Research
Nov 13, 2025
Generative AI Digest: Major AI agent releases
RESEARCH — Nov. 13, 2025 Generative AI Digest: Major AI agent releases By Melissa Incera and Alex Johnston While previous months have been filled with new model releases, October saw more focus on deploying and integrating these models into real-world workflows, with Google LLC, Salesforce Inc. and OpenAI LLC announcing major AI agent releases. Additionally, the push to bring models into the physical realm continues, with notable rounds for General Intuition and Periodic Labs — the latter inking one of the largest technology seed rounds in history. OpenAI dominated headlines in October on a number of fronts. The first was its DevDay announcements, which highlighted ChatGPT's growing extensibility as a platform, enabling users to engage with other applications and take actions via agents directly within the ChatGPT interface. This has major implications across the technology ecosystem as the intelligent, conversational interface becomes the operating center for both work and consumer life, with ChatGPT seeking to position itself as the center of gravity for all digital interactions. In parallel, October continued a massive spending spree, inking supplier deals with Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Oracle Corp., NVIDIA Corp. and Broadcom Inc. in recent weeks to secure critical infrastructure. These deals amount to potentially trillions of dollars in spending over the next decade, which dwarfs OpenAI's current revenue (targeting $13 billion annual revenue this year). The company's future and ability to meet contracts hinges entirely on whether it can grow revenue fast enough and keep attracting outside funding to cover its massive costs. Product releases and updates Google announced Gemini Enterprise, a layer that seemingly replaces Agentspace as its targeted interface between organizations and agents. Agent galleries and builders, connectors, and governance capabilities were all headline items, with Gemini Enterprise made available at SME (Gemini Business) and Enterprise (Gemini Enterprise Standard/Plus) tiers with per-seat pricing. As part of the announcement, the company previewed its new Data Science Agent, which can engage in data preparation, pattern recognition and model building. A protocol announced in September — Agent Payment Protocol, an extension of the popular A2A protocol — also saw attention at the event as a means of addressing agent-led commerce, which can be a challenge when payment systems commonly require verified humans to be involved in the process. It also announced the video model Veo 3.1, featuring improvements in audio output and editing controls. OpenAI DevDay 2025 brought announcements with an emphasis on building and extending capabilities. This included the general availability of coding agent Codex; a visual drag-and-drop agent builder tool kit, Agent Builder; and the ability to engage with apps inside of ChatGPT. This included Apps SDK, built on an open standard, which allows third-party apps to engage through chat. In the keynote showcase, CEO Sam Altman handed off a sketch to Figma Inc., where Figma's AI tool could turn that sketch into a workable diagram in the chat interface. The model updates for the API were GPT 5 Pro, a lower-cost voice model and (in preview) new video model Sora 2. The company also showcased ChatGPT Atlas, an AI-powered web browser built around the core functionality of ChatGPT. It aims to make web browsing more interactive and productive by integrating the AI assistant directly into the user experience. Microsoft Corp.'s Copilot 2025 Fall Updates introduce an optional animated character called Mico, to make voice interactions more engaging; long-term contextual memory; shared Copilot sessions for up to 32 participants; and a new Real Talk mode that adapts to a user's communication style for more natural, constructive conversations, among other enhancements. Dell Technologies Inc. announced Dell AI Data Platform advancements, within the Dell AI Factory, designed to help enterprises convert distributed data into faster, reliable AI outcomes. Key highlights of the platform, which is integrated with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform, are new data engines like the Data Search Engine (with Elastic) and Data Analytics Engine (with Starburst) to simplify data complexity for AI workloads like retrieval-augmented generation, fine-tuning and inference. Dell also deepened support for PowerScale (file) and ObjectScale (object), most notably with ObjectStore S3 over RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) in preview. Anthropic PBC has introduced Claude Haiku 4.5, a new large language model designed to offer high performance at a low cost. Priced significantly less than its flagship Claude Sonnet 4.5, the new model is a hybrid reasoning model that can adjust its computing use, offering an "extended thinking" mode for more complex queries. Haiku 4.5 supports large multimodal prompts up to 200,000 tokens and is benchmarked to trail the Sonnet model by less than 10% on most tests while being more than twice as fast as the previous Sonnet 4. Salesforce announced Agentforce 360, a unifying overlay that sits above Salesforce's apps and data cloud, at its Dreamforce event. The announcement included the low-code Agentforce Builder, voice functionality and a new scripting language, Agent Script, designed for more controllable agents. Ant Group Co. Ltd., an affiliate of Chinese conglomerate Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., announced an open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model. The announcement was notable because it was the first model of this size to be released with full model weights available for download and is licensed under the permissive MIT license. Early benchmarking suggests that the model appears to perform well in mathematics, code generation and logical reasoning. International Business Machines Corp. made a number of AI announcements at its TechXchange 2025 event. These included Project Bob, a new AI-first integrated development environment that has entered private preview, and a deepening partnership with Anthropic. Another IBM partnership announcement over the past few weeks was with inferencing engine Groq, with GroqCloud now available on watsonx Orchestrate. Airia has introduced a "prompt layering" feature to its enterprise AI orchestration platform. The capability enables developers to assemble AI agents from modular, reusable prompt segments rather than writing complete prompts each time. Segments can be designated as shared, applying organization-wide standards, or custom, tailored to individual workflows. Adobe Inc. announced the general availability of AI agents integrated into its Experience Platform, as well as a set of agents. The announced agents relate to customer insight, customer journey orchestration and site optimization, among other areas. NetApp Inc. introduced new products aimed at improving enterprise data infrastructure for AI workloads at Insight 2025. These included the NetApp AFX system, which employs a disaggregated storage architecture designed to provide AI models with fast access to data across hybrid cloud environments, powered by ONTAP, and the NetApp AI Data Engine, which integrates with NVIDIA's AI Data Platform to simplify workflows between storage and data practitioners, curate data search and discovery, and secure AI data pipelines. Rubrik Inc. has launched Rubrik Agent Cloud, a solution designed to accelerate the adoption of enterprise AI agents while effectively managing their risks. It is positioned as a control layer for the AI agent life cycle, built on Rubrik's foundation of data, identity and application security. This builds on Rubrik's recent Agent Rewind (Agent Remediate) announcement, powered by its acquisition of Predibase Inc. Its other two pillars, Agent Monitor and Agent Govern, are based on Rubrik's DSPM (data security posture management) and IAM (identity and access management) toolsets — all delivered through Rubrik Security Cloud. Equinix Inc. announced a new Distributed AI infrastructure designed to support large-scale distributed AI systems. The initiative includes an "AI-ready backbone," a global AI Solutions Lab for testing, and Fabric Intelligence for enhanced performance and automated network observability and management, available in the first quarter of 2026. Funding and M&A OpenAI has signed a multiyear deal with AMD, reportedly to deploy up to 6 GW of Instinct GPUs, starting with 1 GW in 2026. The agreement includes warrants for up to 160 million AMD shares, about 10% of its equity, at a nominal price, vesting on deployment and stock price milestones. World-model-builder General Intuition announced that it has raised $133.7 million in a round of funding co-led by new investors Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst Group Management. The transaction included participation from new investor Raine Ventures. Spun off from the gaming clip platform Medal, the startup uses gaming videos to train its AI in an effort to give the AI advanced spatial-temporal reasoning, meaning it can understand the movement and interaction of objects in space and time. Periodic Labs, a research lab headed by former OpenAI researcher Liam Fedus and former Google Brain employee Ekin Dogus Cubuk, has emerged from stealth with a $300 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. There have been only 13 technology seed rounds in history at $300 million or higher to date. The company's mission is based on the belief that the next AI breakthrough will require moving beyond existing stores of static internet data by generating new scientific knowledge through active experimentation in the physical world. The company is building closed-loop, autonomous laboratories where AI agents propose hypotheses, run physical experiments and use the results to train stronger models. On Oct. 9, Reflection AI Inc. closed a $2 billion funding round led by new investor NVIDIA. Additional new participants included 1789 Capital, Citigroup Inc., DST Global, Disruptive Technology Advisers, GIC and B Capital, alongside returning investors Sequoia, Lightspeed and CRV, plus individual investors Eric Yuan and Eric Schmidt. The startup, which focuses on open weight models but is best known for its Asimov code agent, now holds a post-money valuation of $8 billion. Chipmaker Cerebras Systems Inc. raised over $1 billion in a series G funding round at a valuation of $8.1 billion, bringing its total funding to $1.9 billion. This financing was chosen despite the company's initial plan to go public by 2025, which faced regulatory delays. Cerebras will use the new capital primarily to expand its data center footprint and US manufacturing hubs, while maintaining its long-term aspiration to complete an IPO. Agentic AI startup LangChain Inc. has raised $125 million in series B funding, landing the company a $1.25 billion valuation. The round was led by Institutional Venture Partners and included investment from corporate funds like CapitalG, ServiceNow Ventures and Cisco Investments. LangChain is best known for its open-source tool that simplifies AI agent development, allowing engineers to quickly create applications with a unified API for switching between different large language models without changing code. RevOps management company Fullcast Inc. announced the acquisition of AI workflow startup CopyAI Inc. The intent appears to be to overlay Copy.ai's generative AI capabilities over Fullcast's sales planning and performance management tools, in order to build an "end-to-end AI-native revenue operations" platform, uniting planning, forecasting, execution and compensation. Perplexity AI Inc. has acquired Visual Electric, an AI design company, and will absorb its team to form a new Agent Experiences group internally. The two-year-old startup had raised $2.5 million in funding and will retire its own product. Politics and regulations The European Union has launched a €1 billion "Apply AI Strategy" to promote the use of AI across key sectors like manufacturing, healthcare, energy and mobility. This initiative, set out by the European Commission, aims to strengthen Europe's tech sovereignty and support organizations of all sizes in adopting AI. Examples include healthcare diagnoses and enhanced public services. Concrete measures include setting up AI-powered screening centers, supporting the development of frontier and agentic AI models, and launching the Apply AI Alliance to coordinate action among industry, academia and the public sector. The British government has proposed AI growth labs, which are designed to allow AI products in a sandbox environment. The proposal stresses the opportunity to deploy "AI-enabled products and services that current regulation hinders" in these controlled environments. California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed the Transparency in Frontier AI Act (SB-53) into law, which is focused on enforcing safety and transparency among companies building the most advanced AI. It requires developers to publish "frontier AI frameworks" explaining how they will test for and mitigate risks, and to report certain critical safety incidents. The law applies primarily to "large frontier developers" (over $500 million in revenue) and models trained with over 10^26 FLOPS, and focuses on catastrophic risks like AI-assisted weapon creation or cyberattacks. Provisions include deployment reporting, incident reporting, whistleblower protections and enforcement penalties. California has also passed new legislation (SB 243) that regulates AI companion chatbots for minors. The law requires providers to enact protocols that monitor for suicidal tendencies and provide referrals to mental health assistance. It also mandates that model providers remind users that responses are artificially generated, take "reasonable measures" to prevent minors from seeing sexually explicit content, and prompt children to take breaks from using the bots. S&P Global Market Intelligence 451 Research is a technology research group within S&P Global Market Intelligence. For more about the group, please refer to the 451 Research overview and contact page. This article was published by S&P Global Market Intelligence and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.
