Anthropic has locked in one of the largest compute procurement deals in AI industry history — a $1.8 billion, seven-year cloud computing agreement with Akamai Technologies designed to meet the surging demand for its Claude AI models. The deal, disclosed during Akamai’s Q1 2026 earnings call and subsequently confirmed by Bloomberg and Reuters, signals a major strategic move for the AI lab as it diversifies its infrastructure footprint well beyond its primary relationship with Amazon Web Services. ...

As of May 7, 2026, Anthropic’s Claude is no longer just available in your browser or terminal — it’s officially embedded in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint via a generally available add-in on Microsoft AppSource. Outlook integration has moved into public beta. And there’s one killer feature that separates this from every other AI bolt-on you’ve tried: context that actually travels with you across apps. What’s Now Live Claude for Microsoft 365 launched into general availability after a period of preview, with the add-in now installable directly from the Microsoft AppSource Marketplace. The coverage as of launch: ...

Claude for Microsoft 365 is now generally available for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — and Outlook has entered public beta. Here’s exactly how to get it installed and running in under five minutes. Prerequisites Before you start, confirm you have: An active Microsoft 365 subscription (any tier that includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) An active Anthropic Claude subscription — Pro, Team, or Enterprise plan (free Claude accounts are not supported for the Office add-in integration) Administrator rights may be required if you’re on a managed corporate machine — check with your IT department if you’re unsure Option A: Install from Inside an Office App This is the quickest route and works inside any of the three supported apps. ...

When one of the world’s largest financial institutions decides that autonomous AI agents are ready for retail banking, it’s worth paying close attention to how they’re doing it — and what they’ve decided to trust. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group — MUFG, Japan’s largest bank with over $3 trillion in assets — announced a strategic partnership with Google to embed agentic AI into retail banking operations using Google Gemini. The scope is ambitious: autonomous agents handling everything from household budgeting to mortgage planning, with a new digital bank launch planned for late FY2026 and an AI agent pilot rolling out March 2027. ...

The most valuable thing an AI agent can do isn’t to fix a problem faster. It’s to prevent the problem from existing in the first place. Kyndryl, the world’s largest IT infrastructure services company, announced a new patented AI capability within its Bridge platform that does exactly that — continuously analyzing 200,000+ devices to predict infrastructure failures before they cause outages. The claimed results: up to 50% fewer IT incidents, 90% reduction in mission-critical outages, and $3 billion in total annual customer savings. ...

Most discussions about AI agents focus on what they can read and write. Text-in, text-out. The assumption is that the interesting agent workflows live in code, documents, and APIs. Voice is the quiet exception — and OpenAI just made it a lot louder. On May 7, OpenAI released three new realtime voice models specifically designed for voice AI agents: systems that don’t just answer questions over audio, but take actions, call tools, and operate across multi-turn conversations with real-world consequence. The release signals that voice is no longer a side channel for AI — it’s becoming a first-class agent deployment surface. ...

When a software team ships a release that contains zero new features and 25+ bug fixes, that’s not a quiet week — that’s a signal. It says: we care about what’s already in your hands. OpenClaw v2026.5.7, released May 7, 2026, is exactly that kind of release. It’s a focused maintenance drop targeting reliability, security, and correctness across the platform. No flashy additions, just a disciplined hardening of the foundation. For a tool that orchestrates AI agents on production infrastructure, that discipline matters. ...

There’s a specific moment in platform history when investors stop betting on products and start betting on infrastructure. That moment appears to have arrived for enterprise AI agents — and Sierra AI just cashed a $950 million check to prove it. The San Francisco company, co-founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, announced a Series E led by Tiger Global and GV (Google Ventures) that values Sierra at over $15 billion. With this raise, Sierra has accumulated more than $1 billion in total capital — and it’s not spending it on experimentation. It’s spending it to become the default deployment layer for enterprise AI agents. ...

The agent economy stopped being theoretical today. Amazon Web Services announced Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments — now in public preview — enabling AI agents to autonomously discover, negotiate, and pay for services using USDC stablecoins, without any human in the loop. Built in partnership with Coinbase and Stripe, this is the first major cloud-native infrastructure for agentic payments at scale. How It Works AgentCore Payments is built on two foundational technologies: ...

Industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos has published analysis documenting what researchers describe as the first confirmed AI-assisted attack on operational technology (OT) and industrial control systems (ICS) infrastructure. The target: SADM, the municipal water and drainage authority serving Monterrey, Mexico. The AI at the center of the attack: Claude. What Dragos Found The incident occurred in January 2026, but Dragos published its full technical analysis this week after completing a months-long investigation. The report reveals that attackers used Claude as their primary technical executor throughout the operation — not as an assistant for planning, but as the active agent writing reconnaissance code, identifying OT assets, and directing the intrusion. ...