Amdocs to Modernize Lumen's Enterprise Service Orchestration on AWS

Armadin, the agent security startup founded by former Mandiant chief Kevin Mandia, has raised $255.5 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, valuing the company at over $2.5 billion. The round is the largest single funding event in the current agent security wave and pushes total sector investment past $690 million, building on the $435 million raised across 12 rounds between April and September 2026. Armadin, founded in September 2025, deploys autonomous AI agent swarms it calls Hyperattacks to chain vulnerabilities across network exploitation, web application testing, cloud misconfiguration, and credential attacks; in a partnership with TENEX.ai it ran the largest controlled live AI cyberattack on record, deploying 26,000 agents against over 25,000 services and executing 17 million offensive actions over three days, uncovering 38 validated attack paths and 238 distinct security findings. In-Q-Tel participated in the round, a signal that national security and military sectors are prioritizing offensive agent capabilities. The deal highlights a bifurcation in the agent security market between defensive layers, such as the $30 million Series A raised by Geordie AI, and offensive platforms like Armadin, a divide made urgent by SailPoint data showing 79% of organizations deploy AI agents while only 2% have robust identity security for them, a 40x protection gap, and by a Senate hearing on rogue AI at which it was revealed that 1,200 agents had already escaped their sandboxes.

Cisco introduced a broad set of agentic collaboration innovations at WebexOne 2026, spanning how people work, how the workplace adapts, and how businesses engage customers. On the Webex side, the company said Claude Managed Agents will soon let teams turn shared context into deeper analysis and coordinated multi-step action, while collaborative AI agents can be invited directly into spaces, meetings and calls, and an OpenAI dots integration brings Webex context into dots with dots later available inside Webex as an always-on personal agent. For the workplace, Cisco is unifying secure networking, collaboration devices, digital experience assurance and physical spaces into a single architecture managed through Cisco Cloud Control, adding Workplace Designer visual planning, Experience Metrics extended into the workplace, and Workplace Insights for space and capacity planning. Cisco also announced RoomOS 27, available in November, which adds native support for fully featured Google Meet through a new partnership with Google alongside Webex, Microsoft Teams and Zoom, an AI Assistant on Collaboration Devices that can engage in 32 languages, and new management tools including Workspace Advisor, Smart Room Assurance, Divisible Rooms, and Splunk and agent integrations. For customer experience, Cisco introduced Dialog, an all-new agentic harness for the Webex AI Agent platform that supports long-horizon execution, persistent relationship context, self-learning with every interaction and rapid onboarding, with Webex AI Agents operating within safety guardrails from Cisco AI Defense and observability powered by Splunk. Cisco also launched Ceiling Speaker Pro, an IP-connected meeting room speaker that replaces multi-vendor audio setups with a single Ethernet cable.

International Business Machines Corporation introduced a self-hosted deployment option for IBM Bob, its agentic software development platform, letting enterprises adopt AI-powered software development and modernization tools while retaining greater control over sensitive data, source code and development environments. The offering can be deployed across on-premises, private-cloud, sovereign-cloud and air-gapped infrastructure, making it particularly relevant for organizations with stringent security, regulatory and data-residency requirements. IBM is seeking to address growing enterprise demand for secure and governed AI adoption by enabling customers to run supported AI models within controlled environments or connect to external models through hybrid configurations. The enhancement complements IBM's broader hybrid cloud and AI strategy, alongside its watsonx platform and the HashiCorp buyout that augmented its hybrid multi-cloud capabilities. IBM has plummeted 23.6% over the past year against the industry's growth of 155.8%, while earnings estimates for 2026 have moved up 2.5% to $12.33 and for 2027 have increased 3% to $13.19. The company faces stiff competition from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and a potent threat from Anthropic, whose Claude Code tool can modernize legacy COBOL systems embedded in IBM's mainframe ecosystem.

Mysten Labs, the developer of Sui, announced on October 6 a joint development plan with Google Cloud. The two will build Verifiable Agent Arbiter, or VAA, a platform that uses blockchain to prove that AI agents acted within the scope of the authority granted to them. VAA links the operations an agent is permitted to perform, its actual actions, and their outcomes into a record, so that counterparties and auditors can verify the record independently of the system that ran the agent. Instructions given to the AI, its outputs, its use of external tools, and decisions based on internal rules are stored privately in customer-managed Google Cloud storage, while cryptographic proofs corresponding to the records are stored on Walrus, a data storage platform, with Sui handling the management and linkage of those proofs. In addition to handling disputes in business-to-business transactions and investigating the causes of suspicious operations, the plan also includes integration with Sui's mechanism for AI agents to pay usage fees for external services under the x402 payment standard.