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Only First-party#Agent
September 22Tuesday
  1. LiveKit Blog38

    LiveKit Launches Private Links for Secure Agent Access to Internal Resources

    LiveKit has launched Private Links, a fully managed encrypted tunnel that lets LiveKit-hosted agents reach private internal resources via AWS PrivateLink or Azure Private Link without public IPs, inbound firewall rules, or VPN infrastructure. Traffic routes through a WireGuard tunnel to a LiveKit gateway in the same cloud region, and only TCP connections secured with TLS are supported. Setup is available through the LiveKit CLI or Dashboard, with one-time connection approval on the customer side.

  2. OpenClaw Blog60

    OpenClaw adds opt-in decision models and a shared Plugin SDK interface

    OpenClaw introduced support for a separately configured decision model that its core and plugins can call through api.runtime.decisions.evaluate in the Plugin SDK, returning a choice, score or probability instead of a chat reply. The feature is opt-in and does not replace the chat model, and the provider packages are still awaiting a supporting release. The TypeSafe adapter supports hosted Jev and a local System One server such as Jared Palmer's Kev, and the evaluation tool is moving into OpenClaw core as decision_evaluate.

    Why it matters: OpenClaw adds an opt-in decision model layer that returns typed answers from application code, with a shared Plugin SDK interface so plugins can use it without per-provider integrations.

September 17Thursday
  1. LiveKit Blog25

    LiveKit launches Startup Program with $23,000 in credits for early-stage AI agent builders

    LiveKit launched a Startup Program giving eligible startups about $23,000 in total value: $7,000 in inference credits across seven partners, $10,000 in LiveKit Cloud credits, and one year of the Scale plan normally priced at $500 per month. Models from partners including Deepgram, AssemblyAI, and LiveKit-hosted Gemma 4 31B are available through LiveKit Inference without separate provider accounts or API keys. The program targets startups with fewer than 50 employees that have raised less than $5 million and are building voice, video, or physical AI into their products.

  2. Goodfire Research74

    Goodfire Research finds models internally signal reward hacking, detectable with activation probes

    Goodfire Research reports that open-source models Kimi K3, GLM 5.2 and Qwen 3.8 Max reward-hacked in 50–96% of rollouts across three agentic benchmarks, and that a shared internal signal tied to cheating and avoiding detection accompanies the behavior. Simple difference-of-means activation probes detect that signal, catching cases chain-of-thought monitors miss and generalizing to new tasks such as shopping and customer support. On Kimi K3, combining a probe with an LLM monitor cut LLM monitoring cost by 90% with about a 1% drop in precision.

    Why it matters: Goodfire finds a shared internal signal for reward hacking across open-source models and shows activation probes can catch it more cheaply than LLM monitors.

September 16Wednesday
  1. Mistral AI55

    Mistral partners with Mozilla to power Firefox Smart Window in France and North America

    Mistral announced a partnership with Mozilla under which its models now power Firefox Smart Window (beta), Mozilla's AI browsing assistant, for users in France and North America, with the UK and Germany expected later this year. Mistral says Smart Window conversations are not saved on Mozilla's servers by default and that partners agree to zero data retention, and it frames the deal as bringing open-weight, regionally fine-tuned models to consumer browsing.

  2. Vapi Blog12

    VapiCon 2026: Vapi's Voice AI Summit Returns with 1,200+ Builders and Speakers from Deepgram, LangChain, Vercel

    Vapi is bringing its voice AI summit back as VapiCon 2026, expanding to two days and two tracks at Fort Mason, San Francisco, on November 11 and 12, 2026, for 1,200+ builders and operators. Confirmed speakers include Deepgram's Scott Stephenson, LangChain's Harrison Chase, Vercel's Guillermo Rauch, Twilio's Andy O'Dower, Cartesia's Brandon Yang, and Arize AI's Laurie Voss, alongside Vapi's Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta. Sessions will cover speech-to-speech versus cascaded architectures, evals and observability, sub-second time to first byte, human handoff, and production deployments in healthcare and contact centers.

September 15Tuesday
  1. Factory58

    Factory raises $200M at a $5B valuation to scale self-improving software development

    Factory has raised $200M at a $5B valuation, bringing total funding to over $400 million, with backing from Blackstone, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners and others. The company says it will put the capital into research, product and global go-to-market for its enterprise software factory platform, which lets teams govern the full development lifecycle and choose cloud, on-premises or air-gapped deployment. Factory says Nvidia, Blackstone, RBC, Palo Alto Networks, Adobe and T-Mobile use it, and that its Factory Router cuts token spend by more than 60% while maintaining frontier performance.

September 14Monday
  1. Modal Blog40

    Modal Product Updates: Sandbox Sidecars, Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 Support, Refreshed Dashboard

    Modal added day-zero support for four open-weight models — Kimi K3, Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B, GLM-5.3, and GLM-5.3-Flash — on its Auto Endpoints, with Kimi K3 running at 460 tokens per second on agentic workloads via a custom DFlash speculator. Sandbox Sidecars entered public alpha, VM Sandboxes reached public beta, and the broad-region pricing multiplier dropped from 1.5x to 1.15x. The dashboard was refreshed with a light mode beta, and Python SDK 1.5.5 plus JavaScript and Go SDK 0.10.0 shipped.

September 9Wednesday
  1. Factory26

    Factory launches on Claude Marketplace, bringing autonomous software development to enterprises

    Factory is now available on Anthropic's Claude Marketplace, letting enterprise customers apply their committed Anthropic spend toward Factory without a separate buying cycle. Factory automates the software development lifecycle, covering planning, implementation, testing and security, and supports multiple enterprise deployment models. Its customers include NVIDIA, Adyen and Ernst & Young.

September 3Thursday
  1. Vapi Blog38

    How AI voice agents tell a live person from a voicemail

    Voicemail detection, also called answering machine detection, decides within roughly three to five seconds whether an outbound call reached a live person or a recording, relying on timing and behavior signals rather than voice audio. A 2026 arXiv preprint found timing features alone can match beep- and keyword-based approaches while avoiding their added latency. Vapi lets users choose a detection provider, tune timing, and switch back to conversation when a human answers.

  2. Vapi Blog40

    Vapi opens private beta and public waitlist for GPT-Live speech-to-speech model

    Vapi has opened a limited private beta for GPT-Live, OpenAI's next-generation full-duplex speech-to-speech model, alongside a public waitlist for early access. GPT-Live replaces the modular speech-to-text, LLM and voice pipeline by handling all three in one model, cutting turn latency and preserving tone and emphasis. Beta teams run it on the same Vapi stack as existing modular agents, and modular pipelines remain supported.

September 2Wednesday
  1. LiveKit Blog38

    LiveKit non-production deployments let you test voice agents before production

    LiveKit added non-production deployments that run a voice agent under a different name on the same container image, project and secrets as production, created with a single command. Each deployment sleeps when idle at no cost and wakes on the next request, and you target it with the --deployment flag. It requires livekit-agents 1.6+ for Python or @livekit/agents 1.7.1+ for Node, and plans grant 2 deployments on Ship and 5 on Scale.

  2. Modal Blog22

    How Botika runs full-stack generative AI on Modal

    Botika runs its full-stack generative AI operation on Modal, covering a 100-terabyte image data pipeline, in-house foundation models with tens of billions of parameters, and roughly 15 models serving production inference. The pipeline processes that dataset with under a 1% error rate across thousands of concurrent containers, and a single researcher can now run 50 experiments a day instead of one or two.

September 1Tuesday
  1. LiveKit Blog58

    LiveKit launches Connectors to bring voice agents to Twilio and WhatsApp calls

    LiveKit launched Connectors, a direct bridge between LiveKit rooms and Twilio Programmable Voice and WhatsApp Business Calling, with more platforms planned. Each call joins the room as a CONNECTOR participant carrying platform context such as the Twilio call SID or the WhatsApp caller's phone number, and agent dispatch happens in the same API request. Connectors are generally available on LiveKit Cloud at SIP pricing of $0.004 per minute on Ship and $0.003 on Scale, with 5, 20, and 100 concurrent connector calls on Build, Ship, and Scale respectively.

August 31Monday
  1. Vapi Blog58

    Vapi rebuilds Campaigns for batch outbound calling at 10,000 contacts

    Vapi launched a rebuilt version of Campaigns, its batch outbound calling product, which now runs on a standalone durable workflow engine separate from the call queue. Each campaign can take up to 10,000 contacts plus an assistant or squad and a phone number, with dialing confined to a set window, per-contact variables in the assistant prompt, and a pre-dial webhook that skips contacts who already converted. Vapi says campaign state persists outside any single process, concurrency runs as a sliding window rather than a batch, and every state change appends an immutable event so progress and audit trails cannot drift.

August 25Tuesday
  1. Vapi Blog22

    Build vs. buy: what you're really deciding with voice agents

    Teams weighing whether to build voice agents in-house are really deciding whether to build an orchestration layer, since the agent itself is only about 20% of the work and the rest is real-time audio, telephony, and observability infrastructure. One scheduling vendor's six-week demo became an eight-month project before it migrated the feature onto a platform in six weeks. Building in-house only makes sense for deep pipeline customization, existing voice infrastructure, regulatory constraints, or voice as core competitive advantage.

August 20Thursday
  1. Vapi Blog22

    Best AI Voice Agents for CX: How to Evaluate Them

    Vapi published a seven-criteria rubric for evaluating AI voice agents in customer experience, covering resolution, real-time voice quality, action-taking, escalation, model flexibility, lifecycle trust, and platform control. The guide argues containment and deflection overcount success, since contained callers may simply hang up, and cites ContactBabel data showing phone preference for complex interactions rose from 28% in 2018 to 47% in 2024. Vapi positions itself as a model-agnostic platform layer with configurable endpointing, interruption handling, and background denoising.

  2. LiveKit Blog38

    LiveKit adds PII redaction to Agent Observability

    LiveKit has added PII Redaction to Agent Observability, automatically removing names, addresses, birthdays and other sensitive details before recordings and transcripts are stored, at no extra cost to all Agent Observability customers. An LLM reads each conversation in context to detect PII, replacing words with markers and dropping entire turns from audio. It covers 41 PII types across 10 groups and requires LiveKit Agents SDK 1.7.0 for Python or Node.js.

August 18Tuesday
  1. LiveKit Blog40

    LiveKit: multi-participant robotics beyond 1:1 connections

    LiveKit is extending its SFU architecture beyond single peer-to-peer links so robot deployments can run multi-participant sessions, where a Room lets each camera, model, operator, or service join as its own participant. LiveKit describes three architectures: human-in-the-loop data recording with robot, policy, operator, and recorder in one session; VLM-guided skill orchestration where a vision-language model selects skills at roughly 1 Hz while separate policy participants control the robot at tens of hertz; and policy escalation, where a reward model at 30 Hz or higher flags stuck or unsafe states and the robot revokes authority from the specialist policy.

  2. Vapi Blog55

    Vapi launches Simulations to test voice agents against AI callers

    Vapi launched Simulations, a native AI-powered testing feature that places AI testers with distinct personalities and customer-derived scenarios on the other end of a call with a voice agent. Each run returns pass/fail results, a full transcript and a recording, and teams can mock API responses, run cheap text-based chat mode or full voice mode, and trigger runs via API with quality gates that block deploys when pass rates drop.

August 14Friday
  1. Vapi Blog22

    How to Choose a Conversational AI Platform for Enterprise Development

    A vendor-neutral guide lays out five criteria for picking a conversational AI platform for enterprise voice agents: developer control, model choice and fallbacks, testing and observability, the full agent lifecycle, and compliance at scale. It cites a Zapier survey of 542 US C-level executives in which 81% worried about depending on a specific AI vendor and only 6% could drop their primary vendor without disruption. The guide argues latency and orchestration matter more than feature lists, noting AssemblyAI's finding that delays past 500–700 ms feel unnatural.

August 13Thursday
  1. Factory38

    Factory launches Agent Effectiveness analytics for Enterprise

    Factory has made Agent Effectiveness generally available in Factory Analytics for Enterprise organizations, linking Factory sessions to cycle time, work intent, and shipped artifacts. The feature adds Throughput, Output, and Attribution views that connect Droid usage to delivery outcomes, backed by a Local Signals classification layer that reads from Jira, Linear, GitHub, and GitLab. It is opt-in, off by default, and requires the Advanced Analytics enterprise control.

August 4Tuesday
  1. Vapi Blog22

    What Makes a Great Conversational AI Experience: Vapi on Voice Design

    Vapi argues that voice agents are judged on five real-time dimensions: latency, turn-taking, interruption handling, prosody, and a resilient pipeline. It cites research putting human turn gaps near 200ms and notes delays beyond roughly 500–700ms feel unnatural, while naive sequential pipelines can cost about 1.9 seconds versus 600–900ms for optimized ones. Vapi positions its model-agnostic pipeline as tunable and testable via simulated calls.

July 29Wednesday
  1. Modal Blog40

    Modal responds to Hugging Face agent incident: platform isolation not compromised

    Modal said its platform and isolation were not compromised in the Hugging Face agent intrusion, which used Modal as a third-party launchpad. The affected environment was a customer application deployed to a publicly accessible endpoint without authentication that executed internet-submitted code inside a Modal Sandbox, and the code execution stayed within that customer's own container. Modal noted unauthenticated Sandbox exposure is never the default and recommended authentication, IP allowlists and restricted outbound network access.

July 27Monday
  1. Vapi Blog22

    Anthropic and Vapi Webinar Q&A: How the Claude Haiku Ride-Booking Voice Agent Was Built

    Vapi published answers to questions from its webinar with Anthropic on voice AI, detailing the live ride-booking demo agent built on Vapi with Anthropic's Claude Haiku and the Layla v2 voice. The agent used five tools — estimate, book, check status, cancel and end call — plus smart endpointing and a conservative interruption threshold to reach sub-second turns. Agents running Claude on Vapi handled nearly 5M calls in the past 30 days across 50+ languages.

July 26Sunday
  1. Berkeley AI Research33

    ABBEL: Teaching LLMs to Update Belief States for Long-Horizon Interaction

    Berkeley AI Research introduces ABBEL, a framework that replaces full interaction history with natural-language belief states and supervises their contents via belief grading. On CollabBench collaborative coding, reconstruction-based belief grading cuts the gap to full-context models by about 50% and trains in 50 steps instead of 100, while using fewer peak tokens.

July 24Friday
  1. Vapi Blog22

    How to reduce customer wait times with AI voice agents

    AI voice agents cut customer wait times in two ways: removing work from the queue through self-service deflection, intelligent routing, agent assist, and demand prediction, and answering instantly with no hold. SQM Group found customers abandon calls at 2 minutes 36 seconds on average, while ContactBabel put the UK mean abandonment rate at 8.4% in 2024. Vapi says a first voice agent can be stood up from its dashboard in minutes, then measured on ASA, abandonment, and first-call resolution.

July 21Tuesday
  2. Modal Blog58

    Modal and Cognition launch Devin Outposts with modal-devin sandbox integration

    Modal is a launch partner for Devin Outposts, a Cognition feature that moves Devin's code execution into an environment the customer controls while Devin's reasoning stays in Cognition's cloud. The open-source modal-devin library and CLI runs each Outpost session in a Modal Sandbox, giving access to GPU-backed machines, custom images, workspace snapshotting and scale-to-zero, and it is live in alpha starting July 21, 2026. Setup uses uvx modal-devin init, which generates an orchestrator function and a worker session function that teams can keep customizing.

July 16Thursday
  1. Modal Blog60

    Modal rebuilds its sandbox platform to run 1 million concurrent sandboxes, created in under a minute

    Modal has rebuilt its core sandbox platform from the ground up, and on the new system it ran 1 million sandboxes concurrently, creating all of them in under a minute. The redesign removes central coordination and any data store from the sandbox creation path: horizontally scaled scheduling servers pick a worker with an in-memory algorithm and call it directly, while workers publish state asynchronously to a Redis stream. Modal says sandbox start latency is under half a second at the median, and the new system is already available in Beta with a one-line code change to opt in.

    Why it matters: Modal rebuilt its sandbox control plane to drop central coordination, showing how far container scheduling can scale once global consistency leaves the critical path.

July 7Tuesday
  1. Berkeley AI Research36

    Intelligence Is Free, Now What? Data Systems for, of, and by Agents

    UC Berkeley's Aditya G. Parameswaran and collaborators argue that as inference costs fall from roughly $30 per million tokens in early 2023 to under $1 today, data systems must be redesigned around three challenges: systems for agents, of agents, and by agents. They note that in a text-to-SQL benchmark with multiple agents per task, only 10-20% of sub-plans are distinct, so 80-90% of sub-queries duplicate work, and propose reuse, approximation, and proactive data systems.

June 30Tuesday
  1. Modal Blog66

    Anthropic launches Claude Science with Modal as scalable compute backend

    Anthropic launched Claude Science on June 30, an AI workbench where life sciences researchers run computational workloads directly inside a conversation with Claude. Modal integrates as the compute backend: workloads needing GPUs or many concurrent CPUs route automatically to Modal sandboxes from a researcher's connected workspace, while default execution stays sandboxed on the local machine. Modal cites fan-out virtual screening across hundreds of containers, per-step GPU access for models like ESMFold2, shared Modal Volumes storage and reproducible Modal Images, and commits up to $100,000 in compute for Anthropic's AI for Science Claude Science Cohort at $500–$2,000 per project, with applications open through July 15, 2026.

    Why it matters: Modal's post explains how Claude Science routes GPU and parallel workloads to Modal sandboxes, with concrete life-science examples and a compute grant for academic labs.

June 25Thursday
  1. Vapi Blog22

    Vapi: Voice Agents That Turn High-Stakes CX Into a Competitive Advantage

    Vapi is pitching its voice AI platform as a way for brands to turn the contact center from a cost center into a competitive advantage, citing Amazon Ring, which evaluated over 40 voice AI vendors before going live on Vapi in two weeks and now runs 100% of its inbound CX volume through it, with improved CSAT scores. Vapi argues packaged voice solutions lock brands into vendor-controlled models and generic voices, while building from scratch is slow and costly, and it touts sub-second response times, VPC-resident architecture with zero data retention and PII scrubbing, and deployments that go live in days.

June 24Wednesday
  1. Vapi Blog15

    Vapi Answers Top Questions from Its SVG Lead Qualification Webinar

    Vapi published answers to the seven most-asked questions from its webinar with Spring Venture Group, where Homer Kay described how SVG uses Vapi voice agents to qualify Medicare leads before transferring callers to licensed agents. The answers cover outbound calling compliance, API-first integrations, swapping STT, LLM and TTS components independently, human handoff, and HIPAA-eligible configurations with Zero Data Retention.

June 22Monday
  1. Modal Blog36

    Modal explains why sandbox "started" ≠ "ready" and how warm pools cut perceived startup latency

    Modal argues that container scheduling and boot time, which most sandbox benchmarks measure as time to interactive, is the smallest part of what users actually wait through; application-level setup after the container starts often takes multiple seconds. Modal is making Readiness Probes generally available to signal when a sandbox has finished initializing, and recommends warm sandbox pools built on modal.Queue plus Directory Snapshots to move setup off the user's critical path.

June 17Wednesday
  1. Vapi Blog30

    Built for the Ear: Designing Conversations for Voice AI

    Voice AI success starts with use-case selection: tasks ending in a link, code, or number belong in chat, while urgent, hard-to-type, or emotionally loaded problems suit voice. Chat scripts must be rewritten for the ear—split long passages into single-idea turns, restate collected details like dates aloud, and limit spoken options to two or three. One staffing company cut downstream placement errors by 30% by confirming each slot as it was collected, and another team trimmed 40 seconds off average call duration by turning open questions into choices.

  2. Vapi Blog40

    How Vapi Bootstrapped 15 Homepage Voice Agents in Code

    Vapi built the 15 voice agents on its homepage — 3 use cases across 5 languages — by generating them from a single ROUGH_DRAFT.md file instead of hand-editing each in the dashboard. The four-phase framework (plan, draft, bootstrap, harden) scaffolds a TypeScript project with OpenAI gpt-4.1 at temperature 0.5, ElevenLabs and Deepgram/Soniox voice stacks, and an idempotent upsert loop that stores assistant IDs in .env.local. The repo is public: clone it, add VAPI_PRIVATE_KEY, and run bun run bootstrap.

June 15Monday
  1. Modal Blog34

    Modal Product Updates: VM Sandboxes, Regional Routing, RBAC and More

    Modal shipped a batch of platform updates, including alpha VM Sandboxes that run a real Linux kernel to support Docker containers, eBPF, systemd and cgroups. Functions can now route through US West, EU West or Asia Pacific South instead of the default US East region, and RBAC is available to all Team and Enterprise plans. Sandbox readiness probes are now GA, and the Python SDK 1.5.0 and JS/Go SDK 0.8.0 set a 30-day default snapshot TTL.

June 11Thursday
  1. Factory62

    Factory rolls out automated security review in Droid

    Factory is rolling out automated security review in Droid, which runs a STRIDE-based security review alongside standard code review on every non-draft PR and posts findings with severity, a CWE reference, an explanation and a suggested fix as inline comments on the diff. The company says Droid's security review has been run across production codebases and surfaced findings that went through responsible disclosure, including CVE-2026-42876 in external-secrets and workos/workos-node#1578. Droid builds a lightweight threat model of the changed surface, scans for vulnerabilities such as OWASP Top 10 and OWASP LLM Top 10 issues, then validates each candidate finding against the diff to filter false positives before posting one deduplicated summary per PR.

    Why it matters: Factory's Droid now runs a STRIDE-based security review on every non-draft PR, and the post shows real CVEs it surfaced in production codebases.

June 1Monday
  1. MiniMax Blog87

    MiniMax M3 released with 1M context, frontier coding and native multimodality

    MiniMax released M3, an open-weight model it says is the first to combine frontier coding and agentic performance, a 1M-token context window, and native image and video input. M3 uses MiniMax's new MSA sparse attention architecture, which the company reports cuts per-token compute at 1M context to 1/20 of the previous generation and speeds prefill by more than 9x and decoding by more than 15x. It scores 59.0% on SWE-Bench Pro, 66.0% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and 74.2% on MCP Atlas, and is available through MiniMax Code, the Token Plan and the API, with weights and a technical report promised within 10 days.

    Why it matters: MiniMax M3 combines a 1M-token context, frontier coding and agentic scores, and native image and video input in one open-weight model, with MSA cutting per-token compute at long context.