Devon Fritz had his midlife crisis a little early.
Tech
AI-Enhanced Robotic Guide Dog Talks You Through Every Step
People who are visually impaired rely on reliable assistance to gain an understanding of their environment without fear of colliding with something. Guide dogs have been doing this for a long time using tiny signs like yanking on the leash or altering their body weight, but engineers have now added spoken information to the mix, creating a system that responds ordinary queries and communicates what’s ahead.
Shiqi Zhang, the project’s leader at Binghamton University, and his colleagues outfitted a robot with large language models, allowing it to understand what humans are saying and engage in real-world conversations. Users simply tell the robot where they want to travel, and the robot will map out all feasible routes, including how long each one will take. When you choose one, the robot begins to move and continues to inform you of doors, passageways, and any other obstacles.
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First, you plan your path, and the robot simply walks you through all of the alternatives so you can choose one without guessing. Then you can begin traveling, while the robot provides live narration of all the data that your eyes would typically detect, such as how long a hallway is or whether a corner is approaching. This two-part back-and-forth allows consumers to be in control of their decisions and feel confident when on the move.
Photo credit: Jonathan Cohen
Testing was held in one of the larger office areas, which had numerous rooms connected. Seven legally blind individuals directed the robot to a conference room, but they all communicated with it in different ways, asking it to outline routes and then providing live updates. Every single one of them claimed that using both oral plans and live updates was the greatest option because it eliminated ambiguity before you even started moving and provided new information while you were in motion. This resulted in improved communication and a greater understanding of your surroundings.
Earlier versions responded exclusively to physical tugs on the leash. However, the updated version retains the fundamental direction while giving it a voice, since the robot can now communicate to you and handle a wide range of demands that go much beyond “go left” or “go right”. The larger language models allow it to engage in real conversations rather than simply answering pre-programmed inquiries. Participants departed with a lot of questions and a visible hope for expanded use. Real guide dogs rarely master more than a few basic commands. This robot, on the other hand, can use considerably more complex language skills to provide you with flexible answers and continue to discuss what you observe. The difference manifests itself in a variety of common situations, such as when someone needs a sip of water or simply wants to know what’s beyond the next doorway. When information flows freely rather than being locked away behind invisible signals, both safety and independence improve significantly.
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Cerebras Systems, a startup building what CEO Andrew Feldman describes as “the fastest AI hardware for training and inference,” has filed to go public.
The company previously filed for an initial public offering in 2024, but that was delayed due to a federal review of an investment from Abu Dhabi-based G42 and was ultimately withdrawn. Cerebras raised a $1.1 billion Series G last year, followed by a $1 billion Series H in February at a $23 billion valuation, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In recent months, the company announced an agreement with Amazon Web Services to use Cerebras chips in Amazon data centers, as well as a deal with OpenAI reportedly worth more than $10 billion.
In a recent interview with the WSJ, Feldman boasted, “Obviously, [Nvidia] didn’t want to lose the fast inference business at OpenAI, and we took that from them.”
Cerebras brought in $510 million in revenue in 2025, according to the filing, with a net income of $237.8 million (excluding certain one-time items, it was a non-GAAP net loss of $75.7 million).
A company has not disclosed how much it hopes to raise in the IPO. A spokesperson said the offering is planned for mid-May.
Google just made one of Gemini’s most useful features available to everyone. The Notebooks feature, initially rolled out to paid AI subscribers earlier this month, is now available to all free users on the web. If you use Gemini regularly, this is a pretty big deal.
What is Gemini’s Notebooks feature and what can you do with it?
Think of Notebooks as a dedicated project workspace inside Gemini. Instead of starting fresh every time you open the app, you can store your conversations, files, and sources all in one place under a single topic. Gemini then uses everything in that notebook as context when you ask your next question.
The feature shows up as a new Notebooks section in Gemini’s side panel, right between Gems and Chats. Any conversation you have inside Gemini can be saved to a notebook using the three dots menu.
You can also set custom instructions to control the tone, format, and style of responses. If you prefer Gemini to answer without referencing your saved chats, there is also an option to turn off notebook memory entirely.
What makes this genuinely exciting is the NotebookLM integration. These are the same notebooks used in NotebookLM, Google’s standalone research tool. Since the two sync automatically, any source you add in one app instantly appears in the other. That means you can research something in Gemini and then use NotebookLM’s Video Overviews and Infographics features on the same material, without any manual transfers.
How many sources can free Gemini users add to a notebook?
Free users can add up to 50 sources per notebook. If you are on a paid plan, the limits scale up considerably: AI Plus subscribers get 100 sources, Pro users get 300, and Ultra subscribers can go up to 600. The feature currently supports Gemini’s full toolkit, including web search and other AI-powered functions.
For now, Notebooks is live on the web only. It has not yet reached mobile or Mac apps, though broader availability is expected in the coming weeks.
A court has stopped the U.S. government from forcing Apple to take down ICE reporting apps from the App Store, due to it being a violation of the First Amendment.
Image credit: TheFire.org
In February, a lawsuit from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) took aim at the U.S. government over the right to report the activities of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE).
The preliminary finding, issued on April 17, lands in FIRE’s favor, with the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice being prevented from coercing Apple and Facebook into removing apps and interfering with communications.
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At a trendy venue near the San Francisco pier, Sam Altman’s verification project World celebrated its next evolution and rapid expansion of its ambitions. And it’s starting with Tinder.
Tools for Humanity (TFH), the company behind the World project, announced Friday plans to integrate its verification tech into dating apps, event and concert ticketing systems, business organizations, email, and other arenas of public life.
“The world is getting close to very powerful AI, and this is doing a lot of wonderful things,” said Altman, speaking before a packed crowd at The Midway. “We are also heading to a world now where there’s going to be more stuff generated by AI than by humans,” he added. “I’m sure many of you [have had moments] where you’re like, ‘Am I interacting with an AI or a person, or how much of each, and how do I know?”
World (formerly Worldcoin) distinguishes itself from many of its ID verification peers by offering the ability to verify that a real, living human is using a digital service while still protecting that person’s anonymity. There is some complex cryptographic alchemy behind this (something called “zero-knowledge proof-based authentication”). The upshot: The company is creating what it calls “proof of human” tools, which are mechanisms that can verify human activity in a world rife with AI agents and bots.
Its chief tool for verification is a spherical digital reader called the Orb that scans a user’s eyes, converting their iris into a unique and anonymous cryptographic identifier (known as a verified World ID). This can then be used to access World’s services, although users can also access World’s app without one.
Altman kept his remarks brief on Friday (TFH’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Blania, was absent due to a last-minute hand surgery, Altman said). He then turned much of the presentation over to World’s chief product officer, Tiago Sada, and his team.
Sada explained that World was launching the newest version of its app (the last version was launched at an event in December), along with a plethora of new integrations for its technology.
World has been preparing, for some time, to deploy a verification service for dating apps — most notably, Tinder. Last year, Tinder launched a World ID pilot program in Japan. That pilot was apparently a success because World announced that Tinder would be launching its verification integration in global markets —including the U.S. The program integrates a World ID emblem into the profiles of users who have gone through its verification processes, thus authenticating them as a real person.
World is also courting the entertainment industry by launching a new feature called Concert Kit, where musical artists can reserve a certain number of concert tickets for World ID-verified humans. This is designed to ensure that fans are safe from scalpers who often use automated ticket-buying bots to scarf up seats. Concert Kit is compatible with major ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster and Eventbrite, and the company is promoting it via partnerships with 30 Seconds to Mars and Bruno Mars — both of whom plan to use it for their upcoming tours.
The event was full of many other announcements, including some aimed at businesses. A Zoom/World ID verification integration seeks to battle a supposed deepfake threat to business calls, and a Docusign partnership is designed to ensure signatures come from authentic users.
The company is also working on a number of features in anticipation of the Wild West of the agentic web, including one called “agent delegation,” in which a person can delegate their World ID to an agent to carry out online activities on their behalf. A partnership with authentication firm Okta has also created a system (currently in beta) that verifies that an agent is acting on behalf of a human. The system is set up so that a World ID can be tied to a specific agent and then, when the agent goes out into the web to operate on that person’s behalf, websites will know a verified person is behind the behavior, said Okta’s chief product officer, Gareth Davies, at the event.
So far, it’s been difficult for World to scale, due largely to the verification process itself. For much of the company’s history, to get its gold standard, you had to travel to one of its offices and have your eyeballs scanned by an Orb — a fairly inconvenient (not to mention weird) experience.
However, World has continually made moves to increase the ease and incentive structure for verification. In the past, it offered its crypto asset, Worldcoin, to some members who signed up and has distributed its Orbs into big retail chains so that users can verify themselves while they’re out shopping or getting a coffee. Now the company is announcing that it is significantly expanding its Orb saturation in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The company also promoted a service where interested users could have World bring an Orb to their location for remote verification.
In a conversation with TechCrunch, Sada also shared that World has attempted to solve the scaling problem by creating different tiers of verification. The highest tier is Orb verification, but below that, World has previously offered a mid-level tier, which uses an anonymized scan of an official government ID via the card’s NFC chip.
The company also introduced a low-level tier, or what Sada called “low friction”— meaning low effort, I guess, but also “low security” — which involves merely taking a selfie.
Selfie Check, which Sada’s team presented during the event, is designed to maintain user privacy.
“Selfie is private by design,” said Daniel Shorr, one of TFH’s executives, during the presentation. “That means that we maximize the local processing that’s happening on your device, on your phone, which means that your images are yours.”
Selfie verification obviously isn’t new, and fraudsters have long managed to spoof it. “Obviously, we do our best, and it’s like one of the best systems that you’ll see for this. But it has limits,” Sada told TechCrunch. Developers looking to integrate World’s services can choose from the three different verification tiers depending on the level of security that’s important to them, he noted.
He spent his 20s writing tax software, staying on track to hit all the life targets he’d set for himself: house, kids, financial security. And then, one day, he did the math and projected forward what the next 20 years of his life would look like. But instead of relief, “I had this weird feeling that I’d totally missed the target,” he told me recently.
”I looked around at my colleagues, who kind of felt stuck in this place,” he said. “They had gotten to this cushy job where things were good, pay was good, benefits were good, but nobody seemed happy.”
This might sound familiar. Who among us hasn’t had the occasional crisis of meaning, perhaps mentally scored to the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime”? (The last part might just be me.) But most of us shake off those existential doubts and press on, for better or for worse.
Devon Fritz, however, is not like you or me. Searching for a more meaningful life and career, he tried volunteering with refugee-aid groups in Germany during the 2015 migrant crisis — only to be discouraged by how slow, unresponsive, and ineffective he found the nonprofit world.
Eventually, at a conference in Oxford, England, he discovered effective altruism, or EA. EA is built on the idea that we should use rigorous evidence and cost-benefit analysis to do the most good possible, very much including how we donate to charity. A dollar to one organization might save a life; a dollar to another might buy a commemorative tote bag. EA takes that gap in impact seriously and follows the math wherever it leads, always searching for the donation or the act that can create the most measurable positive impact, especially in terms of lives saved.
The idea clicked with Fritz, and over the next several years, he rebuilt his career around a single, very EA-inflected question: How can you build a career that really matters? The result is his book The High-Impact Professional’s Playbook, the manual Fritz says he wished he’d had during his early existential crisis. The book lays out concrete paths through which a person with a regular job can actually create outsized positive impact on the world.
What follows are five of the most useful ideas from it. And while Fritz’s framework comes out of effective altruism — which, with all its hyper-rationality, can sometimes seem cold or weird to outsiders — he argues that the lessons have value for everyone.
“Being impactful — in its best form — doesn’t tell you what to do,” he told me. “It just says do stuff. Figure out what’s good, and do something that’s really good.”
Next best may be better than best
The intellectual spine of Fritz’s book is a concept called “counterfactuality,” which, I’ll admit, may make you want to stop reading now. But while it’s a 22-point word in Scrabble, counterfactuality is actually pretty simple. For any action meant to do good, ask yourself: What would have happened if I hadn’t done it? If the honest answer is “basically the same thing,” your actual impact is smaller than you think.
Haindavi Kandarpa, one of the case studies in Fritz’s book, was at Boston Consulting Group working on public health and education projects in India and Bangladesh. That sounds both important and good, but when Kandarpa asked the counterfactual question about her own role, the answer was devastating: Nothing would really change. If she wasn’t doing it, someone equally competent would have taken her slot and done roughly the same work. That realization led her to leave for a charity startup incubator.
A lot of the standard advice about doing good falters when faced with the counterfactual. If 500 people apply for a job at an elite nonprofit and one gets it, the actual impact of the hire is the often-small gap between them and the closet runner-up. Fritz’s paradoxical conclusion is that you can have more counterfactual impact in obscure places nobody is looking — like the charity ranked fifth on the effectiveness list, not first. That can be hard to hear, especially for high performers used to competing for every top prize, but the status hit is worth it for the sake of actually making a difference.
It’s not just what you do — it’s what you do with your money
Unless you’re a full-time volunteer or are extremely bad at salary negotiation, you get money for your work. And what you do with that money can be just as impactful as what you did to get it.
According to a 2024 GiveWell analysis cited in his book, you can statistically save one human life if you give just $3,000 — provided it’s to the most effective charity. Switching just 10 percent of your charitable giving from a typical charity to an evidence-backed one can help up to 100 times more people or animals, all for the same cost. That is a life-saving impact.
This is the move with the lowest barrier to entry in the entire book, and the one most influenced by effective altruism. You don’t have to quit your job, move countries, or learn a new skillset. You keep doing what you’re doing but write the check — or, better, set up a recurring transfer — to an organization on a credible evaluator’s list. (GiveWell is a great place to begin.) You can start at 1 percent of income and see how it feels.
Your workplace is a lever
Most people don’t think of their workplace as something they can change. But if you have any influence over procurement, hiring, 401(k) match programs, charitable giving policies, or the company’s public positions, you have access to budgets and decisions that could dwarf what you can do on your own.
A mid-level manager who convinces their company to enroll in a workplace-giving program that defaults to effective charities can route more money in a single policy change than they could personally donate over a decade.
Nonprofits desperately need people who know how things work
The most consistently surprising path in Fritz’s book is trusteeship and advisory work. Charities and NGOs are often filled with well-meaning people who desperately want to do good, Fritz told me, but “they don’t have anybody even thinking” about quotidian details like finance. Luciana Vilar, another case study in the book, spent years in corporate finance before joining two nonprofit boards and was routinely the only person in the room who knew how to build a real budget.
If you are a competent finance person, lawyer, HR professional, or operations manager — which includes basically anyone who has worked inside a functioning company — you probably have skills that even well-funded nonprofits are desperate for. Giving few hours of your week to board or advisory time can unlock capacity an organization can’t buy, and it doesn’t require a career switch.
Your network has more leverage than you think
Fritz’s most striking claim is that the most time-efficient path to making a difference isn’t your career or your donations; it’s the people you already know.
If an effective but under-resourced charity is trying to fill a role, and you spend an hour emailing the five people in your network who’d be a good fit, and one gets hired, the counterfactual math of what you’ve done is absurdly high. And it didn’t require you to change jobs or write a check. All you had to do was send some emails.
It’s the path Fritz himself has taken, starting High Impact Professionals, which has placed dozens of mid-career people into higher-impact roles, all while rigorously measuring its own counterfactual impact. (When a candidate in the network takes a job, they ask the employer how good the next-best candidate was. When it’s very close, they count less impact.)
The same network effects can work with donations. Fritz describes people raising $1,000 or more by posting on social media a few weeks before their birthday, asking friends to donate to an effective charity instead of sending a gift. A lot of “how can I make a difference” agonizing is really about not wanting to look at the lever that’s already in your hand.
I’ve talked to enough people lately, including myself in the mirror, to know that low-grade despair is becoming our default setting. The problems of the world feel too large, individual action feels too small, and it can feel like the honest move is to just tend your garden. But when I pushed Fritz on this, he gave me an answer I keep coming back to. “There are big problems,” he acknowledged. “But that means it’s a great time to jump in and try to solve them.”
That can sound naive — but it’s also right. A world without problems wouldn’t need any of us. The world we actually have needs all the help it can get, and the bar for being useful in it is lower than we think.
Victrola and Third Man Records have officially pulled the trigger on their limited-edition collaboration for Record Store Day 2026, adding a hardware angle to a weekend we’ve already covered heavily from the music side including some of the most sought-after releases hitting bins today. This time, it’s not about what you’re chasing on vinyl, it’s what you’ll be spinning it on.
The release pairs the custom Victrola VPT 1520 TMR turntable with a matching set of VPS 400 TMR Tempo bookshelf speakers, both finished in Third Man’s signature yellow-and-black. The collection is available separately or as a bundle via Third Man’s official site and Victrola’s dedicated page, along with in-store availability at Third Man Records locations in Detroit, Nashville, and London.
The launch coincides with Record Store Day events, including a celebration at the label’s Detroit pressing plant.
“I’ve had the opportunity to visit Third Man many times, and if you haven’t been to one of their locations, you need to go,” said Scott Hagen, CEO of Victrola. “What Jack and his team have built is something truly magical,” Hagen continued. “They aren’t just painting things yellow and black—it’s as if they’re bringing inanimate objects to life, each one with its own character and soul. Maybe that’s why vinyl and vinyl culture fit so naturally within the Third Man world. It’s certainly why Victrola was incredibly honored when Third Man asked us to design and bring these new products to market together. I’m super proud of the outcome. Anyone who loves Third Man is going to need this new turntable and speakers in their life.”
Third Man Records x Victrola Wave VPT 1520 TMR Turntable
The Third Man Records x Victrola Wave VPT 1520 TMR turntable features an MDF plinth, adjustable counterweight, removable headshell, and high-resolution Bluetooth with Auracast support. It’s finished in a custom black-and-yellow color scheme with the Third Man globe logo prominently integrated into the design.
- Drive Method: Belt drive
- Speeds: 33 ⅓ and 45 RPM
- Cartridge: Ortofon OM5E
- Bluetooth Version: 5.4
- Bluetooth Codecs: aptX Adaptive, aptX HD, SBC, LC3 (Auracast supported)
- Profiles: A2DP, AVRCP
- Outputs:
- RCA (built-in preamp: 200–280 mV)
- Phono (2.5 mV ±3 dB)
- Power Input: AC 100–240V, 50/60Hz
- Dimensions: 16.93″ W x 14.84″ L x 4.72″ H
- Weight: 13 lbs (with cover)
- Included: Dust cover, platter, silicone slipmat, 45 RPM adapter, 6′ RCA cable, manual
Third Man Records x Victrola VPS 400 TMR Wireless Powered Speakers
The VPS 400 TMR Tempo powered bookshelf speakers round out the system with flexible wired and wireless connectivity, including Bluetooth and Auracast support for multi-room playback with up to 10 speakers.
- Inputs: Bluetooth, Auracast Broadcast Audio, 3.5mm AUX, RCA, USB-C (PC/flash drive), Optical (Toslink)
- Outputs: Auracast Broadcast Audio, Subwoofer out (with hi-pass “Bass Filter”)
- Dimensions (Right/Primary): 5.91″ W x 7.76″ D x 8.86″ H (150 x 197 x 225 mm)
- Dimensions (Left/Secondary): 5.91″ W x 8.07″ D x 8.86″ H (150 x 205 x 225 mm)
- Weight (Pair): 9.47 lbs (4.30 kg)
- Included: Right and left speakers, power cord (1.5m), speaker interconnect cable (4m), RCA cable (1.5m), 3.5mm cable (1.5m), instruction manual
Third Man Records x Victrola Vinyl Collection
To round out the collaboration, Victrola has curated a capsule collection of Third Man Records titles available at Victrola.com/thirdmanrecords, pairing the hardware launch with some of the label’s most recognizable releases.
- Featured Titles:
- Elephant – The White Stripes
- Blunderbuss – Jack White
- Broken Boy Soldiers – The Raconteurs
The Bottom Line
The collaboration between Victrola and Third Man Records is a straightforward, practical play tied to Record Store Day 2026. Instead of focusing only on records, it connects the purchase of vinyl with a ready-to-use playback system.
What stands out is the combination of a belt-drive turntable with a known cartridge and powered speakers that include both wired inputs and modern wireless features like Bluetooth and Auracast. That flexibility allows users to play records, stream from a phone, or send audio to other compatible speakers without adding more components.
At $499.99 for the turntable, $249.99 for the speakers, or $649.98 for the bundle, this is aimed at newer vinyl buyers or casual listeners who want a complete system without building one piece by piece. It lowers the barrier to entry while offering more functionality than entry-level all-in-one options.
It’s not intended for more advanced systems or users looking to upgrade individual components over time, but for its target audience, the value is in simplicity and convenience rather than maximum performance.
Price & Availability
- VPT 1520 TMR Turntable – $499.99
- VPS 400 TMR Powered Wireless Speakers – $249.99
- Turntable/Speaker bundle – $649.98
Tip: The Victrola Wave turntable (regular edition) is available at Amazon, as well as the Victrola Tempo speakers, which are the same models without yellow branding.
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There are various rules and regulations in home construction. Each discipline involved in the process — carpentry, plumbing, and electrical, to name a few — has codes to follow, which are intended to prevent shoddy workmanship or ensure homeowners’ safety. The 6-12 rule (or, as it’s sometimes known, the 2-6-12 rule) is definitely for the latter.
The rule mandates a certain spacing for electrical outlets and covers all the various types of outlets. Under the 2-6-12 rule, an electrical outlet must be installed in any wall space longer than 2 feet. A wall space is any continuous wall that is not broken up by a door or fireplace. Further, those outlets cannot be spaced more than 12 feet apart. This is to make sure that no point along the wall is more than 6 feet from an outlet.
The rule makes a lot of sense because most appliances that a homeowner will plug in have 6-foot cords. The rule is in place to ensure that there will always be an outlet in reach, no matter where you place a TV, stereo, lamp, or other electrical appliance. It’s designed to discourage the use of extension cords wherever possible.
Kitchens follow different rules
The one room in your house that isn’t subject to the same rule is the kitchen. Those rules are modified to accommodate the shorter 2-foot cables that come with kitchen appliances such as coffee makers, blenders, and the like. In a kitchen, electrical outlets must be placed no more than 2 feet from the edge of a counter and no more than 4 feet apart. Those outlets will typically be required to be Ground-Fault Circuit Interrupt or GFCI outlets (the outlets with the reset button). These can be wall-mounted or mounted within the counter.
Kitchen islands have still more rules. Islands are not required to have an electrical outlet, but they still need to have all the necessary equipment for power to be added later. Often, this means a closed electrical box located in one of the island’s cabinets. As long as it can be added later, it’s allowed.
Other rooms, like foyers and bathrooms, have similar but different rules, and you’ll have to be aware of what your local regulations require. This is especially true since those rules can vary between regions. If you’re a DIYer, be sure to research what’s applicable in your city or county.
A rogue AI agent at Meta passed every identity check and still exposed sensitive data to unauthorized employees in March. Two weeks later, Mercor, a $10 billion AI startup, confirmed a supply-chain breach through LiteLLM. Both are traced to the same structural gap. Monitoring without enforcement, enforcement without isolation. A VentureBeat three-wave survey of 108 qualified enterprises found that the gap is not an edge case. It is the most common security architecture in production today.
Gravitee’s State of AI Agent Security 2026 survey of 919 executives and practitioners quantifies the disconnect. 82% of executives say their policies protect them from unauthorized agent actions. Eighty-eight percent reported AI agent security incidents in the last twelve months. Only 21% have runtime visibility into what their agents are doing. Arkose Labs’ 2026 Agentic AI Security Report found 97% of enterprise security leaders expect a material AI-agent-driven incident within 12 months. Only 6% of security budgets address the risk.
VentureBeat’s survey results show that monitoring investment snapped back to 45% of security budgets in March after dropping to 24% in February, when early movers shifted dollars into runtime enforcement and sandboxing. The March wave (n=20) is directional, but the pattern is consistent with February’s larger sample (n=50): enterprises are stuck at observation while their agents already need isolation. CrowdStrike’s Falcon sensors detect more than 1,800 distinct AI applications across enterprise endpoints. The fastest recorded adversary breakout time has dropped to 27 seconds. Monitoring dashboards built for human-speed workflows cannot keep pace with machine-speed threats.
The audit that follows maps three stages. Stage one is observe. Stage two is enforce, where IAM integration and cross-provider controls turn observation into action. Stage three is isolate, sandboxed execution that bounds blast radius when guardrails fail. VentureBeat Pulse data from 108 qualified enterprises ties each stage to an investment signal, an OWASP ASI threat vector, a regulatory surface, and immediate steps security leaders can take.
The threat surface stage-one security cannot see
The OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications 2026 formalized the attack surface last December. The ten risks are: goal hijack (ASI01), tool misuse (ASI02), identity and privilege abuse (ASI03), agentic supply chain vulnerabilities (ASI04), unexpected code execution (ASI05), memory poisoning (ASI06), insecure inter-agent communication (ASI07), cascading failures (ASI08), human-agent trust exploitation (ASI09), and rogue agents (ASI10). Most have no analog in traditional LLM applications. The audit below maps six of these to the stages where they are most likely to surface and the controls that address them.
Invariant Labs disclosed the MCP Tool Poisoning Attack in April 2025: malicious instructions in an MCP server’s tool description cause an agent to exfiltrate files or hijack a trusted server. CyberArk extended it to Full-Schema Poisoning. The mcp-remote OAuth proxy patched CVE-2025-6514 after a command-injection flaw put 437,000 downloads at risk.
Merritt Baer, CSO at Enkrypt AI and former AWS Deputy CISO, framed the gap in an exclusive VentureBeat interview: “Enterprises believe they’ve ‘approved’ AI vendors, but what they’ve actually approved is an interface, not the underlying system. The real dependencies are one or two layers deeper, and those are the ones that fail under stress.”
CrowdStrike CTO Elia Zaitsev put the visibility problem in operational terms in an exclusive VentureBeat interview at RSAC 2026: “It looks indistinguishable if an agent runs your web browser versus if you run your browser.” Distinguishing the two requires walking the process tree, tracing whether Chrome was launched by a human from the desktop or spawned by an agent in the background. Most enterprise logging configurations cannot make that distinction.
The regulatory clock and the identity architecture
Auditability priority tells the same story in miniature. In January, 50% of respondents ranked it a top concern. By February, that dropped to 28% as teams sprinted to deploy. In March, it surged to 65% when those same teams realized they had no forensic trail for what their agents did.
HIPAA’s 2026 Tier 4 willful-neglect maximum is $2.19M per violation category per year. In healthcare, Gravitee’s survey found 92.7% of organizations reported AI agent security incidents versus the 88% all-industry average. For a health system running agents that touch PHI, that ratio is the difference between a reportable breach and an uncontested finding of willful neglect. FINRA’s 2026 Oversight Report recommends explicit human checkpoints before agents that can act or transact execute, along with narrow scope, granular permissions, and complete audit trails of agent actions.
Mike Riemer, Field CISO at Ivanti, quantified the speed problem in a recent VentureBeat interview: “Threat actors are reverse engineering patches within 72 hours. If a customer doesn’t patch within 72 hours of release, they’re open to exploit.” Most enterprises take weeks. Agents operating at machine speed widen that window into a permanent exposure.
The identity problem is architectural. Gravitee’s survey of 919 practitioners found only 21.9% of teams treat agents as identity-bearing entities, 45.6% still use shared API keys, and 25.5% of deployed agents can create and task other agents. A quarter of enterprises can spawn agents that their security team never provisioned. That is ASI08 as architecture.
Guardrails alone are not a strategy
A 2025 paper by Kazdan and colleagues (Stanford, ServiceNow Research, Toronto, FAR AI) showed a fine-tuning attack that bypasses model-level guardrails in 72% of attempts against Claude 3 Haiku and 57% against GPT-4o. The attack received a $2,000 bug bounty from OpenAI and was acknowledged as a vulnerability by Anthropic. Guardrails constrain what an agent is told to do, not what a compromised agent can reach.
CISOs already know this. In VentureBeat’s three-wave survey, prevention of unauthorized actions ranked as the top capability priority in every wave at 68% to 72%, the most stable high-conviction signal in the dataset. The demand is for permissioning, not prompting. Guardrails address the wrong control surface.
Zaitsev framed the identity shift at RSAC 2026: “AI agents and non-human identities will explode across the enterprise, expanding exponentially and dwarfing human identities. Each agent will operate as a privileged super-human with OAuth tokens, API keys, and continuous access to previously siloed data sets.” Identity security built for humans will not survive this shift. Cisco President Jeetu Patel offered the operational analogy in an exclusive VentureBeat interview: agents behave “more like teenagers, supremely intelligent, but with no fear of consequence.”
VentureBeat Prescriptive Matrix: AI Agent Security Maturity Audit
|
Stage |
Attack Scenario |
What Breaks |
Detection Test |
Blast Radius |
Recommended Control |
|
1: Observe |
Attacker embeds goal-hijack payload in forwarded email (ASI01). Agent summarizes email and silently exfiltrates credentials to an external endpoint. See: Meta March 2026 incident. |
No runtime log captures the exfiltration. SIEM never sees the API call. The security team learns from the victim. Zaitsev: agent activity is “indistinguishable” from human activity in default logging. |
Inject a canary token into a test document. Route it through your agent. If the token leaves your network, stage one failed. |
Single agent, single session. With shared API keys (45.6% of enterprises): unlimited lateral movement. |
Deploy agent API call logging to SIEM. Baseline normal tool-call patterns per agent role. Alert on the first outbound call to an unrecognized endpoint. |
|
2: Enforce |
Compromised MCP server poisons tool description (ASI04). Agent invokes poisoned tool, writes attacker payload to production DB using inherited service-account credentials. See: Mercor/LiteLLM April 2026 supply-chain breach. |
IAM allows write because agent uses shared service account. No approval gate on write ops. Poisoned tool indistinguishable from clean tool in logs. Riemer: “72-hour patch window” collapses to zero when agents auto-invoke. |
Register a test MCP server with a benign-looking poisoned description. Confirm your policy engine blocks the tool call before execution reaches the database. Run mcp-scan on all registered servers. |
Production database integrity. If agent holds DBA-level credentials: full schema compromise. Lateral movement via trust relationships to downstream agents. |
Assign scoped identity per agent. Require approval workflow for all write ops. Revoke every shared API key. Run mcp-scan on all MCP servers weekly. |
|
3: Isolate |
Agent A spawns Agent B to handle subtask (ASI08). Agent B inherits Agent A’s permissions, escalates to admin, rewrites org security policy. Every identity check passes. Source: CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, RSAC 2026 keynote. |
No sandbox boundary between agents. No human gate on agent-to-agent delegation. Security policy modification is a valid action for admin-credentialed process. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz disclosed at RSAC 2026 that the agent “wanted to fix a problem, lacked permissions, and removed the restriction itself.” |
Spawn a child agent from a sandboxed parent. Child should inherit zero permissions by default and require explicit human approval for each capability grant. |
Organizational security posture. A rogue policy rewrite disables controls for every subsequent agent. 97% of enterprise leaders expect a material incident within 12 months (Arkose Labs 2026). |
Sandbox all agent execution. Zero-trust for agent-to-agent delegation: spawned agents inherit nothing. Human sign-off before any agent modifies security controls. Kill switch per OWASP ASI10. |
Sources: OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications 2026; Invariant Labs MCP Tool Poisoning (April 2025); CrowdStrike RSAC 2026 Fortune 50 disclosure; Meta March 2026 incident (The Information/Engadget); Mercor/LiteLLM breach (Fortune, April 2, 2026); Arkose Labs 2026 Agentic AI Security Report; VentureBeat Pulse Q1 2026.
The stage-one attack scenario in this matrix is not hypothetical. Unauthorized tool or data access ranked as the most feared failure mode in every wave of VentureBeat’s survey, growing from 42% in January to 50% in March. That trajectory and the 70%-plus priority rating for prevention of unauthorized actions are the two most mutually reinforcing signals in the entire dataset. CISOs fear the exact attack this matrix describes, and most have not deployed the controls to stop it.
Hyperscaler stage readiness: observe, enforce, isolate
The maturity audit tells you where your security program stands. The next question is whether your cloud platform can get you to stage two and stage three, or whether you are building those capabilities yourself. Patel put it bluntly: “It’s not just about authenticating once and then letting the agent run wild.” A stage-three platform running a stage-one deployment pattern gives you stage-one risk.
VentureBeat Pulse data surfaces a structural tension in this grid. OpenAI leads enterprise AI security deployments at 21% to 26% across the three survey waves, making the same provider that creates the AI risk also the primary security layer. The provider-as-security-vendor pattern holds across Azure, Google, and AWS. Zero-incremental-procurement convenience is winning by default. Whether that concentration is a feature or a single point of failure depends on how far the enterprise has progressed past stage one.
|
Provider |
Identity Primitive (Stage 2) |
Enforcement Control (Stage 2) |
Isolation Primitive (Stage 3) |
Gap as of April 2026 |
|
Microsoft Azure |
Entra ID agent scoping. Agent 365 maps agents to owners. GA. |
Copilot Studio DLP policies. Purview for agent output classification. GA. |
Azure Confidential Containers for agent workloads. Preview. No per-agent sandbox at GA. |
No agent-to-agent identity verification. No MCP governance layer. Agent 365 monitors but cannot block in-flight tool calls. |
|
Anthropic |
Managed Agents: per-agent scoped permissions, credential mgmt. Beta (April 8, 2026). $0.08/session-hour. |
Tool-use permissions, system prompt enforcement, and built-in guardrails. GA. |
Managed Agents sandbox: isolated containers per session, execution-chain auditability. Beta. Allianz, Asana, Rakuten, and Sentry are in production. |
Beta pricing/SLA not public. Session data in Anthropic-managed DB (lock-in risk per VentureBeat research). GA timing TBD. |
|
Google Cloud |
Vertex AI service accounts for model endpoints. IAM Conditions for agent traffic. GA. |
VPC Service Controls for agent network boundaries. Model Armor for prompt/response filtering. GA. |
Confidential VMs for agent workloads. GA. Agent-specific sandbox in preview. |
Agent identity ships as a service account, not an agent-native principal. No agent-to-agent delegation audit. Model Armor does not inspect tool-call payloads. |
|
OpenAI |
Assistants API: function-call permissions, structured outputs. Agents SDK. GA. |
Agents SDK guardrails, input/output validation. GA. |
Agents SDK Python sandbox. Beta (API and defaults subject to change before GA per OpenAI docs). TypeScript sandbox confirmed, not shipped. |
No cross-provider identity federation. Agent memory forensics limited to session scope. No kill switch API. No MCP tool-description inspection. |
|
AWS |
Bedrock model invocation logging. IAM policies for model access. CloudTrail for agent API calls. GA. |
Bedrock Guardrails for content filtering. Lambda resource policies for agent functions. GA. |
Lambda isolation per agent function. GA. Bedrock agent-level sandboxing on roadmap, not shipped. |
No unified agent control plane across Bedrock + SageMaker + Lambda. No agent identity standard. Guardrails do not inspect MCP tool descriptions. |
Status as of April 15, 2026. GA = generally available. Preview/Beta = not production-hardened. “What’s Missing” column reflects VentureBeat’s analysis of publicly documented capabilities; gaps may narrow as vendors ship updates.
No provider in this grid ships a complete stage-three stack today. Most enterprises assemble isolation from existing cloud building blocks. That is a defensible choice if it is a deliberate one. Waiting for a vendor to close the gap without acknowledging the gap is not a strategy.
The grid above covers hyperscaler-native SDKs. A large segment of AI builders deploys through open-source orchestration frameworks like LangChain, CrewAI, and LlamaIndex that bypass hyperscaler IAM entirely. These frameworks lack native stage-two primitives. There is no scoped agent identity, no tool-call approval workflow, and no built-in audit trails. Enterprises running agents through open-source orchestration need to layer enforcement and isolation on top, not assume the framework provides it.
VentureBeat’s survey quantifies the pressure. Policy enforcement consistency grew from 39.5% to 46% between January and February, the largest consistent gain of any capability criterion. Enterprises running agents across OpenAI, Anthropic, and Azure need enforcement that works the same way regardless of which model executes the task. Provider-native controls enforce policy within that provider’s runtime only. Open-source orchestration frameworks enforce it nowhere.
One counterargument deserves acknowledgment: not every agent deployment needs stage three. A read-only summarization agent with no tool access and no write permissions may rationally stop at stage one. The sequencing failure this audit addresses is not that monitoring exists. It is that enterprises running agents with write access, shared credentials, and agent-to-agent delegation are treating monitoring as sufficient. For those deployments, stage one is not a strategy. It is a gap.
Allianz shows stage-three in production
Allianz, one of the world’s largest insurance and asset management companies, is running Claude Managed Agents across insurance workflows, with Claude Code deployed to technical teams and a dedicated AI logging system for regulatory transparency, per Anthropic’s April 8 announcement. Asana, Rakuten, Sentry, and Notion are in production on the same beta. Stage-three isolation, per-agent permissioning, and execution-chain auditability are deployable now, not roadmap. The gating question is whether the enterprise has sequenced the work to use them.
The 90-day remediation sequence
Days 1–30: Inventory and baseline. Map every agent to a named owner. Log all tool calls. Revoke shared API keys. Deploy read-only monitoring across all agent API traffic. Run mcp-scan against every registered MCP server. CrowdStrike detects 1,800 AI applications across enterprise endpoints; your inventory should be equally comprehensive. Output: agent registry with permission matrix, MCP scan report.
Days 31–60: Enforce and scope. Assign scoped identities to every agent. Deploy tool-call approval workflows for write operations. Integrate agent activity logs into existing SIEM. Run a tabletop exercise: What happens when an agent spawns an agent? Conduct a canary-token test from the prescriptive matrix. Output: IAM policy set, approval workflow, SIEM integration, canary-token test results.
Days 61–90: Isolate and test. Sandbox high-risk agent workloads (PHI, PII, financial transactions). Enforce per-session least privilege. Require human sign-off for agent-to-agent delegation. Red-team the isolation boundary using the stage-three detection test from the matrix. Output: sandboxed execution environment, red-team report, board-ready risk summary with regulatory exposure mapped to HIPAA tier and FINRA guidance.
What changes in the next 30 days
EU AI Act Article 14 human-oversight obligations take effect August 2, 2026. Programs without named owners and execution trace capability face enforcement, not operational risk.
Anthropic’s Claude Managed Agents is in public beta at $0.08 per session-hour. GA timing, production SLAs, and final pricing have not been announced.
OpenAI Agents SDK ships TypeScript support for sandbox and harness capabilities in a future release, per the company’s April 15 announcement. Stage-three sandbox becomes available to JavaScript agent stacks when it ships.
What the sequence requires
McKinsey’s 2026 AI Trust Maturity Survey pegs the average enterprise at 2.3 out of 4.0 on its RAI maturity model, up from 2.0 in 2025 but still an enforcement-stage number; only one-third of the ~500 organizations surveyed report maturity levels of three or higher in governance. Seventy percent have not finished the transition to stage three. ARMO’s progressive enforcement methodology gives you the path: behavioral profiles in observation, permission baselines in selective enforcement, and full least privilege once baselines stabilize. Monitoring investment was not wasted. It was stage one of three. The organizations stuck in the data treated it as the destination.
The budget data makes the constraint explicit. The share of enterprises reporting flat AI security budgets doubled from 7.9% in January to 16% in February in VentureBeat’s survey, with the March directional reading at 20%. Organizations expanding agent deployments without increasing security investment are accumulating security debt at machine speed. Meanwhile, the share reporting no agent security tooling at all fell from 13% in January to 5% in March. Progress, but one in twenty enterprises running agents in production still has zero dedicated security infrastructure around them.
About this research
Total qualified respondents: 108. VentureBeat Pulse AI Security and Trust is a three-wave VentureBeat survey run January 6 through March 15, 2026. Qualified sample (organizations 100+ employees): January n=38, February n=50, March n=20. Primary analysis runs from January to February; March is directional. Industry mix: Tech/Software 52.8%, Financial Services 10.2%, Healthcare 8.3%, Education 6.5%, Telecom/Media 4.6%, Manufacturing 4.6%, Retail 3.7%, other 9.3%. Seniority: VP/Director 34.3%, Manager 29.6%, IC 22.2%, C-Suite 9.3%.
There are two UNIVAC 1219B computers that have survived since the 1960s and one of them is even operational. [Nathan Farlow] wanted to run a Minecraft server on it, so he did. After a lot of work, of course, which is described in a detailed blog post, and, a YouTube video by [TheScienceElf] we’ve embedded below.
The UNIVAC is a seriously weird architecture by modern standards: it’s got eighteen-bit words — yeah, not even a power of two — and one’s compliment arithmatic with a weird signed zero thing going on. There’s one 36-bit and one 18-bit register, and only 40,960 words of memory. Eighteen-bit words. Yeah, it was the 1960s and they were making it up as they went along.
[Nathan] wasn’t, entirely, as this weird system is both well-documented and already had an emulator — in BASIC, of all things. [TheScienceElf] used the docs and the existing emulator to recreate his own in Rust so he could test their somewhat crazy plan without wasting cycles on real hardware. The plan? Well, there are really only two options if you want to build modern software for a niche architecture: one is to add niche support to something like GCC, and the other is to write a RISC V emulator and compile to that. We’ve seen that second one before, and that’s the route [Nathan] took.
Of course, [Nathan] is a machine learning guy, so he made the best possible use of LLMs — though it’s interesting to see that unlike Z80 Assembly, Claude Code really couldn’t wrap its virtual head around the UNIVAC’s assembly language, and [Nathan] had to bang out the RISC V emulator himself. Emulator in hand, [Nathan] and friends had code to run on the museum UNIVAC. A single frame of an NES game took 40 minutes, but hey, at least it finished before they got back from lunch.
[TheScienceElf]’s YouTube treatment teases hosting Minecraft, but it wasn’t a full server, just the login portion. That they were able to get TCP/IP over serial and set up a handshake between a 2020s laptop and a 1960s computer is still mighty impressive. Just the work the Vintage Computer Federation put in to get and keep this antique running is mighty impressive all on its own, but it’s wonderful they let people play with it.
We’ve had good reasons to look up at the skies lately: the pink moon earlier this month and the launch and splashdown of the Orion spacecraft, which carried humans to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years on the Artemis II mission.
And now we have two meteor showers.
The first is the Lyrids, which began on Tuesday and continues until the end of the month. It’s a relatively minor meteor shower fed by the C/1861 G1 comet, also known as Thatcher after its discoverer, A.E. Thatcher, in 1861. It’s a long-period comet that takes 415.5 years to orbit the sun.
The Lyrids meteor shower peaks between April 21 and April 22 and will produce somewhere between 15 and 20 meteors per hour under optimal conditions. Per the American Meteor Society, the peak should occur on the evening of April 22, so if you can only make it out for one of the two nights, the second night is expected to be the better viewing experience.
The second meteor shower starting this weekend is the Eta Aquariids. This meteor shower begins on Sunday, April 19 and spans for over a month, wrapping up on May 28. This is the stronger of the two meteor showers with an expected peak of roughly 50 meteors per hour, depending on where you view them from. The Eta Aquariids shower is known for its fast meteors and persistent tails that stick around for a little longer after the meteor has disappeared.
The 1P/Halley comet feeds it, the same one that feeds the Orionids meteor shower every October. Its peak should be between May 5 and May 6. The further south you are, the more meteors you can expect to see, and the opposite is true the further north you go. The best place to view this meteor shower is in the tropics.
Meteors from the Lyrids meteor shower will appear to originate from the Lyra constellation, which rises in the eastern skies during April.
How to see Lyrids and Eta Aquariids
Meteor showers come with a built-in trick for finding them. They are named for the constellations where the meteors appear to originate. This origin point, known as the radiant, is where you want to be looking.
The Lyrids meteor shower originates from the Lyra constellation, which is close to the larger Hercules constellation. Both of them rise from the eastern sky shortly around 11 p.m. local time. It will then follow a similar trajectory to the sun, streaking overhead before setting in the west. Sunrise happens long before the constellations actually set, so if you’re waking up early to view these, you’ll want to look high in the western sky.
Meteors from the eta Aquariids will appear to originate from the Aquarius constellation, visible on the eastern horizon a few hours before dawn during April and May.
The Eta Aquariids shower is more difficult to view. It originates from the Aquarius constellation, which spends most of the night of May 5-6 below the eastern horizon. The constellation rises around 3 a.m. local time and will only barely breach the horizon before sunrise a few hours later. If you go out to view the eta Aquariids, get up high and point yourself east.
If you’re having trouble finding the constellations, your best bet is using a sky map app like StarWalk (Android and iOS) or using web tools like Stellarium’s Sky Map. Such tools can help you identify where the constellations will be. For meteor shower viewing, all you really need is the general direction, but there’s no harm in knowing how to find the constellation.
Tips for viewing meteor showers
The advice for viewing meteor showers is the same, no matter how big or small the shower is. The single biggest advantage you can give yourself is getting as far away from light pollution as you can. This means leaving the city and the suburbs behind in favor of greener, dimmer pastures.
The moon can significantly impact viewing. This won’t be a problem for Lyrids since the moon is expected to be about a quarter full during Lyrids’ peak. Eta Aquariids viewers aren’t so lucky since the moon will be about 80% full that night, which will cause significant light pollution. The American Meteor Society says that the shower’s peak may be up to 50 meteors per hour, but with the moon that close to full, people can expect closer to 10.
Other than light pollution, the advice is pretty simple. Make sure to get out there early so your eyes can adjust, and avoid using any bright lights that could affect your night vision. Since meteor shower watching can be a multihour activity, make sure to dress appropriately for the weather and abstain from alcohol, since it acts as a vasodilator and can cause you to lose body heat more quickly on cold evenings.
You won’t need any equipment since meteors are visible to the naked eye. Telescopes and binoculars will reduce your field of view, which may cause you to miss meteors.
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