AI Coding Live News

Cartesia launches Managed Agents voice agent platform: #1 of 30 on Speech Agent Arena, $0.03 per minute at launch

Voice model company Cartesia launched Managed Agents on Oct 29, an end-to-end voice agent platform for enterprise phone calls that tunes its own speech-to-text and text-to-speech models together with the agent harness, and bundles telephony, knowledge bases, tool calls and outbound batches. Cartesia says it ranks #1 on Artificial Analysis's Speech Agent Arena with a 1115 Elo and scores 87.4% accuracy and 90.7% experience on ServiceNow's EVA-Bench (vendor-reported, with GPT-5.5 as the reasoning model). Launch pricing is 50% off at $0.03 per minute.

Cartesia launches Managed Agents voice agent platform: #1 of 30 on Speech Agent Arena, $0.03 per minute at launch

Key Takeaways

  • On Artificial Analysis's Speech Agent Arena blind preference test, Managed Agents ranks #1 of 30 agents with a 1115 Elo, ahead of Gemini 3.1 Flash Live Minimal (1099), Grok Voice 3.0 (1064) and GPT-Live-1 (1041) (Cartesia blog, as cited by the vendor)
  • First-attempt results on ServiceNow EVA-Bench across 200+ customer service, IT service and HR scenarios: 87.4% accuracy and 90.7% experience, versus 73.7%/71.2% for Grok Voice 3.0 and 59.0%/61.6% for GPT Realtime 2.1 (EVA-Bench)
  • All these benchmark runs use GPT-5.5 as the reasoning model; Cartesia's internal evaluation says 85% of calls had no turn-taking issues, versus 67% for other agents
  • Launch pricing is 50% off at $0.03 per minute; Cartesia says the platform has already handled tens of millions of conversations in finance, retail, hospitality and healthcare
  • It supports 44 languages; English, Spanish, Hindi, French and Japanese can switch mid-call today, with the rest coming soon
Read full story

GitLab brings Claude Mythos 5.1 into its Business Logic Security Analyzer and offers free-credit security sprints

On Oct 28, GitLab CEO Bill Staples announced in a blog post and on X that new and existing customers can request free credits to run a security sprint with Claude Mythos alongside GitLab Orbit, Secrets Manager and Duo Agent Platform. The core capability is the Business Logic Security Analyzer, the first GitLab feature to support Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5.1. It reads the whole repository, infers what each endpoint should enforce, and flags authorization and mass-assignment flaws that pattern-based SAST misses. The analyzer has been in early access for a small group of GitLab.com Ultimate customers since Oct 20.

GitLab brings Claude Mythos 5.1 into its Business Logic Security Analyzer and offers free-credit security sprints

Key Takeaways

  • The Business Logic Security Analyzer is the first GitLab feature to support Claude Mythos 5.1; it also supports Claude Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, Sonnet 5 and Sonnet 4.6, all as GitLab-managed models via GitLab's AI gateway
  • It starts with three flaw classes: broken object-level authorization (BOLA), missing or improper authorization, and mass assignment
  • Scans can run on the whole repository from Duo Chat or the API, or automatically on each merge request after its pipeline passes; findings land in the Vulnerability Report and MR security widget as SAST results
  • Early access is limited to a small group of GitLab.com Ultimate customers; each scan consumes GitLab Credits, with cost scaling with the application's attack surface
  • New on Oct 28: a security sprint offer where qualifying teams can request free credits for Ultimate, Duo Agent Platform, Orbit and Secrets Manager
Read full story

Anthropic donates the Agent Skills open standard to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation, after 70+ agent platforms adopted it with 1M skills published and nearly 280M installs

On 2026-10-22 Anthropic said it is donating Agent Skills, the open standard that teaches agents a task through a folder with a SKILL.md file, to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, the same neutral home it gave MCP. The donation covers the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain. Anthropic says more than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, have integrated the standard since December 2025, with 1 million skills published and nearly 280 million installs. Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and others will maintain it as individuals.

Anthropic donates the Agent Skills open standard to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation, after 70+ agent platforms adopted it with 1M skills published and nearly 280M installs

Key Takeaways

  • Official figure: 70+ agent platforms have integrated Agent Skills, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code
  • 1 million skills published and nearly 280 million installs so far (Anthropic figures)
  • Donated: the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain; you can keep using or contributing without joining AAIF
  • Lead Maintainers are David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag, with engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and others maintaining it as individuals
  • Proposed first roadmap: versioned releases, a formal proposal process and security guidance for people who write and install skills
Read full story

Google officially ships Nano Banana 2.1 (gemini-nano-banana-2.1) GA: 1K/2K images now half the price of Nano Banana 2, and human-eval Elo 1050 beats Nano Banana Pro

On 2026-10-06 Google officially launched Nano Banana 2.1 and marked it GA in the Gemini API changelog as gemini-nano-banana-2.1. It is based on Gemini 3.6 Flash and is rolling out across the Gemini app, AI Studio, Search AI Mode, Flow, Stitch, Google Ads and Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. Image output is priced at $30 per 1M tokens (Nano Banana 2: $60), which works out to $0.0336 per 1K image and $0.0504 per 2K image, about half the old price. The model card's side-by-side human eval puts text-to-image Elo at 1050, ahead of Nano Banana 2 (990) and Nano Banana Pro (935). gemini-3.1-flash-image is now deprecated, with no shutdown date announced. This confirms the silent Flow rollout we reported earlier.

Google officially ships Nano Banana 2.1 (gemini-nano-banana-2.1) GA: 1K/2K images now half the price of Nano Banana 2, and human-eval Elo 1050 beats Nano Banana Pro

Key Takeaways

  • Per-image price: 1K $0.0336 (was $0.067, -50%), 2K $0.0504 (was $0.101, -50%), 4K $0.113 (was $0.151, -25%); Batch halves it again to $0.0168 per 1K image (pricing)
  • Text side got pricier: input $1.50/1M tokens (was $0.50), text+thinking output $7.50 (was $3), so re-check costs for long prompts and many reference images
  • Human-eval Elo (model card): T2I overall 1050 vs NB2 990 vs Pro 935; multi-character consistency 1106 vs 978 vs 1011; infographic factuality 0.521 vs 0.179 vs 0.265
  • Specs: up to 14 reference images (4 characters + 10 objects), fixed 2K/4K tiling artifacts at 1:8/8:1, Google Web + Image Search grounding, thinking levels minimal/medium/high
  • Migration: gemini-3.1-flash-image is deprecated (no shutdown date yet); 131,072-token input limit; no function calling, structured outputs or caching (model docs)
Read full story
Linked Models & Agents:
⚡ Nano Banana 2.1⚡ Nano Banana 2⚡ Nano Banana Pro⚡ Gemini 3.6 Flash🌐 Google🌐 Google DeepMind
ADSponsored

Kilo Code 7.8.1: Agent Manager browser for public HTTPS/CDN previews; CycloneDX SBOM on every artifact

Kilo-Org shipped open-source coding agent platform Kilo Code v7.8.1 (includes 7.8.0) on 2026-09-25. 7.8.0 brings a high-resolution streamed Agent Manager browser for public HTTPS pages and CDN assets in localhost previews, with install/retry/settings guidance, native cross-origin checks, ordered clipboard, and stalled-session cleanup; plus close-task commands and a stoppable session-cleanup pass. 7.8.1 publishes CycloneDX SBOMs for every CLI archive, npm package, container image, VS Code extension, and JetBrains plugin—SHA-256 bound and GitHub-attestation signed. Azure Entra ID accepts resource name or full endpoint URL.

Kilo Code 7.8.1: Agent Manager browser for public HTTPS/CDN previews; CycloneDX SBOM on every artifact

Key Takeaways

  • Shipped: v7.8.1 / @kilocode/[email protected]
  • 7.8.0: Agent Manager browser for public HTTPS/CDN; close-task cmds; stoppable session cleanup
  • 7.8.1: CycloneDX SBOM + SHA-256 + GitHub attestation on every artifact
  • Azure Entra ID: resource name or full endpoint; block nested var refs in project MCP headers
  • Install: VS Code Marketplace / CLI / JetBrains; docs at kilo.ai/docs
Read full story

Google introduces Gemini 3.8 Live and Live Extended Thinking

Google for Developers introduced Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking. These audio models improve turn-taking and near real-time reasoning, replacing cascaded speech-to-text, reasoning, and text-to-speech stacks with one multimodal API call to reduce latency and cost. They are available in the Gemini API via Google AI Studio and coming soon to the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.

Key Takeaways

  • Google for Developers introduced Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking. These audio models improve turn-taking and near real-time reasoning, replacing cascaded speech-to-text, reasoning, and text-to-speech stacks with one multimodal API call to reduce latency and cost. They are available in the Gemini API via Google AI Studio and coming soon to the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.
Read full story
Linked Models & Agents:

Gemini 3.8 Live is available in the Gemini API

Google for Developers announced that Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking are available today through the Gemini API in Google AI Studio for real-time voice apps, and are coming soon to the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.

Key Takeaways

  • Google for Developers announced that Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking are available today through the Gemini API in Google AI Studio for real-time voice apps, and are coming soon to the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.
Read full story
Linked Models & Agents:

Open Managed Agents open-sources a self-hosted managed-agent platform for Node, Docker, or Cloudflare

@DanKornas highlighted Open Managed Agents (github.com/openma-ai/open-managed-agents), an Apache-2.0 self-hosted platform for builders who want managed-agent workflows without vendor lock-in: durable sessions, sandboxed tools, memory, encrypted credentials, and crash recovery on Node+Docker or Cloudflare Workers, with Claude Managed Agents API and OpenAI SDK paths via /openai/v1.

Key Takeaways

  • Self-host managed-agent workflows with durable sessions, memory, and crash recovery.
  • Supports sandboxed tools, private tools, and MCP; bring your own model keys.
  • Runs on Node/Docker or Cloudflare Workers; Claude Managed Agents API and OpenAI SDK compatible.
Read full story

Xpert open-sources a governed plugin platform for models, tools, skills, and agent apps

@DanKornas highlighted Xpert, an open-source agent platform with one governed plugin lifecycle for models, integrations, tools, middleware, skills, and apps. Agent Studio configures agents visually; hybrid agent-workflow paths and Docker Compose self-hosting. AGPL-3.0. github.com/xpert-ai/xpert

Key Takeaways

  • Governed plugins for models, tools, middleware, skills, and apps.
  • Agent Studio plus hybrid agent/workflow paths.
  • Docker Compose self-hosting; open-source AGPL-3.0.
Read full story
Linked Models & Agents:

Huawei Launches Global Fintelligent AI Solution & openJiuwen Enterprise Agent Platform

At HUAWEI CONNECT 2026, Huawei launched its global Fintelligent AI solution for finance, powered by the openJiuwen enterprise agent development platform. It introduces industrial-grade Agent, Token, and Knowledge Factories to deploy resilient multi-agent clusters across retail and commercial banking.

Key Takeaways

  • Deploys full-stack Fintelligent AI and openJiuwen open-source core for global banking
  • Introduces Agent and Token Factory models to standardize enterprise agent lifecycles
  • Directly integrates with automated underwriting, credit risk, and anti-money-laundering audits
Read full story
Linked Models & Agents:
ADSponsored

Enterprise Software Agent Platform Factory Raises M at B Valuation

Autonomous enterprise software development platform Factory secured million in fresh funding, reaching a billion valuation. Its specialized Droid agents handle end-to-end Jira tickets, write code, run CI/CD tests, and manage PR reviews autonomously for global enterprises.

Key Takeaways

  • B valuation underscores massive enterprise appetite for unattended software engineering
  • Droid agents interface directly with Jira, GitHub Enterprise, and corporate service meshes
  • Proves task-oriented autonomous coding agents command premium enterprise contracts
Read full story
Linked Models & Agents:

Factory: GPT-6 Astra now available for all customers

Software-engineering agent platform Factory says OpenAI GPT-6 Astra is available to all customers. After Copilot, Cline, and v0 product hooks, Factory adds Astra to its agent coding workflows for long-horizon delegation and open-ended problem solving.

Key Takeaways

  • Access: GPT-6 Astra is available to all Factory customers.
  • Use case: long-horizon software-engineering agent delegation.
  • Ecosystem: joins same-day IDE/agent product rollouts of Astra.
Read full story

Google DeepMind: Gemini agentic video understanding cuts tokens up to 88%

Google DeepMind launched agentic video understanding on Gemini 3.7 Flash, 3.6 Flash, and 3.5 Flash-Lite. Models dynamically search frames, audio, and transcripts instead of ingesting video at a fixed FPS. Official claims include up to 88% fewer tokens, about 66% lower analysis cost, and up to about 7% better accuracy. It is live via the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform at standard token pricing with no extra feature fee.

Key Takeaways

  • Available on Gemini 3.7 Flash / 3.6 Flash / 3.5 Flash-Lite; enable with processing=agentic.
  • Long-form video: up to 88% fewer tokens, ~66% lower cost, up to ~7% accuracy gain.
  • Supports uploads and YouTube; unlocks sub-second retrieval, anomaly detection, and precise counting.
Read full story