The top AI agents that can live in your text messages
TechCrunch has compiled a list of notable AI agents that work through text messaging, ranging from general assistants to agents built for families, travel and work.
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Google optimizes Agent Development Kit's 200K-line Python codebase overnight with Gemini 4 Argon
Google says an unattended 11-hour run of Gemini 4 Argon produced two accepted optimisations to its Agent Development Kit codebase. They cut in-memory session preparation overhead by about 40% in long sessions and cold package import time by 21%.
OpenClaw 2026.9.34 long-term release adds safer agent file edits
OpenClaw 2026.9.34 is an extended-stable release, the project's equivalent of LTS, based on the late-September code with critical security updates, reliability fixes and support for new models. Its headline change makes apply_patch validate the whole set of edits before touching the workspace, so a bad later step can no longer delete files changed earlier.
Anthropic's sandbox-runtime: OS-level sandboxing for AI agents, no containers
Anthropic's open-source sandbox-runtime, the sandbox used by Claude Code, limits file and network access for agents, MCP servers and command-line tools. It relies on Seatbelt on macOS and bubblewrap on Linux rather than containers.
Building stateful engineering copilots with Letta
A tutorial shows how to build an engineering copilot with Letta whose memory goes beyond the prompt. It covers inspectable core memory, vector-based archival retrieval, state shared between agents, custom tools and portable workflows.
Google's Data Agent Kit hits general availability, splitting agent guardrails between skills and IAM
Google has made Data Agent Kit generally available: a free set of MCP tools and 37 open-source skills that connect coding agents to more than fifteen Google Data Cloud services. It ships two kinds of guardrail, one where a skill asks the agent to stop and one where an IAM deny policy blocks the call outright.