• Cisco's president, Jeetu Patel, said he uses four or five of the most popular personal AI agents.
• One of them, which costs him $20 a month, recently saved him more than $1,000 in subscription bills.
• But he said it's important not to give personal AI agents access to work tools or resources.

If getting mysterious and surprising subscription bills are the bane of your existence, Cisco's president and product chief, Jeetu Patel, is in the same boat.

Patel told Business Insider that said he's been using four to five different personal AI agents, like Meta's Muse, Instinct, and OpenAI's Dots, for things like consolidating news, summarizing earnings calls, and even booking his daughter's concert tickets. But recently, he was impressed by how one agent could slash his subscription bills.

He said that the first time he gave a personal AI agent access to his email, the agent told him, "Hey, you've got $9,000 worth of subscriptions that you subscribe to per year. Are you sure you want all of these? It seems like a lot of subscriptions."

He told the agent to make him a table of all his subscriptions, how much he spends on each, and how long he's had each. After the agent presented him with the table, he picked out two subscriptions that he didn't need and made the agent cancel them, which it did without difficulty, and sent him cancellation emails.

"I'm like, OK, that was kind of creepy how easy it was to do that," Patel said. "And then it saved me 1,000, 1,200 bucks a year just over there. So basically, for the most part, I paid for that agent, at a $20-a-month plan, several times over."

The agent also managed to cancel part of his Dropbox subscription — an $11.95 plan he had accidentally subscribed to, even though he had already purchased a 2-terabyte plan.

Patel is a big fan of AI agents, both at work and outside it. He said he rarely starts any task now without asking an AI agent to do a "recon job" and give him research and context.

But the important thing to remember, he said, was not to give personal AI agents, which are not vetted by employers, access to work tools and resources. He hasn't linked his email or calendar to his personal agents, instead using his internal work agent for those tasks.

"These are common-sense things that I think most companies implement, which is, 'Don't give your crown jewels of your source code repository to Muse; it might not be a good idea,'" Patel said.

Rogue or not, AI agents have been causing a buzz

Personal AI agents have been all the rage in recent months, serving as personal assistants and handling mundane, repetitive tasks like paying bills and buying groceries for their users.

While they've been touted as productivity boosters, there have been several instances of users reporting that the agents have performed actions outside their permissions, such as posting bank balances to company Slack channels or misinterpreting instructions, such as ordering 20 pounds of chicken for a dinner for two.

Obedient or not, personal AI agents have been causing a buzz, especially for investors.

Ross Mayfield, an investment strategist at Baird, told Business Insider's William Edwards ahead of Meta's earnings that Muse is the first big app of the AI era and that it assuages some investors' fears about Big Tech's ballooning AI spending. And Instinct, founded by a 23-year-old, raised $1 billion in its Series C, bringing its valuation to $10 billion.

But these new products are coming in a year when there have been several instances of AI agents going rogue and performing unauthorized actions, such as breaking out of sandboxes during security tests and exploiting software vulnerabilities in external companies' websites.

This has led companies such as Bank of America to invest resources and hire additional personnel to address issues with their legacy software and prevent such hacks.

Former and current staffers at frontier AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI have publicly raised concerns that AI development is progressing too rapidly, without adequate checks and balances. September was characterized by an air of doom and gloom over an "AI apocalypse," in which AI researchers estimated that the technology would kill all of humanity in the next decade.

• A version of this story originally appeared in the AI Insider newsletter.
• Sign up for Business Insider's weekly AI Insider newsletter here.

AI companies have already scraped much of the web. Now they're chasing something even more valuable: data that shows how humans actually work.

That's the focus of Business Insider's new series, The AI Data Grab. This week, we published three stories showing how the race for workplace data is accelerating.

One piece, from Charles Rollet, Tom Carter, and Stephen Council, examines the booming market for company records. AI firms are offering businesses six- and even seven-figure sums for anonymized Slack messages, emails, presentations, and internal documents.

The goal is to teach AI systems how people solve problems, collaborate, make decisions, and complete long, multi-step tasks. Those real-world workflows are becoming the fuel for the next generation of AI agents.

Another story, from Melia Robinson, explores how law firms are building AI systems around decades of legal knowledge, turning their own experience into a competitive advantage rather than relying solely on off-the-shelf AI models and tools.

A third piece, by Rya Jetha, reveals how AI companies pay people to record real-world work, such as cooking dinners and packing warehouses, to teach robots how humans perform everyday physical tasks.

Together, these stories point to a major shift in AI development. The first wave of generative AI was mostly about bigger models and faster chips. The next chapter is about machines understanding how work gets done, so AI can help us do it better and quicker.

Sign up for the AI Insider newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com

• OpenAI's Alexander Embiricos said the AI era gives a choice: work more, or work less.
• He's in charge of Dots, the company's new always-on work assistant.
• AI is often pitched as freeing up time. Embiricos responded to the idea that it might add more work.

As the competitive AI race pushes tech workers into long hours, the head of OpenAI's new Dots product says AI gives people another option: work a whole lot less.

Alexander Embiricos, who leads OpenAI's enterprise product and helms the new Dots agent tool, told a crowd at TechCrunch's Disrupt conference on Thursday that AI's capabilities have created something of a fork in the road for workers. You can grind to meet the moment. Or you can use AI to kick your feet up a little.

"We basically have a lot more choice now," he said.

Embiricos made the comments after a reporter asked about when AI systems will actually deliver more free time. The reporter shared an anecdote where an OpenAI employee used a ChatGPT mobile feature to work in their car and on a plane — not exactly liberated by the new tech.

Embiricos said that the moment has already arrived where a worker can "outsource" tasks to AI and do less work. Then again, some people are so excited about AI's potential that they feel like it's an "interesting, ripe moment" to put in extra hours.

"I think that's why a lot of people are motivated to work very hard right now. That includes myself," he said. "But I think actually there is this choice, and there's totally this other setup where you could delegate a ton more things."

OpenAI is billing its Dots tool as a workplace assistant, always on and capable of proactively handing tasks and sorting to-dos. Embiricos uses his Dot often in Slack, he said, engaging on various threads.

His perspective illustrates how early companies are in their journey to adopt AI tools. Most companies have not yet automated their work tasks, and many workers are still debating how much to use the tools. Early AI adopters, meanwhile, can sprint through some work that used to take days or weeks, especially in software engineering.

Embiricos summed up the situation he feels workers are in: "You either choose: do you expand the ambition of what you can do, or do you do less? I do think we're there."

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at scouncil@businessinsider.com, or over text, Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 415-757-8198. Use a personal email address, a non-work WiFi network, and a non-work device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

George Anibowei, a U.S. citizen, is a Texas-based immigration attorney with many clients battling the Department of Homeland Security. Border agents have searched his phone at least five times without a warrant as he returned to the United States.

In the first search, agents copied the phone's entire contents, including his confidential communications with clients. The government still has that data, and Anibowei still doesn't know why it was kept or who has seen it. He now leaves his work phone at home when he travels.

On September 29, the Supreme Court asked the federal government to respond to Anibowei's petition, which asks whether the Fourth Amendment lets border agents search the contents of a phone without a warrant. (I'm one of his lawyers.) The government waived its response, expecting the Court would deny the petition without a second look.

But in 2021, the solicitor general told the Court that this very question had produced an "entrenched circuit conflict" of "considerable practical importance." The conflict has only deepened since. Seven federal appeals courts now hold that a warrant is never required to search a phone at the border, while the 4th and 9th Circuits require one in at least some cases. That means one of your constitutional rights currently depends on which airport you fly into.

While circuit courts may disagree, the Supreme Court has already shown the best answer for this question. In Riley v. California (2014), the Court unanimously held that police generally need a warrant to search the phone of someone they arrest. There is an exception for searches incident to arrest, which allows the police to arrest someone without a warrant; that exists to protect officers and preserve evidence. Data can't hurt an officer, and a phone can be secured while police get a warrant. An extension of an old exception to digital data, the court said, "has to rest on its own bottom." Treating a phone like any other container in an arrestee's pockets was like saying "a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon."

The border-search exception fails the same test. Those searches exist to collect duties, keep out people who may not enter, and stop contraband. But duties attach to physical goods, not data. And as the legal scholar Orin Kerr has put it, agents "will not find a person smuggled inside a computer hard drive." As for digital contraband, anyone who wants illicit files can carry a clean phone and download them after clearing customs. Suspicionless phone searches burden millions of innocent travelers while barely inconveniencing smugglers.

The appeals courts that disagree mostly cite one another. But the Supreme Court rejected a lopsided lower-court consensus in Riley, and again in Carpenter v. United States (2018). Counting courts is not a constitutional argument.

Defenders of these searches lean on history. In United States v. Ramsey (1977), the Court noted that the first Congress authorized warrantless customs searches in 1789, less than two months before it proposed the Fourth Amendment. True enough. But that statute let officers search ships for hidden dutiable goods. To search a house, store, or other building for the same goods, officers needed a warrant. And nothing in the statute let officers read a traveler's papers.

That distinction was no accident. Customs abuses had helped spark the Revolution. Writs of assistance gave British customs officers blanket authority to search wherever they pleased, which James Otis said placed "the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer." And the founding generation guarded letters especially closely. Benjamin Franklin, as the first postmaster general, made postal workers swear they would not open mail without an express written warrant.

Even Ramsey, the government's favorite border search precedent, respected that distinction. It upheld opening international mail to look for contraband, but the regulations before the court flatly prohibited reading correspondence without a warrant, a point the justices stressed repeatedly. The Court has never held that border agents may read a traveler's papers without a warrant. A phone holds years of correspondence. It deserves at least the same protection the Founders gave a sealed envelope.

Last month, however, the 2nd Circuit joined those courts that have disregarded this tradition. In United States v. Alisigwe, Judge Steven Menashi wrote that agents need no suspicion whatsoever to search a traveler's property at the border, phones included. A border search becomes non-routine, he reasoned, only when it intrudes on the person, as a strip search does. A phone is property, so searching it is routine.

Judge Eunice Lee concurred, agreeing that no warrant was required. But she warned that the majority's rule permits suspicionless searches for any reason, "including political or discriminatory ones."

The Alisigwe majority's premise miscasts the Fourth Amendment. The amendment's text secures "persons, houses, papers, and effects" in a single, unranked list. The abuses that produced the amendment were searches of property, including private papers. Agents may properly physically examine a phone to ensure it's not really a container for smuggling contraband. But reading or viewing its digital contents without a warrant trespasses on a person's papers and effects. The framers protected property because they recognized that human beings are not ghosts: We live in the physical world by exercising our property rights, and so searching our property can reveal much about our lives.

Alisigwe is the latest word from a Court of Appeals, but it contains complications for the constitutional issue. The trial court found that agents had reasonable suspicion, so the no-suspicion holding arguably wasn't needed to decide the case. That suspicion involved a forged passport, which goes to identity and admissibility, the core of border authority. Finally, Alisigwe was a permanent resident, not a citizen, so the government's interest in deciding who may enter was heightened.

Anibowei is simple on each of these counts, which is why one can be hopeful the Supreme Court will take it and address the Fourth Amendment question now. Anibowei is a naturalized citizen, no one suspects him of anything, and he challenges the government's search policies directly rather than seeking suppression of evidence in a criminal case. As the 5th Circuit itself acknowledged, his case "turns squarely and solely" on the warrant question.

The stakes keep growing. In FY 2025, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) searched 55,318 electronic devices, nearly 11 times as many as in 2012—and nearly a quarter of those searches targeted U.S. citizens. According to the directives Anibowei challenges, agents may keep what they find and share it with federal, state, local, and foreign agencies. Investigators have learned to wait for a target to travel and ask CBP to search his phone on the way back in, rather than go to the trouble of demonstrating probable cause to a judge. No wonder universities, bar associations, and press freedom groups now advise travelers to leave their devices at home.

The Founders rebelled against customs officers who could search wherever they pleased and read whatever they found. A rule letting border agents scroll through a citizen's correspondence, photos, and client files without a warrant, or any suspicion at all, revives that power. The Supreme Court should take Anibowei's case. Our papers don't lose Fourth Amendment protections at the border just because they're digital.

The post Are Warrantless Phone Searches at the Border Constitutional? The Supreme Court May Soon Decide. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history. As more and more AI applications have become available, people have turned to them to seek advice, build businesses, express ideas, learn, and improve their health and quality of life. Nowhere is this more clear than in Asia. AI is already turbocharging small businesses […]

The post Choices that will define Asia’s AI future are coming into focus appeared first on Asia Times.

Only the US and Israel were hit by more cyberattacks than Ukraine this year. Ukraine ranked third in the world and first in Europe among the countries whose organizations and users were most often targeted by cyberattacks in the first half of 2026, accounting for 4.8% of all victims worldwide, up from fifth in the world and third in Europe a year earlier, Microsoft said in its Digital Defense Report 2026.

Microsoft processes more than 165 trillion security signals a day, which lets it show how often attackers go after customers in each country. Russian state hackers aimed 14% of their recorded activity at Ukraine, more than at any country except the US.

The era of machine-speed cyberattacks is here

Government agencies and services were the most targeted sector worldwide at 27%, up from 17% in 2025. Phishing drove 23% of intrusions Microsoft investigated, up from 7% a year earlier, and the median time from finding a vulnerability to weaponizing it has fallen well below 24 hours.

The use of artificial intelligence is pushing cyberspace into an era of “machine-speed” attacks that operate continuously and without fatigue, according to Dev.

“Many AI agents act on behalf of users and with their access rights, so a compromised agent combines user-level access with machine-scale actions,” Natalia Burlakova, Security Sales and Engineering Lead at Microsoft, says.

Deception beats code in attacks on Ukraine

Ukraine's own agency data show a similar pattern. Malware accounted for 33% of cyber incidents in the first half of 2026, and social engineering 31%, the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection reported on 30 September. System infections made up 15%, and system compromises 4.5%.

Attackers rely less on technical complexity than on trust, according to the report by Ukraine's computer emergency response team, CERT-UA. Hacker groups create fake pages that mimic CERT-UA, Ukraine's Parliament's document management system, and the Brave1 defense technology platform.

Microsoft urges five government steps

Microsoft asks governments to prepare for faster-moving threats by assigning roles and coordinating agencies in advance of a crisis, and to treat AI security as part of national resilience. It also asks them to plan for incidents that spread, noting that 52.2% of intrusions involving valid accounts led to additional credential theft.