Tootfinder

Palo Alto Networks agrees to acquire Portkey, which develops AI gateway tech to manage and secure AI agents; sources say the deal values Portkey at $120M-$140M (The Economic Times)
https://economictimes.indiati…

Palo Alto Networks to acquire AI infra firm Portkey; valuation may double to $140 million
Cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks is acquiring AI infrastructure startup Portkey to bolster its defences for autonomous AI systems. This move aims to provide enterprises with a centralised control plane for managing and securing AI agents. The acquisition is expected to close in Palo Alto Networks’ fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, subject to approvals.

Palo Alto Networks to Acquire Portkey to Secure the Rise of AI Agents
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/palo-alto-networks-to-acquire-portkey-to-secure-the-rise-of-ai-agents-302759436.html

Palo Alto Networks to Acquire Portkey to Secure the Rise of AI Agents
/PRNewswire/ -- Palo Alto Networks® (NASDAQ: PANW), the global cybersecurity leader, today announced its intent to acquire Portkey, a pioneer in AI Gateways....

'Significant change' needed to tackle agri pollution #environment

'Significant change' needed to tackle agri pollution
The Office for Environmental Protection said existing regulations are insufficient to deliver necessary water quality improvements.

Palo Alto Networks to Acquire Portkey to Secure the Rise of AI Agents
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/palo-alto-networks-to-acquire-portkey-to-secure-the-rise-of-ai-agents-302759436.html

Palo Alto Networks to Acquire Portkey to Secure the Rise of AI Agents
/PRNewswire/ -- Palo Alto Networks® (NASDAQ: PANW), the global cybersecurity leader, today announced its intent to acquire Portkey, a pioneer in AI Gateways....

Former Trump and Biden AI advisers Dean Ball and Ben Buchanan urge bipartisan action on AI security risks, including tighter export controls and safety audits (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/opinion

Opinion | A.I. Is a National Security Risk. We Aren’t Doing Nearly Enough.
Both parties can agree to do a whole lot on A.I., but they have to move faster.

US anti-trust investigation into Microsofts business practices on #Azure and AI:
"The CIDs [i.e., the documents requesting information] say the goal of the FTC probe is to determine if #Microsoft has used unfair methods of competition in its cloud, software products, and related service…

Improved Approximation Guarantees for Groupwise Maximin Share Fairness
Georgios Amanatidis, Anna Korfiati, Evangelos Markakis, Christodoulos Santorinaios
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04731 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.04731 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.04731
arXiv:2606.04731v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods to a set of $n$ agents with additive valuation functions. We focus on the very demanding notion of \textit{groupwise maximin share fairness} (GMMS), which requires that each agent $i$ receives value comparable to their maximin share, where the latter is computed \textit{with respect to any subset of agents that contains $i$}. We show that it is possible to compute $(\phi-1)$-approximate GMMS allocations in polynomial time, where $\phi \approx 1.618$ is the golden ratio). This improves on the previously known guarantee of $4/7$ of Chaudhury et al. [SICOMP; 2021] and Amanatidis et al. [TCS; 2020]. We propose a simple algorithm that maintains the same main properties as the Draft-and-Eliminate algorithm of Amanatidis et al. [TCS, 2020] and we improve on the approximation guarantee analysis by carefully bounding the relevant value within any subinstance induced by the restriction of our allocation to a subset of agents. Our analysis is asymptotically tight for algorithms that share these properties and has the additional benefit of giving improved guarantees for restricted settings; in particular, when the agents agree on the top $n$ goods or when the number of agents is small. To illustrate the challenges of going beyond the guarantees of our algorithm, we also present a variant with an improved approximation of $(\sqrt{10}-1)/3 \approx 0.72$ for the case of three agents. To achieve this improvement we partially characterize the maximin share guarantees of short picking sequences for a small number of goods.
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Indian IT company Persistent Systems offers to acquire its Germany-based peer Nagarro for $1.45B; Indian IT companies are ramping up M&A as AI reshapes growth (Sayan Chakraborty/Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technolog…

Indian IT firms ramp up acquisitions as AI reshapes growth
Smaller firms in particular target large contracts as clients consolidate vendors

Microsoft's Q3 Intelligent Cloud revenue was $34.68B vs. $34.27B est., with Azure and other cloud services surging 40% YoY; Microsoft 365 Copilot has 20M seats (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/29/microsoft-msft-q3-earnings-report-2026.html

Microsoft beats on top and bottom lines with 40% Azure growth
Microsoft's Azure growth did better than Wall Street had predicted, and corporate adoption of the Copilot artificial intelligence assistant is picking up.

Alibaba and its US payment processor AUS agree to pay $600M to resolve DOJ allegations that they failed to prevent illegal sales of drugs and other products (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/alibaba-aus-merchant-services-p…