Enterprise Giants Unite on AI Protocol to Challenge Startups

Jasjeet Sekhon, chief strategy officer at Google DeepMind, framed the AI industry's massive capital expenditures as a bet on recursive self-improvement (RSI), the ability of AI systems to automatically create better versions of themselves. Speaking at UC Berkeley's Agentic AI Summit, Sekhon called RSI a key part of the investment thesis. The framing signals a shift in how the industry publicly justifies unprecedented spending, with RSI emerging as the new goalpost after AGI dominated earlier discourse.

Researchers from Peking University and partner institutions released DataFlow-Harness, an open-source framework that guides AI agents to build structured data pipelines instead of free-form code. The tool addresses a production gap where LLMs excel at one-off scripts but struggle with complex, auditable workflows needed for enterprise systems. DataFlow-Harness achieves 93.3% success on a 12-task benchmark while reducing API costs by up to 72.5% and latency by 49.9% compared to standard Claude Code.

Smallest.ai has raised $13 million in funding to develop voice AI models designed to conduct phone calls that pass the Turing test. The startup is focused on building ultra-fast voice models that sound genuinely human. The funding supports the company's effort to create AI capable of handling realistic voice interactions.

Okta has acquired AI security startup Permiso for approximately $200 million, according to sources. The deal adds identity threat detection capabilities to Okta's platform, addressing enterprise demand for securing AI agents and other non-human identities in cloud environments. The acquisition reflects growing market focus on identity security as organizations deploy AI systems at scale.