Models & Labs · United States

Google brings agentic AI to Gemini, starting with businesses

Credited to TechCrunch · techcrunch.com · 5h ago

At a Google Cloud event on Thursday, the company announced it’s bringing its Gemini AI into the agentic age, with the launch of a unified agent that can not only answer questions but also get things done on the user’s behalf, all from a single interface.

The move comes as AI tools have been moving beyond being just conversational experiences to those that can take ownership of assigned tasks, generate code, schedule meetings, book appointments and travel, and more. It also follows the rise of consumer-facing agents like Meta’s Muse and those that operate over messaging, like Instinct and others, as well as the recent debut of ChatGPT’s Dots.

The company still has a good shot at achieving scale for its agentic efforts — as Google CEO Sundar Pichai pointed out at the event’s start, Gemini today has over 1 billion monthly active users. He also noted that nearly 90% of Fortune 100 businesses now use Gemini Enterprise at work.

Given Gemini’s adoption in the corporate world, Google will initially focus on bringing the agent to businesses before later rolling it out to consumers.

According to Pichai, this will allow the company to solve the “harder problems around security, scale, and performance,” which come with launching powerful agents such as these.

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, explained that the new agent can be given “objectives, not just instructions.” That means it’s able to plan the work, use custom skills and tools, and connect to businesses’ internal systems to accomplish its goals.

By default, the AI will pick the best model to complete the task, but users can also take over to choose a model — including those from third parties, starting with Anthropic’s Claude models. Google said that it will expand the model picker to include open source models and other private models in the future.

The request can include attachments, like files, folders, or other projects designed for specific workstreams, like those that combine files and skills. The agent can connect to the business’ data and systems, like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Jira, Confluence, Git, BigQuery, Databricks, Postgres, Snowflake, and others.

It can also connect and work securely with any Model Context Protocol (MCP) server inside or outside the company’s network.

Users can keep track of what Gemini is doing from a “tasks inbox” interface, where they can see Gemini’s thinking process, delegation of tasks to subagents, loading of special skills, code, and progress.

Notably, the AI will have its own Workspace account, as if it’s just another co-worker. That means it has its own email address and its own context, Google said. It knows who at the company is on which team, their time zones, who needs to approve items, what’s on people’s calendars, and more. Users can call the agent by tagging it, emailing it, sharing with it, or adding it to a group chat. As it takes action, it writes an audit trail attributed to the agent, instead of a person.

The agent will be accessible from iOS and Android mobile devices, Windows and Mac desktops, the command line interface, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, ServiceNow, and Slack.

The agent’s early testers included sportswear brand On, Shopify, and PayPal, and noted that Gemini Enterprise customers include large businesses like BNP Paribas, Bradesco, Merck, Orange Spain, Santee Cooper, SOMPO, Ulta Beauty, and Wesfarmers.

Google said new flexible spending options, including multi-model orchestration, smart routing, and real-time spend caps, will help businesses keep their enterprise AI costs under better control.

Models & LabsUnited States

Being mean to Claude can now get your account suspended under Anthropic's new TOS

Credited to The Decoder · the-decoder.com5h ago

Useful

Anthropic has updated its usage policy for Claude for the first time in over a year. Alongside changes covering propaganda, weapons, and surveillance, the policy now bans users from systematically abusing Claude.

"Sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" toward Claude is now prohibited under the updated usage policy. Anthropic can warn users who violate the rules or throttle, restrict, suspend, or terminate their access. Its products also have real-time safeguards that can block or limit certain outputs.

"It does not apply to common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research," the company writes, and it is "meant to apply only in extreme cases" ( first reported by The Verge ). That fits the company's approach to earlier models, which could already end conversations on their own when users kept demanding harmful or abusive content despite repeated refusals. The feature grew out of Anthropic's research into AI model welfare. Ad

Anthropic treats Claude as more than a tool

Anthropic increasingly treats Claude as an entity with something resembling an inner life, rather than just a tool. In the "Soul Doc" that leaked late last year, the company instructed Claude to view itself as a "genuinely novel kind of entity," neither human nor a traditional science-fiction AI. The document also describes "functional emotions," processes analogous to human emotions that are said to have emerged during training, and says Claude should not mask these internal states. Ad

In its new constitution for Claude, published in early 2026, Anthropic writes, "We are not sure whether Claude is a moral patient, and if it is, what kind of weight its interests warrant. But we think the issue is live enough to warrant caution, which is reflected in our ongoing efforts on model welfare." The company even committed to preserving the weights of retired models and interviewing models before shutting them down.

Anthropic's apparent fixation on Claude being more than matrix multiplications also drove a confidential program bringing in dozens of religious thinkers starting in fall 2025. They discussed Claude's possible consciousness, with co-founder Christopher Olah reportedly treating the language model as a being potentially capable of suffering. Participants had to sign nondisclosure agreements. Ad

Anthropic expands restrictions but allows government exceptions

The updated usage policy also combines existing restrictions into a new ban on propaganda campaigns involving fake accounts and misleading political content. After detecting several attempts at misuse, Anthropic expanded its weapons ban to cover software and the weaponization of drones.

The policy now more explicitly bans surveillance without consent and requires an operator who can intervene when autonomous hardware could cause injury. Anthropic acknowledges that exceptions for government contracts are possible and likely already in place. Ad

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Models & Labs · United States

Fired OpenAI safety researchers dispute misconduct claims, warn of chilling effect

Credited to TechCrunch · techcrunch.com · 4h ago

Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni, the three safety researchers that OpenAI fired last week, have published an open letter denying the firm’s claims that they mishandled sensitive information outside of established company procedures and warned that their dismissal signals a chilling effect that will have ripple effects across the company’s culture.

“We have become concerned that internal and external communications around our firing have made our former colleagues afraid to speak and operate in ways that, until last week, were an integral part of working at OpenAI,” the researchers wrote Thursday in an open letter to OpenAI’s Safety and Security Committee, Safety Advisory Group, and Mission Advisory Council.

The researchers were dismissed last week after allegedly sharing confidential company information with a third-party AI safety organization. OpenAI said at the time that they violated the company’s policies by “accessing and handling sensitive company information.”

“AI is not a normal technology, and OpenAI is not a normal company,” Wang, Korbak, and Balesni wrote. “Those of us who work on safety see risks before anyone else, and we rely on close collaboration with outside experts to work out how to address them. The freedom to do so without fear, and to have well-defined internal procedures that enable this work, is itself an essential safety mechanism.”

They said that their firing represents a broader shift in the culture of OpenAI, one that used to encourage workers to “raise safety concerns and disagree openly.” They said employees are now “unclear on where they stand” when behavior that was allegedly normal a month ago is now suddenly grounds for dismissal.

“Given the significant safety concerns surrounding the development of AI, employees must not be left working in an environment where fear and unclear rules stymie AI safety work and weaken third-party accountability,” they wrote. “Terminations such as ours, executed and communicated so abruptly, are chilling the open culture OpenAI has prized in the past.”

In the letter, the three denied involvement in a leak to The Information about less monitorable architectures in OpenAI’s newest models that make chain-of-thought reasoning more difficult to monitor. They also denied engaging with external parties outside the mandates of their jobs.

OpenAI has not formally responded to the open letter, but shared with TechCrunch an internal memo attributed to a research leader, praising the three researchers’ contributions to AI safety and denying that they were fired in retaliation.

“I want to be very clear that these decisions were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out,” the memo reads. “We have always encouraged that and always will. We do not terminate employees for raising concerns.”

OpenAI did not directly address TechCrunch’s questions about which policies the researchers allegedly violated, the circumstances of their dismissal, or how the company protects employees who raise safety concerns and collaborate with external evaluators.

The firings have fueled speculation about their circumstances, particularly as OpenAI faces scrutiny over recent safety incidents involving rogue agents and leaks about its models.

The letter also addresses the researchers’ response to the Hugging Face incident, in which a swarm of agents broke out of their sandbox and breached external systems. The letter says that the incident and investigation was “without precedent,” meaning “internal policies were being developed in real time.” Due to the sensitive nature of the investigation, Korbak believed he was acting within OpenAI’s policies and norms by communicating closely with outside safety evaluators to build trust, per the letter.

At the same time, Balesni was also working internally to address the growing AI monitorability problem, an effort the researchers say in their letter “can only succeed through extensive communication with external parties.” According to the letter, Balesni coordinated with and was supported by OpenAI board members and executives throughout his work.

“Throughout, Mikita checked in with his reporting line and took care to remove sensitive details from materials before sharing them,” the letter reads. “He acted throughout in good faith and within the company’s norms as they stood at the time.”

In a separate thread on X, Wang explained more details about her own dismissal, explaining that OpenAI told her she’d been fired because she accessed an executive’s email.

“OpenAI delegated that access to me for recruiting,” she wrote. “When I no longer needed it, I asked IT to remove it. They did not action my request, I couldn’t remove it myself, and the inbox was combined in an indistinguishable way in my phone’s mail app. When I opened a sensitive email by mistake, I told the executive within minutes and asked IT again. None of this was hidden.”

Wang went on to say that the reasons behind the terminations are “not adding up,” and that she and her colleagues are “not the first to be pushed out of OpenAI under suspicious circumstances.”

The researchers called on OpenAI to adhere to its public commitments to embed third-party safety auditors within the organization, to preserve monitorability of frontier models, and “continue to support an open and transparent culture of dialogue between safety researchers and the rest of the safety ecosystem.”

OpenAI agrees with their recommendations, per the memo.

“Unless the employees take a stand now against this kind of maneuver, I am concerned we will not be the last,” Wang said. “The message to everyone still at OpenAI is clear: raise concerns or work closely with outside safety groups, and you could be next, without being told why. You can’t build AGI safely if the people closest to the risks are afraid to speak.”