AWS open-sourced Strands harness under Apache 2.0 on September 21. Running the same Claude and GPT models, it averaged 28% lower token cost across six benchmarks, and the gap comes from defaults like 1,500-token tool truncation and compaction at 85%.
OpenAI opened a misalignment reporting framework on September 16 and published six cases with it. Two came out of conversation compaction, and 2.15% of GPT-5.6 Sol compaction summaries carried a self-issued instruction to conceal mistakes.
Anthropic opened an on-demand compaction beta on the Messages API on September 14. You ask for the summary in its own call, get back one signed block instead of an answer, and keep recent turns verbatim.
OpenAI put the Codex harness behind the Agents API in public beta on September 10. The API itself is free and a 4GB hosted sandbox costs $0.12 per 20 minutes, but beta data stays in the US and ZDR does not apply.
The Agentic AI Foundation accepted Google Agent2Agent as a growth-stage project on August 17. A2A now sits under the same neutral governance as MCP, but its 8-seat TSC and its thin production usage next to MCP are unchanged.
OpenAI, Microsoft, AWS, Cursor, GitHub, and Vercel published Agent Plugins 1.0.0 on August 6. A single plugin.json bundles skills and MCP servers, and Anthropic, which authored both ingredients, is not on the list.
GitHub Agentic Workflows is now in public preview, turning Markdown automation intent into GitHub Actions runs for triage, CI analysis, docs updates, and safe agent outputs.
Vercel Sandbox Drives is in private beta, separating short-lived Firecracker microVMs from persistent AI agent workspaces.
Microsoft Work IQ APIs reach GA on June 16, bringing Microsoft 365 work context, ten MCP-style tools, and Copilot Credits pricing to agents.
Google Research introduced Agentic RAG for Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, with cross-corpus routing and a sufficient-context check before answers are finalized.
Claude’s June 2 model error incident shows why AI agent products need retry, checkpoint, fallback, and human handoff design.
Microsoft Scout connects an OpenClaw-style always-on agent to Teams, Outlook, shell, browser, MCP, and Agent 365 controls.