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Today’s Vergecast: How much should you tell your AI agent?

The next big thing in AI, at least if you ask the tech companies, is assistant agents. David and The Verge’s Allison Johnson have both been testing products like Meta’s Muse, OpenAI’s Dots, and startups like Instinct, in an effort to find out how much you can really get done by messaging with an AI tool – and whether the productivity is worth the tradeoffs.

McDonald's sued over AI tool that recommends prices to US franchisees

McDonald’s is facing a federal lawsuit that alleges its AI-enhanced pricing tool violates antitrust laws because it shares nonpublic data with franchisees who might be competing in the same market.

Meta is helping develop an AI agent protocol “that defines how personal agents interact with businesses.”

Here’s the high-level idea of the Personal Agent Protocol, according to a blog post from the AI company Sierra:

You can use Claude directly in Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets with a new add-on.

Claude for Google Workspace, now in public beta on all paid Claude plans, adds a sidebar where you can prompt Claude to edit your files, similar to Google’s Gemini sidebar. Anthropic’s also launching new connectors for creating and editing Google Workspace files directly in Claude.

AI & Tech Brief: Jay Clayton Takes Control

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Expanding the Cyber Verification Program

We’re launching a new, expanded version of our Cyber Verification Program (CVP), which makes advanced cyber capabilities and reduced blocking classifiers available to qualifying security professionals. The program now consists of three access tiers, which allow security teams to apply for the level of access that best suits their work. Each tier includes access to our most capable models, including Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5, Claude Mythos 5.1, and new models moving forward. Interested customers can apply here.

Hark releases an AI personal assistant with a focus on privacy

The AI lab's personal assistant is an operating system from the future designed to compete with Muse, Dots, and Instinct.

Google launches the next version of its on-device AI model.

EmbeddingGemma 2 can work with more than just text, featuring capabilities across coding, images, video, and audio. Google says the upgraded model has 740 million parameters and is designed to perform on-device tasks like finding a video clip from a voice memo or searching through audio recordings based on a text prompt.

Fable is trying to get its AI film an Oscar.

Though AI studio Fable has not yet announced which distributor will put its animated Gods Don’t Give Gifts feature into theaters, Variety reports that the project is now slated to premiere on December 4th — which would make it eligible for submission for the upcoming Oscars.

Dario Amodei earned $18 million as Anthropic’s CEO in 2025.

An IPO prospectus viewed by Reuters included Amodei’s compensation, which the outlet says is higher than last year’s pay for Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Anthropic is expected to file for its IPO this fall, potentially valuing the AI company at over $2 trillion.

OpenAI Lawsuit: Can AI Agents Break the Law?

OpenAI's Drew Pusateri calls the lawsuit over the Hugging Face incident "completely without merit" as a non-profit argues AI autonomy is no legal defence

Mirror Particle is building a ‘world model’ of human behavior

Mirror Particle will launch at TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield 200 with a world model built from scratch to predict human behavior, arguing that LLM role-play falls short for market research and brand strategy.