest rival's: Amazon has recently begun blocking outside AI agents from making purchases on shoppers' behalf.

The Agent Gateway is Walmart's own MCP server — the Model Context Protocol was originally created by Anthropic — letting approved agents search Walmart and Sam's Club inventory and buy on a customer's behalf, without the customer having to hand the agent their personal information or purchase history. Walmart already offers integrations with Meta's Muse, ChatGPT, Gemini and other popular AI apps.

Agent Profiles, rolling out next month, give each agent a dedicated profile inside a customer's Walmart account, likened to adding an authorized user to a credit card. Customers can require approval for every purchase or set a spending limit, can delete a profile at any time, and do not need a Walmart+ membership. Walmart is also publishing terms for agents: they cannot exceed what the shopper intends, cannot access payment information, and non-compliant agents will be blocked — while Walmart's returns process still applies when an agent buys the wrong thing.

Two critical vulnerabilities in PHP — the language behind roughly 70% of websites, including WordPress sites — were publicly disclosed on Wednesday, with emergency patches issued by the PHP Foundation. The flaws, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 and collectively nicknamed PHP2Shell, are rated 9.2 in severity, allow unauthenticated remote code execution, and have sat in PHP versions since version 5 in 2004.

AI found them first. Security firm Calif, working in OpenAI's new Patch the Planet initiative, used GPT-5.6 Sol to find one flaw in August, while Wiz independently found both using its Wiz Atlas agent together with Google's Gemini 4 Argon and GPT-5.6 Sol. OpenAI says it led a two-month coalition of maintainers, researchers and providers to prepare fixes, and is putting $1 billion in subsidized model access behind defender work of this kind.

The US National Security Agency warned that sites that cannot patch immediately should be pulled offline until they can. Patched releases are PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35; versions 8.1 and older are unsupported. Wiz notes the same AI capability that found the bugs also lowers the barrier to exploiting them, which is why the patch race is urgent.

Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis has pulled his AGI timeline closer again. In a Wall Street Journal profile published this week, he says he now expects a system matching the full cognitive range of the human brain within two to three years — down from the three-to-five-year estimate he was giving earlier this year. 'It's soon,' he said. 'I'm updating nearer and nearer.'

His test for the milestone is characteristically concrete: whether a model trained only on knowledge available before 1901 could reproduce Einstein's 1905 papers. Hassabis, a chemistry Nobel laureate and former chess prodigy, is taking on a new role after a recent leadership shuffle at Google DeepMind while continuing to run Isomorphic Labs alongside it.

His framing of the stakes is measured: AI's risks are profound but addressable without hype in either direction — 'not all disaster, and not all nirvana.' Winning, in his words, means helping humanity steward AGI into the world safely and securely for the benefit of everyone.

General Motors announced at its GM Forward event in New York on Wednesday that OnStar — its 30-year-old connected-car service — is being rebuilt around an in-house personal AI assistant. Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson said 'the intelligence of OnStar will exist everywhere': in the car, on the phone and in the cloud.

The OnStar AI Assistant responds to 'Hey, OnStar,' uses live vehicle data to answer questions and control systems such as climate and the charge port, and is pitched as proactive — for example, noticing a driver will be late, then moving a grocery pickup and alerting others. It will be a subscription service, launching first on the 2027 Cadillac Lyriq via an over-the-air update in the coming months, with more models to follow; human OnStar advisors remain available.

The assistant is proprietary, replacing GM's current reliance on Google's Gemini in its cars. A unified OnStar mobile app planned for 2027 will replace the OnStar Guardian app and the separate Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC apps, syncing with the in-car software.

Google, working with Meta's PyTorch team, has released TorchTPU, an open-source native PyTorch backend for Google's Cloud TPUs. It runs eagerly by default, compiles through torch.compile and XLA, and is positioned as the replacement for PyTorch/XLA in new TPU workloads.

The release is part of a wider push to make it easier to run AI models on hardware other than Nvidia's. It landed one day after Amazon announced a similar approach for its Trainium chips, and the same day DeepSeek open-sourced DeepInfer, the inference engine behind its V4.1 Flash model, with Huawei Ascend support built in.

For developers, the practical effect is that PyTorch code can move to TPUs with less porting work, which matters as the labs and cloud providers compete on the cost of running models, not just on training them.

Google announced new Gemini tools for small businesses on October 20, headlined by a dedicated business landing page inside the Gemini app. From the hub, owners can build their brand, analyze finances and review customer insights, and connect Gemini to Google Business Profile, Google Ads and Google Workspace, plus third-party apps including Adobe, Canva, Dropbox, Shopify, Wix, Zoho and Xero.

Businesses can also define their brand style in Gemini by uploading a website, brand kit, fonts or color palettes. Paired with Nano Banana 2.1, Google's latest image model, Gemini then generates marketing visuals that keep that style, instead of owners re-uploading their guidelines for every asset.

Google says tens of millions of small business owners already use Gemini to brainstorm products, manage customer feedback and analyze performance. The hub is the company's latest push to make Gemini a working layer for running a small business, not just a chat window.

Google began rolling out Personal Intelligence for Gemini in Android Auto on October 20, letting the in-car assistant draw, with permission, on a driver's Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Photos, Maps, YouTube and Search history. Cars with Google Built-in follow in the coming months.

Google's examples are hands-free and natural-language: ask for your flight gate and whether the flight is on time in one question, say 'take me to my doctor's appointment' and let Gemini pull the address from your calendar, or find a car wash from a photo you took last week and navigate to it. The feature is opt-in, and an opt-in already set in the Gemini phone app carries over to the car automatically.

The rollout covers eligible personal accounts for users 18 and older, and excludes the European Economic Area, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Nigeria. Workspace accounts are left out, and on Google Built-in cars personal answers surface only while the driver is in the car with their phone connected.

Google Public Sector unveiled Gemini for government services at its summit on October 20: an add-on that gives federal, state and local agencies specialized skills, AI agents and connectors to the software they already run, including ServiceNow, Salesforce, Google Workspace, Outlook, SharePoint and Oracle applications. Google says the tools can interpret dense regulations, redact documents for Freedom of Information Act requests, rewrite jargon-heavy text in plain language and review procurement bids, with answers linked back to the exact source regulation or file.

A few agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the State of Missouri, have been testing it over the past few weeks. Google is now letting more agencies into the early-access phase to gather feedback and expects general availability later this year, with no set date; IT leaders will choose which connections to enable and for which users.

Agencies already have discounted access to Gemini at $0.47 a year per agency until November 15 under the extended OneGov deal, Nextgov/FCW notes, though Google has not published a price for the new add-on itself.

ChromeOS 156 has reached the Stable channel (platform 16836, browser 156.0.8078.42, rolled out from October 20), and the release is mostly a Gemini release. On Chromebook Plus, Gemini in Chrome gains media understanding: users can ask questions about audio or video they have already played in a tab and get summaries or specific details back, checkable at chrome://settings/ai/gemini.

The update also adds Gemini Talk to Type dictation, direct file uploads and file generation in Gemini in Chrome, and an interactive Quiz feature that turns a webpage, PDF, slide deck or video into a study session. ChromeOS 156 confirms that users can temporarily share saved Google Password Manager logins with the Gemini Spark agent so it can sign in to third-party web apps, with explicit consent plus a biometric or device unlock required for every task. 'Autofill with AI' is renamed Enhanced autofill and expanded to more regions.

Underneath, the release carries the 353 security fixes from Chrome 156, six of them critical memory-corruption patches, plus two high-severity Mali GPU kernel fixes specific to ChromeOS. Rollout is gradual: Chrome Unboxed updated a Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 to 156 and had not yet seen Talk to Type appear, so the headline features may lag the OS update itself on a given machine.

Google said on October 19 that Gemini Notebook now offers more creative control over two of its most popular outputs, Slide Decks and Video Overviews. Instead of jumping straight from a first prompt to a finished result, Notebook can now walk users through a short creation flow based directly on their sources.

In the new co-creator workflow, Notebook suggests topics to include from the user's sources, then lets them steer the content and guide the visual style and format. A new Review toggle lets users check the outline notes for slides or the producer notes for a video, and give feedback — such as adding an executive summary or swapping the order of a scene — before anything renders.

Users who already know what they want can specify it in the prompt and go straight to the review flow, or skip the toggle and generate as before. Google says the co-creation capabilities are rolling out globally to all Gemini Notebook users over the upcoming week.

OpenCode disclosed on Saturday, October 17 that a security breach tied to what it calls a large-scale distillation attack exposed provider API keys saved by some users of its paid Console product. The company put the share of Console users affected at 1.4% — specifically the subset who had linked external providers — and said it had emailed everyone affected that morning with the subject line "Action Required: Potential provider key breach." Users who received no email were not impacted, it said.

The keys at risk are users' own credentials for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and other providers — OpenCode, an open-source terminal coding agent built by Anomaly, works with models from more than 75 providers and says 16 million developers use it monthly. The intrusion came through a legacy system the company was in the process of decommissioning. Affected users were told to revoke and reissue each key through the provider's own dashboard and to watch their accounts for unexpected usage; some users have already reported unauthorized charges and token usage on their OpenAI and Anthropic accounts.

OpenCode said the incident is ongoing and that it is working with Anthropic, OpenAI and Google to remediate, adding that it cannot yet share more detail. Co-founder Dax Raad said his personal accounts were also being attacked. The episode is a new kind of breach for the AI era: what was stolen was not user data but billable access to frontier models, which is directly spendable by whoever holds it.

Update, October 19: Tibo Sottiaux posted that OpenAI's team worked with OpenCode to get OpenCode users who are also OpenAI API customers back in business, and to refund any credits that would have been drawn in the attack. He also invited defenders to request Daybreak Blue access — OpenAI's cyber-permissive setup for defence — rather than waiting until they have to deal with an incident. OpenCode co-founder Dax Raad said the models OpenCode was using to investigate the attack began refusing to help mid-incident as the analysis triggered safety guardrails, and that OpenCode now has Daybreak Blue access; Anthropic was reported to have revoked the affected Claude keys.

A conjecture Harold Grad made in 1967 — that certain three-dimensional plasma equilibria for magnetic confinement cannot exist without special symmetry — has fallen to AI-assisted work. University of Maryland physicist Matt Landreman published explicit counterexamples on September 22, crediting GPT-6 Astra Pro with discovering the solutions, and says he manually checked every equation.

Landreman's preprint landed one day after a separate team published its own counterexamples with Lean 4 certification, so AI does not get sole priority. A follow-on paper submitted October 5 then gave Landreman's results and the remaining open questions to a team of Google DeepMind Gemini 4 Argon agents, which produced broader solutions that remove an additional symmetry restriction; the researchers checked those derivations independently, and they held up.

The result is mathematics, not a reactor: it supplies exact solutions useful for theory and numerical testing of stellarator designs, and it neither proves better plasma confinement nor changes any engineering timeline. It is, though, another data point that frontier models from two rival labs are now producing checkable research results on the same problem within weeks of each other.

Google has added an exception to a long-standing privacy promise. Its privacy policy, in the version dated October 16, still says it does not show personalized ads based on content from Drive, Gmail or Google Photos — but now adds 'unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads.' Google is also testing ads in AI Mode for people who connect those apps through Personal Intelligence.

The link is opt-in: it applies once a user connects Gmail, Workspace or Photos to Search services under Search Services Personalization, turning on Personalized Recommendations and Connected Content Apps. Google says ads will not be based directly on a person's inbox or photo library, and advertisers cannot see the connected apps; instead Search may use summaries, excerpts and inferences drawn from them. Race, religion, sexual orientation and health are excluded from ad personalization.

It is still a reversal worth noting: in March, Google told reporters there were no ads for people who connect their apps with AI Mode and that this was not changing 'right now.' The change arrives as Personal Intelligence expands across Gemini and Search, putting years of email and photo context behind both answers and, now, ad selection for opted-in users.