The 1EdTech Organization Announces an Ecosystem to Estandarize Credentials

1EdTech CEO Curtiss Barnes announced the CASE Global Ecosystem initiative during the 2026 Digital Credentials Summit, with plans to launch later this year. “We’re currently seeing a true national and global push for clearer pathways between education and employment, and for learner mobility across institutions, sectors, and borders,” he said. Currently, micro credentials, skills, competencies, and curriculum data remain siloed across platforms, frameworks, and jurisdictions. Meanwhile, employers need records they can trust and understand instantly. When introducing the CASE standard as a shared technical and semantic foundation, the 1EdTech organization aims to create an open, decentralized, and globally coordinated system that enables the interoperable exchange of skills, competencies, and curricula. Tim Couper, Chief Architect & Associate CTO, 1EdTech, stated to IBL News, “The CASE standard has become a foundational solution worldwide, and combined with other standards like Open Badges and Comprehensive Learner Records (CLR), is making credentials more trusted across systems.” Today, more than 37 million Americans have completed some college coursework but no degree, creating an enormous wage gap and economic disadvantage. People with some college but no degree face a $40,500 annual wage gap (86% less) than bachelor's degree holders. Those with college debt but no degree are financially worse off than high school graduates with no debt! During the Digital Credentials conference, which took place this week in Philadelphia, attending educators shared their readiness to meet the demand for clearer signals, more flexibility, and credentials that travel.

OpenAI Released ‘Prism’, a Free Workspace Designed to Accelerate Scientific Work

Goldman Sachs Is Co-Developing with Anthropic AI Agents to Automate Trades and Client Management

The Sci-Fi Moment of OpenClaw and Open Source AI Agents

GitHub Incorporates Claude Code and Codex Rival Models to Improve Its Copilot Offering

GitHub continues embracing rival AI models and agents to improve its own Copilot offering. This month, it made available inside its platform the coding agents of Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI’s Codex for users with a Copilot Pro Plus or Copilot Enterprise subscription. Developers were are already able to access models from Anthropic, Google, xAI, Cognitiion, and OpenAI in GitHub Copilot, so the move is part of GitHub’s vision to make AI agents native. Now, developers can choose Copilot, Claude, Codex, or other custom agents when they’re creating a task. Each coding agent consumes a premium request, and developers can assign agents to issues and pull requests. They can also weigh up how each agent performs and generates a solution. GitHub's approach is to avoid context swithing when developing software. “With Codex, Claude, and Copilot in Agent HQ, you can move from idea to implementation using different agents for different steps without switching tools or losing context," said Mario Rodriguez, chief product officer at GitHub. On the other hand, Microsoft is increasingly trialing Claude Code tool, even asking its own developers to Anthropic's tool with GitHub Copilot, in an effort to improve GitHub Copilot.  

OpenAI Makes Its Low-Cost Subscription 'ChatGPT Go' Available Globally

OpenAI rolled out its low-cost subscription offering ChatGPT Go worldwide, including the U.S., where the service is available for $8 per month. ChatGPT Go gives access to OpenAI's GPT‑5.2 Instant model, along with 10x more messages, file uploads, and image creation than the free tier, as well as longer memory and a wider context window. ChatGPT Go was first introduced in India as a low-cost subscription in August 2025 and later expanded to 170 additional countries, making it our fastest-growing plan. Users mostly adopted it for everyday tasks like writing, image creation, learning, and problem-solving. In the free tier and ChatGPT Go offering, the company announced that it begin testing ads in the US soon. The two other existing consumer subscriptions are ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Pro, which, along with Enterprise, will remain ad-free. • Offered globally at $20 USD/month, ChatGPT Plus is designed for work that requires deeper reasoning —like writing and editing documents, learning and research, or data analysis. It offers access to the coding agent Codex and the advanced model GPT‑5.2 Thinking. It also allows users to choose legacy models. Compared to Go, ChatGPT Plus includes higher limits for messages, file uploads, memory, and context, remembering more detail from past conversations and supporting longer, more continuous workflows. • Offered at $200 USD/month, ChatGPT Pro offers full access to the company's most powerful model, GPT‑5.2 Pro, along with maximum memory and context, and early previews of our newest features. "It is built for users pushing the limits of advanced intelligence." > OpenAI’s plan to introduce ads > Plan comparation

OpenAI Hires Peter Steinberger, the Creator of OpenClaw

An Intelligence Explosion Accelerates the Shift of AI, Hitting Soon Everyday Jobs

OpenAI Explains How It Uses Its Internal Data Agent to Support Its Day-to-Day Work

A Company that Provides Sandboxed Compute to Operate AI Agents at Scale Attract Funding

Most cloud infrastructure today is optimised for production workloads. AI Agents would need to operate at far higher speed and scale, requiring environments that can launch in milliseconds, branch into parallel executions, support snapshots, and scale across large numbers of concurrent instances and environments. Therefore, as AI agents take on more work, they will require computing resources at a much greater scale. That's a new business opportunity, and some investment firms are jumping into these scenarios. Some startups, such as the Croatian-founded Daytona, are introducing sandboxes as a core infrastructure. A sandbox is a programmatic, composable computing environment in which CPU, memory, storage, GPU, networking, and the operating system can be provisioned on demand. These environments can be started, paused, forked, snapshotted, or terminated at any point during execution. This European company has raised $24M in Series A funding to build infrastructure designed for large-scale agent workloads, providing programmable, sandboxed compute that allows agents to run code, explore alternative execution paths, and persist state at scale. The round was led by FirstMark Capital, Pace Capital, Upfront Ventures, Darkmode, and E2VC, along with strategic investments from Datadog and Figma Ventures. The round also includes a group of angel investors, including Gorkem Yurtseven (Co-founder of Fal), Theo Browne (Founder of T3 Chat), Eno Reyes (Co-founder of Factory.ai), Nikita Shamgunov (Founder of Neon), and others.

'OpenClaw' Becomes a Popular Framework for Building AI Assistants Connected to Services

Proactive, personal, and autonomous digital assistant, open-source AI agent OpenClaw—formerly Moltbot, formerly Clawdbot—has become the most talked-about AI tool on the internet this month, racking up over 177,000 GitHub stars to date. Demos of this AI agent autonomously completing tasks rocketed across X, TikTok, and Reddit. It runs locally on a user's own hardware and connects to apps like WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, Telegram, and iMessage, acting as a proactive digital assistant. It can take autonomous actions across a user's online life, running commands, summarizing information, updating calendars, or managing emails. OpenClaw features persistent memory and works more like a digital employee and assistant than a chatbot. Its mascot is a “space lobster."A developer named Peter Steinberger created OpenClaw, inspired by Claude Code. “It is very personal, it’s very easy, and you can get both very practical and very silly with it," explained IBM Senior Research Scientist Marina Danilevsky. Meanwhile, Matt Schlicht, Cofounder of Octane AI, built Moltbook, a social network designed exclusively for AI agents. Their agents generate posts, comments, argue, joke, and upvote each other in a swirl of automated discourse. Humans may observe, but cannot participate. Since launching on January 28, Moltbook has ballooned to more than 1.5 million agents. These tools show that creating agents with true autonomy can also be community-driven, not limited to large enterprises. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, a Principal Research Scientist at IBM, said, "The rise of OpenClaw challenges the hypothesis that autonomous AI agents must be vertically integrated, with the provider tightly controlling the models, memory, tools, interface, execution layer, and security stack for reliability and safety." OpenClaw’s popularity also reflects a broader moment for AI agents. What was recently a concept in research papers and enterprise roadmaps has become something that Other AI agents that regular people can install, run, and experiment with are Claude Cowork and IBM’s Granite 4.0 Nano. However, some experts have raised questions about whether OpenClaw provides sufficient guardrails, since highly capable agents without proper safety controls can create major vulnerabilities, especially when deployed in workplaces. As OpenClaw usage grows, the hosting company DigitalOcean launched a VM-based deployment, with elastic scaling, safe defaults, and cost control. The 1-Click Deploy OpenClaw promises system control, with a secure, hardened environment where users own the virtual machine and manage the underlying infrastructure directly. Agent software updates are Git-driven, allowing teams to upgrade the OpenClaw image with “git push” and zero downtime from otherwise manual upgrades as the project evolves. "Agents need to remain private, isolated, and stateful — even as they restart, update, or scale," said the company. OpenClaw also works in a Cloudflare Sandbox container, starting at $5 per month. The creator of OpenClaw, Peter Steinberger, defined his app as "a mix of Jarvis and Her", referring to the two movies.  