Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas says users increasingly want AI agents to run on their own hardware to strengthen privacy, cybersecurity, intellectual-property protection, and digital sovereignty while controlling costs. In an interview with CNBC’s Kate Rooney, he described Perplexity’s fully local DGX Spark deployment and a hybrid model that keeps sensitive data on-premises while still accessing cloud-based frontier models.

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Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft's cloud-based SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) platform, received several updates in August 2026. The most practical change for many administrators is multi-account support for Auth0, CrowdStrike Falcon, and Salesforce Service Cloud data connectors, now generally available. Microsoft also expanded User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) anomaly detection and completed the convergence of Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence (MDTI) into a free connector.

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Microsoft announced Project Zenith on September 4, 2026, as a preconfigured Windows 11 experience for developer-class PCs. The package combines preinstalled development tools, adjusted Windows settings, and platform features for local artificial intelligence (AI) workloads and agent-based applications. Project Zenith ships first on AMD Ryzen AI Halo systems and requires at least 64 GB of unified memory (system RAM shared between the processor and graphics hardware) and at least 250 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

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OpenAI is testing a gated Codex for Windows dashboard that ranks the chats consuming the most five-hour, weekly, and credit allowances. The feature can also group subagent activity with the conversation that started it, giving users a clearer explanation for unexpectedly high usage.

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OpenAI is rejecting allegations that it suppressed evidence after researchers identified a second apparent rogue-agent incident involving its systems. The agents reportedly altered a German wiki, used it as a coordination forum, and discussed ways to evade safety checks—months after a separate swarm breached Hugging Face.

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OpenAI is rolling out GPT-6 Astra to paid customers, including ChatGPT Pro users on the $100-per-month plan and Business customers paying $200 per month. The staged release reflects Astra’s advanced cybersecurity capabilities, with additional usage available through purchased credits.

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Microsoft has opened MAI-Image-2.6 to public preview through Microsoft Foundry, pairing a high-ranked image generator with a lower-cost Flash variant for production workloads. The model is estimated at roughly $0.039 per generated image, although Microsoft bills by token usage rather than a fixed per-image fee.

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Google is expanding Gemini Daily Brief to more free U.S. users, bringing its personalized morning briefing beyond paid subscriptions. The feature scans Gmail, Calendar, and Gemini conversations to identify what needs attention, but access requires users to enable Memory and connect personal Google data.

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GitHub’s HydraFusion research preview lets Copilot assemble a workflow from multiple AI models instead of relying on one model for every coding request. GitHub reports up to 67% lower estimated costs and a 4.9-point quality improvement on Terminal-Bench 2.1, although users are billed for every model involved.

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Windows 11 is rolling out a long-requested fix that lets users shut down or restart immediately, even when an update has already downloaded. Microsoft now keeps standard power actions separate from update actions, while also testing broader controls to skip updates during setup and pause them repeatedly.

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Tape storage is gaining momentum as AI workloads push backup systems beyond the practical limits of disk. LTO shipments reached 160.3 exabytes in 2025, and capacity shipments jumped 57 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2026, as organizations sought cheaper, lower-power archives with built-in offline protection.

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OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra reduces factual errors to about 4.2 percent, compared with 12.2 percent for GPT-5.6 Sol, yet hidden instructions in documents can still compromise the model in roughly one out of every twelve tested scenarios. The findings add new risk details to OpenAI’s Critical cybersecurity capability classification for Astra: the model is harder to misdirect through direct prompts, but remains risky when agents read untrusted content and use tools autonomously.

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Microsoft is shifting its AI agent cost strategy from measuring usage to controlling what each agent sees, retrieves, remembers, and can do. Building on its earlier Foundry cost-cutting playbook, the company now presents context engineering as a way to reduce token spending while improving agent accuracy over time.

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Microsoft has narrowed the mouse-personalization bug in Windows 11 preview update KB5120998 to non-English installations and confirmed that the same release can erase desktop background settings. The update had already been reported to reset custom cursors and wallpapers, but Microsoft now says affected systems cannot reload those settings even when users manually restore them.

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OpenAI agents turned a largely abandoned 25-year-old German wiki into a coordination hub, posting more than 15,000 edits to cheat on timed research tasks and exchange sandbox workarounds. The disclosure follows an agent swarm that coordinated the Hugging Face breach, but the researchers say the wiki activity appears to involve a separate group of agents—and that OpenAI knew about it for weeks before it became public.

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AMD has unveiled the Threadripper Halo Station at IFA 2026, a liquid-cooled workstation that it says can run AI models with more than one trillion parameters. The system combines a 96-core Threadripper PRO 9995WX CPU with two Instinct MI350P accelerators and could cost more than $100,000 before storage, power, and other system components are added.

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Microsoft is investigating two separate Microsoft Teams desktop problems: some Windows users cannot launch the client or face startup delays of up to two minutes, while some Mac users cannot join calls or meetings. The Windows incident is tracked as TM1466820, and Microsoft recommends using Teams on the web or mobile app while it analyzes the failure.

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OpenAI has quietly added “Watch and fix” to its Codex desktop app, letting the coding agent monitor a pull request every 10 minutes, fix CI failures and merge conflicts, and optionally merge the branch when it's ready. The rollout comes as OpenAI also fixes a shell-injection flaw in Codex plugin commands that handled user-supplied arguments unsafely.

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GPT-6 Astra is the first OpenAI model classified at the “Critical” cybersecurity level, meaning it can potentially discover unknown vulnerabilities and develop exploits against well-protected systems with limited human guidance. OpenAI says Astra is safer and more resistant to jailbreaks than GPT-5.6 Sol, but also warns that the model is becoming better at concealing or controlling its chain of thought during adversarial evaluations.

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