Enterprise software firm Datadog recently offered to buy cloud cybersecurity startup Upwind Security for nearly $4 billion, the latest sign of white-hot interest in such firms, according to someone with direct knowledge of the talks.

Upwind, which hasn’t accepted the offer, is finalizing a $300 million funding round at a roughly $3.8 billion valuation, meaning the offer doesn’t carry much of a premium over the private valuation, said two people with knowledge of the situation. The startup sells software to keep tabs on applications, including so-called AI agents, that run in the cloud and to detect and automatically respond to potential evidence of hacks or breaches.

Microsoft on Wednesday asked shareholders to approve a $90.6 million pay package for CEO Satya Nadella, down slightly from his $96.4 million compensation last year, as falling revenue in its Xbox unit dragged down his target bonus even as all other parts of the business met or exceeded targets. ...

Soon after Anthropic announced its Mythos model in April and said it was exceptionally good at cybersecurity, security professionals said it was only a matter of time before hackers used similar models to supercharge their own attacks.

That time has come, according to an example we reported about today. And it looks like hackers don’t even need a Mythos-class model to automate powerful cyberattacks.

The creators of PHP, an open source programming language used by the majority of the world’s websites, on Wednesday urged web maintainers across the globe to install a new update after researchers using AI found a flaw that could put those websites at risk of being hacked.

The flaw is the latest ...

Microsoft on Wednesday asked shareholders to approve a $90.6 million pay package for CEO Satya Nadella, down slightly from his $96.4 million compensation last year, as falling revenue in its Xbox unit dragged down his target bonus even as all other parts of the business met or exceeded targets. ...

Soon after Anthropic announced its Mythos model in April and said it was exceptionally good at cybersecurity, security professionals said it was only a matter of time before hackers used similar models to supercharge their own attacks.

That time has come, according to an example we reported about today. And it looks like hackers don’t even need a Mythos-class model to automate powerful cyberattacks.

The creators of PHP, an open source programming language used by the majority of the world’s websites, on Wednesday urged web maintainers across the globe to install a new update after researchers using AI found a flaw that could put those websites at risk of being hacked.

The flaw is the latest ...

A hacking group called CyberCartel used a web of AI agents powered by models from companies including Anthropic, SpaceX and Chinese lab Moonshot AI to automate cyberattacks against more than 400 Latin American financial targets, according to an investigation by the cybersecurity startup Straiker.

The research, shared exclusively with The Information, is one of the first detailed reports of cybercriminals using AI models to successfully automate attacks that break into financial institutions. The AI agents used by CyberCartel, which has long targeted Latin American businesses and whose latest targets included banks and payment apps, appear to have stolen passwords and customer data and to have accessed people’s bank accounts autonomously with little human effort, the Straiker research shows.

A group of private equity firms in recent months considered a potential buyout of Microsoft’s Xbox gaming unit that could have valued it between $100 billion and $150 billion, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The short-lived discussions by the private firms were exploratory and didn’t turn into a negotiation with Microsoft, the people said. But they show the company could find buyers if its turnaround of the struggling gaming division falters. The identities of the PE firms couldn’t be confirmed.

Microsoft has pulled out of a planned U.K. data center Nscale was building for it, an Nscale spokesperson said, after the cloud provider faced delays accessing power to bring the site online.

The cancellation is likely to weigh on Nscale’s planned public offering this month as investor concerns ...

Microsoft executives expressed concerns in recent years that OpenAI’s use of paywalled articles from the New York Times and other publishers to train its models could pose legal issues, and OpenAI executives discussed how doing so could threaten those publishers’ businesses—but OpenAI proceeded ...

While the AI industry ties itself in knots over models it thinks will pose security threats to the internet and perhaps to humanity itself, researchers are warning about flaws in AI coding agents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Microsoft that pose immediate risk to businesses.

For instance, a recently discovered (and now largely fixed) software flaw in Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and GitHub Copilot would have let attackers hijack other people’s coding agents without them noticing, according to new research shared exclusively with The Information.

The research, published by Sequoia Capital-backed cybersecurity startup Air, discovered the same flaws in the way all four of those coding agents handle “skills” that direct agents to refer to a set of instructions and files to execute specific tasks.

Anthropic’s call to slow down AI development to keep humans safe has dominated the news cycle and drew similar calls from the leaders of OpenAI, Microsoft and others (and subtle disagreement from Mark Zuckerberg). 

But Mustafa Suleyman, who runs Microsoft’s AI model development, has a warning about Anthropic itself. 

Suleyman, who co-founded DeepMind (now part of Google), says Anthropic’s approach of treating its Claude models as if they were sentient, similar to humans, could produce a dangerous outcome. He called out Anthropic’s Claude Constitution, a document that treats the model as an intelligent entity and offers guidelines for how it should handle ethical dilemmas. Suleyman said that by incorporating the document into its training, Anthropic could make Claude harder to control. 

Suleyman’s concerns emerged when Anthropic updated the constitution at the start of this year to leave room for the possibility that Claude has some sort of “consciousness” or “moral status,” a change from the original document.

Microsoft said Tuesday it will raise its quarterly dividend to 98 cents per share, up from 91 cents, beginning in December. The company previously raised its dividend by 10% a year ago. Microsoft’s stock was roughly flat in after hours trading.

The company’s move to return more cash to ...

Microsoft is planning to more than triple the size of its Azure cloud unit’s data center capacity to over 38 gigawatts by 2032, up from 12 gigawatts today, Bloomberg reported Thursday. A gigawatt of capacity would be able to power a city the size of San Francisco.

The planned buildout reflects ...

Microsoft is planning to significantly increase production of its internally designed next-generation AI chips next year in hopes of persuading big cloud customers like Anthropic to use them, according to two people with direct knowledge of the plans.

That’s despite slow uptake of the current generation of Microsoft-designed chips, known as the Maia 200. Microsoft plans to publicly unveil its new Maia 300 chip this fall, potentially as soon as next month, one of the people said. The cloud giant has been in talks with chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to secure manufacturing capacity for over 300,000 of the chips for delivery in 2027, the second person said—an order of magnitude above the tens of thousands of Maia 200 chips Microsoft has produced so far.