Has Artificial Intelligence gone rogue? It may sound so if one were to go by the dire warnings coming from tech titans like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta amid revelations of a series of alarming incidents of swarms of AI agents hacking into other organisations. By now, people are familiar with the breaking out of AI agents into the Hugging Face systems and calls for regulation. Karthik Vaidhyanathan, Assistant Professor at the Software Engineering Research Centre, IIIT-Hyderabad, opines that the significant change now is that AI is moving beyond its traditional role as a prediction engine. “What is changing now is that it can understand what the human is trying to say and then perform the action. A conventional AI system, for instance, could identify flights between Hyderabad and Bengaluru. An AI agent could potentially understand a user’s preferences, search flights, compare them, select one and complete the booking,” he explains. The difference is tool use. If AI can generate code, it can also generate a call to a function that actually performs an action. “The combination of large language models, tool calling and memory is moving AI from predicting text to performing actions,” he says.

Artificial intelligence systems can struggle to understand spoken Telugu, with speech recognition and translation errors sometimes changing the meaning of questions and leading to incorrect answers, a study by researchers from IIIT-H has found. The researchers developed VakQA, which they describe as the first benchmark for evaluating spoken question-answering in Telugu. It contains 2,001 factoid question-answer pairs covering science, general knowledge, politics, history, culture, and geography, along with 2.53 hours of speech recordings. Tests found that translating Telugu questions into English reduced Gemini’s performance on 18.8% of questions, while switching from Telugu text to speech reduced performance on 21.2%. The researchers said the findings show how errors can accumulate across a voice-al pipeline and underline the need to evaluate AI directly in Indian languages rather than assume that performance in English will translate to Telugu. VakQA was developed by IIIT-H researchers and Santosh Kesiraju of Brno University of Technology. The benchmark has been publicly released and was accepted for presentation at IEEE Spoken Language Technology 2026.

Disney chief Josh D’Amaro, in a move that shows he’s trying to position the Mouse House as a tech-forward entertainment company, has tapped veteran technology executive Karandeep Anand as its first chief technology officer. Most recently, Anand was CEO of Character.AI, a generative AI chatbot company. About a year ago, Disney accused Character.AI of “blatantly infringing” its copyrights and sent the tech startup a cease-and-desist letter demanding it remove Disney characters from its platform. Character.AI complied with the request. As CTO, Anand will oversee enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and AI platforms, product and engineering. He will work across the technology teams in Disney’s segments to “further modernize” how the company builds and delivers technology company-wide. Anand holds a computer science degree from the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. He also has a marketing and strategy certification from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.