Google has shown off a new AI project that could make language barriers a little less intimidating, and it doesn’t need an internet connection to do it. The company has introduced the Gemma Translator, a compact prototype built in collaboration with Antigravity. Unlike most AI translation tools that rely on cloud processing, this device runs entirely offline using Gemma 4 E2B, Google’s lightweight open model. Everything happens locally on the device, making it both portable and independent of an internet connection. The prototype is powered by a Raspberry Pi 5 and includes a microphone and speaker inside a custom 3D-printed enclosure, creating a self-contained translator you can carry almost anywhere.

AI translation, without the cloud

The demonstration shows just how far AI models have come. Instead of depending on remote servers, the Gemma Translator processes speech directly on the Raspberry Pi, translating conversations on-device.

That approach offers a few obvious advantages. Travelers could use it in places with unreliable connectivity, while businesses or organizations handling sensitive conversations wouldn’t have to send voice data to the cloud. Running everything locally could also reduce latency, making conversations feel more natural. Although Google hasn’t positioned the project as a commercial product, it highlights what’s now possible with efficient AI models that can operate on affordable hardware.

A glimpse of what’s coming next

The Gemma Translator is more of a technology showcase than a product announcement. Still, it points toward a future where AI assistants don’t always need powerful data centers to be useful.

As open models continue to shrink while becoming more capable, devices like this could eventually find their way into travel gadgets, accessibility tools, classrooms, or even emergency response kits where internet access isn’t guaranteed. For now, Google’s latest prototype serves as a reminder that some of AI’s most interesting innovations are being squeezed into tiny devices that can work almost anywhere.

from the keeping-up-with-the-ai dept

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

On an afternoon in mid-May, dozens of Microsoft engineers and their managers gathered online and in a conference room at the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to discuss Project Glasswing.

The tech giant was racing to fix weaknesses in its code that a new AI model known as Mythos was uncovering at an unprecedented clip. The AI behemoth Anthropic, which developed Mythos, had given access to select organizations that make software used by regular people, companies and governments across the world. The goal was to find and fix the vulnerabilities before hackers and adversarial governments like China began using similar tools to find and exploit them for espionage and sabotage.

As the group settled in, one engineer asked the question that loomed over the meeting: Did Mythos “live up to the hype that Anthropic claimed it would have had?”

“Yes,” a manager responded, according to a recording of the meeting viewed by ProPublica.

The version being used by Microsoft, Claude Mythos Preview, was surfacing bugs faster than the tech giant could patch them, and engineers, the manager said, were now in “a mad dash” to close the gap.

One slide in that day’s presentation showed that in April alone, Mythos had uncovered 90 “critical” bugs and 141 “important” ones in SharePoint, Microsoft’s widely used collaboration software. In the first half of May it found even more.

“Please, please, please if your org has any April bugs, drive those down,” engineering manager Hans Andersen implored the group. They had roughly two weeks “to find as many things and do as much good as we can with this access.”

May 31, he explained, “is considered the day when the rest of the world will have caught up.”

The engineers on the call poked at that assertion, with one of them summing up the predicament: “So basically you’re saying if it’s released on June 1, then on June 2 the adversaries will have our bugs?”

Yep, one person responded. Yep, another echoed.

Ever since Anthropic kick-started a national conversation about the bug-hunting power of AI in April, when Project Glasswing was made public, national security experts predicted that the U.S. would have a window of opportunity to fix flaws before adversaries would have similar models capable of discovering the same weaknesses. In late June, the international alliance of intelligence agencies known as the Five Eyes — whose members are the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K. — warned in an unusual joint statement that in a matter of months, that window would be closing. But the recording of the Microsoft meeting, along with internal documents reviewed by ProPublica, suggest the day of cyber reckoning may already be here.

Given the deluge of flaws Mythos has identified, Microsoft so far has focused on patching those it considers most dangerous, which are classified critical or important, according to the presentation as well as the company’s own public patch updates. The internal records indicate that Microsoft plans to eventually address “moderate”-severity flaws uncovered by Mythos. The documents made no mention of “low”-severity bugs.

The company’s approach reflects the triage system that is typical in the industry. Just as the sickest patients are the first to be treated in the emergency room, vulnerability triage prioritizes issues that are likely to cause the most damage if exploited by hackers.

But that strategy carries its own risk in this AI-powered bug-finding era, in which new tools are unearthing a record-breaking volume of weaknesses in the products we use every day. Mythos, for example, is able to chain together a string of bugs that build on one another, meaning that the low- and moderate-severity vulnerabilities that remain unpatched could create an opening to carry out devastating attacks.

“The problem now is that you can chain four low-level flaws, and that can equal a high severity,” said Vinh Nguyen, a senior technical adviser to Anthropic and a senior fellow for AI at the Council on Foreign Relations who formerly served as chief AI officer and chief data scientist at the National Security Agency. “If you’re Microsoft, the current triage strategy may be underpricing risks.”

In emailed responses to ProPublica’s questions, Microsoft stood by its approach, saying its triaging decisions are based on a number of factors, including exploitability and the impact on customers. The company presentation did not mention chaining, but a spokesperson told ProPublica that the technique “has long been considered as part of vulnerability assessment and risk analysis.”

Asked about the internal presentation and the then-looming May 31 deadline, the spokesperson downplayed its significance, saying that “accelerated targeting and exploitation of new vulnerabilities is not a new phenomenon.” That said, he added, the comments made during the meeting reflect how the company “feels a sense of urgency to help our customers at this time.”

“What was heard on that call and is true today is that security is Microsoft’s most important priority and teams across the company are prioritizing using AI to discover and remediate vulnerabilities as quickly as possible.”

Microsoft declined to answer questions about how many bugs engineers had patched since the presentation.

Anthropic declined to comment.

The internal Microsoft presentation and accompanying slides predicted that the group of staffers working on SharePoint, which is used by governments and businesses worldwide to manage data and documents, “will be busy for months,” first working through the highest-priority critical bugs then tackling the important ones in August. Microsoft says vulnerabilities it categorizes as critical include so-called worms that can crash systems and spread malware as they race across computer networks. Important ones could result in “compromise of the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of user data” as well as the “availability of processing resources.” After those categories were cleared, the group would begin work on roughly 300 “moderate” bugs, according to the presentation.

While the internal documents reviewed by ProPublica do not include updates on the entire breadth of Microsoft’s offerings, they do give a sense of the scale of the problem. One document noted that, since the company started using Mythos earlier this year, it had collectively found hundreds of bugs that Microsoft categorized as either critical or important in popular products such as Microsoft 365, the Teams conferencing platform and the Copilot AI tool. As of mid-May, most of them had yet to be patched.

“They’re not profound and exotic, but they’re real,” Andersen, the engineering manager, said during the meeting. “And a lot of them are exploitable.”

It’s unclear whether hackers have exploited any specific bug identified by Mythos, but some  have tapped AI to automate attacks and appear to be using Mythos-like tech to find and exploit weaknesses.

There have been outward signs of Microsoft’s internal struggle to deal with the growing list of bugs to be patched. Each month, the company publicly releases fixes for its software vulnerabilities in what’s known as “Patch Tuesday.” In June, it released patches for more than 200 bugs, which industry experts then said was an all-time high. But on July 14, the company blew through that record and released patches for more than 600 bugs. Only seven were categorized as low- or moderate-severity, one of which hackers were actively exploiting, according to Dustin Childs, leader of the Zero Day Initiative bug bounty program, which is part of cybersecurity company TrendAI. The rest were important or critical.

“Well folks. Here we are. The bug apocalypse has fully descended upon us,” Childs wrote in a blog post on July 14.

Microsoft told ProPublica that the overall volume of bugs “will not be plateauing for a bit,” but a spokesperson said the company has “invested heavily in both people as well as AI-powered triage solutions that scale quickly to handle the growing number of vulnerabilities.”

Given the new realities of the AI age, including the chaining capabilities, companies like Microsoft might need to rethink their entire approach to triage, said Nguyen, the NSA’s former AI chief. Rather than shunting what are now considered low-risk flaws aside, companies should be dedicating staff to developing and testing patches for the entire spectrum of vulnerabilities, he said. In other words, the cyber ER needs more doctors and nurses treating illnesses that are life-threatening as well as the minor wounds that could later turn deadly.

“There’s no alternative,” Nguyen said. “The patients are coming in fast and furious.”

Microsoft told ProPublica it’s “always going to be reevaluating and considering whether things that were previously lows or moderates be upgraded or thought about differently. With these AI systems, it makes us rethink some of these things. Across the industry, we’re all looking to see how drastic of a change it will be.”

Microsoft’s users may be particularly vulnerable. The popularity of its offerings, used the world over, makes it a frequent and lucrative target for hackers. In addition, many of its products contain “legacy” code. Developed decades ago using now-outdated technology, this code contains unaddressed flaws and contributes to what is known in the industry as “technical debt.”

But the challenge of fixing the flood of newly found bugs also extends to the rest of the software industry, and to open-source software code that is typically free to use and largely maintained by volunteers. Open-source software underpins internet infrastructure and is incorporated into much of the world’s modern technology, including products offered by major tech companies such as Microsoft.

“Nobody has really figured out how to deal with this, and everybody is casting around for what they need to do,” said J. Michael Daniel, a former cybersecurity adviser to President Barack Obama and the president of the Cyber Threat Alliance, a nonprofit organization focused on cybersecurity. “Our tech debt is coming due.”

Ben Edwards, a data scientist who specializes in managing software vulnerabilities, said the software industry was handling an “intense volume even before AI.”

“It was like drinking from a garden hose on the jet setting before, and now it’s like drinking from a fire hose,” Edwards said. “They might have had the teams that could handle that garden hose. Whether they can handle the fire hose is something else.”

Although the volume of vulnerabilities has grown over the years, Microsoft’s internal group responsible for fielding them, the Microsoft Security Response Center, has been perennially understaffed. Even before the crush of AI-identified bugs, the center fielded hundreds or even thousands of reports a month, pushing the group to its limits, ProPublica has reported.

The size of the center reflects Microsoft’s corporate philosophy: Plugging security holes is a cost center, while making new products is a profit center, former employees said. The company is loath to tie up its best engineers with making security patches — a cost center — instead of developing new products and features that will generate profits, ProPublica has reported.

Microsoft told ProPublica that it does not discuss internal staffing decisions but has made investments in recent years to “focus our teams on keeping our customers secure.” The company “continuously evaluates the staffing, processes, and technologies required to support security response and vulnerability management,” a spokesperson said.

According to the slides that accompanied the May internal presentation, Anthropic provided Mythos access to roughly 50 full-time Microsoft employees, with a goal to “harden critical services before publicly available models catch up.” A slide titled “What’s Next” predicted that the Microsoft Security Response Center would see continued case volume “as public tools catch up” to Mythos.

During the May meeting, one staffer appeared to take comfort in the belief that adversaries “don’t have the source code” that such an AI tool would scan for weaknesses. His colleagues, however, quickly corrected him. Portions of Microsoft’s code have, in fact, fallen into hackers’ hands over the years.

“It might not be this week’s source code,” one person said. “But they’ve got source code. It’s out there.”

In a statement to ProPublica, Microsoft downplayed the comment, saying engineers “design our security processes on the expectation that determined adversaries may gain access to code.”

Filed Under: ai, bug hunting, bug patching, cybersecurity, mythos, security, vulnerabilities

Companies: anthropic, microsoft

from the this-is-why-we-can’t-have-nice-things dept

I’ve written a few times now about how the Trump administration hijacked a $42.5 billion broadband investment fund included in the 2021 infrastructure bill, stripped away requirements that the resulting broadband be fairly deployed and affordable, and instead redirected billions of dollars to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos in exchange for slower, more expensive satellite connectivity they’d already planned to deploy without subsidies.

Basically, this redirected tens of billions of dollars away from higher-capacity, faster, more reliable fiber access, and toward Low-Earth Orbit satellite services, which have a long list of problems I’ve explored in detail. The Trump administration then falsely claimed that they’d “saved” taxpayers roughly $21 billion (you can read my recent piece at The Verge for more detail on what that means for real people).

Here’s the thing. This $21 billion in “non-deployment funds” the Trump administration claims it “saved” is technically supposed to go to the states. Congress (aka, the law) specifically stated that the full $42.5 billion included in this Broadband Equity, Access, And Deployment (BEAD) was supposed to be spent on internet access or something very closely adjacent (digital skills training, telehealth tools).

But after the Trump NTIA retooled the program last year (causing all sorts of new delays and problems) they basically just went mute on what happens next. They refuse to meaningfully answer questions on where that money is going to go:

“It’s anybody’s guess if nondeployment funds will ever be released. It’s now been 13 months since the NTIA changed the rules for nondeployment funds, and they are obviously in no hurry to see these funds ever get spent.”

This hasn’t gotten a ton of attention in a U.S. press that finds infrastructure too boring to cover, but it still obviously matters. There were various clumsy attempts to hijack these “non-deployment funds” for other purposes (Sen. Joni Ernst proposed using it reduce the federal deficit, others have wanted to throw it at AI data centers), but that would be technically illegal (for whatever that means anymore).

It seems likely that the Trump administration just hopes that people forget about the funding so it can be pocketed by crony capitalism and associates, but that hasn’t been easy. State leaders and even many Republicans have consistently peppered the NTIA with letters asking them what happens next to these funds, only to be met with more delays or silence.

It’s worth remembering that last election season, Republicans (with Ezra Klein and the “abundance” crew’s help) made a giant stink about how this program was taking way too long to connect anybody. For the whole 2024 election season, Republicans blasted the BEAD program’s bureaucracy and promised how once they were in power, they’d completely revamp it, speed everything up, and save taxpayer billions.

When that “revamp” arrived it involved creating all manner of costly new delays, stripping all the language out of the program ensuring funds were spent fairly and wisely, dumping a whole bunch of money into the laps of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and then running off with half of the program’s funds and refusing to tell anybody what happens next.

In the interim, delays, high costs (from pointless tariffs and wars), and bureaucracy have resulted in even more original BEAD subsidy bidders backing off of their plans for widespread fiber, resulting in bid defaults, even more delays, and even more taxpayer money being thrown at Bezos and Musk for satellite broadband that’s too congested to handle the full load.

Great stuff. Very populist. Incredibly well thought out government efficiencies.

Filed Under: bead, broadband, elon musk, fiber, howard lutnick, infrastructure bill, internet access, jeff bezos, ntia, satellite, subsidies

When Dolby Vision 2 was announced in late 2025, the next generation of Dolby’s dynamic HDR technology arrived with plenty of promises and almost as many unanswered questions. Ten months later, the picture is finally coming into focus, with Hisense confirming that select 2026 UX, UR9, UR8, and U7 televisions will receive Dolby Vision 2 Max through software updates rolling out in the coming weeks. The upgrade will apply to supported Google TV and VIDAA models across multiple regions, making Hisense one of the first manufacturers to bring Dolby’s next-generation HDR platform to televisions already in consumers’ homes.

In this podcast, eCoustics founder Brian Mitchell, Senior Reviewer Al Griffin, and Editor at Large Chris Boylan break down the latest developments surrounding Dolby Vision 2 and Dolby Vision 2 Max, including what has changed, which Hisense TVs will support the technology, and what consumers can expect over the coming weeks and months.

Read the full breaking-news report here.

Watch the full podcast on YouTube.

This episode was recorded on July 29, 2026.

On the Panel:

Presented by CloudMosa

Enterprise work now happens increasingly inside the browser, and that shift has made the browser a primary point of entry for cyberattacks as well. Browser-based attacks have surged over the past two years, according to industry reports, while Gartner projects that more than 85% of enterprise workloads will be accessed through the browser by 2027.

And yet most enterprise security architecture is still built to protect the device rather than the browser session where that work, and those attacks, actually take place, says Shioupyn Shen, founder and CEO of CloudMosa, the company behind Puffin Cloud Security.

“CloudMosa originally built its cloud architecture to improve browser performance and accessibility, with the expectation that enterprise work would increasingly move into the browser,” Shen says. “Today’s AI-assisted hacking has validated that architecture, demonstrating that what was designed for performance also provides a strong foundation for modern enterprise security.”

The browser as the enterprise’s operating environment

SaaS platforms, CRM and ERP systems, and collaboration tools have made the browser the primary gateway, and often the central workspace, for enterprise operations. As LLM-powered workflows and autonomous AI agents increasingly operate through that same environment, this shift has also redefined what a threat looks like.

In a device-centric world, security teams could focus much of their attention on endpoints and networks they could monitor, manage and patch on schedule. But because web code now executes locally on the user’s device, every open browser tab can become a potential entry point for malicious scripts, credential theft, supply chain compromise and other browser-based exploits.

The browser now interprets and executes remote code, manages authenticated sessions across enterprise applications, and increasingly serves as the execution layer for AI workflows and agents.

“The browser is no longer just another application running on the endpoint,” Shen says. “In practice, it has become the central operating environment for modern enterprise work. Traditional browsers were never designed to carry this level of enterprise responsibility. They were built as local interpreters of remote code, not as enterprise-grade execution environments with strong isolation and policy enforcement.”

Why detection-first security fails against browser-based attacks

Detection-first security has a timing problem: it typically begins only after risky code has reached the device and started executing inside the browser. Because modern browsers execute dynamic, often obfuscated JavaScript and WebAssembly locally, attacks can act on the device before endpoint tools have time to respond. Short-lived or fileless attacks may steal credentials, exfiltrate data or complete their objective before a security team can intervene.

“It is no longer sufficient to ask only whether a threat can be detected,” Shen says. “The stronger approach is to prevent risky or malicious code from ever reaching the device in the first place.”

AI-generated malware strains signature-based detection

AI is a force multiplier that lets attackers automate the creation, mutation and deployment of malware at a scale signature-based tools were never designed to handle. It can generate large volumes of malware variants and help attackers adapt fileless and browser-delivered techniques faster than defenders can analyze them and update signatures.

That matters because polymorphic malware can alter its code or behavior from one instance to the next, making a known signature less reliable. And when attacks are malware-free — relying instead on legitimate tools, compromised sessions or malicious web content — there may be no conventional file signature to detect at all.

Enterprises have seen an 89% increase in attacks by AI-enabled adversaries over the past year, as increasingly automated and adaptive attacks compress the window available for detection and response.

“Defenders are no longer just chasing more threats, they are chasing a machine that can keep creating new ones,” Shen says. “What was good enough in the past 10 years will not be sufficient in the next six months,” he adds.

Building architecture that removes the attack surface

Rather than continuing to refine detection, the more durable response is to change where web code is allowed to execute in the first place.

“In a conventional browser, the risk comes to the device,” Shen says. “In an isolated cloud model, the risk is kept away from it.”

That principle underlies Puffin Cloud Security. Rather than incrementally improving the browser itself, the platform shifts browser execution into isolated cloud environments. That architectural change improves both performance and security.

The platform runs the original web session, including its JavaScript, WebAssembly, and other executable payloads, inside a disposable cloud environment and streams only a rendered pixel view to the device. Users keep full interactive control over clicking, typing, and scrolling, but the device itself never parses, executes, or stores the original active code.

CloudMosa says display rasterization — the layer responsible for the pixel stream — accounts for roughly 5% of the browser’s total workload, while the more compute-intensive HTML rendering remains isolated in the cloud. As a result, zero-day exploits and AI-generated polymorphic malware have no executable code to run on the endpoint, while fileless attacks or supply chain compromises within SaaS tools remain contained in the cloud.

“In CloudMosa’s view, that means moving from good-enough security on the device to airtight security in the cloud,” Shen says.

Fitting browser isolation into SWG, CASB and ZTNA stacks

Puffin is designed to extend existing security infrastructure rather than replace it. Secure web gateways, cloud access security broker platforms, and zero trust network access tools remain effective at routing traffic, enforcing policy, and controlling access. But none can fully stop local execution once risky content reaches the browser.

Puffin closes that gap by routing high-risk sessions through isolated cloud environments and enforcing browser-level policy, whether a user connects over a VPN, a home network, a managed device or an unmanaged, bring-your-own-device setup.

“Organizations can start with narrow use cases, such as high-risk SaaS access or AI agent workflows, and expand without disrupting tools already in place,” Shen says. “The goal is not to undo existing investments, but to make them more complete.”

The choice between faster detection or endpoint isolation

Detection will always have a role in enterprise security, but the more consequential question is no longer how quickly a threat can be caught, but whether attackers can reach the endpoint at all. Recent 2026 surveys found 92% of security professionals are concerned about the impact of AI agents, with 48% naming agentic AI the top attack vector of the year. Shen noted that agents acting autonomously with user-level privileges are especially exposed to prompt injection, session hijacking, and indirect compromise through compromised web content.

In designing Puffin Cloud Security, CloudMosa has been “paranoid by design,” meaning it invested in an architecture built for worst-case scenarios and for a threat environment where endpoint security and detection alone may not be enough.

“This is not just a philosophy, but something that is reflected directly in the architecture itself,” Shen says. “CloudMosa built earlier for a harsher threat model than most other organizations did, but today’s AI-assisted attacks are now making that posture feel increasingly relevant.”

By dividing a full browser into a very small layer on the device and a much larger layer in the cloud, CloudMosa designed this approach to improve both performance and security at the same time: In Puffin Cloud Security’s architecture, an AI agent’s browser activity takes place inside isolated cloud sandboxes. The endpoint receives only a pixel stream, not the original active code, preventing malicious web content from interacting directly with the device, its credentials or connected systems.

“AI-assisted hacking represents the kind of structural shift that rewards companies willing to rethink browser from the ground up,” Shen says. “And so security leaders now have a choice: redesign for foresight, or wait until hindsight makes the lesson unavoidable.”

Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

Samsung took a hard look at how people actually use big foldable screens and decided the tall, narrow shape everyone had gotten used to was not the full story. The Galaxy Z Fold8, priced at $1,900 with $350 Amazon GC, arrives with a shorter, wider body that feels closer to a passport than a phone book, and that single change unlocks a far better experience for videos, games, and everything in between.

When you open the cover, you’ll notice a 5.5-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2x panel running at up to 120Hz. With a 10:16 aspect ratio, you can watch vertical clips on Instagram, YouTube Shorts, or TikTok without the awful letterboxing we saw on the Fold Ultra. It also has brightness and a Gorilla Glass Ceramic 3 layer, so no matter how tough you use it, it will not break or become dark on you. Furthermore, its modest size allows you to surf through feeds or answers with just your thumb.

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When you unfold the device, the main attraction emerges: a 7.6-inch Dynamic LTPO AMOLED 2x screen measuring 1828 by 2448 pixels in a tidy 4:3 ratio. This is also quite bright; 3000 nits at peak brightness is a lot to take in, and the HDR10+ support allows for some very deep blacks and brilliant colors. Plus, with an anti-reflective coating, it may be used outside, and what about the fold crease? Samsung did a much better job at reducing it this time. As you rotate the device, the screen shifts to a 16:10 aspect ratio, comparable to that of a tablet or laptop. So, watching a movie on Netflix or Disney+ does not result in black bars along the sides. Alternatively, if you prefer action games, the larger screen is a significant improvement; no more cramped UI elements or cutscenes.

Along with all that screen real estate, you’ll get some significant power under the hood. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Samsung Galaxy, along with an Adreno 840 graphics processor, performs even the most demanding games with easily, with several reviewers claiming flawless performance even at higher settings. Don’t worry about it being too hot; it does warm up little over a long gaming session, but it recovers quickly. You have 12 GB of RAM, so you can have tons of apps and gaming files simply sitting there ready to go, no need to reload every time, and the stereo speakers do a really nice job of delivering crisp dialogue and some reasonable bass.

As you’d expect, given all that screen time, the battery life is fairly decent as well; according to Samsung, a 4800 mAh dual-cell pack provides up to 26 hours of continuous video playback, and in practice, you can go through a day of streaming, browsing, and small gaming spurts without needing to recharge. Charging it back up is also quick; 45 watts wired puts you over 60% in 30 minutes, but 20 watt wireless gives you a slower top-up. At 201 grams, it’s light enough to handle for hours without tiring, and the folded-up thickness of only 4.5mm makes that large screen feel much less substantial.

By Thyaga Vasudevan, EVP of Product at Skyhigh Security

For decades, enterprise security was largely focused on endpoints and networks. By protecting corporate end-user devices, establishing secure connectivity, and controlling access to on-premises resources, teams could effectively keep their centralized servers secure from intrusion.

Eventually, these priorities evolved as enterprises embraced software-as-a-service (SaaS) models and cloud services, shifting to include new cloud security, data protection, and identity-based controls.

Then employees began working from anywhere, on any device, and the network expanded even further. And if that wasn’t enough, the artificial intelligence (AI) boom came along and made the threat landscape even more complicated.

When users can be in person, remote, or hybrid, and access data from a corporate computer or a personal laptop—then turn around and share that data with third-party AI models—endpoint and network measures alone are no longer sufficient.

Even as enterprise networks become increasingly distributed and complex, there is one common thread that connects users, applications, data, and AI models: the browser. It is the primary interface for modern work, acting as a gateway to business-critical tools, platforms, and more.

Because of this, securing the browser has taken on even more significance, emerging as a critical component of modern security strategies designed to protect data wherever it is accessed—even by AI models.

How AI Revealed an Existing Blind Spot

The excitement around AI has understandably focused enterprise attention on the new risks associated with these models. Security teams worry about employees copying and pasting sensitive information, uploading private files, or inadvertently exposing intellectual property while using AI services and workflows.

Because of this, they focus on protecting sanctioned enterprise AI tools while discouraging the use of unsanctioned shadow AI models, trying to promote adoption while avoiding new threats.

While this is well and good, these growing AI security concerns point to a broader issue that enterprises have long been able to ignore: employees have been moving sensitive data through browser-based applications for years; all AI did was accelerate the volume and visibility of these kinds of interactions.

Think about the everyday actions that take place within a browser session. Users copy and paste information between applications, upload files, download reports, print documents, and share content with partners and collaborators. And this is all done across different devices and locations.

This browser-based activity mirrors much of today’s AI usage, demonstrating that we’re not dealing with an entirely new security challenge, but an evolution of an existing one.

The problem enterprises must now solve is how to govern browser activity effectively without disrupting or greatly inhibiting the user experience.

Why Traditional Security Approaches Are Struggling

The shift to primarily browser-based work has exposed key weaknesses in traditional enterprise security methods. Historically, controls were designed to inspect and secure traffic crossing the network perimeter, or to protect managed corporate devices at network endpoints.

While these methods remain important to overall enterprise security, they were not designed to govern the growing number of user interactions taking place within browser-based applications, services, and models. 

The rise of hybrid work only adds to these challenges. As employees, contractors, and external partners access corporate resources from various devices—both managed and unmanaged—enforcing consistent access and security policies becomes increasingly difficult.

Because of this, enterprises often find themselves with strong protections on company-owned devices, but far less visibility into how data is accessed, shared, or manipulated once it moves beyond managed environments.

AI usage further expands this potential threat landscape, providing additional avenues through which data can quickly and easily leave protected corporate networks. While organizations can restrict access to applications and monitor data as it moves across the network, they still need to govern these kinds of actions that create risk in the first place.

Whether it’s copying sensitive information into an AI prompt, uploading a confidential document to a cloud platform, or downloading proprietary data to a personal device, teams need to find a way to control and manage browser-based activity.

Securing the Browser Without Replacing It

As things stand, enterprises have adopted several different approaches to enhanced browser security. Some choose to deploy entirely new secure browser environments that employees must adopt, while others rely on virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or remote browser isolation (RBI) to keep browser activity separated from endpoints.

These methods, while effective, are not perfect. They tend to suffer from deployment complexity, infrastructure overhead, user adoption challenges, and limited coverage for unmanaged devices.

In response to these inefficiencies, a new model has emerged that focuses directly on securing sessions without replacing or largely restricting browsers. These solutions apply inline security controls across common browsers like Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox, allowing organizations to govern user actions within browser sessions without upending existing workflows or inhibiting secure experimentation with new AI models.

Skyhigh Security’s Secure Browser Controls solution is an example of this new, dynamic approach to browser security. Built to work within existing browser and security service edge (SSE) architectures, this solution enables organizations to deter common risk activities, including:

• Controlling copy-and-paste activity involving sensitive data
• Restricting uploads and downloads to sanctioned applications and AI services
• Preventing unauthorized printing or screen capture of sensitive information
• Governing drag-and-drop actions and other methods of data movement between applications
• Applying data protection policies to AI prompts, file uploads, and other browser-based interactions in real time

Protecting Work Where It Happens

As enterprise applications, collaboration tools, and AI services continue to converge inside the browser, security teams must be able to apply controls wherever users interact with data.

Skyhigh Security’s Secure Browser Controls help align security controls with where work is actually happening in enterprise networks, rather than applying them strictly at endpoints and system borders.

The rise of AI may have intensified the conversation around browser security, but the underlying trend extends beyond these newer tools.

By recognizing the browser as a critical control point for enterprise security—and protecting it as such—organizations can ensure their sensitive data is kept safe while supporting browser-based collaboration and innovation.

Request a free a demo of Skyhigh Secure Browser Controls now. 

Sponsored and written by Skyhigh Security.

Nearly £50 off a 2TB drive that reads at 7,250 MB/s isn’t a discount you stumble across every day.

This 2TB Samsung 990 EVO Plus, already considered one of the best SSDs you can buy right now, has dropped from £297.89 to £249.99, a saving of £47.90 that brings serious NVMe speed down to a genuinely reasonable price.