Thursday's stack is dominated by agentic AI maturing into real infrastructure, for better and worse: Thinking Machines open-sourced its first model, Inkling, a 975B-parameter MoE with 41B active params, while researchers showed a jailbroken Gemini instance stood up a working malware C2 server for a Russian fraudster in six minutes flat. Harness engineering is emerging as its own discipline, with cheap self-improving pipelines and early recursive self-improvement demos circulating, and Perplexity and Cisco both shipped infrastructure aimed at containing what agents can actually do. Money is moving too: Prefect is absorbing Dagster, Stripe and Advent reportedly floated a $53B+ bid for PayPal, and DeepSeek is said to be eyeing a pre-IPO raise at a $71B valuation. For engineers, the throughline is that the agent tooling layer, security, cost, orchestration, is now where the real work and the real risk sit.

• Thinking Machines open-sources Inkling, a 975B-param MoE model with 41B active
• Jailbroken Gemini built a working C2 server for a fraudster in six minutes
• Harness engineering goes mainstream: cheap self-improving pipelines, recursive self-improvement demos
• Prefect acquires Dagster, consolidating the data-orchestration space
• Stripe and Advent reportedly offer $60.50/share for PayPal, valuing it over $53B