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.

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Shopify’s Costs Grew Half as Fast as Its Revenue Last Quarter

Shopify’s operating expenses rose 16% in the third quarter while its revenue climbed 32%, and that gap lifted operating income about 66% to $568 million, the commerce software company said in its quarterly results Tuesday morning.

Revenue came to $3.74 billion, up from $2.84 billion a year earlier. That was a hair under the roughly $3.75 billion analysts had expected, The Wall Street Journal reported. Merchants pushed $119.1 billion in gross merchandise volume through the platform, a 29% increase.

On profitability, the quarter came in ahead of Shopify’s own targets. When it reported second-quarter results in August, the company guided to operating expenses of 33% to 34% of revenue and a free cash flow margin “in the high-teens to low-twenties.” Expenses ended up near 32% of revenue. Free cash flow reached $816 million, a 22% margin, compared with 18% a year ago. Gross profit grew 28% to $1.78 billion, at the upper end of the mid-to-high-twenties growth Shopify had forecast.

Where the growth came from

Merchant solutions, the segment that includes Shopify’s payments business, brought in $2.91 billion, up 35%. Subscription solutions grew more slowly, rising 20% to $836 million, and monthly recurring revenue reached $230 million from $193 million.

Spending didn’t rise evenly across the company. Research and development grew by about a third, to $497 million, roughly matching revenue. Sales and marketing rose 14% and general and administrative costs 13%. Transaction and loan losses fell to $120 million from $148 million, even though loans and merchant cash advances on the balance sheet grew to $2.35 billion from $1.78 billion at the end of last year.

Net income rose 75% to $462 million. Stripping out changes in the value of its equity investments, Shopify earned $584 million, against $367 million a year earlier.

“We powered $119 billion in GMV, while continuing to build commerce into every surface, every agent, and increasingly, everywhere,” President Harley Finkelstein said in the release. Shopify’s Agentic Storefronts let eligible merchants list products in ChatGPT, Google’s AI tools, Copilot and Meta from one dashboard, part of a broader push by retailers and platforms that WebProNews looked at on Monday.

Top-line growth eased a little

The 32% revenue gain was slightly slower than the 34% Shopify posted in the second quarter, and GMV growth slipped from about 32% to 29%. Chief Financial Officer Jeff Hoffmeister pointed to the company’s size. “Delivering these results at our scale speaks to the strength of our model, our multiple growth drivers, and our expanding addressable market,” he said.

For the fourth quarter, Shopify expects revenue to grow at a low-thirties percentage rate and gross profit at a high-twenties rate. It also forecast operating expenses at 29% to 30% of revenue, down from roughly 32% in the quarter just reported.

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Samsung Discontinuing Samsung News

Samsung announced it is discontinuing its Samsung News service, notifying users via an in-app message.

Samsung News is one of several Samsung-branded apps included on the company’s line of Galaxy devices. Samsung is known for creating compelling apps of its own, even when they sometimes overlap with Google’s Android offerings. Periodically, the company has discontinued apps that are too expensive to maintain, or that don’t capture enough market share.

The company shared the following notice:

Thank you for using Samsung News.

We would like to inform you that Samsung News will be discontinued as of December 21, 2026, 00:00 (UTC).

Following the discontinuation of the service, the Samsung News widget will no longer receive content updates. We kindly recommend removing the widget from your Home screen.

Upon the termination of the service, all personal information collected in connection with Samsung News will be deleted without undue delay. However, certain information may be retained where required under applicable laws and regulations. Any such information will be retained only for the required period and then deleted.

For more information on how we handle the deletion and retention of personal information, please refer to our Privacy Notice.

Samsung News Privacy Notice

If you have any questions, please contact us via:
Settings > Contact Us > Ask Questions

We sincerely appreciate your support and will continue striving to provide better services in the future.

Thank you for your understanding.

Samsung News Service Team

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What Is Guided Selling? AI Shopping Assistant Guide

AI Shopping Assistant and Guided Commerce Trends

More shoppers now ask AI tools what to buy before they visit an online or physical store. Product discovery is moving from search boxes and category grids to conversations, and the brands best placed for that shift will have an AI shopping assistant that asks the right questions, understands the answers and explains its recommendations. That is the job of guided selling.

Agentic Commerce and Guided Discovery

The first big guided commerce trend is agentic commerce, in which AI agents compare options, track prices and even complete purchases for a shopper. For brands, that means products have to be understandable to machines as well as people, because complete attributes and a clear answer to “who is this for?” can decide whether an agent picks a product.

The same shift is showing up on brand websites, where AI shopping assistants and conversational product finders are starting to replace static filters as the entry point for undecided shoppers. In this model, the category page opens with a question instead of a grid, and the shopper describes a need and gets an answer. That is also the simplest definition of what guided selling is: asking shoppers about their needs before recommending products.

Zero-Party Data as a Competitive Advantage

Tracking signals are weaker and AI platforms now sit between brands and shoppers. That makes zero-party data, the information customers choose to share, one of the few advantages competitors cannot copy. In guided selling for ecommerce, the answers shoppers give can drive personalization across the website, email and advertising, and personalization based on stated preferences is easier to explain to customers.

Guided experiences are also moving beyond the product page. Brands are putting product finders on campaign landing pages, in social ads and on in-store screens, so each touchpoint can collect shopper preferences.

AI Shopping Assistant Implementation in Five Steps

An AI shopping assistant rollout does not have to start as a large project, especially with current guided selling platforms:

1. Pick a first category, ideally the one with the most traffic and the most “which one should I buy?” questions.

2. Prepare the product data by adding attributes, use cases and tags written in shoppers’ own language.

3. Launch one flow with three to six needs-based questions and a reason for every recommendation.

4. Connect the answers to the CRM so stated preferences become customer segments.

5. Measure before scaling by comparing the conversion rate of shoppers who finish the flow with the category average.

What Stays the Same in Ecommerce

Shoppers still buy when they feel confident they are making the right choice. AI changes how that confidence is built, not the need for it.

Poltio, which sells guided selling software, reports that across its customers, shoppers in guided flows convert 66% better than the site average and spend around 20% more per basket.

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Anthropic Brought In Nearly $17 Billion Last Quarter and Slipped Back to an Operating Loss

Anthropic’s third quarter brought in almost $17 billion in revenue and still ended with an operating loss. In an amended IPO prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission this morning, the Claude maker put most of the swing on $5.0 billion of short-term compute, which costs it more than capacity bought under long-term contracts, and $2.0 billion in non-cash charges from its employee donation matching program.

Revenue for the three months ended Sept. 30 was $16.96 billion. That compares with $1.38 billion a year earlier and $11.56 billion in the second quarter. The operating line went the other way: a $567 million loss, after $974 million of operating income in the June quarter, the only quarter with operating income in the filing’s quarterly table. The original S-1, which WebProNews covered last week, stopped at June 30. Figures shared with prospective investors in mid-October had put the quarter at $16.8 billion.

Paying up for capacity it couldn’t wait for

Compute and infrastructure expenses reached $9.86 billion, or 58% of revenue, up from 48% in the second quarter. Anthropic says it usually contracts compute 12 to 18 months before the capacity shows up. When customer demand or research needs run past that pipeline, it buys short-term capacity at a higher price, and the filing says that will keep growing for now: “We expect our use of short-term compute to continue to increase in the near term and to in turn compress our operating margin and Adjusted Operating Margin as a result.”

The non-GAAP view held up better. Adjusted operating income rose to $2.5 billion from $2.2 billion in the second quarter, though the adjusted margin slipped to 15% from 19%. Price cuts on new model versions, along with contractual discounts, offset about $600 million of usage-driven revenue gains between the two quarters. The only other quarter-to-quarter change where the filing puts a number on price cuts came at the end of 2025, at about $70 million.

Most of the net loss had nothing to do with running the business. Anthropic lost $23.3 billion in the quarter, compared with $12.1 billion a year earlier, and $21.9 billion of that came from marking convertible notes and similar instruments to a higher company valuation. Total operating expenses were $17.5 billion, up 292% from the third quarter of 2025.

Fewer eggs in the top five baskets

About 79% of third-quarter revenue came from customers outside the five largest, up from roughly 64% in the first quarter. The top five still made up about 25% of revenue over nine months, and each of them spent a record amount in the third quarter. Sales through cloud provider marketplaces accounted for 44% of nine-month revenue, below the 48% the first filing showed for the half. Sales, marketing and partnership costs fell to 14% of revenue from 22% in the first quarter, which the company tied partly to new terms in its channel partner deals.

The bigger number sits in the commitments section, which the first filing left blank. Anthropic has signed purchase and lease agreements worth about $895.4 billion, substantially all of it for compute and infrastructure, the amendment shows. About $69.8 billion falls due within 12 months of Sept. 30 and roughly $447.5 billion before the end of 2030. A growing share runs through Anthropic Direct, its program for leasing chips and hosting them in dedicated facilities, which it says will let it backfill expensive short-term capacity with cheaper long-term compute as its own infrastructure comes online. It ended September with $146.6 billion of liquidity, including $95.6 billion in cash and $36.3 billion in short-term investments.

The amendment still leaves the price range and share count empty. The line for run-rate revenue as of Oct. 31 is blank too.

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Marvell’s $115 Billion Lumentum Deal Is a Wager That AI Networks Go Optical

Marvell Technology is betting $115 billion in stock that the copper wiring inside AI data centers is close to its limits. The chipmaker will acquire Lumentum, which makes the lasers and optical transceivers that carry data between AI servers, in an all-stock deal that values Lumentum at an implied enterprise value of $115 billion, the two companies said Monday.

Lumentum stockholders will receive a fixed 4.500 Marvell shares for each share they hold, which works out to roughly $1,132 a share. That is a premium of about 23.9% based on both stocks’ closing prices on Oct. 28, the last trading day before word of the talks got out. Marvell’s current holders will own about 67% of the combined company on a fully diluted basis, and Lumentum’s about 33%. Bloomberg put it among the largest technology deals on record.

Why a chip designer wants a laser maker

Marvell’s business sits on the electrical side of the network. It sells DSPs and other interconnect chips, network switches and custom AI processors, which it calls XPUs, to cloud companies that design their own silicon. Lumentum works in photonics: high-speed and high-power lasers, optical modules and optical circuit switches, and it runs its own compound semiconductor manufacturing, including indium phosphide. Marvell’s investor presentation credits Lumentum with the world’s largest indium phosphide wafer fab capacity.

The argument for owning both is that the next round of AI hardware will need them designed together. Optics already links data centers and the racks inside them, and the companies expect it to move into shorter “scale-up” and “scale-in” connections, all the way down to links inside a chip package. That is the territory of co-packaged optics, or CPO, where the optical engine sits in the same package as the switch or processor. “AI infrastructure is undergoing a fundamental architectural shift toward optical connectivity, creating an opportunity that comes along once in a generation,” Matt Murphy, Marvell’s chairman and CEO, said in the announcement.

Lumentum is growing fast on its own. In results released the same morning, it reported fiscal first-quarter revenue of $1.26 billion, up 136.5% from a year earlier, and forecast $1.575 billion to $1.625 billion for the current quarter. CEO Michael Hurlston said Lumentum landed its second major NPO/CPO win in the quarter, “backed by purchase commitments exceeding $5 billion.”

Put together on an annualized basis, the two companies have about $17.7 billion in revenue, $12.6 billion of it from Marvell, according to the presentation. Management puts the combined addressable market at $550 billion in 2030 and sees a path to more than $1 billion in yearly run-rate cost savings, mostly in cost of goods sold. The companies expect the deal to add to Marvell’s adjusted earnings per share in its first year after closing.

Where Broadcom and Nvidia fit

The obvious rival is Broadcom, which has long been Google’s main partner for custom chips and can sell a cloud customer a wider range of data center hardware than Marvell, CNBC noted. The two have fought over accounts before; WebProNews reported last year on Microsoft reportedly negotiating with Broadcom over custom Azure chip work that Marvell had been doing. In August, Marvell signed an agreement to supply chips that work alongside Google’s AI processors, worth up to $120 billion in sales through fiscal 2033, and in February it closed its $3.5 billion purchase of Celestial AI, a photonics startup.

Nvidia already holds stakes on both sides of the deal. It agreed in March to invest $2 billion in Lumentum, alongside a multibillion-dollar purchase commitment for laser components and funding toward a new U.S. fab. At the end of that month it put another $2 billion into Marvell through convertible preferred stock, as part of a partnership that brings Marvell’s custom XPUs into its NVLink Fusion platform.

Investors had cooled on both stocks while the talks were in the news. Since reports first surfaced late last month, Lumentum shares fell about 8% and Marvell’s about 22%, CNBC said, as a wider chip selloff gathered pace after Intel’s weak forecast.

Both boards approved the agreement unanimously. Murphy will stay on as chairman and CEO, and three Lumentum directors, Hurlston among them, will join Marvell’s seven-member board. The deal still needs votes from both companies’ stockholders and regulatory approvals the announcement didn’t spell out, and Marvell and Lumentum don’t expect to close it until the first half of 2028.

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What the EU’s New Packaging Rules Mean for Recyclability

Europe is rewriting the rules for the boxes, bottles and wrappers that carry almost everything people buy. The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, known as PPWR, was proposed by the European Commission in 2022 to replace the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive that dates to 1994. It entered into force in 2025, and its requirements phase in over the next 15 years.

The goals are straightforward: prevent and reduce packaging waste, make packaging easier to recycle and keep materials circulating. Because the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation is a regulation rather than a directive, it applies directly and uniformly in every EU member state. The push grew out of rising concern in the 2010s about single-use plastics, packaging waste and missed recycling targets.

A Letter Grade for Every Package

The centerpiece is a Design for Recycling (DfR) grading system. Recyclability will be assessed per unit, by weight, and the detailed DfR rules are due to be set through delegated acts by 2028. Grade A means at least 95% recyclable, grade B at least 80% and grade C at least 70%. Anything below 70% counts as technically non-recyclable and can’t be placed on the EU market from 2030.

Shoppers will see changes sooner. Starting in 2028, standardized, mandatory waste-sorting labels are required on all waste bins and on consumer packaging, so the label on a carton matches the label on the bin it belongs in.

The Timeline From 2030 to 2040

By 2030, all packaging on the EU market must be recyclable by design, and most plastic packaging must meet initial minimum recycled-content targets. Single-use plastic packaging also faces new restrictions that year, including for multipacks, fresh produce and foodservice items. By 2035, all packaging must be recyclable at scale. In 2038 the recyclability criteria get stricter, and in 2040 most plastic packaging must meet higher recycled-content targets.

Why Paperboard Makers Like the Rules

Fiber-based packaging starts from a strong position. Paperboard, made from a blend of virgin wood and recycled fibers, can be recycled five to 10 times. Its loop is simple: mills process raw and recovered fiber into board, converters turn it into packaging, brands and retailers fill and sell it, and consumers put it back into the recycling stream.

Collection rates already reflect that. About 87% of paperboard packaging in Europe is recycled, compared with 42% of plastic, according to Eurostat figures cited by Graphic Packaging International, which makes paperboard packaging for brands worldwide. For companies selling into the EU, the gap between those two numbers is a preview of which materials will have the easier path to compliance.

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