As the only director to have helmed more than a single Predator film (previously the direct-to-streaming Prey and animated anthology Killer of Killers), Dan Trachtenberg has become the de facto shepherd of the franchise, and that’s a good thing. With Badlands, he takes audiences in a new direction, revealing some deep backstory to the “Yautja” culture and even creating sympathy for the story’s underdog protagonist.

We open on their homeworld where Dek, the runt of his clan, struggles to prove his worth, particularly in the eyes of his cold, fanatical father. Barely escaping execution, Dek blasts off to the “death planet” of Genna, desperate to kill the ultimate prey and earn his prized camouflage cloak once and for all. Immediately we discover how this place earned its nickname, and he only survives his first few moments with the help of a sassy robot, a “synthetic” named Thia (Elle Fanning). They form an unconventional bond and begin a shared quest, fraught with danger and more than a few twists big and small.

Predator: Badlands was shot digitally and yielded a native 4K master filled with extensive computer-generated visual effects that are photo-realistic and imperceptibly blended, such that the adventure plays out like we’re viewing it all through a 2.39:1 window. The use of color is occasionally quite clever, such as when a bleak, oppressive sky is streaked with vermilion. Emissive highlights stand out as well, particularly when the headlights of high-tech vehicles slice through the darkness.

Enemies approach and attack from all directions, and the hand-to-hand fights are some of the fiercest I’ve seen in a minute, bringing us some wonderfully hyperactive panning across the surrounds. Bass impact is outstanding, from rocket blasts to explosions to individual weapon hits, with the testosterone meter seldom dipping below 10. Among the more subtle flourishes, a distinctive inorganic effect is applied to the synthetics’ voices, at different levels as the mood commands. Worth noting, the Dolby Atmos track is exclusive to the 4K disc, as the included HD Blu-ray disc tops out at DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1.

Trachtenberg anchors the commentary, joined by his producer, director of photography and stunt coordinator. The track also appears on the HD Blu-ray, where the assorted featurettes do a fantastic job of breaking down the unique challenges of such an original production. In addition, there are half a dozen deleted, alternate and extended scenes, some rendered as detailed pre-visualizations, totaling almost half an hour, with their own optional commentary. The two-disc (plus digital copy) set is also being offered as a SteelBook ($76.99 at Amazon)

Fans will be quick to note that this is not the first Predator movie that tips its cap to the long-running Alien franchise, although when the script isn’t giving us a nifty wink it can be a bit derivative of a variety of sources. Overall, Badlands is a fierce and revitalized entry in the franchise that absolutely dominates in a home theater setting.

Movie Details

• STUDIO: Fox/Disney
• FORMAT: Ultra HD 4K Blu-ray (February 17, 2026)
• THEATRICAL RELEASE YEAR: 2025
• ASPECT RATIO: 2.39:1
• HDR FORMATS: Dolby Vision, HDR10
• AUDIO FORMAT: Dolby Atmos with TrueHD 7.1 core
• LENGTH: 107 mins.
• MPAA RATING: PG-13
• DIRECTOR: Dan Trachtenberg
• STARRING: Elle Fanning, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, Rohinal Nayaran, Chris Terhune, Mike Homik, Stefan Grube

Our Ratings

★★★★★★★★★★ Picture

★★★★★★★★★★ Sound

★★★★★★★★★★ Extras

Where to buy

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The iPad Air, the middle child in Apple’s tablet lineup, has been upgraded to the M4 chip with increased RAM and… Well, there’s not a whole lot else if I’m being honest. At the very least, the new iPad Air M4 models remain at the same price as the iPad Air M3, with the 11-inch version starting at $599 and the 13-inch at $799. I would give Apple more credit if it had increased the starting storage or added literally anything else.

If you put them side by side, you might not be able to tell the difference, but this upgrade would benefit creatives and professionals more than anything. There’s a significant performance bump from the M3 to the M4, and the increased RAM is doing a lot of work, especially if you’re taking advantage of Apple Intelligence.

If you’re using an M1-powered iPad Air or something even older, though, the new iPad Air M4 should be a compelling upgrade. Pre-orders start at 9:15AM ET on March 4, with the units arriving a week later. We expect full reviews will be published by then. But in the meantime, let’s dive into what the performance gains might look like and what we’re missing out on in this year’s iteration of the iPad Air.

iPad Air M4 vs. iPad Air M3: Performance and battery life

The most significant difference between the two iPad Air generations is their chipsets. The latest iPad Air launches with the M4 chip versus its predecessor’s M3 chip, and it gets a bump in RAM from 8GB to 12GB.

I don’t give much fanfare to incremental chip increases because the performance gain is usually minimal. However, the M4 is up to 30 percent faster than the M3, according to Apple. That might be noticeable to even casual users, especially as the years go on and iPadOS becomes more demanding. For power users, it’ll mean more demanding work like video editing will be noticeably quicker.

For those in need of the fastest internet speeds, the new iPad Air is also equipped with Apple’s N1 chip, which enables Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, the latest connectivity technology. However, I really don’t imagine the average user needing up to 46 gigabits per second of internet speed compared to the iPad M3’s 9.6 Gbps on Wi-Fi 6. If you do, you’re in the tax bracket for an iPad Pro.

Now, despite the increase in speeds, the battery life between the M4 and M3 models remains the same. Apple claims all four models get up to 10 hours of battery life surfing the web on Wi-Fi or watching video (up to 9 hours on cellular). No complaints here.

iPad Air M4 vs. iPad Air M3: Design, display, audio and cameras

For better or worse, we’re not getting any changes in any of these departments, which is why I’m lumping them together.

The iPad Air comes in blue, purple, beige and gray. The 11-inch option measures 9.74 x 7.02 x 0.24 inches and the 13 comes in at 11.04 x 8.46 x 0.24 inches. As their names suggest, they’re both rather light, at 1.01 pounds (1.02 pounds for M4) and 1.36 pounds, respectively. My only wish was that we got new colors that popped a bit more.

Then there’s the displays. All four versions of the iPad Airs sport a Liquid Retina LED display at 264 ppi. The 11-inch supports a 2,360 x 1,640 resolution with a peak brightness of 500 nits, while the 13-inch offers a 2,732 x 2,048 resolution at 600 nits. It would’ve been nice to see an OLED or even Mini-LED panel make its way to the iPad Air, which could’ve made the screen more vivid and vibrant. But it’s more disappointing that we’re stuck at 60Hz unlike the Pro models that offer 120Hz, making their visual experience smoother.

Both products feature landscape stereo speakers. The iPad Air M3’s audio quality couldn’t live up to the iPad Pro, so I doubt the M4 model will.

You won’t catch me taking photos with an iPad, but for those of you who do, the iPad Air M4 features the same 12MP cameras on the front and back as its predecessor.

iPadOS 26, Apple Intelligence and Apple accessories

Nothing huge is happening to iPadOS or the Apple accessories in the iPad Air refresh. The revamped Magic Keyboard from last year still works with these new models, as does the Apple Pencil Pro. iPadOS 26, released last fall, was a major update but will still be familiar enough to anyone who has used an iPad before. The new iPad Air M4 is getting a significant boost in AI processing speeds, though, thanks to its new chip and 50 percent increase in RAM. However, unless you’re an AI power user, you probably won’t notice a difference there.

All that said, if your love language is spreadsheets, the full specs are helpfully laid out below:

iPad Air M4 vs. iPad Air M3: Specs at a glance

Joe Gebbia, cofounder of Airbnb and the US chief design officer appointed by President Trump, was spotted in San Francisco today using a mysterious metallic device. In a social media post on X viewed more than 500,000 times, a man who looks like Gebbia sits with an espresso at a coffee shop. He’s wearing metallic buds that bisect his ears, with a matching clamshell-shaped disc in front of him on the counter.

After the video was posted Monday morning, social media users were quick to suggest that this could be some kind of prototype from OpenAI’s upcoming line of hardware devices designed in partnership with famed Apple designer Jony Ive. An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment on the potential Gebbia video after WIRED reached out. Gebbia also did not respond to a request for comment.

The device Gebbia appears to be wearing looks quite similar to the hardware seen in a fake OpenAI ad that was widely circulated on Reddit and social media in February. That video seemingly showed Pillion actor Alexander Skarsgård interacting with an AI device that had a similar-looking pair of earbuds and a circular disc. At the time, OpenAI denounced the widely seen video as not real. “Fake news,” wrote OpenAI President Greg Brockman at the time, responding to a social media post.

The earbuds seen in the video of Gebbia on Monday also look quite similar in shape to the Huawei FreeClip 2, a pair of open earbuds released earlier this year. However, the clamshell seen on the coffee counter next to Gebbia is different from Huawei’s most recent headphone case. It would also be quite surprising if a government official were seen using Huawei tech, considering the Chinese company is effectively banned from selling its phones in the US due to security concerns.

WIRED’s audio experts say he’s most likely wearing open earbuds, as Gebbia’s pair share some similarities with Soundcore’s AeroClips or Sony’s LinkBuds Clip, though the cases for those buds don’t match what’s on the table in front of Gebbia. WIRED also ran the photo and video through software that attempts to identify AI-generated outputs and other deepfakes. The detection software, from a company called Hive, says the odds are low that this imagery of Gebbia was generated by AI. Still, AI detectors are not always reliable and can include false outputs. It’s possible that the entire post could be a synthetic hoax.

Could this be some kind of soft launch teaser for OpenAI’s hardware? The timing of this trickle-out would make sense, since the company may ship devices to consumers sometime early in 2027. Still, OpenAI denied any involvement with the previous pseudo-ad for the metallic AI hardware, with its shiny earbuds and matching disc.

Despite political turmoil in the U.S. AI sector, in China, the AI advances are continuing apace without a hitch.

Earlier today, e-commerce giant Alibaba’s Qwen Team of AI researchers, focused primarily on developing and releasing to the world a growing family of powerful and capable Qwen open source language and multimodal AI models, unveiled its newest batch, the Qwen3.5 Small Model Series, which consists of:

• Qwen3.5-0.8B & 2B: Two models, both ptimized for “tiny” and “fast” performance, intended for prototyping and deployment on edge devices where battery life is paramount.

• Qwen3.5-4B: A strong multimodal base for lightweight agents, natively supporting a 262,144 token context window.

• Qwen3.5-9B a compact reasoning model that outperforms the 13.5x larger U.S. rival OpenAI’s open soruce gpt-oss-120B on key third-party benchmarks including multilingual knowledge and graduate-level reasoning

To put this into perspective, these models are on the order of the smallest general purpose models lately shipped by any lab around the world, comparable more to MIT offshoot LiquidAI’s LFM2 series, which also have several hundred million or billion parameters, than the estimated trillion parameters (model settings) reportedly used for the flagship models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google’s Gemini series.

The weights for the models are available right now globally under Apache 2.0 licenses — perfect for enterprise and commercial use, including customization as needed — on Hugging Face and ModelScope.

The technology: hybrid efficiency and native multimodality

The technical foundation of the Qwen3.5 small series is a departure from standard Transformer architectures. Alibaba has moved toward an Efficient Hybrid Architecture that combines Gated Delta Networks (a form of linear attention) with sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE).

This hybrid approach addresses the “memory wall” that typically limits small models; by using Gated Delta Networks, the models achieve higher throughput and significantly lower latency during inference.

Furthermore, these models are natively multimodal. Unlike previous generations that “bolted on” a vision encoder to a text model, Qwen3.5 was trained using early fusion on multimodal tokens. This allows the 4B and 9B models to exhibit a level of visual understanding—such as reading UI elements or counting objects in a video—that previously required models ten times their size.

Benchmarking the “small” series: performance that defies scale

Newly released benchmark data illustrates just how aggressively these compact models are competing with—and often exceeding—much larger industry standards. The Qwen3.5-9B and Qwen3.5-4B variants demonstrate a cross-generational leap in efficiency, particularly in multimodal and reasoning tasks.

Multimodal dominance: In the MMMU-Pro visual reasoning benchmark, Qwen3.5-9B achieved a score of 70.1, outperforming Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite (59.7) and even the specialized Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B (63.0).

Graduate-level reasoning: On the GPQA Diamond benchmark, the 9B model reached a score of 81.7, surpassing gpt-oss-120b (80.1), a model with over ten times its parameter count.

Video understanding: The series shows elite performance in video reasoning. On the Video-MME (with subtitles) benchmark, Qwen3.5-9B scored 84.5 and the 4B scored 83.5, significantly leading over Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite (74.6).

Mathematical prowess: In the HMMT Feb 2025 (Harvard-MIT mathematics tournament) evaluation, the 9B model scored 83.2, while the 4B variant scored 74.0, proving that high-level STEM reasoning no longer requires massive compute clusters.

Document and multilingual knowledge: The 9B variant leads the pack in document recognition on OmniDocBench v1.5 with a score of 87.7. Meanwhile, it maintains a top-tier multilingual presence on MMMLU with a score of 81.2, outperforming gpt-oss-120b (78.2).

Community reactions: “more intelligence, less compute”

Coming on the heels of last week’s release of an already pretty small, powerful open source Qwen3.5-Medium capable of running on a single GPU, the announcement of the Qwen3.5-Small Models Series and their even smaller footprint and processing requirements sparked immediate interest among developers focused on “local-first” AI.

“More intelligence, less compute” resonated with users seeking alternatives to cloud-based models.

AI and tech educator Paul Couvert of Blueshell AI captured the industry’s shock regarding this efficiency leap.

“How is this even possible?!” Couvert wrote on X. “Qwen has released 4 new models and the 4B version is almost as capable as the previous 80B A3B one. And the 9B is as good as GPT OSS 120b while being 13x smaller!”

Couvert’s analysis highlights the practical implications of these architectural gains:

• “They can run on any laptop”

• “0.8B and 2B for your phone”

• “Offline and open source”

As developer Karan Kendre of Kargul Studio put it: “these models [can run] locally on my M1 MacBook Air for free.”

This sentiment of “amazing” accessibility is echoed across the developer ecosystem. One user noted that a 4B model serving as a “strong multimodal base” is a “game changer for mobile devs” who need screen-reading capabilities without high CPU overhead.

Indeed, Hugging Face developer Xenova noted that the new Qwen3.5 Small Model series can even run directly in a user’s web browser and perform such sophisticated and previously higher-compute demanding operations like video analysis.

Researchers also praised the release of Base models alongside the Instruct versions, noting that it provides essential support for “real-world industrial innovation.”

The release of Base models is particularly valued by enterprise and research teams because it provides a “blank slate” that hasn’t been biased by a specific set of RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) or SFT (Supervised Fine-Tuning) data, which can often lead to “refusals” or specific conversational styles that are difficult to undo.

Now, with the Base models, those interested in customizing the model to fit specific tasks and purposes an easier starting point, as they can now apply their own instruction tuning and post-training without having to strip away Alibaba’s.

Licensing: a win for the open ecosystem

Alibaba has released the weights and configuration files for the Qwen3.5 series under the Apache 2.0 license. This permissive license allows for commercial use, modification, and distribution without royalty payments, removing the “vendor lock-in” associated with proprietary APIs.

• Commercial use: Developers can integrate models into commercial products royalty-free.

• Modification: Teams can fine-tune (SFT) or apply RLHF to create specialized versions.

• Distribution: Models can be redistributed in local-first AI applications like Ollama.

Contextualizing the news: why small matters so much right now

The release of the Qwen3.5 Small Series arrives at a moment of “Agentic Realignment.” We have moved past simple chatbots; the goal now is autonomy. An autonomous agent must “think” (reason), “see” (multimodality), and “act” (tool use). While doing this with trillion-parameter models is prohibitively expensive, a local Qwen3.5-9B can perform these loops for a fraction of the cost.

By scaling Reinforcement Learning (RL) across million-agent environments, Alibaba has endowed these small models with “human-aligned judgment,” allowing them to handle multi-step objectives like organizing a desktop or reverse-engineering gameplay footage into code. Whether it is a 0.8B model running on a smartphone or a 9B model powering a coding terminal, the Qwen3.5 series is effectively democratizing the “agentic era.”

The Qwen3.5 series shift from “chatbits” to “native multimodal agents” transforms how enterprises can distribute intelligence. By moving sophisticated reasoning to the “edge”—individual devices and local servers—organizations can automate tasks that previously required expensive cloud APIs or high-latency processing.

Strategic enterprise applications and considerations

The 0.8B to 9B models are re-engineered for efficiency, utilizing a hybrid architecture that activations only the necessary parts of the network for each task.

• Visual Workflow Automation: Using “pixel-level grounding,” these models can navigate desktop or mobile UIs, fill out forms, and organize files based on natural language instructions.

• Complex Document Parsing: With scores exceeding 90% on document understanding benchmarks, they can replace separate OCR and layout parsing pipelines to extract structured data from diverse forms and charts.

• Autonomous Coding & Refactoring: Enterprises can feed entire repositories (up to 400,000 lines of code) into the 1M context window for production-ready refactors or automated debugging.

• Real-Time Edge Analysis: The 0.8B and 2B models are designed for mobile devices, enabling offline video summarization (up to 60 seconds at 8 FPS) and spatial reasoning without taxing battery life.

The table below outlines which enterprise functions stand to gain the most from local, small-model deployment.

While these models are highly capable, their small scale and “agentic” nature introduce specific operational “flags” that teams must monitor.

• The Hallucination Cascade: In multi-step “agentic” workflows, a small error in an early step can lead to a “cascade” of failures where the agent pursues an incorrect or nonsensical plan.

• Debugging vs. Greenfield Coding: While these models excel at writing new “greenfield” code, they can struggle with debugging or modifying existing, complex legacy systems.

• Memory and VRAM Demands: Even “small” models (like the 9B) require significant VRAM for high-throughput inference; the “memory footprint” remains high because the total parameter count still occupies GPU space.

• Regulatory & Data Residency: Using models from a China-based provider may raise data residency questions in certain jurisdictions, though the Apache 2.0 open-weight version allows for hosting on “sovereign” local clouds.

Enterprises should prioritize “verifiable” tasks—such as coding, math, or instruction following—where the output can be automatically checked against predefined rules to prevent “reward hacking” or silent failures.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman said the company will amend its deal with the Defense Department (or the Department of War) to explicitly prohibit the use of its AI system on mass surveillance against Americans. Altman has published an internal memo previously sent to employees on X, telling them that the company will tweak the agreement to add language to make that point especially clear. Specifically, it says:

“Consistent with applicable laws, including the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, National Security Act of 1947, FISA Act of 1978, the AI system shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals.

For the avoidance of doubt, the Department understands this limitation to prohibit deliberate tracking, surveillance, or monitoring of U.S. persons or nationals, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information.”

Altman has also claimed in the memo that the agency affirmed that its services will not be used by its intelligence agencies, including the NSA, without a modification to their contract. He added that if he received what he believed was an unconstitutional order, he would rather go to jail than follow it.

In addition, the OpenAI CEO has admitted in the memo that the company shouldn’t have rushed to get the deal out on Friday, February 27, since the issues were “super complex and demand clear communication.” Altman explained that the company was “trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome” but it “looked opportunistic” in the end. If you’ll recall, OpenAI announced the partnership shortly after President Trump ordered all US government agencies to stop using Claude and any other Anthropic services. To note, Anthropic started working with the US government in 2024.

The Defense Department and Secretary Pete Hegseth had been pressuring Anthropic with to remove its AI’s guardrails so that it can be used for all “lawful” purposes. Those include mass surveillance and the development of fully autonomous weapons. Anthropic refused to bow down to Hegseth’s demands and in a statement said that “no amount of intimidation or punishment” will change its “position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.” Trump issued the order as a result. The Defense Department had also taken the first steps to designate Anthropic as a “supply chain risk,” which is typically reserved for Chinese companies believed to be working with their country’s government.

Altman said that in his conversations with US officials, he reiterated that Anthropic shouldn’t be designated as a supply chain risk and that he hoped the Defense Department would offer it the same deal OpenAI agreed to. In an AMA session on X over the weekend, Altman clarified that he didn’t know the details of Anthropic’s agreement and how it differed from the one OpenAI signed. But if it had been the same, he thought Anthropic should have agreed to it.

After the news broke out about OpenAI’s deal, Anthropic climbed its way to the number one spot of the App Store’s Top Free Apps leaderboard, beating out both ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Anthropic, capitalizing on Claude’s sudden popularity, launched a memory import tool to make switching to its chatbot from another company’s easier. Meanwhile, uninstalls for ChatGPT’s jumped by 295 percent day-over-day, according to Sensor Tower.

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Sales mean stocking up, especially on outdoor equipment and camping supplies ahead of your next adventure. Whether you’re about to take up fishing and need supplies, or have Noah Kahan concert tickets in sight and want extras from his L.L. Bean collaboration collection for the event, all of that is available to you. You can save 75% off these L.L. Bean sale items, no promo code needed.

This is a different sort of two-for-one special: twice a day, L.L. Bean posts new sales at 6 AM and 2 PM sharp, Eastern time. While the two-a-day daily markdown is not super expansive in terms of inventory up for grabs, what is posted for sale usually comes at a heavily discounted price akin to deals you’d see on Black Friday.

This L.L. Bean sale is like an online treasure hunt. The daily markdown sale involves a new deal posted daily from 6 AM to midnight Eastern time. Inventory leans toward gear, such as backpacks, blankets, and shoes.

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Intuit has lost around a third of its market cap since the beginning of the year. It’s not alone. Many established SaaS players have seen their stock prices fall in recent months, including Adobe and IBM — the latter experiencing its most significant one-day drop (roughly $40 billion) with Anthropic’s announcement that Claude could now read, analyze and translate legacy COBOL into modern languages like Java and Python. The market has a name for it: the SaaSpocalypse.

The argument from investors and market watchers: AI agents can now do bookkeeping, file taxes and reconcile accounts — without a human ever touching software. For instance, instead of a human using QuickBooks to categorize transactions, Claude Cowork can access financial data, apply tax logic and autonomously prepare documents. Rather than using TurboTax, agentic AI tools can handle complex tax logic and even file taxes. In lieu of QuickBooks, automated agents can handle multi-step bookkeeping tasks (like lining up receipts).

Why investors are repricing SaaS

Intuit has been among the hardest-hit, with its market capitalization now sitting at around $114 billion.

The catalyst has been the emergence of fully agentic, no-code AI assistants like Claude Cowork and open-source tools like OpenClaw, whose founder was recently acqui-hired by OpenAI. Fears are that these cheaper service-as-a-service offerings (or service-as-software, or results-as-a-service, depending on who you ask) will upend pay-per-seat subscriptions; whereas traditional SaaS delivers a tool (software) for users to complete a task, service-as-a-service delivers a fully-automated outcome.

For instance, Anthropic’s Cowork platform includes finance capabilities that allow the agent to read financial files and turn them into structured models, tables and reports. 

“The advantage is that I am abstracting away the complexity of my business operations,” said Brian Jackson, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group (who prefers to call it “service-as-software”). “To hear about a model where you only pay when you get the outcome that you want, that’s very appealing.”

This emerging capability is in line with past technological advancements, he pointed out: IT departments used to be in charge of running infrastructure, but cloud computing came along to abstract away that management. Then, SaaS tools emerged to orchestrate the application layer. Now users manage their work — inputting data, filling out forms, creating analytics dashboards — within SaaS apps. 

“So the next step is automated intelligence,” Jackson said. “Instead of having people do those things, we’ll just have AI do them.” Essentially, it could become a headless system without a UI; users simply let it run and don’t think about it. 

This new concept comes at a time when enterprises are becoming fed up with the SaaS business model, he noted. Lock-in is frustrating, fees continue to go up, seats expand, and “it becomes this unwieldy operating cost,” Jackson said. “And it’s not always guaranteed to drive value, it doesn’t guarantee ROI at all.”

Why Intuit got hit the hardest

Intuit, which was founded in 1983, now serves around 100 million customers with a suite of products that, in addition to QuickBooks and TurboTax, include Mailchimp and Credit Karma. But these core offerings are now considered low-hanging fruit for AI, potentially endangering the company whose revenue model relies heavily on per-seat/per-user subscriptions.

Intuit’s CEO Sasan Goodarzi has recently shrugged off SaaSpocalypse claims, calling data the “most important moat” in a Semafor interview. 

Marianna Tessel, EVP and GM for Intuit’s small business group, takes the same stance. Yes, Claude Cowork and similar agentic tools are “robust” tools, she noted, but Intuit has “persistent” and “durable” advantages. 

Notably: First-party data. Customers generate various types of data on Intuit’s systems, whether it’s by creating an invoice, importing ledgers or performing various finance projects. Then there’s third-party data, which is generated through Intuit’s connections with 24,000-plus banks, e-commerce sites and other entities, Tessel pointed out. 

AI agents simply do not have access to this “vastness” of data, she contended. Further, Intuit knows how to organize and use data, such as stitching together information across customer segments to provide market snapshots. “We understand this data, we know how to turn it into action,” Tessel argued. 

She also doubled down on Intuit’s deep understanding of its customers. Rather than a chatbot that can process and act on numbers and figures, “we know what small businesses face,” she said, whether it’s their concerns around bookkeeping and payroll, or their struggles with hiring. 

“We’ve been in business for over 40 years,” Tessel noted. “We have a lot of know-how that is very specific.”

Other SaaS companies stand staunchly behind this argument. Jon Aniano, Zendesk’s SVP of product and CRM applications, pointed out that his company serves 80,000 customers and deeply understands their needs. “We actually see [general purpose agentic tools] at a disadvantage because they’ve gotta go customer by customer and learn things that we’ve learned over the course of 20 years,” he said at a recent VentureBeat event. 

The data moat argument does hold up, noted Info-Tech’s Jackson. He also pointed out that, realistically, the SaaS market is projected to grow at a “pretty good clip” in the years ahead. “Could that change very quickly? It’s possible, but it’s unlikely,” he said. 

Also, SaaS is so entrenched in modern business, and pivoting to something entirely new can be a challenge. Even disruptive and compelling technologies like AI can take time to deploy at scale because enterprises have to recraft their workflows, Jackson noted.

“You have workers in place. You have departments in place. It just takes effort and time to change the processes and the expectations around these things,” he said, although “the appetite will definitely be there.”

How Intuit is betting on what agents can’t replicate 

To get ahead of this, Intuit recently signed a multi-year partnership with Anthropic to bring AI agents to mid-market businesses. Using Anthropic’s Claude Agent SDK on the Intuit platform, enterprises will be able to build and customize agents. On the other end, Intuit’s tools can be surfaced directly inside Anthropic products such as Cowork, Claude for Enterprise, and Claude.ai through Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations with TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks and Mailchimp.

This builds on Intuit’s previous rollout of Intuit Intelligence, which features specialized AI agents for sales, tax, payroll, accounting and project management. Users can query and interact with their financial data in natural language, automate tasks and generate dynamic reports or KPI scorecards. 

“They have the data, they have the interface, and now they’re introducing themselves as an orchestration layer,” Jackson said of moves like this by large SaaS players. “We can be the place where you build your agents and manage them.”

To this point, Tessel calls Intuit “a well-run company” that can react with speed. Her team keeps up with orchestration advancements, reads academic papers and is “constantly learning” about new technologies. “We’re on it,” she said.”

Ultimately, companies must be “awake and aware right now,” she emphasized. As she put it: “What’s the pivot of the day? How many times did you pivot? Are you experimenting?”

Zendesk’s Aniano agreed that there are “cool new ways of developing software,” and acknowledged that he “lives” 90 to 120 minutes of his day inside Claude Code. Companies that can make the “mental shift” to building software in new ways can create a level playing field between incumbents and startups. 

One thing that’ll be interesting to see is how quickly SaaS providers offer MCP plugins or build their own within their software suites, Jackson noted. “How good will these SaaS providers be at supporting AI interoperability?” he said. “And what ways will they try to create friction or make it harder for enterprises to abandon their interface?”

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect Intuit’s current market cap decline of approximately 33% year-to-date.

A phishing campaign is using a fake Google Account security page to deliver a web-based app capable of stealing one-time passcodes, harvesting cryptocurrency wallet addresses, and proxying attacker traffic through victims’ browsers.

​The attack leverages Progressive Web App (PWA) features and social engineering to deceive users into believing they are interacting with a legitimate Google Security web page and inadvertently installing the malware.

PWAs run in the browser and can be installed from a website, just like a standalone regular application, which is displayed in its own window without any visible browser controls.

Victim browser becomes attacker’s proxy

The campaign relies on social engineering to obtain the necessary permissions from the user under the guise of a security check and increased protection for devices.

The cybercriminals use the domain google-prism[.]com, which poses as a legitimate security-related service from Google, showing a four-step setup process that includes giving risky permissions and installing a malicious PWA app. In some instances, the site will also promote a companion Android app to “protect” contacts.

According to researchers at cybersecurity company Malwarebytes, the PWA app can exfiltrate contacts, real-time GPS data, and clipboard contents.

Additional functionality observed includes acting as a network proxy and internal port scanner, which allows the attacker to route requests through the victim’s browser and identify live hosts on the network.

The website also requests permissions to access text and images copied to the clipboard, which can occur only when the app is open.

However, the fake website also asks for permission to show notifications, which allows the attacker to push alerts, new tasks, or trigger data exfiltration.

Additionally, the malware uses the WebOTP API on supported browsers in an attempt to intercept SMS verification codes, and checks the /api/heartbeat every 30 seconds for new commands.

As the PWA app can only steal the contents of the clipboard and OTP codes when it is open, notifications can be used to send fake security alerts that prompt the user to open the PWA again.

Malwarebytes says that the focus is on stealing one-time passwords (OTP) and cryptocurrency wallet addresses, and that the malware also “builds a detailed device fingerprint.”

Another component in the malicious PWA is a service worker that is responsible for push notifications, running tasks from received payloads, and preparing stolen data locally for exfiltration.

The researchers say that the most concerning component is the WebSocket relay that allows the attacker to pass web requests through the browser as if they were on the victim’s network.

Because the worker includes a handler for Periodic Background Sync, which allows web apps in Chromium-based browsers to periodically synchronize data in the background, the attacker can connect to a compromised device for as long as the malicious PWA app is installed.

Malware Android companion

Users who choose to activate all the security features for their account also receive an APK file for their Android devices that promises to extend protection to the list of contacts.

The payload is described as a “critical security update, ”claims to be verified by Google, and requires 33 permissions that include access to SMS texts, call logs, the microphone, contacts, and the accessibility service.

These alone are high-risk permissions that enable data theft, full device compromise, and financial fraud.

The malicious APK file includes multiple components, such as a custom keyboard to capture keystrokes, a notification listener for access to incoming notifications, and a service to intercept credentials filled automatically.

“To enhance persistence, the APK registers as a device administrator (which can complicate uninstallation), sets a boot receiver to execute on startup, and schedules alarms intended to restart components if terminated,” the researchers say.

Malwarebytes observed components that could be used for overlay-based attacks, which indicate plans for potential credential phishing in certain apps.

By combining legitimate browser features with social engineering, the attacker does not need to exploit any vulnerability. Instead, they trick the victim into providing all the needed permissions for malicious activity to occur.

The researchers warn that even if the Android APK is not installed, the web app can collect contacts, intercept one-time passwords, track location, scan internal networks, and proxy traffic through the victim’s device.

Users should be aware that Google does not run security checks through pop-ups on web pages or request any software installation for enhanced protection features. All security tools are available through the Google Account at myaccount.google.com.

To remove the malicious APK file, Malwarebytes recommends users look for a “Security Check” entry in the list of installed apps and prioritize uninstalling it.

If an app called “System Service” with a package name com.device.sync is present and has device administrator access, users should revoke it under Settings > Security > Device admin apps and then uninstall it.

Malwarebytes researchers also provide detailed steps for removing the malicious web app from both Chromium-based Windows, such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, as well as from Safari.

They note that on Firefox and Safari browsers, many of the malicious app’s capabilities are severely restricted, but push notifications still work.

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