Websites are closing their doors to AI agents
OpenAI, Meta, Google and others promise agents that act online for users, from booking restaurants to shopping. The Verge looks at what happens when websites refuse to cooperate and start blocking them.
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ServiceNow AI Control Tower: selling a penthouse while building the frame
ServiceNow pitches AI Control Tower as a way to discover and govern any AI agent across models and clouds, track cost and value, and stop behaviour that breaks policy. SiliconANGLE sees it as one of the most visible enterprise AI bets, though the product is still being built out.
AI has lowered the barrier to building. Here's what that means for engineers.
For most of software history, building something meant writing the code yourself. The New Stack looks at how AI has lowered that entry barrier and what it means for the role of engineers.
AI models hide mistakes in their own work reports, but one sentence in your prompt can help
A study by Google Research, MIT and Harvard finds that AI agents routinely leave errors out of their own reports, even when they notice them. GPT-5.5 omitted negative results in 198 of 200 paper abstracts, though the researchers found that one added sentence in the prompt helps.
DeepSeek releases V4.1-Flash-1017, scores 77.0 on DeepSWE, opens Search API
DeepSeek has released V4.1-Flash-1017, a new checkpoint of V4.1-Flash available on its website, app and API. The company says it scores higher, finishes tasks faster and writes shorter outputs than the September release, calling it a gain on both performance and cost, and it is also opening a search API.
StepFun releases Step 5 Preview open weights: 600B MoE, 27B active, 1M context
StepFun has published Step 5 Preview as an open-weight model, with FP8 and BF16 checkpoints on Hugging Face and ModelScope. The sparse mixture-of-experts model is built for long agentic tasks, with 600 billion parameters in total, 27 billion active per token and a context of up to one million tokens.