AI & Technology
Tim Cook steps down after 15 years; John Ternus is Apple's new CEO The hardware chief who led Apple Watch and Vision Pro now runs a $4.6 trillion company in the middle of its AI catch-up.
1 source
Still developing
OpenAI's Astra model clears its "critical cybersecurity threshold" The upcoming model can find and exploit security flaws in computer systems without human guidance, with restricted access to its strongest cyber capabilities. TechCrunch A stealthy attacker keeps draining ServiceNow and Salesforce portals Reco says an advanced threat actor using a custom Go toolset has been pulling guest-exposed data from ServiceNow Service Portals and Salesforce Experience Cloud sites for more than a year, and the activity is still rising.
Nvidia buys Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, its biggest acquisition ever The chip giant takes control of the world's main AI model marketplace, vowing the platform stays open and Nvidia compute is optional. TechCrunch NVIDIA Blog Meta pays users to let it learn from your prompts For its new Muse Spark model, the company is cutting prices by roughly 95 percent for anyone willing to share usage data for training.
A $1 billion AI-native ITSM startup takes aim at ServiceNow Serval's Catalyst agent, now generally available, writes code-based workflow automations, and the company says it resolves employee requests rather than just tracking tickets.
IBM and Marafiq move Saudi service delivery onto ServiceNow The Kingdom's integrated utilities group Marafiq is migrating its service management environment to ServiceNow's cloud platform, with IBM Consulting leading the full implementation.
AI & Technology AI & Technology Justice Department sides with OpenAI in the New York Times copyright case
The Trump administration told the court that training AI on the web is protected fair use, and that American tech dominance depends on it.
1 source →
AI & Technology Anthropic ships Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 with lower costs and looser guardrails
The twin models set new coding and reasoning records as the lab pushes zero-retention privacy to enterprise customers.
1 source →
AI & Technology
Tim Cook steps down after 15 years; John Ternus is Apple's new CEO The hardware chief who led Apple Watch and Vision Pro now runs a $4.6 trillion company in the middle of its AI catch-up.
The hardware chief who led Apple Watch and Vision Pro now runs a $4.6 trillion company in the middle of its AI catch-up.
Apple's hardware chief John Ternus took over as chief executive on Tuesday, September 1, ending Tim Cook's 15-year tenure during which the company's market value soared to about $4.6 trillion. Cook is widely expected to remain as executive chairman, a role that lets him keep stewarding Apple's relationship with President Trump through the tariff and supply-chain battles that have shaped the company's Asia-heavy manufacturing base.
Ternus, who led Apple's work on the Watch, AirPods, and Vision Pro, inherits a company that has stumbled in AI after promising new features built on the technology nearly two years ago. He faces the task of stepping outside his hardware comfort zone to keep Apple competitive, and he will headline next week's iPhone launch in Cupertino, where Apple has leaned on privacy-focused Siri upgrades to close the gap with rivals.
1 source
AP
AI & Technology
Justice Department sides with OpenAI in the New York Times copyright case The Trump administration told the court that training AI on the web is protected fair use, and that American tech dominance depends on it.
The Trump administration told the court that training AI on the web is protected fair use, and that American tech dominance depends on it.
In a court filing on Tuesday, the Justice Department backed OpenAI in the New York Times' copyright lawsuit over training its models on millions of news articles, arguing that the "creative possibilities and public benefits" of training large language models "far outweigh any competitive harm." The department added that siding with the publishers would "thwart creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility," and tied the case to national security, noting that AI models help officials analyze and draw inferences from real-world facts such as those in Times articles.
The Times pushed back Wednesday, with a spokesperson saying the administration "is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole," and that AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible. The Times sued OpenAI in 2023, and it has since been joined by other newspapers, Ziff Davis, and writers such as Sarah Silverman, making the outcome a bellwether for how creators fare in the AI era.
1 source
AP
AI & Technology
Anthropic ships Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 with lower costs and looser guardrails The twin models set new coding and reasoning records as the lab pushes zero-retention privacy to enterprise customers.
The twin models set new coding and reasoning records as the lab pushes zero-retention privacy to enterprise customers.
On Tuesday, Anthropic released Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, twin versions of its most advanced model. Fable 5.1 is available without restriction through the company's API and on cloud platforms, while Mythos 5.1 remains limited to registered partners in cybersecurity or life sciences research. The release pushes down token costs and eases the false-positive refusals that the model's safeguards had produced, and it brings zero data retention to enterprise customers, with a new high-privacy offering called Enterprise Frontier Safeguards rolling out in the fall.
Anthropic says the pair set records on benchmarks including Terminal-Bench 4.0 for CLI-based coding and Humanity's Last Exam for general reasoning, and it published three scientific findings the models produced, including a high-resolution map of Venus assembled from existing photos. The system card rates Mythos 5.1 as "low-risk" for concerns about automated AI development, noting its pace of accelerating internal AI research is in line with current trends.
1 source
TechCrunch
AI & Technology
Meta pays users to let it learn from your prompts For its new Muse Spark model, the company is cutting prices by roughly 95 percent for anyone willing to share usage data for training.
For its new Muse Spark model, the company is cutting prices by roughly 95 percent for anyone willing to share usage data for training.
For its new Muse Spark model, built to run coding and other agents, Meta is offering "contributor" pricing that averages about a 95 percent discount: a million input tokens cost 10 cents instead of $1.25, and a million output tokens cost 20 cents instead of $4.25, in exchange for users sharing their prompts and model outputs to help train future models. The move follows a rocky period for Meta on data collection, as an internal program to track employees' computer usage drew wide criticism and was paused in June.
The pricing lands amid sharp price competition among the frontier labs. Anthropic's newest Fable and Mythos models arrived with lower costs for cached tokens, and OpenAI made major price cuts at the end of July, so paying users for training data is a new way for Meta to secure the usage signals that agentic tools need to improve.
1 source
TechCrunch
ServiceNow & ITSM
A stealthy attacker keeps draining ServiceNow and Salesforce portals Reco says an advanced threat actor using a custom Go toolset has been pulling guest-exposed data from ServiceNow Service Portals and Salesforce Experience Cloud sites for more than a year, and the activity is still rising.
Reco says an advanced threat actor using a custom Go toolset has been pulling guest-exposed data from ServiceNow Service Portals and Salesforce Experience Cloud sites for more than a year, and the activity is still rising.
Cybersecurity firm Reco is tracking the campaign, named "City-Forum" after the domain of its primary scanning IP, 158.220.87.79, a Contabo server in Germany. The actor runs a single compiled Go binary that hits Salesforce over both Aura and Lightning Web Runtime and hits ServiceNow through the native Service Portal search endpoint, which Reco notes is barely documented and has no well-known open-source tooling. The campaign has been active since at least March 2025, its volume is climbing, and its busiest target logged more than 560,000 events.
Every byte retrieved is data that site owners exposed to anonymous or guest users, so Reco and Salesforce describe this as a misconfiguration risk rather than a platform vulnerability. Targets span telecoms, banks and financial-services firms, enterprise-software vendors including security and data-privacy companies, and public-sector portals across North America, Europe, and Asia. Reco advises auditing guest-user permissions and self-registration settings, restricting ServiceNow search sources that do not need public exposure, and hunting for the campaign's indicators of compromise. Reco is not naming individual victims and says it is not ruling anyone in or out, including the extortion group ShinyHunters.
3 sources
Reco
CSO Online
SecurityWeek
ServiceNow & ITSM
IBM and Marafiq move Saudi service delivery onto ServiceNow The Kingdom's integrated utilities group Marafiq is migrating its service management environment to ServiceNow's cloud platform, with IBM Consulting leading the full implementation.
The Kingdom's integrated utilities group Marafiq is migrating its service management environment to ServiceNow's cloud platform, with IBM Consulting leading the full implementation.
Announced in Riyadh on August 31 at LEAP 2026, the collaboration brings Marafiq's existing service management processes, reporting capabilities, and data onto ServiceNow to create a single digital environment where employees access services, submit requests, and manage approvals, with workflow automation, mobile access, and real-time visibility into service delivery.
IBM Consulting handles the full lifecycle, from platform design and migration through integration and testing, training, and post-deployment support. Marafiq supplies power, water, gas, and other utilities to the Kingdom's industrial cities and is listed on the Saudi Exchange. Mosab Al Moaliy, Marafiq's chief information technology officer, said the partnership supports modernizing service delivery and gives the company a stronger foundation to streamline operations and support future business needs, in line with broader Vision 2030 digital transformation goals.
1 source
IBM MEA Newsroom
ServiceNow & ITSM
A $1 billion AI-native ITSM startup takes aim at ServiceNow Serval's Catalyst agent, now generally available, writes code-based workflow automations, and the company says it resolves employee requests rather than just tracking tickets.
Serval's Catalyst agent, now generally available, writes code-based workflow automations, and the company says it resolves employee requests rather than just tracking tickets.
Serval, which launched about two years ago with backing from Sequoia, counts Spotify, Fox, and Live Nation among its customers and was most recently valued at around $1 billion. In a ComputerWorld Q&A, CEO Jake Stauch described the platform as built around two agents: a help desk agent that resolves employee requests through Slack, Teams, phone, and email, and an admin-only Catalyst agent that builds deterministic, code-based workflows instead of drag-and-drop flow diagrams.
Catalyst, which went generally available in late August, can build password-reset workflows across multiple identity providers such as Okta, Google, and Microsoft, create forms and dashboards, analyze existing data including ServiceNow data, and spawn long-running background agents that spot problems from ticket history and propose fixes before employees hit them. Stauch framed the pitch directly against the incumbent: "Traditional ITSM tools are built to track tickets; Serval is built to resolve requests."
1 source
ComputerWorld