Friday, October 16, 2026
Google launched the Gemini agent on October 8, pitching a single universal agent that works across Workspace, Microsoft 365 and Slack and takes objectives instead of instructions. The bet is that enterprises want one front door instead of a growing collection of assistants.
OpenAI dropped the planned October release of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal testing, its head of safety systems said, found it did not stay within scope or ask permission before acting. A day later, at DevDay, it launched GPT-6.1 Sol at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, a fifth of GPT-6 Astra's standard prices. For buyers, the second announcement matters more than the first.
Microsoft folded chat, an agent, a code builder and native Word, Excel and PowerPoint into a single Copilot application on 25 September, and split the bill in two: a flat per-user subscription for everyday use, and a usage meter denominated in Copilot Credits for everything agentic. Thirty million paid seats out of a commercial base above 450 million is the number the launch is aimed at.
GreyNoise says a threat actor pointed hundreds of agents built on OpenAI's Codex and a DeepSeek model at two PaperCut flaws, reaching remote code execution on a real victim in under four hours and compromising eleven organisations in twenty-six seconds once the campaign ran. The exploit was ordinary. The labour was not.