DOJ Announces Launch of ‘Super Intelligence’ Task Force

The Department of Justice announced the launch of its “Super Intelligence” Task Force, aimed at protecting against the misuse of artificial intelligence by bad actors and foreign operatives.

The department refers to advanced artificial intelligence as “Super Intelligence,” or SI. The new DOJ-SITF is meant to keep America’s leadership in SI from being compromised by foreign state and state-sponsored actors, transnational criminal organizations, and individual or corporate actors engaged in fraud or other unlawful conduct.

The DOJ’s Super Intelligence Task Force will also identify and prosecute unlawful SI use, including attacks that target taxpayers, critical infrastructure, or national security.

Led by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and Associate Deputy Attorney General Stephen Weiss, the DOJ-SITF will ensure that America’s leadership in SI is not compromised by the misuse of SI by foreign state and state-sponsored actors, transnational criminal organizations, and individual or corporate actors engaged in fraud or other unlawful conduct.

“SI development will continue to be powered by American innovators,” said Attorney General Todd Blanche. “The SI Task Force at the Department of Justice will facilitate our partnership with SI Force Chair Jay Clayton as we ensure critical SI technologies serve the American people and are not manipulated by bad actors at home or abroad. The Department of Justice will continue identifying and prosecuting individuals whose use of SI violates the law, including by maliciously targeting American taxpayers, critical U.S. infrastructure, or other aspects of our national security.”

“As technological capabilities evolve, the DOJ-SITF will advance the Department’s mission to make America safe,” said Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward, Jr. “Our comprehensive effort will promote innovation and prevent the misuse of Super Intelligence.”

“The creation of the DOJ-SITF marks an important moment for the Department to help advance SI technologies and, at the same time, protect American innovation,” said Associate Deputy Attorney General Stephen Weiss. “The Department also has a responsibility to utilize law enforcement tools at our disposal to deter improper use of SI, harden regular reporting on SI risk and response, and ensure companies exercise vigorous internal controls so that SI technology behaves as intended. The Department is committed to protecting all Americans and our business interests.”

The DOJ’s creation of this task force shows the growing role of AI in IT security and national security enforcement.

from WebProNews https://ift.tt/1Jy3lgD

Grok Bot Enterprise: Who Keeps the Bot When an Employee Leaves?

Grok Bot is changing how work gets done. SpaceXSI’s Bots run on their own cloud computers, sign into the tools a team already uses, and finish jobs while people are busy elsewhere. It is also still in beta, and the company is still building what large organizations will need from it. One of those needs is something I have been asking about.

Picture an enterprise with 10,000 employees building Bots. They spend real hours, on company time and at company expense, teaching those Bots to take over parts of their jobs. That work is a company asset. When one of those employees leaves, is let go, or is promoted, the company should be able to hand that investment to the next person in the role. Nobody wants to rebuild Bots from scratch every time someone changes jobs. So how does Grok Bot Enterprise handle that today?

I put the question to Grok, then checked every part of the answer against SpaceXSI’s own documentation. Here is what the docs say.

Shared Bots are the closest thing to a company Bot

According to the Shared Bots documentation, “a Bot is either personal or shared.” A shared Bot is shared with the team “the way you’d share a doc,” and sharing “doesn’t make a copy.” Each person’s chats stay private, while the Bot can save what it learns for the whole team.

Shared Bots have roles. The owner can add people as Collaborators, who chat with the Bot, or as Managers, who can “also change how it works: its instructions, skills, memory, and apps.” The owner and Managers can edit a shared Bot’s plugins, secrets, skills, files and share settings.

Admins get some control as well. The teams and enterprises guide says Manage Shared Bots in the Cursor dashboard lets admins change who can use each shared Bot, auto-add it to members’ sidebars, and delete it. Deleting it “removes it for everyone on the team, removes its Slack app, and cannot be undone.”

The rest of the setup leans personal. “A personal Bot’s memory is yours, and only you can change it,” the Bots documentation says. Only the owner can delete a shared Bot from the app. None of the pages I reviewed describe moving ownership of a Bot to a successor.

Templates don’t fill that gap. A template creates a copy on the recipient’s account, and the recipient never gets “your computer, logins, or conversation history.” That helps someone start fast, but it is a fresh copy, not a handoff.

What happens when someone leaves

The computers documentation describes Enterprise-only tools for cleaning up after a departure. Recreate and Terminate keep a member’s durable disk, so their Bots, files and logins come back. Neither one removes access. To cut off a departing employee, the docs say to remove the member from the team or turn off their access with Manage Group Access, and to revoke their sessions in the identity provider.

The strongest option is Delete All Grok Bot Data. It “permanently deletes a member’s Bots, conversations, memory, routines, and computer across every team they belong to,” including “shared Bots that teammates use, connected apps, email inboxes, and files.” It cannot be undone.

That last detail matters most. If a role-critical shared Bot lives under one employee’s account, wiping that employee’s data on the way out also wipes the Bot the team depends on.

What companies can do now

With today’s documented tools, a business can protect its Bots in a few ways:

• Build role-critical work as shared Bots, not personal ones.
• Add the people who share that role, and their managers, as Managers on the Bot so others can keep its instructions, skills, memory and apps current.
• Keep team-only templates of key Bots so a successor can quickly spin up a fresh copy, knowing memory and history do not come with it.
• Check who owns a shared Bot before running Delete All Grok Bot Data on a departing employee.

The company should own what it pays for

This is my view, not a SpaceXSI announcement. Businesses must control and own the Grok Bot assets they pay for, not the employee who created them. Those Bots are built on company time, and their skills, memory and workflows belong with the role, not with one person’s account. A company Bot is too big an asset to just disappear when someone leaves, is let go, or is promoted.

Shared Bots with Managers and admin controls point in the right direction. What enterprises will want next is a clear way for the company to take over a Bot and hand it to the next person in the role, with its memory and workflows intact. Grok Bot is just getting started, and that feature would help businesses trust it with more of their work.

from WebProNews https://ift.tt/qL2kFz9

Agility Robotics Starts Trading on Nasdaq as the First U.S. Pure-Play Humanoid Stock

Agility Robotics’ common stock and warrants are set to begin trading today on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the tickers AGLT and AGLTW, a debut the company bills as making it the first U.S. publicly listed pure-play humanoid robotics company with proven, active commercial deployments, the Salem, Oregon, company said.

The debut follows the Nov. 4 close of Agility’s business combination with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a special purpose acquisition company. The deal and related financings brought in about $465 million in gross capital before expenses, including a Foxconn-led PIPE and $100 million of equity funding received before closing, according to Agility’s trading-day release and an earlier closing announcement.

Humanoid builders have drawn heavy investor attention this year even as most remain private, a pattern WebProNews has tracked in coverage of factory-scale humanoid plans and Boston Dynamics’ push to grow robot sales. Agility’s listing puts one commercially deployed player on a U.S. exchange while rival Figure AI remains private and Tesla’s Optimus program sits inside a much larger automaker.

“Today marks an important milestone for Agility, but the bigger story is what it means for the future of work,” CEO Peggy Johnson said in the company’s statement. “Digit is doing real work in customer operations today, taking on repetitive, physically demanding tasks.”

Orders, customers and a thin revenue line

Agility says Digit, its bipedal warehouse and factory robot, has logged more than 65,000 hours in the field with enterprises including GXO, Schaeffler and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. GXO expanded the partnership to two more U.S. logistics sites expected to start in early 2027, after Digit moved more than 100,000 totes at a Georgia site. AGCO has signed for a Digit pilot at its Hesston, Kansas, plant in 2027, and Agility lists a pipeline of more than 30 prospective customers.

For Digit 5, unveiled in September, Agility reports more than $300 million in committed multi-year orders that still depend on contractual milestones, product features and specifications. Early customer access is aimed at the first half of 2027, with general availability targeted for the end of that year. The platform is designed for closer work beside people, with cycloidal actuators for repetitive lifts up to 50 pounds, interchangeable end effectors, NVIDIA IGX Thor compute plans, FORT Robotics safety gear and Nyobolt batteries Agility says can recharge in nine minutes for more than 20 hours of work in a day.

Those orders sit against a still-small commercial book. In an interview with TechCrunch ahead of the debut, Johnson said Agility stuck to “manual, very repetitive jobs” rather than dancing or backflipping demos. TechCrunch reported the company recorded about $174,000 in revenue in the first six months of 2026, mostly from related parties, and lost $362 million in the same period. Johnson told the outlet the Digit 5 commitments were “one of the driving factors” behind going public, without naming the buyers.

Manufacturing bets and what the cash is for

Agility’s RoboFab plant in Salem spans 70,000 square feet and is designed for annual capacity of up to 10,000 robots. The company also runs hardware and physical AI work in Fremont, California, and has announced a 50,000-square-foot Pittsburgh expansion for software, deployment and support. Fleet management runs through Agility Arc, its cloud software.

Proceeds are earmarked for fulfilling orders, expanding deployments, scaling Digit production and advancing the robotics and physical AI stack, the company said. Existing Agility holders rolled 100% of their equity into the combined company, with a 180-day lock-up for those shares and the Churchill sponsor stake, subject to early release on stock-price triggers.

Johnson told TechCrunch the SPAC capital meets current needs but declined to say it would carry Agility to self-funding. Digit 5 prototypes are slated for CES 2027, she said, while unit economics under a robot-as-a-service pitch still hinge on throughput, uptime and placement accuracy that customers will measure against contractual gates.

from WebProNews https://ift.tt/wLBTiNe

HP Names Former GSK CEO Emma Walmsley to Lead the Company Starting January 2027

HP Inc. said Wednesday that its board unanimously appointed Emma Walmsley as chief executive officer, effective Jan. 4, 2027. She will succeed Bruce Broussard, who has been interim CEO since February 2026 and will become chair of the board the same day Walmsley starts, HP said in a newsroom release.

Walmsley led GSK as CEO from April 2017 through December 2025 and has sat on Microsoft’s board for seven years, according to HP. Chip Bergh, HP’s chair since 2017, will remain chair until Broussard takes that role on Jan. 4, 2027, and will stay on the board afterward.

“Emma is a proven CEO with a track record of leading organizations at scale and guiding them through significant change,” Broussard said in the release. Bergh said the appointment followed a comprehensive global search and that Walmsley “stood out for the strength of her leadership experience across multiple industries.”

The hire closes a succession gap that opened when Enrique Lores left HP for PayPal earlier this year, a move WebProNews covered in its report on PayPal’s leadership overhaul. Broussard’s interim stretch has lasted since February.

Pay package and Microsoft board exit

In an 8-K filed Nov. 4, HP said it entered an offer letter with Walmsley on Nov. 3. The filing lists an annual base salary of $1,450,000 and an annual target bonus of 200% of base pay, prorated for fiscal 2027. She will also receive a one-time inducement equity award with an aggregate grant-date value of $30,000,000, split evenly between time-vesting RSUs and performance-adjusted RSUs at target, plus a $2,500,000 sign-on bonus and relocation benefits of up to $2,500,000 in her first year.

The same 8-K says Walmsley, 57, will join HP’s board on her start date and that HP amended its bylaws to raise authorized board seats from 12 to 13. It also notes she served as an advisor to GSK’s board and CEO from January through September 2026 after stepping down as Group CEO.

Microsoft said Wednesday that Walmsley will not stand for re-election at its Dec. 8, 2026, annual meeting, citing the HP appointment. “We look forward to continuing our partnership with Emma and with HP,” Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said in that statement. Walmsley has been a Microsoft director since 2019 and sits on its Compensation and Environmental, Social and Public Policy committees.

In HP’s release, Walmsley said she wants the company to put “creativity and innovation to work” in the AI era for customers, shareholders, partners and employees. Her start date is Jan. 4, 2027.

from WebProNews https://ift.tt/xzDk7Kp

Ahold Delhaize Puts a Price on Its October Cyberattack: Up to €250 Million in Lost Sales

Up to €250 million in lost fourth-quarter sales is the price Ahold Delhaize now puts on the cybersecurity incident that forced it to take systems offline in October. The owner of Food Lion, Hannaford, Albert Heijn and Delhaize said in its third-quarter results Wednesday that the incident should cut Q4 net sales by €200 million to €250 million and underlying operating income by €75 million to €100 million.

That was enough to lower the 2026 outlook. The Zaandam-based grocer now expects diluted underlying earnings per share to grow at a low-single-digit rate at constant exchange rates, down from mid- to high-single digits, and free cash flow of around €2.1 billion instead of at least €2.3 billion. The cash flow cut also reflects new supplier payment regulations in Serbia. Response and remediation costs are expected to have only a “marginal impact” on 2026 IFRS operating income, the company said in its interim report.

Why the profit hit runs so deep

The operating income estimate is large next to the sales it accompanies. At the company’s ranges, it works out to between 30% and 50% of the lost revenue, while the group’s underlying operating margin in the third quarter was 4.1%. On the earnings call, CFO Jolanda Poots-Bijl listed what sits on top of the lost sales: shrink, “extra hours worked to get supply running,” “promotional actions to welcome customers back” and the loss of vendor allowances and retail media income, according to management’s prepared remarks.

The disruption mainly hit online ordering in the Benelux and the U.S. and the company’s Benelux supply chain, while its Bol marketplace was not affected. “While most of the disruption was contained within two weeks, work continues to fully restore our normal operations,” CEO Frans Muller said in the release.

When the company confirmed in October that the incident was a cyberattack, WebProNews reported that work had stopped at some Albert Heijn distribution centers and U.S. brands’ online services were still down a week later. This week also brought a separate suspected attack on refrigeration at supermarkets in Belgium, Luxembourg and Sweden, as WebProNews covered Monday.

The quarter before the outage

The third quarter itself, which closed before the attack, came in ahead of forecasts. Net sales were €23.1 billion, up 1.9% at constant rates, and diluted underlying EPS was €0.69. Analysts had expected €22.9 billion in sales and EPS of €0.65, Investing.com reported. U.S. online sales grew 14.2%, the tenth straight quarter of double-digit gains, and the company kept its plan for a €1 billion share buyback in 2027.

Muller told analysts the company is “taking the lessons seriously” and working to emerge better prepared. Neither the release nor the prepared remarks say what kind of attack it was or who was behind it. The investigation, Muller said, “remains ongoing.”

from WebProNews https://ift.tt/2ohtyTI

Fal Raises $1.3 Billion at a $16 Billion Valuation After Demand Outran Its Compute

Over the summer, demand for fal’s image and video models outran the hardware behind them, and the company had to rate-limit customers. It now has $1.3 billion more to spend on that problem. The San Francisco startup closed a Series F led by Bessemer Venture Partners that Bloomberg reported values it at $16 billion, twice its valuation in April.

Nvidia, Sound Ventures, HOF Capital and T. Rowe Price also took part, SiliconANGLE reported. Fal disclosed the round on Tuesday alongside a Series E led by Sequoia Capital that closed earlier this year. Fal said the two rounds total $1.65 billion combined, according to SiliconANGLE and TechCrunch. The company said the money funds work across its platform in 2027 and called out continued investment from Nvidia.

“We hit a point in summer where we were not able to serve our customers and had to rate-limit them,” co-founder and CEO Burkay Gur told Bloomberg, in a quote carried by SiliconANGLE. Gur said the raise is as large as it is because serving that demand takes more compute. Fal also plans to hire beyond its current staff of 185.

Media models need a different kind of serving

Fal runs image, video and audio generation models that developers reach through a single API. In a post explaining the investment, Bessemer’s partners argued that the serving stacks built for chatbots don’t carry over: “LLMs produce one token at a time. Image and video models refine a whole frame over many passes, so they need memory, compute, and latency handled differently.” They wrote that Adobe, Canva, Shopify, World Labs and Amazon have moved production volume to fal.

The company has also started improving the models it hosts. Bessemer said fal Research released H3 Max, a post-trained version of MiniMax H3, in August, and partnered with Black Forest Labs on Flux 3 Max last month. Some of those model arrangements pay fal licensing fees or a share of revenue, according to Bloomberg. Gur said pretraining a model of fal’s own isn’t on the near-term agenda, though he didn’t rule it out.

Big rounds, thin margins

Fal passed $800 million in annualized revenue earlier this year, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. Its new valuation sits just behind rival inference provider Fireworks AI, which SiliconANGLE said raised $1.5 billion at a $17.5 billion valuation in July. TechCrunch counted Baseten and Modal among the other fast-growing inference companies raising at higher prices, and said several people familiar with their financials described gross margins as thin because compute is expensive to buy or lease.

Fal isn’t the only AI company paying up for capacity. Anthropic said in an amended IPO filing on Monday that it spent $5.0 billion on short-term compute last quarter, which costs more than capacity bought under long-term contracts. On the supply side, AMD reported Tuesday that its data center sales nearly doubled from a year earlier.

Bessemer partner Talia Goldberg, who the firm said has known Gur and co-founder Gorkem Yurtseven for more than a decade, is joining the board of Features & Labels Inc., fal’s formal name. With this round, investors have put more than $1.9 billion into the company, by SiliconANGLE’s count.

from WebProNews https://ift.tt/Lcvkmjd

CrowdStrike Agrees to Buy Fiddler and Dreadnode to Track and Test Companies’ AI Agents

When an AI agent takes an action nobody approved, CrowdStrike wants its Falcon platform to be where a company finds out what happened and why. The cybersecurity company said Tuesday it has signed definitive agreements to buy two startups: Fiddler AI, which tracks and explains what agents do, and Dreadnode, which attacks AI models and agents to find weak spots before they reach production.

Both deals were announced at CrowdStrike’s Fal.Con Europe conference in Barcelona. CrowdStrike didn’t disclose a price for either company. Each announcement says the purchase price will be paid predominantly in cash, with a portion delivered in stock subject to vesting conditions, and each deal is expected to close during CrowdStrike’s fourth quarter of fiscal 2027, subject to customary closing conditions.

A record of what the agent did

Fiddler will be sold as part of Falcon under the name Falcon Observe, with general availability planned for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2027. CrowdStrike said the product will evaluate agents for accuracy and policy compliance before deployment, trace their decisions and tool calls across the full agent hierarchy, and flag behavioral drift, hallucinations and unintended actions once they are live. It will also track token usage and spending, and the company claims Fiddler’s purpose-built models can cut evaluation costs by up to 98% without calling external LLMs. Supported frameworks include LangGraph, Amazon Bedrock, AWS Strands and Google ADK, instrumented through OpenTelemetry.

“When a regulator or your board asks what an agent did, saying ‘the model did it’ is not an answer,” George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s CEO and founder, said in the announcement. “Fiddler is the flight recorder for every agent: the observability to explain exactly what an agent did and why.”

Krishna Gade, Fiddler’s CEO and co-founder, said the startup was founded to answer whether enterprises can trust what their AI agents are doing. “As AI security and observability converge, enterprises need to understand their agents’ actions, intervene when they go off course, and explain why,” he said.

Breaking the AI before attackers do

Dreadnode covers the earlier stage. Its software runs more than 100 known AI attack strategies, among them jailbreaks, prompt injection and multi-turn, agent-specific attacks, against models, agent reasoning loops, applications and the MCP servers that connect agents to tools. Findings are ranked by severity and mapped to frameworks such as the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, MITRE ATLAS and the NIST AI RMF. CrowdStrike said those findings will feed Falcon Guardian, its AI detection and response product, as policy recommendations, and Dreadnode’s team will join the company’s Cyber Superintelligence Lab. The testing product is also slated for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2027.

“AI fails in ways traditional testing was never designed to catch, and the people best equipped to find those failures think like attackers,” said Brad Palm, Dreadnode’s CEO.

The kill switch is available now

One piece of the news didn’t have to wait for a deal to close. CrowdStrike released an AI Kill Switch in Falcon Guardian that lets an authorized administrator stop a misbehaving agent, block it from relaunching on a host or host group, and cut its enterprise network access, with every action logged. Termination happens first at the Gateway and “soon” on the endpoint, the company said.

“One control point isn’t enough to stop that,” Michael Sentonas, CrowdStrike’s president, said in a separate release on the Guardian updates, describing agents that chain steps together and take actions they were never authorized to take.

CrowdStrike isn’t the only vendor building agent controls. IBM recently tied AI agent identity to HashiCorp Vault so access can be cut off mid-task, and Fortinet added prompt and MCP tool-call inspection to FortiGate through a cloud service. CrowdStrike is also reaching into Anthropic’s product: it said Tuesday it is bringing Falcon Guardian natively into Claude Cowork, an integration The Next Web reported is in beta on macOS, with Windows support expected later in November.

Fal.Con Europe wraps up Wednesday. On Monday, its first day, CrowdStrike announced security deals with Dell, Dynatrace and CoreWeave, according to The Next Web.

from WebProNews https://ift.tt/cleSw2M