AI Coding Live News

Gemini API Deprecates Gemini 2.5 Pro and 2.5 Flash: From December 1, Requests Auto-Route to 3.8 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite at the New Models' Rates

In its November 2 Gemini API changelog, Google deprecated gemini-2.5-pro and gemini-2.5-flash and removed both from the Google AI Studio model picker. From December 1, 2026, requests to gemini-2.5-pro will automatically route to gemini-3.8-flash and requests to gemini-2.5-flash to gemini-3.5-flash-lite, billed at the new models' rates. Google flags breaking API changes: stricter function calling and thought_signature validation, thinking_level replacing thinking_budget, and removal of sampling parameters such as temperature and of prefilled model turns. The model string stays valid but behavior can change, so developers should switch model strings and rerun tests before December 1.

Key Takeaways

  • Deadline: from December 1, 2026, gemini-2.5-pro routes to gemini-3.8-flash and gemini-2.5-flash routes to gemini-3.5-flash-lite; API access to 2.5 Pro is already limited to existing users who actively used it.
  • Price change (official price list, per 1M tokens): 2.5 Pro is $1.25 input / $10.00 output for prompts up to 200k; 3.8 Flash is an introductory $0.75 / $3.75 through 2026, rising to $1.50 / $7.50 on January 1, 2027.
  • 2.5 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite both cost $0.30 input / $2.50 output for text, while audio input drops from $1.00 to $0.30.
  • The migration guide says to replace thinking_budget with thinking_level (3.8 Flash has no minimal level), drop temperature/top_p/top_k, candidate_count and prefilled model turns, and include call_id and name in every FunctionResponse.
  • It follows the October deprecation of 3.7 Flash, another case of an old model string silently routing to a newer model; 2.5 Pro users will actually land on a Flash-tier model.
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X Discussion: levelsio Used Claude Code to Decompile the Battlefield 1942 Demo and Put It in the Browser With Multiplayer, Citing About 1M Output Tokens

Indie developer Pieter Levels (@levelsio) said on X on November 2 that he used Claude Code to decompile the engine of the free Battlefield 1942 demo, port it to C, compile it to WebAssembly and host it at bf1942.pieter.com, where it runs in the browser with online co-op on the Tobruk map. He said the job took about 1 million output tokens, roughly $100 at API prices, while he pays for a $100-a-month Claude subscription. His two main posts drew about 2,200 likes and 340,000 views and reached X trending. These are the author's own claims and community discussion, not independently verified.

X Discussion: levelsio Used Claude Code to Decompile the Battlefield 1942 Demo and Put It in the Browser With Multiplayer, Citing About 1M Output Tokens

Key Takeaways

  • Author's account: Claude Code decompiled the Battlefield 1942 demo engine, which was ported to C and compiled to WebAssembly to run in the browser.
  • The live build at bf1942.pieter.com opens directly, is labeled non-commercial and unofficial, and offers online co-op on Tobruk with no install.
  • Cost: about 1 million output tokens by the author's count, roughly $100 at API prices; he actually pays for a $100-a-month Claude subscription.
  • He said it was much harder than his earlier Quake and DOOM ports, whose engine source code id Software released long ago.
  • Reach: the first post had about 1,100 likes and 230,000 views, the launch post about 1,100 likes and 107,000 views; testers are already reporting bugs.
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Anthropic Launches Message Threads in Public Beta on the Messages API: Server-Side Conversations Cut Claude Code TTFT About 35% on 500K-1M Token Requests

On November 2 (US time) Anthropic put message threads into public beta on the Messages API (beta header message-threads-2026-08-12). The API keeps the conversation on the server: the first request sends the full conversation and creates a thread, and each later request sends only new messages plus the previous response id. Anthropic says threads are on by default for most Claude Code users, cutting median time to first token by about 35% on 500K-1M token requests, while the median long-conversation request shrank from about 800 KB to 1.8 KB. Threads expire after 5 idle minutes; pricing and rate limits are unchanged.

Anthropic Launches Message Threads in Public Beta on the Messages API: Server-Side Conversations Cut Claude Code TTFT About 35% on 500K-1M Token Requests

Key Takeaways

  • Per Anthropic, median time to first token on 500K-1M token Claude Code requests is about 35% lower.
  • The median long-conversation request fell from about 800 KB to about 1.8 KB, since each turn uploads only new messages plus previous_message_id.
  • A thread expires 5 minutes after its last request and is deleted within 1 hour; an expired thread returns 404 thread_not_found and must be replayed in full.
  • Pricing and rate limits are unchanged; Message Batches, token counting and on-demand compaction are unsupported, and threads are not ZDR or HIPAA eligible.
  • Available on the Claude API, Claude Platform on AWS, Google Cloud (Anthropic managed) and Microsoft Foundry, with a thread helper in the SDKs.
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Hume Launches Audio Decision API: Ask Plain-Language Questions of Raw Audio in One Call, 70.7% Agreement With a Human Panel per Hume

On November 2 voice AI company Hume launched the Audio Decision API, which it calls the first audio-native model that answers questions about speech and sound. Developers upload raw audio, write each question as a sentence with candidate answers, and get back a probability for each answer, with no transcription step. It supports yes/no, multiple-choice, rating-scale and time-span questions, such as how many speakers there are, whether someone laughs, whether a caller sounds frustrated, or whether a siren is in the background. Per Hume, it was trained on more than 10 million human judgments and in an initial evaluation reached 70.7% agreement with a human panel's average judgment, versus 56.5% for an individual rater. Access is currently by request or waitlist.

Hume Launches Audio Decision API: Ask Plain-Language Questions of Raw Audio in One Call, 70.7% Agreement With a Human Panel per Hume

Key Takeaways

  • Per Hume: 70.7% agreement with a human panel's average judgment in an initial evaluation, versus a 56.5% individual-rater baseline; sample size and languages were not disclosed.
  • Trained on more than 10 million human perceptual judgments (per Hume's X post); the blog cites tens of millions of listener ratings overall.
  • Four question types (yes/no, choice, scale, span); adding a question is one line of JSON, with no labeling or retraining.
  • The endpoint is POST /v0/decisions/file, plus an input-token estimate endpoint, with Python and TypeScript SDKs.
  • Hume says work that used to take 10+ models now takes one call; pricing has not been published.
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Linked Models & Agents:
⚡ Hume Audio Decision Model🌐 Hume AI
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Meituan ships LongCat-2.5, a 1.6T-parameter (about 48B active) native multimodal agentic model, with API pricing of $0.30/$1.20 per 1M tokens

On Nov 2 Meituan's LongCat team listed LongCat-2.5 in its API platform change log as the full release of September 25's LongCat-2.5-Preview. The official technical blog says it has 1.6 trillion total parameters with about 48 billion activated per token, builds on LongCat-2.0 with stronger native visual understanding and agentic coding, and was trained and served with W4A4 inference on domestic AI accelerators. Vendor-reported scores include 88.4 on Terminal Bench v2.1, 38.5 on Terminal Bench v4.0, 91.9 on BrowseComp and 83.1 on MCP Atlas. The API speaks both OpenAI and Anthropic formats with a 1M-token context and up to 128K output tokens, at a limited-time price of $0.30 per 1M uncached input tokens, $0.006 cached input and $1.20 output.

Meituan ships LongCat-2.5, a 1.6T-parameter (about 48B active) native multimodal agentic model, with API pricing of $0.30/$1.20 per 1M tokens

Key Takeaways

  • Scale: a 1.6-trillion-parameter MoE with about 48B active per token, a 1M-token context and up to 128K output tokens (official blog, API docs)
  • Code agents (vendor-reported): Terminal Bench v2.1 88.4 (Claude Opus 5 89.1, GPT-5.6-Sol 88.8), Terminal Bench v4.0 38.5 (GPT-5.6-Sol 37.3, Claude Opus 5 53.9), DeepSWE v1.1 64.6
  • General agents (vendor-reported): BrowseComp 91.9, MCP Atlas 83.1, AutomationBench v1.0.6 51.8, HLE with tools 63.1; AutomationBench jumps from 15.8 on LongCat-2.0
  • Pricing: limited-time $0.30 per 1M uncached input tokens, $0.006 cached input and $1.20 output (pricing page)
  • Engineering: W4A4 inference raises prefill throughput 43.3% and decode throughput 42.77% over a W8A8 baseline; FSDP gives 86% higher per-device throughput than DDP in long-sequence SFT
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Karpathy builds HackerTube in about 2 hours with Claude Code and Opus 5.5: a YouTube clone of 6,454 videos recommended on Hacker News

On Oct 31 Andrej Karpathy published HackerTube (hackertube.org) on his personal blog: a YouTube-style site that only lists the 6,454 YouTube videos recommended in Hacker News comments from 2007 to 2026, grouped into 150 topics. He says Opus 5.5 in Claude Code did the work: it downloaded every HN comment, ran Sonnet over them in a Workflow to narrow things down to about 40K comments recommending a video, wrapped the result in a YouTube UI, then deployed and hardened it on a VPS, all in about 2 hours. His only manual steps were creating a YouTube API key, booting the VPS and buying the domain. His HN submission reached the front page with about 1,005 points and 308 comments.

Key Takeaways

  • Source: Karpathy's personal blog post HackerTube (Oct 31), with the site live at hackertube.org
  • Scale: from every HN comment it narrowed things down to about 40K comments recommending a YouTube video, giving 6,454 videos across 150 topics from 2007 to 2026 (author-reported)
  • Method: Opus 5.5 ran the download and overall pipeline, used Claude Code's Workflow feature to have Sonnet filter comments and drop spam in bulk, then built a YouTube-style front end and deployed and hardened it on a VPS
  • Product details: it uses the frame at the 50% mark instead of the uploaded thumbnail, offers account-free For You picks with state kept only in the local browser, supports keyboard shortcuts, and exports the site's data so you can hand it to your own agent to build a variant
  • Workflow: Karpathy says Opus 5.5 on Medium effort is his default and he no longer reads or writes code or runs terminal commands himself; the HN post has about 1,005 points and 308 comments (public HN data as of Nov 1, 14:10 SGT)
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xAIdocs.x.ai·
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xAI will add an invisible watermark to Grok API text by default from Nov 7, covering grok-4.7 and six other models, with per-model admin opt-out

On Oct 31, xAI (signed as SpaceXSI in its docs) added an "Output Watermarking" page to its API docs: starting November 7, 2026, text generated by grok-4.7, grok-4.6, grok-4.5, grok-4.3, and the reasoning, non-reasoning, and multi-agent versions of grok-4.20 will carry an invisible watermark by default, to comply with the EU AI Act. It covers ordinary text, structured outputs, and tool call arguments on both the Responses and Chat Completions APIs, and works by slightly shaping token choice without adding any characters. Developers can read the x-watermark response header to check; team admins can opt out per model in the Console, but must confirm a legal exception applies, and some models may be locked on.

Key Takeaways

  • Timing: on by default from November 7, 2026, with no code change and no request parameter (xAI docs)
  • Scope: 7 model IDs (grok-4.7, 4.6, 4.5, 4.3, and grok-4.20 reasoning, non-reasoning, and multi-agent) on the global and regional endpoints, across both Responses and Chat Completions
  • Coverage: ordinary text, structured outputs, and tool call arguments; the response header x-watermark: true marks a watermarked output
  • Opt-out: team admins switch it off per model, effective for new requests within 5 minutes and logged in the audit log; admins must confirm a legal exception applies, and some models are locked on
  • xAI's position: no effect on quality or speed; detection is statistical with three outcomes (watermarked, not watermarked, uncertain), and the detection API is by application
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Anthropic (Claude Help Center)support.claude.com·
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Anthropic extends Claude text watermarking to older models including Mythos 5, Opus 4.7/4.6 and Sonnet 4.6, reportedly from November 3

Anthropics help center article "How Claude marks AI-generated content" (updated Oct 28) now lists older models released before Aug 2, 2026, including Claude Mythos 5, Opus 4.7, Opus 4.6, Opus 4.5, Sonnet 4.6 and Sonnet 4.5, as carrying text watermarks on first-party surfaces, and says Anthropic is adding watermarks to these models to meet EU AI Act Article 50 transparency duties. According to a customer email screenshot reported by outlets such as MACCUS, the legacy rollout starts Nov 3, with Amazon Bedrock possibly a few days later; Anthropics public pages do not state that date. The watermark follows Google DeepMinds SynthID-Text approach, adds no hidden characters or extra tokens, and detection is in private preview only for regulators, media, researchers and similarly obligated organizations, which has drawn complaints on X that users cannot check their own text.

Anthropic extends Claude text watermarking to older models including Mythos 5, Opus 4.7/4.6 and Sonnet 4.6, reportedly from November 3

Key Takeaways

  • Scope: in the official support table, older models such as Mythos 5, Opus 4.7/4.6/4.5 and Sonnet 4.6/4.5 are ticked only for first-party text watermarks; cloud-partner watermarks and C2PA file credentials remain limited to models launched after Aug 2 (see the help center)
  • Timing: a customer email reported by media puts the start at Nov 3, with Bedrock possibly a few days later (MACCUS); Anthropics public pages give no date
  • Cost and quality: Anthropic says the watermark adds no characters, no extra tokens and no extra cost, using a variant of SynthID-Text (see Anthropics explainer)
  • Detection: the detection API is in private preview for regulators, law enforcement, media, fact-checkers, researchers and obligated enterprises; ordinary users cannot check text yet
  • Reach: watermarks apply worldwide across Claude, the Claude Platform API, Claude Code, Cowork and Tag, because Anthropic says it has no durable way to scope them by region yet
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Wiz "Black October" report: at least nine AI developer platforms breached in October, with stolen API keys feeding an LLMjacking resale market

Cloud security firm Wiz published research on October 30 saying at least nine AI developer platforms disclosed incidents this month: Fireworks AI, Andromeda, Zeabur, Lightning AI, OpenCode, Railway, Warp, CommandCode and Northflank. Attackers hunted stored environment variables, especially keys for paid AI models; Wiz traced two stolen enterprise keys to roughly 800,000 and 1.7 million Amazon Bedrock calls, which it estimates likely ran over $100k at list price in those two cases alone.

Wiz "Black October" report: at least nine AI developer platforms breached in October, with stolen API keys feeding an LLMjacking resale market

Key Takeaways

  • Scale: between October 6 and 30, at least nine AI developer platforms disclosed incidents, and Zeabur is shutting down as a result (Wiz blog)
  • Methods: Fireworks, OpenCode and Warp reported signs of an "agent swarm" attack, and OpenCode and CommandCode attributed theirs to "distillation" attempts; the common thread is hunting stored environment variables that grant AI access
  • Case A: one stolen key drove about 800k Bedrock calls over 30 hours, about 90% successful, with Opus models making up three quarters (Wiz figures)
  • Case B: a single address made about 1.7 million calls in 13 hours, over a million successful; the two cases together likely exceeded $100k at list price
  • Resale chain: Wiz identified two sites selling discounted frontier-model access and saw both test the stolen keys
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Pika releases open-weight video model Pika H3 Flex: post-trained on MiniMax H3, six-step sampling, five audio stems, API from $0.01 per second

On October 29 Pika released Pika H3 Flex, a joint audio-video generator post-trained on MiniMax H3, with weights on Hugging Face, code on GitHub, and ComfyUI and Diffusers support. Pika says it distilled sampling from 50 denoising steps to six, averages about 1.8x faster DiT denoising than Fal H3 Max at 768p, and can produce a 15-second clip with soundtrack in as little as about 7 seconds; the hosted API adds 1080p to 4K upscaling and five exportable audio stems (dialogue, score, SFX, foley, ambience). All speed and quality figures are vendor-reported.

Pika releases open-weight video model Pika H3 Flex: post-trained on MiniMax H3, six-step sampling, five audio stems, API from $0.01 per second

Key Takeaways

  • Pricing (vendor figures): text/image-to-video from $0.01 per output second, reference-to-video from $0.03/s; Pika's comparison table lists MiniMax H3 at $0.08/s and Seedance 2.5 at $0.103/s
  • Speed (vendor figures): six-step sampling, about 1.8x faster DiT denoising than Fal H3 Max at 768p on average and about 2x for 10–15 s text/image-to-video; 1.60x faster end-to-end 5 s 768p generation on eight B300 GPUs
  • Ranking: Pika's product page says it scores 1293 and ranks #7 on DesignArena's text-to-video board, the highest open-weight model there
  • Release form: the Hugging Face repo is tagged as an adapter on MiniMax-H3 under an 'other' license; local inference natively supports 480p/768p with mixed stereo audio, while 4K upscaling and audio stems are hosted-API only
  • Accepts up to 12 reference inputs (image, audio, video, sketch and more) and supports style transfer, motion transfer, character swap and targeted edits
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Linked Models & Agents:
⚡ Pika H3 Flex⚡ MiniMax H3⚡ Fal H3 Max⚡ HeyGen Video⚡ Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash🌐 Pika🌐 MiniMax
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X discussion: Anthropic's head of platform engineering says a team with no Rust developers had Claude port the whole Messages API to Rust, cutting CPU by roughly 40-50%

Katelyn Lesse, Anthropic's head of platform engineering, said on the Latent Space podcast (published Oct 27) that a Rust version of the Messages API fully rolled out the previous week. The old system was a CPU-hungry Python monolith, the team started with "not a single Rust developer", humans designed and verified the system, Claude wrote the implementation, and shadow traffic compared outputs between the old and new versions. Her ballpark figures are roughly 40-50% less CPU and 10-20% better time to first token. A clip posted by Somi (@somi_ai) drew 1,000+ likes and about 140K views on X and was quoted by swyx and others, with the debate centered on whether "never do the big rewrite" is now outdated advice. These are X discussion views and spoken estimates; Anthropic has not published a written engineering report.

X discussion: Anthropic's head of platform engineering says a team with no Rust developers had Claude port the whole Messages API to Rust, cutting CPU by roughly 40-50%

Key Takeaways

  • The first-hand source is Katelyn Lesse speaking on the Latent Space episode "How Anthropic ships Claude with Claude", in the "56:05 Rebuilding the Messages API in Rust" segment
  • Lesse said the move was driven by CPU becoming a bottleneck as usage surged; CPU now has to be capacity-planned in advance, and research sandboxes, product sandboxes and CI all draw from the same pool inside Anthropic
  • The team forked the entire API in Rust in one go, ran shadow traffic to confirm the Python and Rust outputs matched, then turned it on gradually, deliberately adding no new features during the port
  • Her ballpark is about 40-50% CPU savings and 10-20% better time to first token, with larger gains on longer-running workloads; these are spoken estimates from the podcast, not a formal benchmark
  • On X, Somi called "never do the big rewrite" dead advice and swyx said Anthropic "vibecoded their entire backend to Rust"; the latter is an exaggeration, since Lesse only discussed the Messages API
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OpenAI Agents API ships Auto Review, async compaction, experimental time awareness and mid-session tool updates

The OpenAI Developers account shared a post by Steve (@stevendcoffey), who works on the API at OpenAI, listing five Agents API updates this week: Codex-style Auto Review of commands before execution, compaction that runs in the background, an experimental time-awareness feature, updating a session's tools at any time, and automatic caching of system prompts across all sessions. As of writing, the official API changelog does not list these items yet.

Key Takeaways

  • Five updates: Auto Review, async compaction, time awareness (experimental), updating session tools at any time, and automatic cross-session system prompt caching
  • Auto Review mirrors the Codex mechanism and evaluates commands for potential bad behavior before they run
  • Time awareness lets the model act on time-boxed instructions such as "timebox CI fixes to 10 minutes"
  • The Agents API entered public beta on September 10, and this is another round of features within 7 weeks (after computer use on Sep 29, sandbox prewarming on Oct 9 and Ultrafast mode on Oct 16)
  • OpenAI has published no latency or cost-saving numbers, and the changelog has not listed these items yet
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OpenAI rolls out GPT-6 Rosalind Research, a GPT-6 generation life sciences model for approved research orgs in Work, Codex and the API at $15/$75 per million tokens

In its October 30 ChatGPT Business release notes, OpenAI said GPT-6 Rosalind Research is rolling out to a limited set of customers with Research approval. It shows up in the model picker in ChatGPT Work and Codex, not in the Chat tab, and separately approved organizations can call it through the API as gpt-6-rosalind. OpenAI's token-based Enterprise rate card lists it at $15 per million input tokens, $1.50 cached input and $75 output, three times the price of GPT-5.5 Rosalind Research.

Key Takeaways

  • Approved orgs only: both the organization and the user need Rosalind Research approval, and Discovery approval does not include it
  • Where to use it: the model picker in ChatGPT Work and Codex, not the Chat tab; in Codex it pairs with the Life Sciences Research plugin
  • API model name gpt-6-rosalind needs separate approval and is limited to internal research tools, not customer-facing products
  • Priced at $15 input, $1.50 cached input and $75 output per million tokens, versus $5/$0.50/$25 for GPT-5.5 Rosalind Research
  • Enterprise workspaces start with a two-week Admin Preview that is off by default until an admin enables it for approved users
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Linked Models & Agents:
⚡ GPT-6 Rosalind Research⚡ GPT-5.5 Rosalind Research⚡ GPT-6 Astra🤖 Codex🤖 ChatGPT Work🌐 OpenAI

Claude API launches the Usage and Cost Analytics API in beta and raises the request size limit to 128 MB

Per the official Claude API release notes, on Oct 29 Anthropic launched the Usage and Cost Analytics API in beta, with two endpoints, /v1/organizations/analytics/usage and /analytics/cost, that filter and group token usage and cost by model, workspace, API key, and the user or service account behind each request, with 1-minute, 1-hour, or 1-day buckets. The older Usage and Cost API is now legacy but still supported. On Oct 28 the maximum request size for the Messages and Token Counting APIs on the first-party Claude API rose from 32 MB to 128 MB.

Key Takeaways

  • The new API needs the analytics-usage-cost-2026-08-24 beta header; one endpoint returns token and request counts, the other cost in USD (per the official docs)
  • group_by takes up to 5 dimensions, time buckets can be 1m, 1h, or 1d, and each filter accepts up to 100 values
  • Claude Console and Claude Enterprise organizations share the same endpoints and fields; it also works on Claude Platform on AWS and Claude Models on Google Cloud (Anthropic managed)
  • The old Usage and Cost API and four Enterprise Analytics usage and cost report endpoints are now legacy but still supported, with migration guides
  • Since Oct 28 the Messages and Token Counting APIs accept requests up to 128 MB instead of 32 MB (4x), on the first-party Claude API only
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OpenAI launches Private Intelligence for enterprises: Zero Data Retention, Private Inference preview and agent approval controls

On Oct 30 OpenAI introduced Private Intelligence, a business privacy offering that bundles Zero Data Retention, a Private Inference confidential-computing preview for the API, agent access and approval controls, encryption and compliance certifications across ChatGPT, Codex and the API, built with some of its largest customers.

OpenAI launches Private Intelligence for enterprises: Zero Data Retention, Private Inference preview and agent approval controls

Key Takeaways

  • Covers three product lines, ChatGPT, Codex and the API, with per-product controls documented by OpenAI
  • Private Inference ships as an API preview that OpenAI describes as confidential computing with strict, verifiable controls
  • Businesses set agent data access, available tools, permitted actions and required approvals before agents act
  • OpenAI lists SOC 2 Type 2, ISO certifications, HIPAA BAAs and FedRAMP support; no benchmarks or pricing were published
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