AI Agents - The Batch | DeepLearning.AI

Close-up of a shiny blue padlock, symbolizing security, with a black dial and orange design.

Machine Learning Research

Claude Weakens a Quantum Lock: Anthropic engineers used Claude Mythos to identify cryptographic weaknesses in HAWK and AES

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been testing quantum-proof replacements for today’s encryption algorithms.

Cloudflare diagram on "why the web is being crawled" showing 51.8 percent model training, 36.6 percent mixed use, and 8.6 percent search

Business

Cloudflare’s Web Crawler Flare-Up: Cloudflare moves to block all AI training bots by default

Web publishers using Cloudflare will soon be able to separately control an AI bot’s access based on what it does, allowing search indexing while blocking AI training or agent activity.

Animated GIF of Meta's Muse Spark 1.1's performance on benchmarks, showing strong performance on tool use and roughly second-tier overall intelligence

Business

Meta Sparks A Price War: Muse Spark 1.1 makes a jump in intelligence at a lower price than peers

With Llama, Meta marked itself as an open alternative to OpenAI. With its new closed models, Meta now positions itself as a low-cost, high-value competitor.

Diagram shows Robin system generating hypotheses, analyzing data, and producing therapeutic suggestions.

Machine Learning Research

Put the Lab in the Loop: Robin automates drug discovery, matching chemical processes of known drugs to research on diseases

An AI agent proposed new medical uses for established drugs nearly autonomously — uses that were supported by experiments on isolated human cells — with human input only to name diseases to be treated and run the AI-proposed lab experiments.

Six charts show Fugu and Fugu Ultra scoring highest, marked by red bars, on various tasks and benchmarks.

Machine Learning Research

Fugu Blends Models Task by Task: Sakana debuted dedicated orchestrator models, Fugu and Fugu-Ultra, that spawn Claude, Gemini, and GPT agents

Models that orchestrate the activities of other models and agents achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of benchmarks, outperforming the best individual models working alone.

AI performance chart shows GLM, GPT models competing in reasoning, coding benchmarks. Models highlight performance.

Machine Learning Research

Top Agentic Performance, Low Cost: GLM-5.2, designed for coding and long-running agentic jobs, now the top open model

Z.ai released an open-weights model that rivals proprietary leaders for autonomous agentic tasks.

Performance table shows Nemotron's scores across benchmarks, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses.

Machine Learning Research

Nvidia’s Nemotron Goes Big: Nvidia Nemotron 3 Ultra bets on speed and openness to win customers

Nvidia’s largest-yet model is among the best-performing from a developer based in the U.S. and among the most open developed by anyone.

A line graph compares SWE-Bench Pro and DeepSWE, showing various models' performance percentages.

Machine Learning Research

Agentic Tests Beyond the Bug Hunt: DeepSWE, ProgramBench, and ITBench-AA push agents harder than SWE-bench

SWE-bench, a family of benchmarks that focuses on an LLM’s ability to fix software bugs, is giving way to new tests that evaluate agent software-engineering performance in more challenging ways.

Bar chart shows a sharp rise in code output per person after Claude Code's release, reaching 8x by 2026.

Machine Learning Research

RSI Is the New AGI: What Is recursive self-improvement, and why Is everybody talking about it?

The phrase recursive self-improvement erupted on social media following an Anthropic report that tracked AI-driven gains in the company’s internal software-engineering productivity.

Chart compares performance of Composer 2.5 against Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5, and Composer 2 in benchmarks.

Machine Learning Research

Cursor Fits Its Model to Its Agent: Composer 2.5 for Cursor rivals GPT-5.5's coding abilities at lower price

Cursor’s latest software engineering model rivals the performance of leading competitors like Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5 for a fraction of the price.

Flowchart depicting LLMs memorizing and responding to state media, affecting language-specific outputs.

Machine Learning Research

Qwen3.7-Max Adds Speed and Power: Alibaba's latest proprietary model challenges U.S. rivals

Alibaba updated its flagship large language model for long-running agentic work, pushing it into the top rank among LLMs built in China.

Doughnut chart shows 77% of agentic traffic in 2025 went to product search pages.

Tech & Society

Agents Surf the AI-Written Web: Internet traffic driven by AI rripled last year, study shows

AI-driven activity on the internet rose sharply last year, a study shows.