#AI agents

#AI agents

Update January 9, 2026: Although the acquisition amount has not been disclosed, we do know that Snowflake has purchased the ITOM platform Observe. Before the deal was finalized, Snowflake had already considered adopting Observe, the company told The Register. Now, the company can not only offer observability functionality to customers, but also apply it itself. However, the emphasis is on preventing downtime and the loss of important data for users of the Snowflake platform.

A lot of mega-cap tech titans are ending off 2025 on a high note with big acquisitions. Meta Platforms ( NASDAQ:META) joined in the year-end deal-making spree by buying up AI agent startup Manus in a deal reportedly worth over $2 billion. Undoubtedly, Manus is an incredible technology that's already gained quite the following, with around $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

"This is not just risky; it's unsustainable," he writes. "By 2026, the demand for robust frameworks and private environments to ensure stability and control will be undeniable. Running models locally-on-premises or in controlled AI factories-will become the norm to provide a stable foundation and insulate organizations from external disruptions. But this is more than a prediction. It's an urgent appeal."

For years, the cost of using "free" services from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other Big Tech firms has been handing over your data. Uploading your life into the cloud and using free tech brings conveniences, but it puts personal information in the hands of giant corporations that will often be looking to monetize it. Now, the next wave of generative AI systems are likely to want more access to your data than ever before.

Amazon ( NASDAQ:AMZN) has been a quiet laggard in the Magnificent Seven this year after gaining just over 3% year to date. With just a few trading days left in the year, it's looking like the $2.45 trillion e-commerce juggernaut is about to disappoint yet again, despite all the encouraging AI projects going on behind the scenes, from "frontier" AI agents to those impressive Trainium3 AI chips, the rollout of Alexa+, and let's not forget about the warehouse robots.

In late 2025, Mark Karpelès, ex CEO of Mt. Gox, lives a quieter life in Japan, building a VPN and an AI automation platform. As Chief Protocol Officer at vp.net-a VPN that uses Intel's SGX technology to let users verify exactly what code runs on servers-he works alongside Roger Ver and Andrew Lee, the founder of Private Internet Access. "It's the only VPN that you can trust basically. You don't need to trust it, actually, you can verify".

Last week, Google DeepMind made the Interactions API available as a public beta. The new API represents a fundamental change in how developers work with AI models: from stateless to a stateful architecture with server-side context management. With this move, Google is following the path that OpenAI embarked on in March 2025 with its Responses API. Over the past two years, developers have been working with generative AI via a so-called 'completion' model.

Microsoft has begun rolling out a public preview of native support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) in the latest Windows 11 Insider builds, edging its much-touted "agentic OS" vision closer to reality. The update is rolling out to Windows Insiders on the Dev and Beta channels as part of build 26220.7344 and provides insight into where Microsoft is going with the technology.

November was the month AI went full gladiator mode: three frontier labs released their best models within a week, Google reclaimed the throne with Gemini 3, and open source proved it can win Olympic gold medals in mathematics. Meanwhile, the agent revolution became official doctrine at Microsoft and Google, and China's AI ecosystem hit escape velocity with 10 million app downloads in seven days.