October 08, 2026

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That’s a Thursday! Getting ready for Halloween? Let’s hope you’re half as prepared as Hershey’s: The chocolatier has a retail team 1,100 strong to manage the demand.

In today’s edition:

🚘 Localized

👥 Clone wars

🥧 Pie shelf

—Billy Hurley, Caroline Nihill, Eoin Higgins

HARDWARE

Local news

Morning Brew Inc.

Alex Lisle’s desk plants are in trouble—they’re next to four AI computers that have been running hot lately.

Lisle, CTO at cybersecurity platform Reality Defender, has a quartet of DGX Spark machines, all featuring a Nvidia GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip. Each workstation hosts a different large language model (LLM) to create what coders call an adversarial loop: models like Qwen3.8b write the code, and DeepSeek 4.1 Flash audits any flaws in the generators’ work, with the aim of improving it.

“They’re all different models and they all hate each other, so it’s effectively just a way of replacing the human to make good code for mundane tasks,” he said, which means jobs like fixing workflows and reports.

Model citizens.—BH

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CYBERSECURITY

I’m not the clone!

Photo collage showing two hands pulling on opposite ends of a piece of string, which is tangled and knotted in the middle.

Illustration: Shannon May, Photos: Adobe Stock

Every cybersecurity pro dreads that 3 am ping: someone—or something—is trying to access your organization’s most sensitive systems.

These days, there’s every possibility that the entity attempting access is an internal AI agent trying to complete a legitimate workflow task. But it could also be an automated cyberattack, such as a malicious agent trying to steal critical data.

Paul Reid, VP of adversary research at AttackIQ, suggested that security professionals trying to tell the difference between legitimate agents and their rogue counterparts should start by understanding what “normal” looks like when it comes to agent behaviors on their networks, including tools and data access.

Normies unite.—CN

IT STRATEGY

Combination time

Businesswoman and businessman shaking hands in an office

Getty Images

Leaves are changing, school is back in session, and the tech C-suite is hiring. Here’s how September shook out at the top of the industry.

DOT adds responsibility to Jack Albright’s plate

The days are never boring in the federal government’s IT space. For the Department of Transportation’s Jack Albright, that goes double, as he’s working two jobs now.

In addition to his work as deputy CIO, Albright is now acting chief digital and information officer at DOT, FedScoop reported on September 4 when the agency updated its information on his page.

In this new, combined role, he’ll head up “a team of highly skilled and energetic IT professionals that provide and maintain technology innovations and solutions to effectively, efficiently, and economically enable the Department’s lines of business,” according to his profile.

That’s some work.—EH

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 722. That’s how many papers were uploaded for a total of over 300 mathematical proofs that OpenAI claims its models have solved (mathematicians are working through the proofs). (the Wall Street Journal)

Quote: “The bottleneck has moved from writing code to trusting it.”—Purna Doddapaneni, partner at Bain & Company, on the effectiveness of AI coding tools (CIO Dive)

Read: Google launched an AI-powered gaming development platform where users can create and play their own games. (TechCrunch)

AI-powered financial analysis: Actionable strategies, no technical background needed. Download Nicolas Boucher’s handbook for ready-to-use prompts, NetSuite AI features, MCP guidance, security best practices, and a 30-day plan to drive measurable impact.*

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Written by Billy Hurley, Caroline Nihill, and Eoin Higgins

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