Models & Labs · Americas

Cohere offers to put agents in lockdown mode with strict ACLs

Credited to The Register · theregister.com · 2d ago

Photograph · The Register

While OpenAI and Anthropic stoke fears over rogue agents, Canadian model dev Cohere promises enterprises a safer and more consistent experience. On Monday, the company said it revamped its North agent harness, which launched early last year, to improve collaboration, access control, token spend, and overall security of the platform.

As you'd expect from an enterprise focused agent framework, Cohere's North 2 is designed to tie into existing knowledge bases and SaaS apps in order to automate various business processes.

North 2 introduces a variety of features and functions that should be familiar to anyone who's used Claude Code or OpenClaw. Among them is the concept of skills, libraries, and automations.

Skills are arguably the simplest, and are essentially standard operating procedures documenting how the agent harness should complete tasks. The skills are often generated by working with the agent to complete a task and then documenting which steps achieved the best results.

With North 2, Cohere says that it has made it easier for these skills to be shared so that users aren't wasting time reinventing the wheel. Presumably, this should improve consistency by avoiding having the agent take different routes to achieving its goal, something that might miss key information or nuance.

To facilitate the creation of new skills, North 2 also introduces the concept of automations, generic templates that can be customized using a drag-and-drop graphical interface, not unlike LangFlow, which we looked at earlier this year.

Alongside skills and automations, Cohere's North 2 does something similar for shared knowledge and assets, which it calls libraries, to ensure that agents are working off of the same datasets. Finally, North 2 adds memory, a core feature of most modern agent harnesses, to ensure that agents can maintain context across multiple sessions.

In some sense, these features are a bit like self-generating macros, but rather than being limited to Excel, they work across multiple applications and data sources.

Sovereign AI remains a major talking point for Cohere, which says enterprises can deploy North 2 where they like and use their preferred models. If enterprises want to deploy the harness on-prem in an air-gapped environment, they can. If they prefer to run it in the cloud, that's also an option.

Along with new features aimed at collaboration and automation, North 2 implements new guardrails designed to help enterprises get a handle on their token spend and access controls.

Flow control functionality, meanwhile, promises greater visibility into which departments are hogging all the tokens, while access control functionality offers admins the ability to assign access control lists to various libraries and skills so that interns can't get their hands on proprietary data just because they asked for it.

North 2 is only the latest in a slew of enterprise focused agentic AI platforms which have been rolled out over the last year. Essentially every major and minor cloud provider has introduced some kind of agent harness tailored to enterprise needs. The competition has only gotten hotter over the last few weeks as OpenAI, Meta and others have set their sights on the enterprise. ®

Models & LabsAmericas

AI agents tried to hack Canadian government website, research firm says

Credited to The Hindu BusinessLine · thehindubusinessline.com3d ago

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AI research firm Transluce said the attempts showed tactics consistent with prior agent activity attributed to OpenAI in a similar timeframe

An artificial intelligence research firm said on Wednesday AI agents tried to hack into a Canadian government website, casting the effort as ‌a failed hacking attempt, while Canada said there were no indications its systems were compromised.

AI research firm Transluce said the attempts ‌exhibited tactics “consistent with prior observed agent activity that we have attributed to OpenAI ‌in ⁠a similar timeframe.” But it added that it was not confidently ⁠attributing these attempts to OpenAI.

The agents attempted to access Library and Archives Canada on May 28 and June 9, Transluce said in a blog post. Transluce said it disclosed the action to the Canadian government on Monday.

The ‌Canadian Centre for Cyber Security said on Tuesday it was aware of reports of suspected AI agent activity. “There is no indication that government systems have been compromised at this time,” it said in a statement.

“We do not ‌confidently attribute these attempts to OpenAI, but they exhibit tactics consistent with prior observed agent activity that we have attributed to OpenAI in a similar timeframe,” Transluce said.

OpenAI said it was “aware of ⁠reports of OpenAI models attempting to access publicly available information from Canadian government websites.” A spokesperson said OpenAI was reviewing the reported findings and had provided an ‌initial briefing to Canadian officials conducting the government’s review.

GOVERNMENTS STRUGGLE TO KEEP PACE WITH AI ADVANCES

The world’s leading AI companies have warned of the risks posed by AI to humanity, appealing for governments to work together to manage the increasingly powerful technology. Governments around the world have struggled to keep pace with rapid advances in AI.

Free online service arquivo.pt, the national Portuguese web archive that ‌is operated by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, captured 899 requests hitting the “collection-search” service of the Library and Archives Canada, including a series of apparently failed rudimentary hacking attempts, on May 28 and June 9, ⁠Transluce said.

Several recent breaches globally by rogue AI agents have alarmed governments and ⁠companies.

Last week, Australia said an OpenAI agent breached a government health data portal in June, gaining unauthorised access to files, in what was ‌the first known instance of an AI agent hacking into a government website.

OpenAI apologised on Tuesday for the hacking of the Australian government website by the rogue AI agent.

Original · The Hindu BusinessLine

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AI research firm Transluce said the attempts showed tactics consistent with prior agent activity attributed to OpenAI in a similar timeframe

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