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Cohere announces public beta of Model Vault confidential computing

Cohere announced that the confidential computing feature of Model Vault has entered public beta. The feature is based on the NVIDIA H100 GPU confidential computing capability on Microsoft Azure, providing hardware-level isolation for hosted model inference. According to the Cohere product and research blog, the scope of encryption extends from data at rest and in transit to prompts, documents, responses, and model execution during inference; after application payloads are end-to-end encrypted, they can only be decrypted in a confidential environment that has passed remote attestation. Customers can cryptographically verify the hardware, firmware, and software configuration before sending sensitive data, and the client will refuse to send requests when the security policy is not met. The existing Model Vault API and request format remain unchanged. The feature is currently in public beta.

Cohere launches confidential computing public beta on Model Vault

On October 22, 2026, Cohere launched confidential computing on Model Vault, currently in public beta. The feature runs on NVIDIA GPUs on Microsoft Azure, combining confidential CPU and GPU execution, OHTTP end-to-end encryption of request content, and remote attestation, allowing customers to verify the target environment before releasing sensitive data. Cohere also plans to open-source the confidential inference stack and advance support for NVIDIA Blackwell and B200 GPUs.

Nadella says Volkswagen Group is deploying Copilot company-wide

On October 22, 2026, Satya Nadella said he was pleased to see Volkswagen Group using Copilot across the company. Reports from the same source state that Volkswagen Group has rolled out Microsoft Copilot to more than 330,000 employees, embedding secure AI assistance across its operations and allowing teams to focus on higher-value work. There are currently no follow-up developments; the status of the event remains at the above statements and deployment description.

Microsoft Report Says Storm-0940 Used AI Agent Artex to Launch Cyberattacks

Microsoft released a report stating that the China-linked actor Storm-0940 used the open-source AI agent ARTEX to automate attacks against hundreds of organizations across different industries worldwide. The report notes that ARTEX was released as open source on GitHub and chains together multiple LLM agents, requiring almost no human intervention from reconnaissance to data theft; it uses ConnectWise's Microsoft 365 backup and management application keys to log in, bypassing user login and MFA, and in several intrusions it achieved cloud privileged access from the initial target in under 3 hours. The report also notes that most attack attempts failed, including one password spray that logged 151K+ failures with none succeeding, and that application login alone does not prove data was stolen. There are currently no further developments.

Nadella's shareholder letter proposes matching token costs to business outcomes

On October 22, 2026, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella proposed building a frontier ecosystem in the 2026 annual shareholder letter, and put forward "cost-to-outcome" (the business outcomes obtained per unit of token spending) as a new software economics optimization metric. The letter also disclosed that Microsoft's fiscal 2026 revenue was $331.8 billion, up 18% year over year; Azure grew 41% and surpassed $100 billion for the first time; M365 Copilot paid seats exceeded 30 million, and GitHub Copilot users reached 50 million. The letter also stated that interaction is shifting from synchronous chat to asynchronous agents, with Harness separated from models; Foundry offers more than 11,000 models and has over 100,000 customers, and Microsoft Frontier Co. was established, dispatching 6,000 experts to work on-site. Currently, the content of this letter is reported by a single source, with no subsequent independent developments yet.

AuxoAI Completes $20.7 Million Series A Funding

AuxoAI Inc. announced the completion of a $20.7 million Series A funding round led by NTT Venture Capital. The funds will be used to accelerate the company's growth and expand its enterprise AI consulting model. AuxoAI's core platform, Damia, is a toolkit for "forward-deployed engineers" that can turn enterprise data into applications and encode business process knowledge into AI agents capable of long-term collaboration. According to the report, the company has worked with Global 2000 enterprises for more than three years and has established partnerships with platforms such as Google, AWS, Snowflake, Databricks and Microsoft. At present, the only factual development in this event is the aforementioned funding announcement.

Apple says developers are optimizing apps and games for iPhone Duo

On October 22, 2026, Apple announced that developers are optimizing apps and games for the first foldable iPhone Duo. According to information published on Apple Newsroom that day, iPhone Duo will go on sale on October 23 (this Friday), the App Store will feature a dedicated editorial collection, and adapted apps will be marked with a Made for iPhone Duo badge. Adapted apps include Netflix, Prime Video, Paramount+, Zoom, Slack, and others; Microsoft Word and Outlook will offer desktop-class experiences in the coming weeks. On the hardware side, the iPhone Duo's inner screen is 50% larger than that of the iPhone 18 Pro Max, it is powered by the A20 Pro, and it supports Split View on an iPhone for the first time. There are currently no subsequent developments.

Microsoft report says Storm-0940 used AI agent Artex to launch cyberattacks

Microsoft released a report stating that the China-linked actor Storm-0940 used the open-source AI agent ARTEX to automate attacks against hundreds of organizations across different industries worldwide. The report notes that ARTEX was released as open source on GitHub and chains together multiple LLM agents, requiring almost no human intervention from reconnaissance to data theft; it uses ConnectWise's Microsoft 365 backup and management application keys to log in, bypassing user login and MFA, and in several intrusions it achieved cloud privileged access from the initial target in under 3 hours. The report also notes that most attack attempts failed, including one password spray that logged 151K+ failures with none succeeding, and that application login alone does not prove data was stolen. There are currently no further developments.

View story:Microsoft Report Says Storm-0940 Used AI Agent Artex to Launch Cyberattacks

Cohere Releases Enterprise Retrieval Model Rerank 5

On October 21, 2026, Cohere released its enterprise retrieval model Rerank 5, available in two tiers: Pro and Fast. According to Cohere's product and research blog, the model is now available on the Cohere API, Model Vault, Microsoft Foundry, and Amazon SageMaker, with Pro priced at $0.05 per 1 million tokens and Fast at $0.02. Cohere states that Rerank 5 Pro leads all tested models on four public benchmarks—ViDoRe V3, nanoMTEB, BRIGHT, and BEIR—ranking first on 39 of 46 composite datasets. A new feature, Context Focus, can return the most relevant text snippets within a document in a single call; in official tests, removing half the context cost only 2 percentage points in answer quality. Follow-up reports add that both tiers support a 32K context window and more than 100 languages, and that upgrading requires no index rebuild; in search agent tests, paired with a default threshold of 0.1, it reduced tokens per task by 19% and raised accuracy from 46% to 57%.

Trump demands data centers generate their own power and pay dividends to communities

On October 21, 2026, Trump posted on Truth Social stating that large new data centers must generate their own power and pay cash "dividends" to their host communities. Related reports noted that the closest existing commitment is the Ratepayer Protection Pledge signed in March of that year by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI, under which signatories pledged to build or purchase generating capacity and bear infrastructure upgrade costs, though experts believe the pledge may not be enforceable at the federal level. Trump said the dividend proposal goes further than that pledge. Reports on October 22 further stated that Trump also demanded that data centers supply surplus power to local communities free of charge or sell it to them, and noted that communities across the United States have continued to protest AI data center projects over rising electricity prices, noise, water shortages, and other issues. There are currently no facts on subsequent developments.

Porsche and others announce joint construction of a shared data flywheel for autonomous driving

Porsche, Volkswagen Group brands and CARIAD announce the joint construction of a shared data flywheel for autonomous driving development. The news was announced on October 21, 2026 at the NVIDIA GTC Berlin conference, with Porsche leading initial implementation and ecosystem integration, and Voxel51, NVIDIA and Microsoft participating. According to Voxel51, the group's connected fleet generates data each day equivalent to 11,000 ordinary drivers, and the goal of the cooperation is to reduce repetitive real-vehicle testing by up to 90% and shorten AI regression testing cycles by up to 85%. In terms of division of labor, Voxel51 provides the data layer and supports six workflows including multimodal retrieval, automatic annotation and scenario filtering, NVIDIA provides tools such as Cosmos Data Factory and Omniverse NuRec, and Microsoft Azure provides cloud and computing power. The cooperation is currently at the announcement stage, with no subsequent progress disclosed.

eMudhra admits weak private keys can be reverse-engineered with AI assistance

India-licensed certificate authority eMudhra admits that the private keys of its 8 intermediate certificates are all small numbers less than 256, which can be recovered by brute force, and holders could theoretically forge trusted certificates to impersonate websites. Mozilla and Chrome blocked these certificates on October 17, Apple and Microsoft followed suit, and eMudhra revoked the relevant certificates the next day, saying the affected global TLS business accounts for about 1% of its revenue. Researcher Dennis Jackson said an AI agent recovered the private key on its first attempt under a simple prompt, and Mozilla also independently recovered it within hours of receiving the report. CERT-In and CCA have not yet issued public statements on the matter.

Microsoft proposes using Guardian Agents to monitor enterprise AI agents

Microsoft has proposed a plan to use Guardian Agents to monitor and regulate the actions of enterprise AI agents. Hayete Gallot, Executive Vice President of Microsoft's security division, said in a blog post that Guardian Agents should be deployed to monitor and intervene before AI agents execute actions, and stated that frontier models cannot be trusted no matter where they come from. The plan intends to bring enterprise agents under centralized management, assigning each agent an identity, container, and permission policy, then combining identity, data, cloud, endpoint, network, and runtime signals to assess risk in real time, with red team and blue team agents intervening when risk rises. The plan will be implemented through Microsoft's Project Perception security system announced in July. The plan is still at the proposal stage, and there are no public facts about further implementation progress.

View story:Microsoft proposes using Guardian Agents to monitor enterprise AI agents

WSJ sees Anthropic's draft IPO filing

The Wall Street Journal has seen Anthropic's draft IPO filing. A report dated October 21, 2026, said the draft showed Anthropic had first-half revenue of $16.3 billion and a book loss of $80.7 billion, with compute commitments of about $450 billion; the draft also disclosed fixed payments totaling $25.2 billion to Google, AWS and Microsoft over the next 7 to 10 years, payable whether or not the capacity is used. A report dated October 22 said the same draft showed first-half revenue of $16.3 billion, up nearly 14-fold year over year, and a net loss of $80.7 billion, of which about $72 billion came from the revaluation of financing instruments such as convertible notes; compute and infrastructure spending in the same period was nearly $9 billion, about 55% of revenue, and forward compute commitments exceeded $600 billion, potentially reaching as high as $750 billion if additional agreements are finalized. There is currently no further progress confirmed by factual evidence.

Microsoft releases multiple new cloud sovereignty tools

On October 21, 2026, Microsoft announced multiple new digital sovereignty features for its cloud services at the Frontier Tour in Paris. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and cloud business head Douglas Phillips jointly unveiled a modular cloud sovereignty solution that lets enterprises decide for each computing task the degree of control, transparency, and local execution. A new Sovereign Control Panel aggregates Azure sovereignty signals and will gradually roll out Data Guardian and the Production Touch Ledger, which records remote operations by Microsoft engineers. Azure Managed HSM external key management is now generally available, and on the Azure Local side, DocumentDB, Blob Storage, GitHub Enterprise Local, and Foundry Local have been added. The German Informatics Society (GI) and others criticized such solutions as merely surface-level add-on controls, with the underlying software stack still controlled by U.S. vendors. There have been no further developments so far.

View story:Microsoft releases multiple new cloud sovereignty tools

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Microsoft launches security controls for out-of-control AI agents

On October 19, 2026, Microsoft launched security controls for out-of-control AI agents. According to SiliconANGLE, the feature progressively reduces an agent's permissions when its risk score rises: the Discovery tool can identify 60 categories of local agents on employee devices, including Claude Code, Codex, and GitHub Copilot, and assigns each agent a separate identity through Entra Agent ID; Dynamic Agent Risk continuously updates the risk score based on identity, endpoint, cloud, and network signals, and Dynamic Conditional Access uses it to first revoke write permissions, then require human approval, and at the highest level directly isolate or stop the runtime. These features are grouped under Project Perception and Microsoft 365 E7, and Microsoft has not announced availability or pricing. On the same day, Satya Nadella said that he had previously written an article arguing that models should be treated as an internal risk and that security controls should be placed outside the model, and that today Microsoft is putting this principle into practice by extending Project Perception, adding capabilities to continuously assess agent risk, adaptively adjust permissions, and contain threats.

English translation is being prepared.

Microsoft launches security control features for runaway AI agents

On October 19, 2026, Microsoft launched security controls for out-of-control AI agents. According to SiliconANGLE, the feature progressively reduces an agent's permissions when its risk score rises: the Discovery tool can identify 60 categories of local agents on employee devices, including Claude Code, Codex, and GitHub Copilot, and assigns each agent a separate identity through Entra Agent ID; Dynamic Agent Risk continuously updates the risk score based on identity, endpoint, cloud, and network signals, and Dynamic Conditional Access uses it to first revoke write permissions, then require human approval, and at the highest level directly isolate or stop the runtime. These features are grouped under Project Perception and Microsoft 365 E7, and Microsoft has not announced availability or pricing. On the same day, Satya Nadella said that he had previously written an article arguing that models should be treated as an internal risk and that security controls should be placed outside the model, and that today Microsoft is putting this principle into practice by extending Project Perception, adding capabilities to continuously assess agent risk, adaptively adjust permissions, and contain threats.

View story:Microsoft launches security controls for out-of-control AI agents