Top Stories — Thursday, September 11, 2025
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- Box CEO Aaron Levie on AI's 'era of context' — TechCrunch
- 10-year Treasury yield falls to 4% as traders weigh more inflation datal; jobless claims rise to highest since 2021 — CNBC
- Alphabet's Verily covered up HIPAA violations, whistleblower says in lawsuit — CNBC
Box CEO Aaron Levie on AI's 'era of context'
Source: TechCrunch • Published: 9/11/2025, 8:06:31 PM
Box CEO Aaron Levie on AI's 'era of context'
"There's no free lunch right now in AI."
On Thursday, Box launched its developer conference Boxworks by announcing a new set of AI features, building agentic AI models into the backbone of the company's products.
It's more product announcements than usual for the conference, reflecting the increasingly fast pace of AI development at the company: Box launched its AI studio last year, followed by a new set of data-extraction agents in February, and others for search and deep research in May.
Now, the company is rolling out a new system called Box Automate that works as a kind of operating system for AI agents, breaking workflows into different segments that can be augmented with AI as necessary.
I spoke with CEO Aaron Levie about the company's approach to AI, and the perilous work of competing with foundation model companies. Unsurprisingly, he was very bullish about the possibilities for AI agents in the modern workplace, but he was also clear-eyed about the limitations of current models and how to manage those limitations with existing technology.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TechCrunch: You're announcing a bunch of AI products today, so I want to start by asking about the big-picture vision. Why build AI agents into a cloud content-management service?
Aaron Levie: So the thing that we think about all day long – and what our focus is at Box – is how much work is changing due to AI. And the vast majority of the impact right now is on workflows involving unstructured data. We've already been able to automate anything that deals with structured data that goes into a database. If you think about CRM systems, ERP systems, HR systems, we've already had years of automation in that space. But where we've never had automation is anything that touches unstructured data.
So for us, AI agents mean that, for the first time ever, we can actually tap into all of this unstructured data.
TC: What about the risks of deploying agents in a business context? Some of your customers must be nervous about deploying something like this on sensitive data.
Levie: What we've been seeing from customers is they want to know that every single time they run that workflow, the agent is going to execute more or less the same way, at the same point in the workflow, and not have things kind of go off the rails. You don't want to have an agent make some compounding mistake where, after they do the first couple 100 submissions, they start to kind of run wild.
It becomes really important to have the right demarcation points, where the agent starts and the other parts of the system end. For every workflow, there's this question of what needs to have deterministic guardrails, and what can be fully agentic and non-deterministic.
What you can do with Box Automate is decide how much work you want each individual agent to do before it hands off to a different agent. So you might have a submission agent that's separate from the review agent, and so on. It's allowing you to basically deploy AI agents at scale in any kind of workflow or business process in the organization.
TC: What kind of problems do you guard against by splitting up the workflow?
Levie: We've already seen some of the limitations even in the most advanced fully agentic systems like Claude Code. At some point in the task, the model runs out of context-window room to continue making good decisions. There's no free lunch right now in AI. You can't just have a long-running agent with unlimited context window go after any task in your business. So you have to break up the workflow and use sub-agents.
I think we're in the era of context within AI. What AI models and agents need is context, and the context that they need to work off is sitting inside your unstructured data. So our whole system is really designed to figure out what context you can give the AI agent to ensure that they perform as effectively as possible.
TC: There is a bigger debate in the industry about the benefits of big, powerful frontier models compared to models that are smaller and more reliable. Does this put you on the side of the smaller models?
Levie: I should probably clarify: Nothing about our system prevents the task from being arbitrarily long or complex. What we're trying to do is create the right guardrails so that you get to decide how agentic you want that task to be.
We don't have a particular philosophy as to where people should be on that continuum. We're just trying to design a future-proof architecture. We've designed this in such a way where, as the models improve and as agentic capabilities improve, you will just get all of those benefits directly in our platform.
TC: The other concern is data control. Because models are trained on so much data, there's a real fear that sensitive data will get regurgitated or misused. How does that factor in?
Levie: It's where a lot of AI deployments go wrong. People think, "Hey, this is easy. I'll give an AI model access to all of my unstructured data, and it'll answer questions for people." And then it starts to give you answers on data that you don't have access to or you shouldn't have access to. You need a very powerful layer that handles access controls, data security, permissions, data governance, compliance, everything.
So we're benefiting from the couple decades that we've spent building up a system that basically handles that exact problem: How do you ensure only the right person has access to each piece of data in the enterprise? So when an agent answers a question, you know deterministically that it can't draw on any data that that person shouldn't have access to. That is just something fundamentally built into our system.
TC: Earlier this week, Anthropic released a new feature for directly uploading files to Claude.ai. It's a long way from the sort of file management that Box does, but you must be thinking about possible competition from the foundation model companies. How do you approach that strategically?
Levie: So if you think about what enterprises need when they deploy AI at scale, they need security, permissions and control. They need the user interface, they need powerful APIs, they want their choice of AI models, because one day, one AI model powers some use case for them that is better than another, but then that might change, and they don't want to be locked into one particular platform.
So what we've built is a system that lets you have effectively all of those capabilities. We're doing the storage, the security, the permissions, the vector embedding, and we connect to every leading AI model that's out there.
Read the full story at TechCrunch.
10-year Treasury yield falls to 4% as traders weigh more inflation datal; jobless claims rise to highest since 2021
Source: CNBC • Published: 9/11/2025, 8:03:10 PM
The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield fell to 4% Thursday as investors assessed the latest inflation data, as well as a jump in jobless claims, that complicate the interest rate outlook.
The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury was last down by more than 3 basis points at 4.00%. The 30-year Treasury yield fell more than 2 basis points to 4.649%, as the 2-year yield dropped more than 3 basis points to hit 3.494%.
One basis point equals 0.01%, and bond yields and prices move in opposite directions.
Investors parsed through a raft of mixed economic signals Thursday morning, with hotter consumer prices and higher jobless claims that could muddy the path for monetary policy for Federal Reserve policymakers when they convene for their Sept. 16-17 meeting.
The August consumer price index rose at a seasonally adjusted 0.4% increase for the month, which was double the prior month, with the annual inflation rate coming in at 2.9%. Economists polled by Dow Jones had been looking for readings of 0.3% and 2.9%, respectively.
Weekly jobless claims also jumped by a seasonally adjusted 263,000, marking the highest level since October 2021. The number was also higher than the 235,000 estimate and up 27,000 from the prior period, according to the Labor Department.
"Overall, this set of data reinforced the limited inflationary fallout from the trade war (thus far) and the mounting concern that the labor market is quickly weakening," Ian Lyngen, head of U.S. rates strategy in the BMO Capital Markets Fixed Income Strategy team, wrote Thursday. "This clears the way for a 25 bp cut next week and leaves 50 bp on the table, although we remain in the 25 bp camp."
Markets were last pricing in a roughly 94% probability of a quarter-point cut, with a 6% chance of a bigger half-point move, according to the CME Group's FedWatch tool on Thursday.
The latest economic data comes after Wednesday's weaker-than-expected producer price index also reinforced expectations of a September rate cut.
— CNBC's Jeff Cox and Yun Li contributed to this report.
Alphabet's Verily covered up HIPAA violations, whistleblower says in lawsuit
Source: CNBC • Published: 9/11/2025, 8:02:02 PM
Alphabet's health tech subsidiary Verily used the health data of more than 25,000 patients without authorization and actively covered up those violations, a former company executive alleges.
The executive, Ryan Sloan, claims Verily fired him after he discovered breaches of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, and reported his concerns to the company's senior management.
Patient data in the U.S. is protected under HIPAA, which ensures the sensitive information cannot be disclosed without a patient's consent.
Sloan's allegations are detailed in a pending lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco. The suit, which was filed late last year, has not been previously reported.
On Monday, the judge overseeing Sloan's case denied a request by Verily to dismiss his civil complaint, or to send the dispute to arbitration.
"Verily believes the allegations and contentions alleged in this employment matter that was commenced in 2023 are completely without merit. Verily will defend itself to the full extent of the law," a company spokesperson told CNBC in a statement. "Verily is an equal opportunity employer, and takes its responsibility and commitment to abide by all laws and regulations seriously. As this is an ongoing legal matter, Verily will not be providing further comment at this time."
Representatives for Sloan did not comment.
Verily started as a moonshot in 2015 within Alphabet's innovation lab X, formerly known as Google X. It's Google's sister company and operates under Alphabet's "Other Bets" category.
The company hired Sloan in 2020 to serve as the chief commercial officer of its diabetes and hypertension business, Verily Onduo.
In January 2022, Sloan alleged that he and Julia Feldman, Onduo's general counsel, discovered Verily had improperly used patients' protected health information in its research, marketing campaigns, press releases and national conferences. The "extensive violations" affected more than 25,000 patients in Onduo's diabetes program, according to an amended complaint filed in June.
Sloan and Feldman informed senior Verily leaders of their findings, the filing said, and they repeatedly raised the issue. An internal investigation at Verily confirmed several HIPAA breaches took place, according to the filing.
"Between January and March of 2022, internal investigators at Verily confirmed multiple breaches of fourteen (14) separate HIPAA Business Associate Agreements with large, covered entity clients of Onduo between 2017 and 2021," the filing said.
Patients who accessed Verily Onduo through these clients – which include Walgreens Boots Alliance, Highmark Health, Quest Diagnostics and Delta Air Lines, among others – may have been affected by the breaches.
Delta said in a statement that it doesn't have a comment on the suit, "but our employee's personal information is important to us."
"We are looking into this and will make sure any impact to our people is appropriately addressed," the company said.
Quest said in a statement that, "We are not familiar with the allegations and have no further comment."
Highmark declined to comment. Walgreens did not respond to CNBC's requests for comment.
Under HIPAA, companies like Verily are supposed to notify impacted parties no later than 60 days after discovering a breach. Verily "decided to delay the decision of notifying the covered entities," according to the filing, and the company engaged in negotiations to renew many of those contracts "without revealing that a HIPAA breach had recently occurred."
"During a contract negotiation between Verily and Highmark Health in August of 2022, Verily represented that it was in compliance with HIPAA at all times, while knowingly concealing that a HIPAA breach had occurred," the filing said.
That same month, Verily terminated Feldman and another employee who was aware of the breaches.
When Sloan reiterated his concerns about the breaches to Lisa Greenbaum, Verily's then chief revenue officer, in October 2022, she allegedly defended the company's decision not to disclose them and said that doing so would negatively affect public relations, the filing said.
Greenbaum joined Doximity, another health-care technology company, as chief commercial officer in January 2024, according to her LinkedIn.
Doximity did not immediately respond to request for comment.
In November 2022, Verily allegedly suppressed a press release out of concern that it would draw attention to previous marketing studies that violated its HIPAA Business Associate Agreements. The company removed the press release from its website and instructed employees not to mention it again, according to the filing.
Sloan was officially terminated from Verily in January of 2023, while on protected leave to care for his "critically ill mother," the filing said.
The lawsuit marks the latest in a series of stumbles at Verily, which, despite raising more than $1 billion from investors, has struggled to latch onto a winning product. Verily is reportedly transitioning from a Limited Liability Company, or an LLC, to an investor-friendly C-corp structure to prepare for a fresh round of funding, according to a report from Business Insider on Wednesday.
Verily originally developed hardware like continuous glucose monitors before pivoting to pandemic response when Covid-19 broke out in 2020, then switched directions again to focus on precision health in 2022.
The company introduced a new artificial intelligence-powered chronic care solution called Verily Lightpath last year, and announced it was selling its stop-loss insurance subsidiary, Granular Insurance Company, in February.
--CNBC's Lora Kolodny and Dan Mangan contributed to this report
For complete details, visit the original sources linked above.
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