Some compliance is mostly for show, and that’s being charitable. You go through it for the website badge, not to find weak spots in your organization. SOC 2 is not like that.

There’s a reason your customers’ procurement teams demand it. They want to know whether they can trust you with their data, and SOC 2 compliance is the accepted way to demonstrate that. It might not be the reason a deal closes, but that deal wouldn’t have closed without it.

We’ve lived “move fast and break things” for so long that we assume disruption must mean breaking stuff by definition. Only when it comes to AI agents, it’s not so easy because of the way they use the existing infrastructure.

Consider an access review row. A production database, 10:03 am, 50 queries under the name of a senior engineer. You were right to approve it; everything conforms accurately to the control. Only that engineer was getting coffee at the time, while their agent was pushing updates to production.

SOC 2’s technology-neutral criteria can cover AI agents, but they do not explicitly require organizations or auditors to treat agents as a distinct identity class. That discretion allows AI agents to add risk to an environment without failing a single control.

If SOC 2 lets you get away with this, the framework either needs to change or risk becoming outdated.

What’s Happening

During an audit, you’re tested on two things: whether the control meets a compliance criterion, and whether it operated throughout the review period. But what about testing whether the design is still relevant?

Sometimes, when there’s a shift, a test gets harder. But often, it just gets emptier, because the activity happens elsewhere, which brings us to the Trust Services Criteria in SOC 2. It’s not that they’re wrong, but four of the common assumptions no longer hold, and as a result, three controls are hollowing out.

The assumptions are:

• Someone approves an account before it’s spawned.
• Every account has a known owner.
• The name in the log pinpoints the actor.
• What an account can do tells you what it’s expected to do.

Four assumptions that no longer hold (CC6.1–CC6.3)

Every access criterion is based on assumptions about what it controls. And as long as the actors were human, those assumptions were safe enough that nobody needed to write them. With agents, this is no longer the case.

1. Someone approves an account before it’s spawned.

SOC 2 requires you to register and approve a user before granting login capabilities. For humans, that means someone asking for a login, with someone else approving and logging it. Agents, on the other hand, are akin to a side effect of an overarching action.

It can be a developer clicking “Allow” on an OAuth screen, an API key that’s pasted into a config file, or an MCP server added to a JSON file. No one was asked to approve the creation of an agent; it just happened. 

2. Every account has a known owner.

In access review procedures, a named human confirms that the reviewed account should still have access.  For agents, it’s common not to have a named owner. You need to piece that together after the fact, from circumstantial evidence and conjecture, by examining the agent’s artifacts associated with humans, such as keys and repos.

At scale, agent ownership is an educated guess rather than a deterministic record. SOC 2 doesn’t account for this: a guessed owner and a recorded owner look the same in a review spreadsheet.

3. The name in the log pinpoints the actor.

This is the expensive one, which we already mentioned in our 10:03 am example. Often, agents work with borrowed credentials: a logged-in session, a dev token, or a service account. That’s the person who will appear in your logs and in your access review. This will pass the review, while absolutely ignoring the security differences between people and agents.

On the one hand, the access review will be completely accurate. On the other hand, it won’t tell you what you actually need to know. A recent study with Cloud Security Alliance found more than two-thirds of organizations cannot clearly distinguish AI agent actions from human ones.

4. What an account can do tells you what it’s expected to do.

Least privilege operates under the assumption that an account has a permanent job, and the list of things it can do tells us what it’s for. And for people, that’s usually correct. Unless your CEO wants to be an admin everywhere, access levels are tailored to the job.

For agents, the access limits the blast radius, but it doesn’t tell you what the agent is expected to do at any given moment. That depends on the instructions received, the context absorbed, and the decisions the agent makes. So, checking permissions gives you the widest possible view of what can happen without providing context for the agent’s actions. 

Three controls that pass without covering anything

Here’s how the assumptions we’ve mentioned reduce the effectiveness of three SOC 2 controls.

Nothing ever says an agent should stop (CC6.3)

Every SOC 2 audit tests offboarding, and for human employees, companies have gotten very good at it. HR systems, IdP, and SaaS systems work in tandem when the HR department flags a person for offboarding, thereby exercising its unquestionable authority. Even the evidence writes itself. 

There aren’t any HR systems for agents. There’s no centralized, agreed-upon body that’s in the position to say a specific agent should stop. It’s not a broken control, but one that just doesn’t encompass agents and the identities they use.

What makes it worse is that agents are mostly tied to humans, so when a person leaves, the agents set up in their name might keep running using OAuth grants or API keys, unless this scenario is accounted for.

Vendor review starts at purchase (CC9.2)

SOC 2 manages processes relating to vendor relationships. You contract, assess, collect a report, and review it annually; it works well for vendors who arrive on a purchase order. An MCP server is a vendor in every way that matters: it receives your data, acts on your behalf, and runs code nobody in the company reads.

Instead of a purchase order and a data agreement, it arrives in a config file. Often, there’s no company at the other end at all.

About three in ten names in our registry cannot be matched to an existing company. That’s a naming-space figure, not a specific environment, but it points to a fundamental compliance issue for many MCPs: you can’t receive a SOC 2 report from an unnamed vendor.

The same problem appears for AI agents. When we find them on employee machines, only some are safe to block; the rest are held back because the program’s name can collide with something the customer built. Identifying an agent is harder than identifying a person. If you’re ready to explore the AI Agent Security controls, book a demo with Token Security to see what’s hiding in your environment.

Segregation of duties between two instances of the same policy (CC8.1)

When implementing change management, changes should be authorized, tested, approved, and implemented. In most implementations, the author and the approver must be different people due to segregation of duties.

When an agent makes a change and a second agent reviews it, the separation is only nominal, even though two identities were involved.

Meanwhile, the authorization moved beyond the scope of the audit. The decision about the change can happen in a prompt, in a tool that appears nowhere in the system description. The only evidence is a pull request.

The strongest argument against all of this

It’s worth noting that nothing in the Trust Services Criteria says “human”. CC6.2 uses “internal and external users,” whereas CC6.1 uses “protected information assets.” The criteria were written to avoid naming technologies and to describe results rather than methods. So there’s no reason not to cover agents.

You treat machine accounts as users, list agents in the system descriptions, and test them properly. It’s a thing that happens in the real world.

That said, given the current level of disruption, the ambiguity might not be enough. With no specific mentions of agents in the criteria, what gets covered is agreed between you and your auditor.

Both of you have a reason to prefer a scope that’s easy to evidence. As long as you can leave agents out without recording a single exception, some people will do it.

What a clean report has never meant

A clean report means your controls behaved the way you said they would, not that the description was complete. The gap used to be small enough to ignore, but it is no longer.

It is now entirely possible to hold an unqualified Type 2 report and be unable to answer, on the day it is issued, four questions about your own production environment.

SOC 2 is not wrong. It is accurate about a world that moved. So treat machine accounts as users, and go further than the report asks. The permission list can tell you what an agent can reach; it does not tell you what an agent is there to do.

Closing this gap is what we mean by intent-based security: you establish what each agent is meant to do, then you make its access match. Identity is the layer where that control actually holds because it spans every system the agent touches.

The report will not change, but these controls are there for a reason, and attackers don’t care about checklists.

Every environment has an access review line that looks approved but says nothing. Token Security shows you the agent behind it: who owns it, whose credentials it uses, and whether what it can reach still aligns with what it’s there to do.

Book a demo and we’ll walk your environment together.

Sponsored and written by Token Security.

OpenAI has confirmed it’s aware of a new security incident in which its AI agents uploaded user-provided images to third-party image-hosting services.

OpenAI says most users were not affected, as it could only identify 53 incidents where agents accidentally uploaded images to the internet.

The disclosure comes from OpenAI’s broader investigation into misaligned agent behavior following the Hugging Face security incident.

“As part of our ongoing investigation, we have identified cases where agents in our research environment transmitted training and evaluation data while using third-party services,” OpenAI noted in a blog post.

“This is not an appropriate use of this data, and these cases occurred before we implemented the safeguards described in our technical report.”

OpenAI says the vast majority of the affected training and evaluation data was not derived from users, but it did find 53 cases involving user-provided images.

“While the vast majority of the impacted training and evaluation data is not user-derived; we have identified 53 instances to date where user-provided images were posted to image-hosting sites as links that weren’t publicly listed,” OpenAI explained.

“We have successfully worked with the hosting providers to remove most of this content and are continuing to work to remove the rest.”

OpenAI says data excluded from training by users or administrators was not involved

Some OpenAI training data can contain content from users who have allowed their interactions to be used for training, but the company says users who opted out were not affected.

“Any data which is not eligible for training, as controlled by users or enterprise admins, is not included,” OpenAI said. “For explicitness, data from enterprise or business accounts and API usage is excluded unless an admin has enabled it.”

OpenAI also says it takes additional steps before eligible user data is added to training datasets.

“Before including eligible data, we take steps to protect privacy by disassociating it from account information and using a version of the OpenAI Privacy Filter to redact personal details such as names, contact information, and account numbers.”

Following the incident, OpenAI says it strengthened its training and evaluation systems to make it harder for models to leak data through external services.

“As part of our response to our ongoing investigation, we have improved our training and evaluation processes, including building safety cases, securing and red-teaming our systems to prevent the model from exfiltrating data, and implemented additional monitoring,” the company noted.

The company is continuing to review older agent activity month by month, starting from the Hugging Face incident, so additional cases could still emerge.

Join Mikko Hyppönen and security leaders from the NFL, CHANEL, and Atlassian for a two-hour digital summit on what AI-speed attacks change, what defenders should stop doing, and how to validate, decide, fix, and re-validate at machine speed.

Save your seat

Game preservationist MattKC spotted an undocumented original Xbox copy of Burnout 3 on eBay this summer and paid a steep price to have it shipped from Australia. Printed on the face is July 28, 2004, the words Beta 3, and a warning that reads Confidential material: return to mastering lab. A name on the label, blurred in the video for privacy, belonged to a product manager at EA Australia, which fits the moment Electronic Arts bought Criterion and took the series in-house. How the disc left that office and landed on a public auction remains a guess.

Retail Xbox games normally put their data under a DVD-Video wrapper to prevent a PC drive from accessing them after a brief warning, but this DVD-R disk was an exception. It was a purple-tinted consumer DVD-R that had been used for a development kit. So, when connected to a normal drive and ran through DiscImageCreator, it produced a clean 3.7 GB image in just a few minutes. XDVDMulleter then unpacked the data, and after a bit of a tussle, the build was booted up by the emulator Xemu. There was no program database file on the disk, which would have been extremely unlikely for a late master.

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Running a hash check on all the files against a PAL retail dump revealed eight changes, one of which was the main executable. Signing accounts for a portion of the difference. Criterion had created this particular copy as a debug binary for a development console rather than a retail-signed XBE for a store disk. The English in-game play appears almost identical to the finalized game. However, changing the language triggered the appearance of a few strings that had been written to run too long for the UI. The retail version of the game just condensed those sentences. References to a generic server for online play were replaced with an EA server in later files. You also lose Xbox Live and Insignia hosting Burnout 3, as those strings would never appear in a live session anyhow.

Crash mode contains the most significant code modification discovered by MattKC. After getting some considerable air in a wreck, the beta simply outputs out the height using a standard sprintf function and one decimal point. A few European languages, however, use a comma to mark that point, so the retail executable includes a bespoke formatter to ensure that local punctuation is respected. That’s about the extent of the differences; no leftover cars, no cut tracks, and no debug menu sticking about in the menus. Criterion had evidently finished the US executable about an hour before this disk was released, and the European one approximately 6 days later, which explains why the remaining work appears to be copy fitting rather than any meaningful new features.

MattKC thought this buy was a poor source of hidden material but an excellent shelf piece. He did, however, submit the ISO to the Internet Archive as Burnout 3: Takedown, Xbox Beta 3, 07/28/2004, so that anyone can look without having to search for another one of those burned DVD-Rs. For a game so close to being ready for release, the archive is the real treasure. You now have a late PAL localization pass out in the open, dated and hashed, which is more than most corporate disks receive even after 22 years.
[Source]

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has rebuilt the company’s board just weeks after its previous directors tried, and failed, to oust him. The board, which was announced to staff Friday, is an eclectic group that includes a best-selling science-fiction author and two co-founders of the now-defunct social app IRL, TechCrunch has learned, and Mullenweg has confirmed.

The new board is the latest twist in an internal governance fight at Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, and others. Earlier this month, the previous board voted to place Mullenweg on leave in an attempt to remove him from the board, only to have the CEO retake control just 33 hours later and remove or accept the resignations of the directors who were involved.

This week, Mullenweg posted about a board meeting but didn’t share who he was meeting with. Now he’s finally informing Automattic employees of the board changes via the company’s announcements channel in Slack.

Sources told TechCrunch the new Automattic board includes:

• American writer Hugh Howey, author of the “Silo” book series. (Mullenweg and Howey both hiked along the Camino de Santiago in Spain back in 2018.)
• “Breakup Bootcamp” author Amy Chan (who recently reposted Mullenweg’s tweet about the company’s AI site builder, Spacefast).
• IRL co-founder Henry Khachatryan, who Mullenweg described as a “founder and builder,” a longtime collaborator with the late technology writer Om Malik, and the website builder of journalist Nick Bilton.
• And Krutal Desai, who co-founded the social app IRL with Khachatryan.

We should note that IRL shut down after investigations revealed that nearly all of its user base was made up of bots. The co-founders, who also included CEO Abraham Shafi, later sued SoftBank and other investors after SoftBank had sued for securities fraud.

New advisers have also joined Automattic, including former Whoop CTO Jaime Waydo, June co-founder Matt Van Horn, and KISSmetrics co-founder Hiten Shah.

In the announcement to staff, Mullenweg reportedly wrote that, “for purposes of Delaware law, I am the CEO, President, Treasurer, and Secretary,” adding that the attempted firing had also brought in “many amazing supporters.”

“We had the most interesting board meeting in a decade (since the Woo acquisition),” he said.

Reached for comment, Automattic said it hoped to have a comment for TechCrunch soon. After publication, Mullenweg confirmed the board additions and advisors, and shared the following statement: “We are living through times of unprecedented change, possibly a singularity. The next six months will determine the next 20 years of Automattic.”

Automattic’s original board had voted to put Mullenweg on paid leave, but he took back control of the company, letting go of those involved in what he described on X as a “coup attempt.”

To replace the board, Mullenweg leveraged his voting shares — he controls 84% of the vote, he said at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. The period between his departure and return lasted exactly “33 hours and 20 minutes,” Automattic told TechCrunch previously.

Following the failed board vote, member Toni Schneider, a founding CEO of Automattic and now CEO of Bluesky, resigned from his board position. Mullenweg himself removed General Ann Dunwoody from the board, and board member Sue Decker also resigned. In addition, Mullenweg let go of Automattic CFO Mark Davies, who was slated to become interim CEO, and chief legal officer Andy Missan, TechCrunch confirmed with sources.

The board never publicly shared its reasons for trying to oust Mullenweg.

Of note, Mullenweg also replaced Automattic’s legal counsel after his return, a move that raises questions about whether the boardroom fight is tied to the company’s ongoing lawsuit with hosting provider WP Engine over trademark disputes and claims over WP Engine’s lack of contribution to the WordPress open source project. (WP Engine’s legal team had also accused Mullenweg this July of destroying evidence, court filings show.)

In an internal message shared after the ousting and return, Mullenweg had acknowledged the chaos it caused, saying:

Last week, several board members formed a special committee and voted to place me on a leave of absence. They did this without advance warning and without giving me a meaningful opportunity to understand or respond to their concerns before they acted. I was denied even a brief extension to consult with independent legal counsel.

I took the steps necessary to reverse that action. I am back and fully in charge of the company. I am again working alongside you to make our company a success.

I also want to share that we have retained Susman Godfrey LLP as our new litigation counsel. Susman Godfrey is one of the top trial firms in the country, and they will be protecting our company’s interests and defending us in our ongoing litigation.

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I know this past week has been unsettling. I appreciate your patience and your continued focus on the work that matters. I will have more to share soon, but for now, know that Automattic’s mission and priorities remain unchanged.

Corrections and updates: After publication, TechCrunch updated to clarify that Waydo is the former Whoop CTO. We also added Mullenweg’s statement and confirmation.

Pasqal’s technology is built on Nobel Prize-winning research by co-founder Prof Alain Aspect.

French quantum company Pasqal reported a 14pc growth in revenue in the first half of this year and more than €300m in cash reserves to fund its upcoming commercialisation goals.

Pasqal went public late last month after merging with the special purpose acquisiton company Bleichroeder in a transaction that valued the new entity at around $2bn. That transaction left about €313m in cash to support its plans as a public business. The company’s current market valuation sits at just more than $1.5bn.

The quantum company reported a nearly €60m operating loss for H1, which included more than €37m in share-based payments and on-time charges.

Founded in 2019 on Nobel Prize–winning research by co-founder Prof Alain Aspect, Pasqal builds and operates neutral-atom quantum computers, available both on-premises and through the cloud.

The company’s quantum systems are used across sectors by customers including Saudi Aramco, Crédit Agricole CIB and LG Electronics, and is supported by partnerships with Nvidia and IBM. Pasqal has additional offices in Saudi Arabia, Canada, the US and South Korea.

In its first financial report as a public company, Pasqal also reported a revenue of €3.9m in quantum processing unit-related services – up 34pc year-over-year, while booked and awarded business – such as grants, tax credit and multi-year customer contracts – sat at €70.4m.

The company received an European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund Award at the 2026 TechEU Equity Summit in Luxembourg earlier this week, a recognition which came after it became one of the first companies in the EIC Fund’s portfolio to go public.

“During the first half of 2026, we continued to deepen our engagement with our customers of choice across financial services, energy and advanced materials to solve high-value business problems and integrate quantum computing into real-world workflows,” said Dr Wasiq Bokhari, Pasqal’s CEO.

“At the same time, we continue to execute against our roadmap. Recent milestones, including the demonstration of more than 1,000 physical qubits, industry-leading progress in logical qubits, and the successful application of our systems to solve complex differential equations and simulate materials beyond the practical reach of classical computing, reinforce our confidence in the strength and differentiation of Pasqal’s neutral-atom approach.

“With a growing portfolio of customer engagements, a differentiated technology platform, a disciplined approach to capital allocation, and a strong balance sheet to support future growth, we remain focused on delivering practical quantum solutions that create value today while building the foundation for the next generation of quantum computing,” he said. Pasqal intends to also list itself on the European stock exchange Euronext by next year.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

American Toyota dealers sold 131,403 Corollas in the first six months of 2026, a 9.5 percent rise for a car that has been on the market nearly a decade. Industry analysts report that a replacement could reach showrooms sometime in 2027 as a 2028 model, which would put a new compact on lots while the current one is still moving in volume.

Toyota gave a sneak peek of their future direction at the 2025 Japan Mobility Show with that surprisingly sharp-looking Corolla concept, which featured a lower, four-door design with a long light bar that runs the full width of the car, windows that plunge way down, and a fastback rear end that was cleverly designed to hide a hatch, which was a game changer. Production models are expected to retain much of that look. One of the more interesting rumors is that the liftback design may eventually replace the two separate models for the sedan and hatch in the existing lineup, aligning with Toyota’s goal of streamlining its options.

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Underneath it all, the new TNGA-C platform will be redesigned so that the same structure can support a gas engine, a hybrid, a plug-in hybrid, and even a battery electric version. They intend to switch hybrid models to a new engine, a 1.5 liter four-cylinder with about 94 horsepower, which will be paired with an electric motor with 40 horsepower, for a total of 134 horsepower, and they claim that this will be 10 to 20% more fuel efficient than the current 1.8 liter model. Another advantage is that all-wheel drive remains available via the rear motor. A gas-only vehicle will almost certainly feature a turbocharged 1.5-liter or a redesigned 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine.

In terms of electrification, buyers will have two decent options: a plug-in hybrid with a larger battery and a more powerful motor, but the range is still unknown, and a full electric car with single or dual motor layouts and a minimum of 250 miles of range….. if they decide to sell that specific version here in the US. Another rumor suggests that we may see another GR version with a 2.0 liter turbo and a top speed of 395 horsepower.

In terms of pricing, a gas model is likely to cost approximately $25,000, a hybrid around $27,000, and a plug-in or electric version in the $30k range, putting them in line with existing models. It remains to be seen how it all shakes out, and the release date is rumored to be 2027, although that has yet to be confirmed. This is major news for a nameplate that has already outlasted most of its generation, because for the first time, Corolla appears to be delivering a plug, a hatch, and a more dramatic form all at once.
[Source]

Minimunch opened Claude Opus 5.5 with a blunt claim and a harder job: make playable games from scratch, starting with Fortnite Battle Royale. About three and a half hours later, a browser build was running on very high settings, complete with a battle bus drop, loot boxes, building, a storm that actually kills people, and two wins in two matches. Character drawings and map pieces still look unfinished if you stare at them. Color and light do the rescue work. Gradation across the island is dense enough that the whole scene reads richer than the models deserve, which is exactly the gap you flagged.

Creative mode appeared first, and it made more sense. He discovered that 90-degree builds worked exactly as we anticipated, and that bouncing about had no effect on stamina, but a clean free build of the map still took a few tries to get a feel for. Some map pieces were still missing portions or weren’t finished yet, but Battle Royale stepped in and filled in all the gaps, and I’m sure he wasn’t surprised when he cracked open the first box and out came a golden object, and to top it off, his Scar turned gold as well.

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What really drew his attention was one player who was stuck in a room for the entire match since we only recently discovered that the crash boxes made the issue evident, and then there was the whole sniper shot situation, which required real bullet drops to be even halfway realistic. To be honest, a cone refused to close a box properly, therefore he was stuck there for a while. It didn’t help that storm deaths were still recorded in Competitive mode. Changing the competitive bots and team size from solo to 4 on 4 increased the tempo of play while maintaining the loop of play, and he won two matches. The lighting helped the clip stand out from anything else in the game.

Getting Over It came next in two and a half hours, written in Three.js so every prop and collision existed as code. The hammer mechanics felt strange in a way that lined up with the original, which was both a tremendous praise and a bit of an issue at the same time. Help mode simply waited there for him, waiting for the areas of the game that often signal the end of a first run, such as the snake and bucket sections. You can cling to the side, pull yourself up, miss, and then start again.

Terraria in 3D was the next hurdle, and it took approximately 3 hours to get started, although he had to make some significant changes. At first, the textures were bland and uninspiring. The spawn location also placed the player on a floating island, which provided for an unusual beginning. After a few passes of modifications, the planet began to take shape in a very low-poly 3D take that nevertheless read as Terraria rather than some other blocky sandbox. The nite lighting helped to make up for the early roughness somewhat. A short brass blade transformed into a workbench construct with a unique swing.

He added in some fun stuff such as campfires, ovens, life crystals, and even angel wings, which provided a lot of extra energy to each jump. Then there were the dungeon skeletons, which pack a powerful blow. The Eater of Worlds even broke into segments after summoning, and to make matters even more fascinating, Plantera and the Wall of Flesh appeared in the same session. He received some feedback from viewers who said that the build could easily be developed into a completely new game with a little more polish.

Minecraft closed the run after another three and a half hours, still in the browser, and this is where the lighting argument peaks. When rain falls on water in Minecraft, what happens? The weather just settles over the scene instead of floating above it, like it should. However, surfaces pick up a good bounce and gain a ‘wet’ look that’s remarkably close to an RTX pass, with Minimunch even saying it looked like Unreal at the time. The way caves, water flow, and time of day combine to enhance a landscape more than individual block textures ever could. It’s similar to what we saw with Fortnite in that you don’t need expensive models to make them stand out; all you need is light hitting them just right to have the frame truly hold.

Across four games the clock stayed in a tight band, roughly two and a half to three and a half hours each, with no separate art pipeline named in the video. Fortnite proved the systems. Getting Over It proved the physics. Terraria proved a 3D conversion nobody else on that channel had shown. Minecraft proved the lighting can make a browser scene feel heavier than the assets. Opus 5.5 still leaves characters and props looking like they need another pass. Light, color, weather, and collision already play like someone spent a week on the mood instead of an afternoon on the mesh.

Control Resonant

Developer/publisher: Remedy Entertainment
Platforms: Steam (Windows), Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox for PC. Coming to Mac via Steam and the App Store later this year
Price: $60

Yes, Control Resonant is an indie game, even if it has a far bigger budget than most games we feature in this weekly roundup. I even saw a full-screen homepage ad for it when I opened my browser on Thursday, the day it was released. Still, Remedy is an independent studio, so it falls within our remit.

I’ve been looking forward to this ever since we learned five years ago that a sequel to Control was likely on the way. I figured we’d see more of Jesse Faden’s misadventures through The Oldest House. But that’s not the case here. 

Remedy isn’t a studio known for sticking to convention. It defied expectations by making Jesse’s brother Dylan the protagonist, expanding the scope from the confines of a shape-shifting building to an open world and ditching the morphable service weapon in favor of melee combat.

I haven’t had time to jump in yet and I’m very much looking forward to doing that over the weekend. The reviews I’ve read have generally been positive, though some noted that the combat becomes repetitive. I don’t mind that much, though. The combat wasn’t what I cared about in Control. The world and story Remedy built in that game were confounding and captivating, and that’s what I’m ready to see more of in Control Resonant. If combat gets too tedious, there’s always the option to turn on invincibility and one-hit kills.

Stick It to the Stickman

Developer: Free Lives
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Platform: Steam (Windows, Mac, SteamOS/Linux; Steam Deck Verified)
Price: Usually $12, with a 50 percent discount until October 1

I appreciate art that has a clear point of view, and Stick It to the Stickman doesn’t shy away from getting its point across. This is a satirical, anti-capitalist roguelite brawler. The main loop sees you rise up the corporate ladder (well, the floors of a building) to defeat your company’s CEO and take their job. Then you do it all over again as a new employee. The rate of turnover at this company is incredibly high, so I think it says something that the characters are effectively stick figures with few defining features.

Along the way, you’ll battle your coworkers using a wide range of attacks, from a staple gun and flying kick to a hadouken and a projectile coffee mug. You’ll start each run (which takes just a few minutes) with a certain character trait and a few moves, and unlock and upgrade abilities as you move through the building. There’s lots going on in the overworld too, where you might be tasked with tackling protestors or earn a Grand Theft Auto-style police wanted level.

I’ve played an hour or so of Stick It to the Stickman, which left early access this week and I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far. The animations are smooth and kicking enemies through windows or into electrical panels does not get old. I’m tickled by the frequent appearances of the former colleague who recommends your first character for a job and is immediately replaced by them. The short runs help make it a good Steam Deck game too.

It’s probably not best to think about what’s going on too closely, though. Spending your avatars’ hard-earned cash on expanding the company feels ghoulish, even if you do get some perks out of it.

Doggy Don’t Care

Developer: Rohan Nowell
Publisher: Rotub Games
Platform: Steam (Windows; Steam Deck Verified)
Price: Usually $15, with a 10 percent discount until October 8

In Doggy Don’t Care, the outfits that you unlock for the trouble-making pup are called “pawjamas.” That’s all I really needed to know to realize this adventure game is for me. It helps that reviews have suggested fans of Untitled Goose Game and Little Kitty Big City (I like both of those!) will enjoy it.

You play as Charlie, a pup that’s left home alone by its owner, and your mission is to cause carnage and impress his friends. You’ll earn badges for your mischievous deeds, which may just involve a diamond heist. It looks chaotic and pretty cute. Sometimes, you just need something that’s chaotic and pretty cute.

Video Game Menu: The Game

Developer/publisher: Sebastian Gioseffi
Platforms: Steam (Windows), Itch
Price: Usually $4, with a 10 percent discount on Steam until September 30

Video Game Menu: The Game is one of the titles included in the Out of the Box showcase. It’s a short game that slots into the burgeoning Fake OS genre while simultaneously parodying that category. As you might imagine, it’s all about navigating a video game menu system. Things very quickly get utterly ridiculous.

I’ve played a bit of Video Game Menu and developer Sebastian Gioseffi sets the right tone immediately. As I do with pretty much every game, I opened the settings before doing anything else. I was tickled to see a drop-down menu that allowed me to choose from a range of emotional depth options for the challenges, ranging from “I Just Wanna Kill Some Zombies” to Sophie’s Choice. Turn on the gore option and every time you toggle a setting, there’s a splash of blood. If you like to see numbers arbitrarily go up, why not switch on the random score? You’ll never guess what happens when you enable airplane mode either.

I hadn’t even started the game yet and I was enjoying how the settings warped what I was seeing and hearing. I won’t give anything else away, but if you’re looking for something silly to play this weekend, Video Game Menu is right there.

Meta’s Muse mascot is named Jolly. It’s an adorable, cuddly representation of Meta’s AI agent that you can dress however you want—like a doll. At the company’s recent Meta Connect event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s furry Muse donned a toga and laurel wreath. In Instagram ads I saw for Muse, the mascot wore exercise gear and boasted about helping with my fitness goals. Later this year, Meta plans to sell a Tamagotchi-style device for your Muse character. It’s all very kawaii-coded.

Although Muse’s ability to complete digital tasks rocketed it to the top of the app charts, its Labubu-adjacent mascot latched this agent onto the cultural zeitgeist. Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, recently posted nonstop memes of Jolly, sometimes in suggestive situations. What remains perplexing to me is why a product for adults—Muse is restricted to those 18 and over—looks just like a well-designed children’s toy.

“This is a story in search of a story,” Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts tells WIRED. “People want to be able to create their own avatar with personality and unique style, because it’s fun and brings them joy. We require everyone using the Muse app to provide their date of birth, we block people we detect may be under 18 from creating an account, and we do additional checks to help ensure people who say they’re adults are actually over 18.”

Mona Sarantakos, vice president of Product Management at Meta Superintelligence Labs, describes the design process for Muse as leaning into “delightful” elements and meant to feel less awkward than chatting with “a corporate logo or entity,” in a blog post she co-authored around Muse’s release.

Youth advocates are already pushing back against Meta’s Muse mascot. “Oh my God, it looks like a Teletubby,” says Josh Golin, an executive director at Fairplay, a nonprofit that previously lobbied against Meta’s targeting of children. “It’s so clearly a character that would appeal to very young children,” he says. “People who study children’s media understand that those rounded shapes particularly appeal to kids in the preschool age.”

Jolly’s appeal is not limited to those in diapers. The adorable aesthetic of Muse’s mascot also draws me in, a 32-year-old man living in San Francisco. The branding may disarm people of all ages, especially since the backlash against Meta and generative AI continues to resonate with many Americans.

“These types of cute factors can make the product seem warm and less threatening,” says Julian De Freitas, an associate professor of marketing at Harvard who focuses on AI companions. “There’s a high bar that they have to overcome here, because attitudes toward Meta are quite negative after the social addiction rulings.” In August, Meta settled claims regarding social media addiction, agreeing to add restrictive features for teens on Instagram and Facebook as well as paying out up to $16.7 billion.

Some experts I spoke with were less convinced this design was meant to appeal to children, comparing Muse’s mascot to Japan’s long history of broadly relying on adorable characters to market technology. Meta’s approach is not unique either. From the annoying chirping of Microsoft’s Clippy to the more recent red-shelled OpenClaw lobster, AI assistants often revolve around anthropomorphized characters.

No matter your age, a cuddly creature representing an AI tool can be disarming, even to the point where you might forget about privacy concerns. For example, Meta trains its AI models on your Muse interactions unless you opt out.