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Anthropic launched a new capability on Thursday that allows its Claude AI assistant to tap into specialized expertise on demand, marking the company's latest effort to make artificial intelligence more practical for enterprise workflows as it chases rival OpenAI in the intensifying competition over AI-powered software development.The feature, called Skills, enables users to create folders containing instructions, code scripts, and reference materials that Claude can automatically load when relevant to a task. The system marks a fundamental shift in how organizations can customize AI assistants, moving beyond one-off prompts to reusable packages of domain expertise that work consistently across an entire company."Skills are based on our belief and vision that as model intelligence continues to improve, we'll continue mo

One year after emerging from stealth, Strella has raised $14 million in Series A funding to expand its AI-powered customer research platform, the company announced Thursday. The round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Decibel Partners, Bain Future Back Ventures, MVP Ventures and 645 Ventures, comes as enterprises increasingly turn to artificial intelligence to understand customers faster and more deeply than traditional methods allow.The investment marks a sharp acceleration for the startup founded by Lydia Hylton and Priya Krishnan, two former consultants and product managers who watched companies struggle with a customer research process th

Microsoft is fundamentally reimagining how people interact with their computers, announcing Thursday a sweeping transformation of Windows 11 that brings voice-activated AI assistants, autonomous software agents, and contextual intelligence to every PC running the operating system — not just premium devices with specialized chips.The announcement represents Microsoft's most aggressive push yet to integrate generative artificial intelligence into the desktop computing experience, moving beyond the chatbot interfaces that have defined the first wave of consumer AI products toward a more ambient, conversational model where users can simply talk to their computers and have AI agents complete complex tasks on their behalf."When we think about what the promise of an

A new framework from Stanford University and SambaNova addresses a critical challenge in building robust AI agents: context engineering. Called Agentic Context Engineering (ACE), the framework automatically populates and modifies the context window of large language model (LLM) applications by treating it as an “evolving playbook” that creates and refines strategies as the agent gains experience in its environment.ACE is designed to overcome key limitations of other context-engineering frameworks, preventing the model’s context from degrading as it accumulates more information. Experiments show that ACE works for both optimizing system prompts and managing an agent's memory, outperforming other methods while also being significantly more efficient.The challenge of context engineeringAdvanced AI ap

When Walmart and OpenAI announced that the retailer would integrate with ChatGPT, the question became how quickly OpenAI could deliver on the promise of agents buying things for people. In the battle of AI-enabled commerce, getting agents to securely complete transactions is one of the biggest hurdles. More and more, chat platforms like ChatGPT are replacing browsers and getting very good at surfacing information people search for. Users will ask ChatGPT for the best humidifiers on the market, and when the model returns results, people have no choice but to click the item link and complete the purchase online. AI agents, as of now, don’t have the ability or the trust infrastructure to make people and banking institutions feel safe enough to let it loose on someone’s cash. Enterprises and other industry players understand that, to allow agents to pay

Agents are the trendiest topic in AI today, and with good reason. AI agents act on their users’ behalf, autonomously handling tasks like making online purchases, building software, researching business trends or booking travel. By taking generative AI out of the sandbox of the chat interface and allowing it to act directly on the world, agentic AI represents a leap forward in the power and utility of AI.Taking gen AI out of the protected sandbox of the chat interface and allowing it to act directly on the world represents a leap forward in the power and utility of AI.Agentic AI has been moving really fast: For example, one of the core building blocks of today’s agents, the model context protocol (MCP), is only a year old! As in any fast-moving field, there are many competing definitions, hot takes and misleading opinions.To cut through the noise, I’d like to describe the core components of an agentic AI system and how they fit together: It’s really not as compl

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5 on Wednesday, a smaller and significantly cheaper artificial intelligence model that matches the coding capabilities of systems that were considered cutting-edge just months ago, marking the latest salvo in an intensifying competition to dominate enterprise AI.The model costs $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens — roughly one-third the price of Anthropic's mid-sized Sonnet 4 model released in May, while operating more than twice as fast. In certain tasks, particularly operating computers autonomously, Haiku 4.5 actually surpasses its more expensive predecessor."Haiku 4.5 is a clear leap in performance and is now largely as smart as Sonnet 4 while being significantly faster and one-third of the cost," an Anthropic spokesper

As expected after days of leaks and rumors online, Google has unveiled Veo 3.1, its latest AI video generation model, bringing a suite of creative and technical upgrades aimed at improving narrative control, audio integration, and realism in AI-generated video. While the updates expand possibilities for hobbyists and content creators using Google’s online AI creation app, Flow, the release also signals a growing opportunity for enterprises, developers, and creative teams seeking scalable, customizable video tools.The quality is higher, the physics better, the pricing the same as before, and the control and editing features more robust and varied.My initial tests showed it to be a powerful and performant model that immediately delights with each generation. However, the lo

The Dfinity Foundation on Wednesday released Caffeine, an artificial intelligence platform that allows users to build and deploy web applications through natural language conversation alone, bypassing traditional coding entirely. The system, which became publicly available today, represents a fundamental departure from existing AI coding assistants by building applications on a specialized decentralized infrastructure designed specifically for autonomous AI development.Unlike GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or other "vibe coding" tools that help human developers write code faster, Caffeine positions itself as a complete replacement for technical teams. Users describe what they want in plain language, and an ensemble of AI models writes, deploys, and continually updates production-grade applicati

2025 was supposed to be the year of "AI agents," according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and other AI industry personnel. And it has been, in many ways, with numerous leading AI model providers such as OpenAI, Google, and even Chinese competitors like Alibaba releasing f