OMV adds new processing plant at Schwechat refinery

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OMV adds new processing plant at Schwechat refinery

OMV Aktiengesellschaft, Vienna, has commissioned a new plant for converting end-of-life plastics into circular feedstocks at its 204,000-b/d integrated refining complex in Schwechat, Austria. In service as of Mar. 20, the new plant uses OMV’s proprietary ReOil technology to process up to 16,000 tonnes/year of hard-to-recycle, post-consumer mixed plastic waste into pyrolysis oil, which serves […]

OMV Aktiengesellschaft, Vienna, has commissioned a new plant for converting end-of-life plastics into circular feedstocks at its 204,000-b/d integrated refining complex in Schwechat, Austria.

In service as of Mar. 20, the new plant uses OMV’s proprietary ReOil technology to process up to 16,000 tonnes/year of hard-to-recycle, post-consumer mixed plastic waste into pyrolysis oil, which serves as a feedstock for producing sustainable base chemicals that are subsequently converted into everyday applications such as food packaging, healthcare products, and components for electric vehicles, OMV said.

Part of OMV’s strategy to achieve climate neutrality across its operations by 2050 at the latest, startup of the ReOil chemical recycling plant and its production of circular, virgin-quality plastics will reintegrate the equivalent annual plastic waste generated by 160,000 Austrian households otherwise remaining unrecyclable into the value chain, the company said.

By 2030, OMV estimates the new ReOil plant’s chemical recycling of post-consumer mixed plastic waste can achieve a 34% reduction in carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions compared to the alternative incineration of that waste, according to the operator.

Commissioning of Schwechat’s ReOil plant follows the refinery’s on-premises testing of the technology in a pilot plant that began operating at the site in 2018 (OGJ Online, May 10, 2019).

Achieving nearly 30,000 cracking hours to date, OMV said the ReOil pilot plant sustainably processed more than 2.1 million kg of plastic waste during the trial period, prompting the decision to move forward with construction of the larger, upscaled plant.

Future ReOil plant

Confirmation of the plant’s startup comes just a week after OMV secured up to €81.63 million in funding from the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA) for a proposed first-of-its-kind, full-scale ReOil plant in Austria that would process up to 200,000 tpy of used plastics otherwise destined for landfills or incineration.

Part of the European Union’s (EU) Innovation Fund program—one of the largest global programs for promoting innovative low-carbon technologies that focuses on highly innovative technologies and flagship projects in Europe aimed at achieving major CO₂ emission reductions—OMV confirmed the Mar. 11 CINEA grant represents the largest public funding the company has ever received for a standalone project.

Awarded to OMV Downstream GMBH, the grant will specifically fund OMV’s ReOil 25000 project that—if approved—would become Europe’s largest chemical recycling plant, reaching a relative greenhouse gas (GHG) emission avoidance of 115% the 2021-25 EU ETS benchmark of 6.84 tCO₂e/tH₂ by avoiding nearly 2.2 million tpy of CO₂e over its first 10 years of operation, according to the project’s official EU Innovation Fund description.

While OMV said final investment decision on ReOil 25000 remains subject to approval, EU Innovation Fund confirmed the project is scheduled for an anticipated financial close date of Mar. 31, 2027, for a proposed start-of-operation date on Sept. 30, 2029.

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Ubuntu namespace vulnerability should be addressed quickly: Expert

Thus, “there is little impact of not ‘patching’ the vulnerability,” he said. “Organizations using centralized configuration tools like Ansible may deploy these changes with regularly scheduled maintenance or reboot windows.” Features supposed to improve security Ironically, last October Ubuntu introduced AppArmor-based features to improve security by reducing the attack surface

Kyndryl extends Google Cloud partnership for AI-based mainframe modernization

“Many need to integrate mainframe data with the cloud and update applications to meet new security and compliance rules. Providers are using genAI-based code inspection to accelerate the discovery of code changes and modernization of legacy code,” ISG stated. “GenAI can inspect code and explain how it works, reducing and

Google Cloud partners with mLogica to offer mainframe modernization

Other than the partnership with mLogica, Google Cloud also offers a variety of other mainframe migration tools, including Radis and G4 that can be employed to modernize specific applications. Enterprises can also use a combination of migration tools to modernize their mainframe applications. Some of these tools include the Gemini-powered

Red Hat’s AI portfolio evolves to address enterprise deployment challenges

RHEL AI lets companies deploy workloads where they need them, including cloud, on premises, or on the edge, IDC analyst Michele Rosen says. “AI applications need to live as close as possible to their data,” she says. “For security, latency, and what have you. So you want to have a

BP Advances Gas Development in Trinidad and Tobago

BP Trinidad and Tobago (bpTT) is moving forward with the Ginger gas development project. Ginger is located approximately 50 miles off Trinidad’s southeast coast in water depths of less than 300 feet. Drilling at the first well started in January and is expected to resume in the fourth quarter, the company said in a news release. Ginger will become bpTT’s fourth subsea project and will include four subsea wells and subsea trees tied back to bpTT’s existing Mahogany B platform. First gas from the project is expected in 2027 and will make up one of the company’s 10 major projects expected to start up between 2025 and 2027. At peak, the development is expected to have the capacity to produce an average gas production of 62,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd), according to the release. The Ginger development and bpTT’s Cypre gas project, scheduled to start up this year, are part of bpTT’s strategy of maximizing production from existing acreage, developing capital-efficient projects that tie into existing infrastructure, it said. The project meets the company’s “expected returns from upstream projects” and is fully accommodated within its capital expenditure plans, it said. Further, bpTT reported exploration success at its Frangipani well. Drilling at the well identified multiple stacked gas reservoirs within the same geological structure. Options are currently being evaluated to move the discovery forward, the company stated. Frangipani is located east of the existing Mahogany field, approximately 50 miles off the southeast coast. The company has a 100 percent working interest in both Ginger and Frangipani. bpTT president David Campbell said, “I am very proud to announce these two milestones. With Frangipani, our objective was to prove that our continued progress in exploration and appraisal activity could unlock new fields and investment opportunities for the region. And the

USA DOI Generates $39MM from 1Q 2025 Oil, Gas Lease Sales

In a statement posted on its site recently, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) announced that it generated over $39 million in total receipts from oil and gas lease sales held in the first quarter of 2025. The Bureau of Land Management leased 34 parcels totaling 25,038 acres for $39,007,609 in total receipts for its first quarter of fiscal year 2025 oil and gas lease sales, the DOI noted in the statement. The organization highlighted that the Bureau of Land Management held oil and gas lease sales in Montana, North Dakota, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nevada. In a statement posted on its site on January 22, the Bureau of Land Management announced that its Montana-Dakotas State Office held a competitive oil and gas lease sale, “offering 13 parcels covering 1,324 acres in Montana and North Dakota”. “In total, 255 bids were received, with 13 parcels covering 1,324 acres leased, roughly 100 percent of the total acreage available. A total of $11,314,786 in high bids were received,” the Bureau said in that statement. A statement posted on the Bureau of Land Management’s site on February 21 announced that the Bureau’s New Mexico State Office leased seven parcels totaling 1,317.29 acres for $20,671,801 in total receipts for its quarterly oil and gas lease sale. In another statement posted on its site on March 4, the Bureau said its Wyoming State Office leased four parcels totaling 2,443.11acres for $6,725,713 in total receipts for its quarterly oil and gas lease sale, and in a statement posted on its site on March 18, the Bureau said its Nevada State Office leased 10 parcels totaling 19,954 acres for $295,309 in total receipts for its quarterly oil and gas lease sale. “This quarter’s lease sales demonstrate Interior’s unwavering commitment to fostering American energy dominance, and we are grateful to those who

Shell Completes Takeover of Pavilion Energy, Sale of Singapore Energy Park

Shell PLC said Tuesday it had completed separate transactions to take over Singapore-based liquefied natural gas (LNG) trader Pavilion Energy Pte. Ltd. and divest its Energy and Chemicals Park in the Southeast Asian city-state. The British integrated energy company acquired all shares of Pavilion Energy from Carne Investments Pte. Ltd., an indirect subsidiary of Singaporean state-owned investor Temasek. “The acquisition includes Pavilion Energy’s portfolio of LNG offtake and supply contracts, regasification capacity, and LNG bunkering business, strengthening Shell’s position in the LNG market”, Shell said in an online statement. Pavilion has a “long-term” contracted supply of about 6.5 million metric tons per annum (MMtpa) and regasification capacity of around 2 MMtpa at National Grid Group’s Isle Grain LNG terminal in England, as well as regasification access in Singapore and Spain, Shell noted. Additionally Pavilion holds a time charter for 3 M-type, electronically controlled gas injection LNG vessels and 2 TFDE (tri-fuel diesel electric) vessels. Pavilion also has an LNG bunkering business, whose first vessel was deployed early 2024, Shell said. Shell’s purchase excluded Pavilion’s pipeline gas business in Singapore, which has been transferred to Temasek’s Gas Supply Pte. Ltd. The transaction also excluded Pavilion’s 20 percent stake in Tanzania’s Blocks 1 and 4. “The acquisition will be absorbed within Shell’s cash capital expenditure guidance”, Shell said. In Singapore, Shell, via its 2016 acquisition of BG Group PLC, already holds the first license to import LNG into the country and supplies nearly a quarter of national natural gas needs, according to the company. Shell aims to raise its LNG sales by 4-5 percent through 2030. Last year it sold 65.8 million metric tons of LNG, while it recorded 29.1 million metric tons of liquefaction volumes. ‘‘We want to become the world’s leading integrated gas and LNG business and the most customer-focused

Rystad Looks at Latest Round of USA Sanctions on Iran

The latest round of U.S. sanctions on Iran signal a growing determination to tighten the economic noose around the Tehran administration. That’s what Rystad Energy said in a release posted on its site last week, adding that, “if the sanctions are expanded … the consequences will reach far beyond Iran, could reshape geopolitics, and send shockwaves through energy markets”. “While there is not yet a ‘maximum pressure’ situation – where Iranian oil exports could drop from 1.5 million barrels per day to near zero – Washington is stepping up efforts to push Tehran back to the negotiating table for a new nuclear deal,” Rystad noted in the release. “However, escalating pressure could drive oil prices higher, conflicting with U.S. President Donald Trump’s goal of lowering energy costs to fight inflation, as he promised in his January inauguration speech,” Rystad added. The company stated in its release that its data on oil trade flows shows that almost all Iranian crude exports make their way to China. It added that achieving effective maximum pressure would require cooperation from the Chinese government. “The effectiveness of these sanctions in compelling Iran to negotiate is still unclear,” Rystad said in the release. “Rystad Energy analysis suggests that, if Iran remains unresponsive, the U.S. could introduce further sanctions,” it added. “Trump has repeatedly signaled his desire for a new nuclear deal, urging Iran to return to the negotiating table. While the immediate effects of these sanctions may be limited, they send a clear signal about the U.S. administration’s intent to escalate pressure on Iran,” it continued. Rystad went on to note in the release that the decision by OPEC+ to increase production could play a key role in shaping the U.S. approach to maximum pressure on Iran. “The recent drop in oil prices – partly due

Gazprom to Raise Gas Supply to Slovakia via TurkStream

Slovakia will receive a substantially larger portion of Gazprom PJSC gas deliveries via Turkey and Hungary through the TurkStream pipeline, easing supply concerns after flows via Ukraine were cut off. Starting Tuesday, the country will start getting deliveries at a “multiple” of current flows, Vojtech Ferencz, chief executive officer of state utility Slovensky Plynarensky Priemysel AS, told journalists in Bratislava. Ferencz declined to specify volumes. The additional Russian fuel will provide some relief to landlocked Slovakia, one of the countries most impacted when Moscow halted deliveries to Europe via Ukraine at the start of the year. While Gazprom will still be sending the same amount of gas to Europe via Turkstream, a larger share will now go to Slovakia just as the crucial season to stockpile for next winter starts. Slovakia started receiving Russian gas through the TurkStream pipeline in February, Bloomberg News reported. Much of Europe turned away from Russian piped gas following Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Yet several countries – including Slovakia – continued to rely on Gazprom’s flows via Ukraine and had been forced to buy more expensive supplies elsewhere. There is currently no clear time-line for a possible resumption of transit through Ukraine, Slovak economy minister Denisa Sakova said at the same briefing. Sakova has been negotiating regularly on the matter with the European Commission. SPP’s trade director Michal Lalik added that while repairs to Russia’s Sudzha gas metering station, damaged in a drone attack earlier this month, may take some time, other interconnection points are functional. What do you think? We’d love to hear from you, join the conversation on the Rigzone Energy Network. The Rigzone Energy Network is a new social experience created for you and all energy professionals to Speak Up about our industry, share knowledge, connect with peers and industry insiders and engage

Johan Castberg Goes Onstream

Equinor ASA and its partners on Monday achieved first oil at the Johan Castberg field in the Barents Sea, growing Norway’s production capacity by 220,000 barrels per day (bpd) at peak. “The Johan Castberg field will contribute crucial energy, value creation, ripple effects and jobs for at least 30 years to come”, Geir Tungesvik, Equinor executive vice president for projects, drilling and procurement, said in an online statement by the company. “We expect that this major field development with a price tag of NOK 86 billion (2024) will be repaid in less than two years”. Recoverable volumes are estimated to be 450-650 million barrels, the majority state-owned energy major said. “Johan Castberg opens a new region for oil recovery and will create more opportunities in the Barents Sea”, added Kjetil Hove, Equinor executive vice president for exploration and production in Norway. “We’ve already made new discoveries in the area and will keep exploring together with our partners. “We’ve identified options to add 250-550 million new recoverable barrels that can be developed and produced over Johan Castberg”. It is only the second field developed in the Barents Sea after Snøhvit, which went online 2007. The Nordic country’s northernmost field, Johan Castberg sits about 100 kilometers north of Equinor-operated Snøhvit, according to the operator. Twelve of Johan Castberg’s 30 wells “are ready for production”, enough to achieve the expected peak volume in the second quarter, Equinor said. It plans to continue drilling until late 2026. The development consists of three discoveries. Drivis, Havis and Skrugard were proven between 2011 and 2013. The government approved the project 2018. Johan Castberg has an average water depth of 360-390 meters (1,181.1-1,279.53 feet) according to Equinor. “Johan Castberg has been a massive and challenging project”, noted Tungesvik. Equinor operates the field with a 46.3 percent stake. Vår

Silicon Motion rolls SSD kit to bolster AI workload performance

The kit utilizes the PCIe Dual Ported enterprise-grade SM8366 controller with support for PCIe Gen 5 x4 NVMe 2.0 and OCP 2.5 data center specifications. The 128TB SSD RDK also supports NVMe 2.0 Flexible Data Placement (FDP), a feature that allows advanced data management and improved SSD write efficiency and endurance. “Silicon Motion’s MonTitan SSD RDK offers a comprehensive solution for our customers, enabling them to rapidly develop and deploy enterprise-class SSDs tailored for AI data center and edge server applications.” said Alex Chou, senior vice president of the enterprise storage & display interface solution business at Silicon Motion. Silicon Motion doesn’t make drives, rather it makes reference design kits in different form factors that its customers use to build their own product. Its kits come in E1.S, E3.S, and U.2 form factors. The E1.S and U.2 forms mirror the M.2, which looks like a stick of gum and installs on the motherboard. There are PCI Express enclosures that hold four to six of those drives and plug into one card slot and appear to the system as a single drive.

Executive Roundtable: Cooling Imperatives for Managing High-Density AI Workloads

Michael Lahoud, Stream Data Centers: For the past two years, Stream Data Centers has been developing a modular, configurable air and liquid cooling system that can handle the highest densities in both mediums. Based on our collaboration with customers, we see a future that still requires both cooling mediums, but with the flexibility to deploy either type as the IT stack destined for that space demands. With this necessity as a backdrop, we saw a need to develop a scalable mix-and-match front-end thermal solution that gives us the ability to late bind the equipment we need to meet our customers’ changing cooling needs. It’s well understood that liquid far outperforms air in its ability to transport heat, but further to this, with the right IT configuration, cooling fluid temperatures can also be raised, and this affords operators the ability to use economization for a greater number of hours a year. These key properties can help reduce the energy needed for the mechanical part of a data center’s operations substantially. It should also be noted that as servers are redesigned for liquid cooling and the onboard server fans get removed or reduced in quantity, more of the critical power delivered to the server is being used for compute. This means that liquid cooling also drives an improvement in overall compute productivity despite not being noted in facility PUE metrics. Counter to air cooling, liquid cooling certainly has some added management challenges related to fluid cleanliness, concurrent maintainability and resiliency/redundancy, but once those are accounted for, the clusters become stable, efficient and more sustainable with improved overall productivity.

Airtel connects India with 100Tbps submarine cable

“Businesses are becoming increasingly global and digital-first, with industries such as financial services, data centers, and social media platforms relying heavily on real-time, uninterrupted data flow,” Sinha added. The 2Africa Pearls submarine cable system spans 45,000 kilometers, involving a consortium of global telecommunications leaders including Bayobab, China Mobile International, Meta, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone Group, and WIOCC. Alcatel Submarine Networks is responsible for the cable’s manufacturing and installation, the statement added. This cable system is part of a broader global effort to enhance international digital connectivity. Unlike traditional telecommunications infrastructure, the 2Africa Pearls project represents a collaborative approach to solving complex global communication challenges. “The 100 Tbps capacity of the 2Africa Pearls cable significantly surpasses most existing submarine cable systems, positioning India as a key hub for high-speed connectivity between Africa, Europe, and Asia,” said Prabhu Ram, VP for Industry Research Group at CyberMedia Research. According to Sinha, Airtel’s infrastructure now spans “over 400,000 route kilometers across 34+ cables, connecting 50 countries across five continents. This expansive infrastructure ensures businesses and individuals stay seamlessly connected, wherever they are.” Gogia further emphasizes the broader implications, noting, “What also stands out is the partnership behind this — Airtel working with Meta and center3 signals a broader shift. India is no longer just a consumer of global connectivity. We’re finally shaping the routes, not just using them.”

Former Arista COO launches NextHop AI for customized networking infrastructure

Sadana argued that unlike traditional networking where an IT person can just plug a cable into a port and it works, AI networking requires intricate, custom solutions. The core challenge is creating highly optimized, efficient networking infrastructure that can support massive AI compute clusters with minimal inefficiencies. How NextHop is looking to change the game for hyperscale networking NextHop AI is working directly alongside its hyperscaler customers to develop and build customized networking solutions. “We are here to build the most efficient AI networking solutions that are out there,” Sadana said. More specifically, Sadana said that NextHop is looking to help hyperscalers in several ways including: Compressing product development cycles: “Companies that are doing things on their own can compress their product development cycle by six to 12 months when they partner with us,” he said. Exploring multiple technological alternatives: Sadana noted that hyperscalers might try and build on their own and will often only be able to explore one or two alternative approaches. With NextHop, Sadana said his company will enable them to explore four to six different alternatives. Achieving incremental efficiency gains: At the massive cloud scale that hyperscalers operate, even an incremental one percent improvement can have an oversized outcome. “You have to make AI clusters as efficient as possible for the world to use all the AI applications at the right cost structure, at the right economics, for this to be successful,” Sadana said. “So we are participating by making that infrastructure layer a lot more efficient for cloud customers, or the hyperscalers, which, in turn, of course, gives the benefits to all of these software companies trying to run AI applications in these cloud companies.” Technical innovations: Beyond traditional networking In terms of what the company is actually building now, NextHop is developing specialized network switches

Microsoft abandons data center projects as OpenAI considers its own, hinting at a market shift

A potential ‘oversupply position’ In a new research note, TD Cowan analysts reportedly said that Microsoft has walked away from new data center projects in the US and Europe, purportedly due to an oversupply of compute clusters that power AI. This follows reports from TD Cowen in February that Microsoft had “cancelled leases in the US totaling a couple of hundred megawatts” of data center capacity. The researchers noted that the company’s pullback was a sign of it “potentially being in an oversupply position,” with demand forecasts lowered. OpenAI, for its part, has reportedly discussed purchasing billions of dollars’ worth of data storage hardware and software to increase its computing power and decrease its reliance on hyperscalers. This fits with its planned Stargate Project, a $500 billion, US President Donald Trump-endorsed initiative to build out its AI infrastructure in the US over the next four years. Based on the easing of exclusivity between the two companies, analysts say these moves aren’t surprising. “When looking at storage in the cloud — especially as it relates to use in AI — it is incredibly expensive,” said Matt Kimball, VP and principal analyst for data center compute and storage at Moor Insights & Strategy. “Those expenses climb even higher as the volume of storage and movement of data grows,” he pointed out. “It is only smart for any business to perform a cost analysis of whether storage is better managed in the cloud or on-prem, and moving forward in a direction that delivers the best performance, best security, and best operational efficiency at the lowest cost.”

PEAK:AIO adds power, density to AI storage server

There is also the fact that many people working with AI are not IT professionals, such as professors, biochemists, scientists, doctors, clinicians, and they don’t have a traditional enterprise department or a data center. “It’s run by people that wouldn’t really know, nor want to know, what storage is,” he said. While the new AI Data Server is a Dell design, PEAK:AIO has worked with Lenovo, Supermicro, and HPE as well as Dell over the past four years, offering to convert their off the shelf storage servers into hyper fast, very AI-specific, cheap, specific storage servers that work with all the protocols at Nvidia, like NVLink, along with NFS and NVMe over Fabric. It also greatly increased storage capacity by going with 61TB drives from Solidigm. SSDs from the major server vendors typically maxed out at 15TB, according to the vendor. PEAK:AIO competes with VAST, WekaIO, NetApp, Pure Storage and many others in the growing AI workload storage arena. PEAK:AIO’s AI Data Server is available now.

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs). In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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