Microsoft has released an open-source standard called the Agent Control Spec to manage what AI agents are allowed or prohibited from doing. The specification helps developers and security and compliance teams define agent behavior rules in policy files. Policies can cover permitted and banned actions, points requiring human approval, and what records to keep for later review. The rules are applied at multiple checkpoints throughout an agent’s workflow and support plugins for major agent frameworks.

Pinecone, one of the companies that helped pioneer the vector database market supporting retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), is sending a different message around AI agents. The News Stack reported that Pinecone has provided 800,000 developers with chunking, embedding and retrieval methods for RAG over the past four years and unveiled its agent knowledge engine, Nexus, in early May. Pinecone argues RAG is unstable, slow and costly, but faces questions over industry adoption of its KnowQL.