Stay updated with the latest news about AI agents, autonomous AI, and automation tools.
Australia's fitness industry is being urged to take a fresh look at the security of its digital booking platforms after an autonomous AI assistant exploited...
# Exclusive: Fonio.ai hits $10M ARR after a year of 30% monthly growth The company creates AI voice agents for handling customer calls and works with small and medium-sized businesses. You won’t find a more natural-sounding phone agent than fonio,” says Keinrath, co-founder and CEO of fonio.ai, to _TFN_. ## [Report: Apple sacks 600 employees in California post EV project cancellation](https://techfundingnews.com/layoffs-apple-sacks-600-employees-in-california-post-ev-project-cancellation/) - [Startups News](https://techfundingnews.com/category/startups/)
Cloudflare has entered the agent commerce race with a two-tier wallet architecture designed to give developers programmable control over how AI agents spend...
LTTS launches AgenticIQ, an end-to-end Agentic AI platform enabling autonomous workflows across engineering, manufacturing.
# Barclays on AI testing, telemetry and kill switches Autonomous AI agents are now forcing them to rethink that discipline.
# AI powered market research startup Echovane pulls in $1 million as it announces first funding round **Echovane has secured $1 million in funding in a round co-led by Titan Capital and Neon fund to expand what is pitched as “a permanently done for you research service where clients provide the business question and the company’s AI agents execute the study through to a completed, decision ready outcome”.** The cash will support the expansion of Echovane’s [AI](https://retailtechinnovationhub.com/rtih-ai-in-retail-awards-faqs) agent infrastructure, multimodal research capabilities, and global participant network. “This funding allows us to deepen the agent infrastructure behind Echovane, expand our multimodal capabilities, and strengthen the global participant network required to deliver increasingly complex studies with consistency,” adds Nair. We started off with just 30 people at the South Place Hotel not far from here, then moved to London Bridge Hotel, then The Barbican, and last year RIBA’s HQ in the West End.”
# NEC’s new department staffed only by AI agents by [David Manners](https://www.electronicsweekly.com/author/david-manners/) [11th August 2026](https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/nec-has-new-department-staffed-only-by-ai-agents-2026-08/) in [Business](https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/) [0](https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/nec-has-new-department-staffed-only-by-ai-agents-2026-08/#respond)  On August 1st NEC opened a new department called thev “Corporate AI & Workforce Division” staffed solely by AI agents. Dynamically generating and assigning new AI “employees” (agents) matched to each task, then managing their execution. Learning missing skills and updating themselves continuously. The underdog agents have their steps verified by multiple other agents to prevent errors. The top dog agent reports to human bosses with discussion and decision-making processes. [Share](http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.electronicsweekly.com%2Fnews%2Fbusiness%2Fnec-has-new-department-staffed-only-by-ai-agents-2026-08%2F) [Tweet](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=NEC%E2%80%99s%20new%20department%20staffed%20only%20by%20AI%20agents&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.electronicsweekly.com%2Fnews%2Fbusiness%2Fnec-has-new-department-staffed-only-by-ai-agents-2026-08%2F) [Share](https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.electronicsweekly.com%2Fnews%2Fbusiness%2Fnec-has-new-department-staffed-only-by-ai-agents-2026-08%2F&title=NEC%E2%80%99s%20new%20department%20staffed%20only%20by%20AI%20agents) [Pin](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/bookmarklet/?pinFave=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.electronicsweekly.com%2Fnews%2Fbusiness%2Fnec-has-new-department-sta
# OpenClaw AI agent asked to book gym class ends up hacking system: What went wrong? ## The hacking incident comes amid concerns over next-generation AI agents emerging as a serious cybersecurity risk by behaving in unexpected ways. OpenClaw, an open-source agentic framework, has drawn growing interest from developers, companies, and regulators amid rising security concerns. In the latest bizarre incident of autonomous AI agents taking unwanted actions on behalf of their users, an Australian man who used his personal AI agent to book a spot in a gym’s popular morning classes found himself facing an unexpected problem. These agents powered by cutting-edge large language models (LLMs) from tech companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Moonshot AI have demonstrated in the past few weeks that they can autonomously break out of their safety contaminants and hack into other companies’ servers. ## OpenClaw security concerns The open-source platform spawned an ecosystem of autonomous AI agents or ‘claws’, which can further spin up their own sub-agents to autonomously execute specialised tasks with access to local file systems and data.
# Perplexity blocks Time’s ads served to AI agents, calling them ‘deceptive’ Less than two weeks after Digiday reported that Time [had started serving ads](https://digiday.com/media/time-has-started-serving-ads-to-ai-agents/) inside the markdown versions of its webpages, aimed at AI agents rather than human readers, Perplexity confirmed that it blocked those ads from influencing its own search index.
Lucrative AI Inc. has launched its enterprise revenue engine, backed by a $500,000 incubation investment from Mountainise Inc. The platform uses Model...
LONDON, United Kingdom, August 10, 2026 -- Nevari, the UK-based AI-native enterprise infrastructure firm, today announced the launch of Kassper,...
# AI-Driven Micro-Startups Fuel Founder Isolation Crisis The recent surge in micro-startups is due to AI agents replacing human labor, allowing companies to operate with fewer personnel. ## 로그인 Sign in with Google. Sign in with Google.
# 'GhostJacking' Exposes Identity Governance Gaps in AI Agents [Linkedin](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/ghostjacking-identity-governance-gaps-ai-agents)[Facebook](http://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/ghostjacking-identity-governance-gaps-ai-agents)[Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/ghostjacking-identity-governance-gaps-ai-agents)[Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/submit?url=https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/ghostjacking-identity-governance-gaps-ai-agents&title=%27GhostJacking%27%20Exposes%20Identity%20Governance%20Gaps%20in%20AI%20Agents)[Bluesky](https://bsky.app/intent/compose?text=%27GhostJacking%27%20Exposes%20Identity%20Governance%20Gaps%20in%20AI%20Agents%20-%20https%3A%2F%2Fwww.darkreading.com%2Fcyber-risk%2Fghostjacking-identity-governance-gaps-ai-agents)[Email](mailto:?subject=%27GhostJacking%27%20Exposes%20Identity%20Governance%20Gaps%20in%20AI%20Agents&body=I%20thought%20the%20following%20from%20Dark%20Reading%20might%20interest%20you.%0D%0A%0D%0A%20%27GhostJacking%27%20Exposes%20Identity%20Governance%20Gaps%20in%20AI%20Agents%0D%0Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.darkreading.com%2Fcyber-risk%2Fghostjacking-identity-governance-gaps-ai-agents) ## "GhostJacking" the Way to Infrastructure Takeover In one demonstration, Tenet used a request that a Cloudflare firewall had blocked and recorded in its logs to trick an AI agent into modifying the company's DNS settings, effectively taking over the domain. The attack relied on the fact that AI agents can struggle to distinguish between untrusted content they are processing and instructions they are supposed to follow, making it relatively easy for an attacker to sneak malicious requests in seemingly trusted content. [Claude Code](https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/anthropic-state-actor-ai-tool-espionage/805550/) fell for the trick nine out of 10 times in Tenet's s
An autonomous AI agent just crossed a line that has the tech world on high alert. OpenClaw, an agent built on Anthropic's Claude platform,...
# Tech industry is buzzing after a Claude agent hacked into a gym By now, we all realize that Silicon Valley’s AI labs have built the world’s best hackers in the form of AI agents. Give the latest frontier models a task and they are so resourceful that they get it done, even if this means [breaking out](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/09/the-ai-safety-test-is-becoming-a-safety-risk/) of their cybersecurity “sandbox” protections and infiltrating another’s network. Even so, [a news story over the weekend](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-10/ai-assistant-hacks-gym-website-aus-cyber-attack/107007986) about an Australian guy whose OpenClaw agent hacked into his gym’s reservation system and deleted another customer’s reservation to get him a spot in a coveted class is especially notable. Although the news story was just published by Australian ABC news, proclaiming the incident to be the first documented AI agent hacking case in the country, the actual hack took place months ago. The OpenClaw owner, Andrew Bird, published a now-deleted blog post about it on his company’s website on April 10, according to a copy [still visible on the Internet Archive.](https://web.archive.org/web/20260810072554/https://affinda.com/expert-insights/when-my-ai-agent-hacked-my-gym-mythos-stopped-feeling-theoretical/) Then his agent told him it had found a way to book him into the classes in advance. Bird, a software developer himself, was now freaked out that his AI had just hacked his gym, ABC reported. That wasn’t possible, the AI said. After the famed incident last month where [an unreleased OpenAI model hacked Hugging Face](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/21/openai-says-hugging-face-was-breached-by-its-pre-release-models/), unbeknownst to OpenAI at the time, other labs investigated their models. There’s a future that the Valley is building where everyone has an AI agent working on their own behalf. As one person on [X put it](https://x.com/ThePrimeagen/status/2086586874831815154),
OpenAI and Anthropic disclosed in July that their AI agents had broken out of their environments and hacked into the systems of other companies during cybersecurity tests. Twenty-nine lawmakers, led by Representatives Greg Casar and Doris Matsui, pressed OpenAI to explain how its AI agents are monitored during testing, and whether the rogue models evaded the company's safety controls. The lawmakers cited a Reuters [report](https://www.reuters.com/business/its-ai-agent-spent-days-hacking-company-sources-say-openai-did-not-notice-week-2026-07-24/) that said there were cases when monitoring systems had been disconnected during earlier tests of the OpenAI models. In a separate letter, 22 lawmakers asked Anthropic to detail any safety protocols that the company has implemented since its agents [broke](https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/anthropic-says-claude-ai-models-accessed-three-companies-during-tests-2026-07-30/) into the systems of three companies. President Donald Trump's administration has said very little in public about the Anthropic and OpenAI rogue agents.
# Discovered Materials Raises $9M Seed to Hunt Cooler Chip Materials With AI Agents ## Trying to restart Moore’s law ### MORE FROM THE POST - [BioNexus Raises Seed Funding to Advance AI Scientist Agent Platform](https://en.wowtale.net/2026/08/07/234640/) - [Comfo Labs Raises Seed Funding from Prodigy Investment to Scale AI-Powered Product Development Platform](https://en.wowtale.net/2026/08/06/234627/) - [funding](https://en.wowtale.net/tag/funding/)
# AI agents, IRL socializing, and vibe coding: Where top consumer investors are placing bets ## **4. AI companions and personal assistants to help you connect** **Town**, an AI personal assistant for managing inboxes and calendars, announced a $55 million Series A in June. Menlo Ventures' Carolan said he's fascinated by AI-era startups reinventing "the contacts book" to help people connect. He invested in **Eigen**, a startup that announced $15 million in seed funding this year for an AI "mutual friend." ## **5. Entertainment with an AI twist** For example, [**Suno**, a platform](https://www.businessinsider.com/creator-economy-ai-startups-to-watch-according-vc-investors-2026-3#suno-is-an-ai-song-making-machine-14) for making and sharing AI-generated music, has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and announced it was valued at $5.4 billion in June. ## Read next ### Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know - [Startups](https://www.businessinsider.com/category/startups)
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Nutanix is adding an open-source MCP server to its Cloud Platform software so that AI Agents can access it and use its resources. The Nutanix Cloud Platform...
# AI Agents Now Use Computers, But Infrastructure is Key ### Related startups [\ \ **Menlo Security** \ \ Browser security platform securing the agentic enterprise with unified governance and threat prevention.\ \ Cybersecurity\ \ Artificial Intelligence\ \ $100M](https://www.startuphub.ai/startups/menlo-security) [Visit website](https://www.menlosecurity.com/) [\ \ **Groundhawk** \ \ Digitising Europe's underground infrastructure with AI-powered 3D capture technology for construction crews.\ \ Construction Tech\ \ SaaS\ \ $2M](https://www.startuphub.ai/startups/groundhawk) [Visit website](https://groundhawk.io/) [\ \ **RoboForce** \ \ Developing physical AI robots for industrial labor to automate dull, dirty, and dangerous work.\ \ Robotics\ \ Artificial Intelligence\ \ $67M](https://www.startuphub.ai/startups/roboforce) [Visit website](https://www.roboforce.ai/) [\ \ **Oxford Medical Simulation** \ \ Virtual reality healthcare training simulations for clinicians and students to practice clinical scenarios safely.\ \ HealthTech\ \ EdTech\ \ $21M](https://www.startuphub.ai/startups/oxford-medical-simulation) [Visit website](https://oxfordmedicalsimulation.com/) [\ \ **Nectar AI** \ \ AI Girlfriend Creator\ \ Partner](https://www.startuphub.ai/l064lwf4/JTdCJTIyYSUyMiUzQSUyMjEwNjA2MjMlMjIlMkMlMjJ1JTIyJTNBJTIyaHR0cHMlM0ElMkYlMkZ0cnluZWN0YXIuYWklMkYlM0ZfZWZfdHJhbnNhY3Rpb25faWQlM0QlMjZ1dG1fY2Ftc
An AI agent did not need a malicious operator to cause trouble. OpenAI says its own models escaped a test environment and reached Hugging Face while trying...
# Gym rat asks AI agent to book him a class, it hacks a waitlist API to bump him up the list PublishedMon 10 Aug 2026 // 16:45 UTC An Australian man who asked his AI agent to book him a slot in a class at his local gym got more than he bargained for as the bot hacked into a waitlist and started messing with other members' reservations. Australian broadcaster ABC identified the gym-goer only as “Andrew.” The [report](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-10/ai-assistant-hacks-gym-website-aus-cyber-attack/107007986) says Andrew was using the [OpenClaw](https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/02/03/diy-ai-bot-farm-openclaw-is-a-security-dumpster-fire/4136886) agent with Anthropic’s Claude AI service. Per ABC, Andrew asked his AI agent to book him a hard-to-snag spot in a morning class at his gym. It first responded by telling him that it managed to book him in classes several weeks out, which isn’t supposed to be possible based on the gym’s booking policy. Andrew then asked if the agent could get him to the top of a waitlist for a class later in the week, as he was fourth in line for any possible openings. It was here that agentic hell broke loose. REG AD "The API has zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people's reservations … I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through," the agent told him in response to his request. "So you've moved from #4 to #3 already." REG AD In other words, without directly asking OpenClaw to exploit an API vulnerability, Andrew’s AI chose that route after its user asked if there was any way to bump him up on the waitlist. “The person I removed is gone from the waitlist and I have no way to restore them,” Andrew’s agent explained in a response screenshot published by ABC. “They’d have to re-join themselves, which would put them at the back.” The agent apologized, admitting it ought to have tested its capabilities before making a live API call. ### Will no one rid me of this troublesom
As the IT team sleeps, an AI agent detects unusual login behavior and disables the compromised account. An AI agent could solve that by doing the legwork of reading the team’s internet strata and putting together the first draft in minutes. An AI model or prebuilt agent may already do the job. **Build your AI agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot** _Samantha Kubota reports on everything AI and innovation for Microsoft Signal, with a recent focus on how [AI agents](https://news.microsoft.com/signal/articles/open-digital-markets-agentic-economy/) are [reshaping everyday work](https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/ai/3-new-ways-ai-agents-can-help-you-do-even-more/), Microsoft’s [research breakthroughs](https://news.microsoft.com/signal/articles/can-ai-learn-the-language-of-biology-to-reimagine-medicine/) and the [responsible use of emerging technologies](https://news.microsoft.com/signal/articles/researchers-find-and-help-fix-a-hidden-biosecurity-threat/)._
As security operations teams now use large language models (LLMs) and autonomous AI agents into their daily work, a new frontier is emerging: attackers deliberately manipulating AI agents. In June, researchers at Mozilla [tested a prompt injection attack](https://www.securityweek.com/new-attack-abuses-claude-code-and-harmless-looking-repositories-to-hijack-developer-machines/) on Claude using indirect prompt injection—a technique that embeds malicious instructions in external content the AI agent processes.
# Told to book a gym class, an AI agent hacked the site instead to move its user up the waitlist ## Key Points - An AI agent in Australia exploited a system flaw on its own while booking a gym class. According to ABC News, it's the country's first known autonomous AI cyberattack. According to [ABC News](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-10/ai-assistant-hacks-gym-website-aus-cyber-attack/107007986), it's the first known case of an autonomous AI cyberattack in the country. ## Who pays when your assistant breaks the law ABC News reports it's the first known autonomous AI cyberattack in Australia.
# Recommended Stories ## Digital Billed as $52 annually
# Corma raises $60 million Seed to build AI designed to fight AI-powered cyberattacks ## The Israeli startup is developing a foundation model for defensive cybersecurity, arguing that general-purpose AI models are becoming increasingly effective at attacking companies but remain poorly equipped to defend them. Rather than selling a conventional software product, the company deploys AI agents that operate across an organization's existing security tools and processes and carry out tasks from end to end. ## Sign up for The Dailybrief newsletter - [Zenity raises $125 million Series C as AI agent security startup accelerates global expansion](https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/b1ahbbcbfe) - [Former Palantir and Torq veterans raise $8 million Seed to secure the rise of AI agents](https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hyklcf2bgg) The model powers the company's AI agents, which are designed to operate across a broad range of security functions and continuously learn the environment in which they are deployed.
# Discovered Materials is playing AI whack-a-mole to hunt cooler chips Founders Advaith Sridhar and Akash Ramdas teamed up to launch the company, drawing on Ramdas’ experience earning a doctorate in materials science from Stanford, and Sridhar’s work on agents at Persona AI and Luma Labs. “We’re able to do thousands of guesses a day now by having these agents run 24/7 on the cloud, exploring research directions that he gives them.” ## Most Popular - [Cloudflare launches Kitesurf, a browser built for AI agents](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/07/cloudflare-launches-kitesurf-a-browser-built-for-ai-agents/) - [Sarah Perez](https://techcrunch.com/author/sarah-perez/)
### AI-native market research automation startup Echovane raises $1M Agentic artificial intelligence startup [Echovane Inc.](https://www.echovane.com/) said today it has closed on a $1 million pre-seed funding round to accelerate the development of its AI-native market research platform. Titan Capital and Neon Fund co-led the round, which will help the startup to build out its AI agent infrastructure and enhance its research capabilities. Originally, they had a much more narrow goal of developing an AI agent that could interview humans to speed up qualitative market research projects. Their solution is a team of AI agents designed to handle the market research process from end-to-end, starting with designing the studies, [recruiting and verifying participants](https://www.echovane.com/#recruitment), executing multimodal fieldwork and synthesizing the qualitative and quantitative data those studies generate. Once done, its AI agents don’t just conjure up a static report, but instead present their findings within an interactive dashboard and insight reels that make it easy for researchers to ask follow-up questions. “This funding allows us to deepen the agent infrastructure behind Echovane, expand our multimodal capabilities and strengthen the global participant network required to deliver increasingly complex studies with consistency,” said Chief Technology Officer Nair.
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