AI Agents Now Do Your Shopping and Office Work

is moving from answering questions to taking action. Anthropic launched Claude Duet, an assistant that monitors your work apps and does admin tasks in the background—but it asks for your approval before doing anything important. Walmart opened a beta for third-party AI shopping agents that can buy things at Walmart and Sam's Club, with spending limits and manual approvals so bots don't go rogue. Perplexity now lets you run AI entirely on your Mac, keeping your data local if you have enough memory.

Apple had a mixed week. A possible Oct. 28 event may show touchscreen MacBooks and new iPads, but the $1,999 foldable iPhone Duo is already backordered into January 2027. Mac shipments fell 11%, though Apple gained market share as rivals did worse. Tesla showed a flying Roadster prototype, but it's not street-legal and production isn't until 2028.

Security teams are scrambling. Two critical PHP flaws took government websites in Europe offline, and a 12-year-old GitLab bug with a perfect 10 severity score was patched. A China-linked group exploited a BeyondTrust zero-day, and a 16-year-old flaw in Broadcom's router software puts home and business Wi-Fi at risk. If you manage a website or router, update now.

Hiring is shifting: overall cybersecurity job postings dropped 26%, but AI security engineer roles tripled from a small base. The message is clear: as agents do more, we need people who can secure them—and everyone needs to double-check what the software just did.