Adobe Opens Photoshop and Premiere to Outside AI Agents and Pulls Google Closer

Adobe is preparing to let other companies’ AI agents operate Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and After Effects. It is a bet that the company can keep the work even when a job starts inside ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, as long as its apps do the heavy lifting behind the chat window.

The plan, laid out Tuesday at the Adobe MAX conference in Miami Beach, centers on local MCP integrations that let a user’s preferred third-party agent make changes directly in native project files on their own computer. Layers, vectors, bins and sequences stay editable, so a designer can take over by hand at any point. The integrations go into private beta in early 2027. Adobe paired the preview with an expanded partnership that puts Acrobat inside Google Workspace and Google’s models deeper inside Adobe’s apps. Taken together, the moves show Adobe trying to be the engine behind whatever assistant a customer picks.

Deepa Subramaniam, Adobe’s vice president of product marketing for Creative Cloud, described the workflow in a company blog post: remove a logo from one campaign asset, then “ask your agent to cascade it across the rest of the campaign.” An agent that is also connected to Google Drive or Slack can pull a brief from Google Docs, do the work in Adobe’s tools and post the result to a team channel.

Adobe hasn’t settled how much of its software it will expose. “We are still figuring out where and when and how to draw the line,” Subramaniam told TechCrunch. “We don’t have any need or desire to sort of limit what the MCP endpoint can expose.” Not every rival likes the protocol. Figma co-founder Dylan Field said last month that MCP is not a perfect standard and benefits frontier labs more, TechCrunch noted.

Adobe is also building its own agent layer, so customers have a reason to stay inside its apps. The Adobe Creative Agent now powers AI Assistants, in beta, in Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects and Frame.io, with Photoshop’s version in the Photoshop beta app. In Premiere it can apply effects to every clip in a sequence or adjust color and exposure across an entire sequence at once. Firefly is getting “always-on” agents, in preview, that organize incoming assets, check quality and prepare content for different channels while the user is away. A new Firefly Builder tool, in private beta, turns plain-language prompts into prototypes of websites, presentations and apps, a step TechCrunch described as a move into Figma’s territory.

Google gets a bigger role

The Google agreement runs in both directions. Acrobat will show up as a suggested app in Google Drive and Gmail, including an “Edit with” option in file previews, and Gemini models will help power Acrobat’s AI features. Adobe will add Acrobat and more creative tools to its connectors in Gemini and Gemini Enterprise and bring its creative tools to AI Mode in Google Search. Adobe and Google DeepMind are exploring a customized Google image model for Photoshop that could make near-real-time, prompt-based edits.

The numbers explain why both sides want the deal. Adobe said its creative and productivity products serve more than 1 billion monthly active users, and that more than 400 billion PDFs are opened with Acrobat each year. “By further connecting our respective platforms, we are giving creators and enterprise teams a powerful, integrated environment to turn their ideas into high-impact content,” said Thomas Kurian, chief executive of Google Cloud. Google said businesses will also be able to use Adobe’s CX Enterprise Coworker agent, which helps teams design graphics, work with PDFs and launch marketing campaigns, inside Gemini Enterprise.

Adobe is also shipping optimized versions of Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects and Substance 3D Painter (beta) for Arm-based Windows PCs, including the new Surface Laptop Ultra, and building Adobe Express tools into Microsoft Photos, the company said in its main MAX announcement. The day before, Adobe signed a multi-year alliance with Disney for custom AI models, a deal WebProNews covered Monday.

The push lands as the AI labs build their own work surfaces. Anthropic on Tuesday added spreadsheets and whiteboards inside Claude and opened its interactive connectors as full apps, turning the chatbot into something closer to an office suite. Anil Chakravarthy, Adobe’s president and incoming CEO, said the company wants to “put the power of Adobe’s tools within reach for even more creatives.”

Keith Kirkpatrick, vice president of research at The Futurum Group, sees the logic but wants proof in revenue. “Companies are using several AI models at once, and people are starting more of their work inside these assistants,” he told Computerworld. “If that’s where the request starts, Adobe wants to be the one doing the work behind it.” He also posed the question Adobe will face as the MCP beta opens next year: “The real question is whether any of this turns into paying Adobe customers, and Adobe hasn’t shown that yet with its existing connectors.”

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KDE Introduces Kwi, a New Terminal Emulator

The KDE project continues to develop applications and add features, this time introducing Kwi, a new terminal emulator.

Konsole has been the default KDE terminal emulator for years, but it may finally have some competition. In particular, the new emulator is designed to be a modern alternative, “built on a robust tech stack and following the latest KDE HIG and UI conventions.” Kwi uses elements of the popular Ghostty project, specifically libghostty-vt, along with KDE Frameworks like KPty. Notably, the modern underpinnings provide GPU acceleration, something Konsole lacks.

Eike Hein described Kwi’s status in a blog post:

Compared to the venerable and mature Konsole, Kwi is young and new. At the moment it offers a more streamlined feature set than Konsole, carefully realized using KDE’s latest HIG patterns. The way forward will be to build on this slowly and carefully, using everything we’ve learned as a community about running mature design processes over the last decade or so (hello, VDG!). It’s a chance to canvass the scene, take stock of how other terminals implement more recent innovations in this space, and compete with a KDE spin on things.

Hein goes on to describe Kwi’s benefits versus Konsole:

Konsole is very intertwined with the older of the two user interface tech stacks in Qt, QWidget. QWidget typically renders using the CPU, and so does Konsole. Newer KDE software (including Plasma itself) typically uses Qt Quick and benefits from GPU acceleration via Vulkan or OpenGL instead. This is what Kwi does as well. For certain terminal applications the performance gain (3x-35x faster than Konsole depending on what’s being benchmarked) can make an actual big difference in the user experience, but generally it should also help reduce battery usage.

The new emulator is also better poised to integrate with KDE’s newer apps and frameworks:

There’s a gap we currently have in our developer offerings: Konsole, being strongly tied into the older QWidget tech stack, offers an embeddable component used in various QWidget-based KDE apps, for example Dolphin, Kate and Yakuake (the Kwi project offers a drop-in replacement solution for these apps). It doesn’t offer anything similar to KDE apps written in Qt Quick/Kirigami, however, nor can it easily. This is a (minor) factor increasing the friction to move these KDE apps to the new tech stack. It also leaves new Qt Quick/Kirigami apps without a well-realized KDE terminal component to use.

Kwi installs a public Qt Quick/QML module that can be imported and used by other KDE apps, closing this gap.

In a follow-up blog post, Hein outlined what’s next for Kwi:

Kwi is presently undergoing KDE Review, a quality gate in the KDE community that graduates new projects from being experiments into official KDE projects. This is well underway; we have already completed the required checklist. Subsequently, KDE’s awesome community of translators will start contributing translations to the project. The project will then also gain access to KDE’s release infrastructure. An official, tagged and tarball’d Kwi v0.1 release is planned to follow soon after.

Together with the v0.1 release, will also send our Flatpak package out into the wider world via publication on Flathub.

In the weeks and months after, we plan to stay on top of your bug reports, as well as begin to address some feature requests.

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Anthropic’s IPO Range Is Set, and Its Chip and Cloud Suppliers Have Agreed to Buy $26 Billion in Stock

The companies that sell Anthropic its chips and cloud capacity are lining up to own more of it. Google, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and TSMC have agreed to buy a combined $26 billion of Anthropic stock at whatever price its initial public offering settles on, the company disclosed in an amended registration statement filed with the SEC.

Anthropic launched its roadshow Tuesday and said it will offer 825 million Class A shares at $70 to $78 each, with 801,351,354 sold by the company and 23,648,646 by existing stockholders. The stock is set to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley lead a syndicate of 22 banks, which also gets a 30-day option on another 123.75 million shares.

Who is putting in what

The side deal is a private placement of Class N shares, which carry no vote except where the law requires one. At the $74 midpoint, Google and Nvidia would each buy about $10 billion worth, AMD about $2.5 billion, Broadcom, Micron and Microsoft roughly $1 billion apiece, and TSMC around $500 million, the prospectus shows. Those shares won’t be registered in the offering and aren’t bound by the underwriters’ lock-up agreements. Some board members and affiliated entities have also indicated interest in buying up to $303 million of Class A stock in the IPO itself, though those indications aren’t binding.

Anthropic estimates net proceeds of about $84.6 billion from the IPO and the placement combined at the midpoint, or about $93.7 billion if the banks take their full option. The money goes to general corporate purposes, including compute, infrastructure and hiring. The company said it has no agreements for any material acquisitions.

Public buyers will have limited say in how the company is run. A single Class F share held by an LLC of the seven co-founders will carry 50.1% of the total stockholder vote, and the Long-Term Benefit Trust elects directors who make up a majority of the board.

A lower number than investors were bracing for

At the top of the range the offering would raise up to $64.35 billion, and Anthropic could be worth as much as $1.405 trillion on a fully diluted basis, CNBC calculated. That tops the $965 billion valuation from the company’s funding round in May. It is well short of earlier talk, though: the network reported last week that Anthropic had been looking toward $2 trillion until recently, and that shareholders saw even $1.5 trillion as in doubt. Counting only the roughly 13.1 billion Class A and Class N shares the filing says will be outstanding after the deal, the $78 price works out to about $1.02 trillion.

The prospectus calls Claude’s uptake “the fastest enterprise adoption of any technology in history,” pointing to revenue that went from zero at launch in the first quarter of 2023 to $17.0 billion in the September quarter. Run-rate revenue reached about $81 billion as of Oct. 31, up $10 billion in a month. The same quarter still produced a $567 million operating loss, which the company tied mostly to $5.0 billion of compute bought under short-term commitments and $2.0 billion of non-cash charges from its donation matching program. WebProNews broke down that quarter earlier this month and walked through the original S-1 in October.

The roadshow started a day after Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2. CNBC, citing people familiar with the details, reported that Anthropic plans to price the deal on Nov. 18 and start trading Nov. 19, about five months after SpaceX’s record $85.7 billion offering.

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Coinbase Is Now a Chartered Trust Bank

Coinbase is now a chartered trust bank after winning approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to create Coinbase National Trust Company (CNTC).

Coinbase is one of the leading crypto trading platforms, but the company has been working to take the next step, especially as crypto becomes more mainstream.

For over 14 years, Coinbase has safeguarded digital assets at scale, and today, thanks to the continued trust and support of many of the world’s largest financial services firms, we are the leading crypto custodian globally. Custody is foundational to our business and we have built our offering on a sustained commitment to security, compliance, and regulatory oversight.

This charter allows us to bring clear and consistent federal uniformity to our industry-leading custody capabilities, and strengthens the regulatory framework under which we serve customers. As crypto becomes more embedded in the financial system, this is an important step towards aligning digital-asset custody with the traditional financial infrastructure on which institutions and individuals know and rely.

The company says the OCC’s approval helps it achieve its vision for the future of finance:

This is an important step forward for Coinbase and the broader crypto industry. Coinbase has always pursued clear, consistent and best-in-class regulatory oversight that will move the financial industry, and American leadership in digital assets forward. The OCC’s approval of the charter helps us progress towards that vision as we work to build the future of finance across Coinbase.

Crypto has increasingly made its way into mainstream finance and investment, making Coinbase’s move an important one. It’s a safe bet other platforms will make similar moves at some point.

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Dropbox Agrees to Buy Tigris for About $350 Million and Launches DBX Agent Cloud

Dropbox is putting roughly $350 million in cash behind a push into AI infrastructure. In an 8-K filed Thursday, the company said it signed a definitive agreement on Nov. 3 to buy all of the outstanding equity of Tigris Data Inc., a globally distributed object-storage platform built for AI workloads, subject to customary purchase-price adjustments. Closing is expected in the fourth quarter of 2026 if customary conditions are met.

The same filing attached a press release that also unveils DBX Agent Cloud, a storage and data layer for companies and developers building AI applications and agents. The first piece is standalone, S3-compatible object storage that customers can buy on its own and use with tools and apps already built for Amazon S3.

Dropbox’s announcement art for its AI product evolution and DBX Agent Cloud. Image: Dropbox

“The value of AI depends on the content and context it can work with,” Ashraf Alkarmi, co-CEO of Dropbox, said in the company blog post. “We’re bringing AI to the work people already keep in Dropbox and extending our storage expertise to companies building AI applications. Across both, our goal is to give customers the freedom to choose how they use AI while keeping control of the content they depend on.”

What Tigris customers keep, and what Dropbox wants next

Tigris told customers Thursday that the product, S3-compatible API, pricing with zero egress fees, and support channels stay the same while the deal progresses. The startup, founded by former Uber engineers, markets intelligent data placement meant to keep latency low without forcing buyers onto a single cloud. Dropbox said Tigris will help it enter AI infrastructure on top of nearly two decades of running storage at scale.

After object storage, Dropbox plans filesystem features so agents can keep working across sessions, plus content processing that turns documents, images, audio, and video into AI-ready inputs. “AI is driving storage demand at a scale this industry has not seen before,” Ovais Tariq, co-founder and CEO of Tigris, said in the Dropbox blog post. “Meeting it takes massive scale and a conviction we share with Dropbox: that customers should have the flexibility to run their compute wherever it serves them best, with a product built for developers and agents alike.”

TechCrunch reported that Dropbox described the Tigris deal as expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026 and said it currently has no plans to cut headcount as part of the acquisition. The outlet also noted Tigris raised a $25 million Series A last year and that Dropbox has previously bought AI-focused firms including Reclaim.ai, Promoted.ai, and Mobius Labs. TechCrunch said the deal appears to be Dropbox’s largest acquisition to date.

AI inside Dropbox, not only under it

Alongside the infrastructure bet, Dropbox is rolling out a new experience that lets customers ask the product to find and summarize content, draft and edit files, organize folders, and run multi-step actions after they approve a plan. Results stay tied to existing folders, permissions, and sharing. Customers can switch supported models in a session and open Dropbox files in tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Muse without re-uploading, with work returning to Dropbox.

That experience has already reached more than 70,000 teams, Dropbox said, starting with eligible Standard and Advanced teams in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, in English, with broader availability planned for 2027. The company said it has more than 700 million registered users across about 180 countries.

The move sits beside other large software deals that are reshaping how SaaS vendors own data and AI distribution, including Salesforce’s agreement to buy Braze. Dropbox has also been tightening account rules ahead of a 2027 overhaul, as WebProNews covered earlier this fall, while older product work such as end-to-end encryption and Microsoft 365 co-authoring kept the focus on files people already store there.

Closing still depends on customary conditions. Until then, Tigris said customers can keep using the service as they do today.

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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.

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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.

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