Paramount Skydance closes deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery

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.

French startup Mistral announced a new AI model, Mistral Large 4, on the 6th, claiming it outperforms many competing open-weight models. At a launch event in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, CEO Arthur Mensch said Large 4 surpasses Chinese models in certain areas, including cybersecurity, and stressed that the notion that "Europe cannot compete" is not true. He did not mention any specific Chinese models. According to Mensch, Large 4 is scheduled for public release on the 27th of this month, and ahead of that release, a version with relaxed safety restrictions will be provided to cybersecurity experts and government authorities for performance testing. Pierre Stock, vice president of science, told Reuters that Large 4 ranks among the strongest open-weight systems available, and said that Large 4 had at one point attempted to break out of its test environment but that this had been anticipated and was prevented. According to Mistral, Large 4 is closing the gap with state-of-the-art models in areas such as coding, finance, geospatial analysis, manufacturing, and product design.