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OpenAI built an AI coding agent and uses it to improve the agent itself

12 December 2025 at 17:16

With the popularity of AI coding tools rising among some software developers, their adoption has begun to touch every aspect of the process, including the improvement of AI coding tools themselves.

In interviews with Ars Technica this week, OpenAI employees revealed the extent to which the company now relies on its own AI coding agent, Codex, to build and improve the development tool. β€œI think the vast majority of Codex is built by Codex, so it’s almost entirely just being used to improve itself,” said Alexander Embiricos, product lead for Codex at OpenAI, in a conversation on Tuesday.

Codex, which OpenAI launched in its modern incarnation as a research preview in May 2025, operates as a cloud-based software engineering agent that can handle tasks like writing features, fixing bugs, and proposing pull requests. The tool runs in sandboxed environments linked to a user’s code repository and can execute multiple tasks in parallel. OpenAI offers Codex through ChatGPT’s web interface, a command-line interface (CLI), and IDE extensions for VS Code, Cursor, and Windsurf.

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Β© Mininyx Doodle via Getty Images

A new open-weights AI coding model is closing in on proprietary options

10 December 2025 at 15:38

On Tuesday, French AI startup Mistral AI released Devstral 2, a 123 billion parameter open-weights coding model designed to work as part of an autonomous software engineering agent. The model achieves a 72.2 percent score on SWE-bench Verified, a benchmark that attempts to test whether AI systems can solve real GitHub issues, putting it among the top-performing open-weights models.

Perhaps more notably, Mistral didn’t just release an AI model, it released a new development app called Mistral Vibe. It’s a command line interface (CLI) similar to Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Gemini CLI that lets developers interact with the Devstral models directly in their terminal. The tool can scan file structures and Git status to maintain context across an entire project, make changes across multiple files, and execute shell commands autonomously. Mistral released the CLI under the Apache 2.0 license.

It’s always wise to take AI benchmarks with a large grain of salt, but we’ve heard from employees of the big AI companies that they pay very close attention to how well models do on SWE-bench Verified, which presents AI models with 500 real software engineering problems pulled from GitHub issues in popular Python repositories. The AI must read the issue description, navigate the codebase, and generate a working patch that passes unit tests. While some AI researchers have noted that around 90 percent of the tasks in the benchmark test relatively simple bug fixes that experienced engineers could complete in under an hour, it’s one of the few standardized ways to compare coding models.

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Β© Mistral / Benj Edwards

Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

3 December 2025 at 13:24

Microsoft has lowered sales growth targets for its AI agent products after many salespeople missed their quotas in the fiscal year ending in June, according to a report Wednesday from The Information. The adjustment is reportedly unusual for Microsoft, and it comes after the company missed a number of ambitious sales goals for its AI offerings.

AI agents are specialized implementations of AI language models designed to perform multistep tasks autonomously rather than simply responding to single prompts. So-called β€œagentic” features have been central to Microsoft’s 2025 sales pitch: At its Build conference in May, the company declared that it has entered β€œthe era of AI agents.”

The company has promised customers that agents could automate complex tasks, such as generating dashboards from sales data or writing customer reports. At its Ignite conference in November, Microsoft announced new features like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, along with tools for building and deploying agents through Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio. But as the year draws to a close, that promise has proven harder to deliver than the company expected.

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ServiceNow to Acquire Identity Security Firm Veza

2 December 2025 at 12:44
consolidation, security, cyberthreats, Darktrace cybersecurity acquisition

ServiceNow Inc. announced on Tuesday plans to acquire Veza in a move aimed at fortifying security for identity and access management. The acquisition will integrate Veza’s technology into ServiceNow’s Security and Risk portfolios, helping organizations monitor and control access to critical data, applications, systems, and artificial intelligence (AI) tools. The deal comes as businesses increasingly..

The post ServiceNow to Acquire Identity Security Firm Veza appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Security Gap Widens as Organizations Rush to Deploy AI Agents Without Proper Identity Controls

2 December 2025 at 12:32

Organizations are racing to implement autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents across their operations, but a sweeping new study reveals they’re doing so without adequate security frameworks, creating what researchers call β€œthe unsecured frontier of autonomous operations.” The research, released Tuesday by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), surveyed 271 IT, security, and identity and access management (IAM)..

The post Security Gap Widens as Organizations Rush to Deploy AI Agents Without Proper Identity Controls appeared first on Security Boulevard.

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