AI agents need more than a way to pay. They need authority that is scoped, enforceable, revocable, and visible. Here’s how Kite thinks about payment authority—and how Agent Passport puts those controls into practice.

We detected an attack targeting the Kite (KITE) token. It was identified and contained immediately, and no tokens were lost. In the interest of transparency, here is what happened: • Our security monitoring flagged unusual KITE token transfer activity on Ethereum mainnet. • The team immediately activated incident response and paused all KITE token transfers on Ethereum mainnet, including cross-chain bridging. The affected tokens are frozen in place: they cannot be moved and will not reach the secondary market. • The incident is fully contained to Ethereum mainnet, and the affected tokens have not moved since. Our investigation is ongoing. We will be taking further measures to strengthen on-chain and asset security, and will share details with the community once they are finalized. Thank you for your support and understanding. We will keep you updated.

🔺 Excited to be speaking at @avax Summit 2026 in NYC this September. Looking forward to conversations around onchain finance, consumer apps, and what payments look like when AI agents are the ones transacting. That's the problem we're building @GoKiteAI for. 📍 Chelsea Industrial 📅 Sept 16-17 🔗 See you there 👋

Marathon Playground is live. Interact with your favorite models and submit AI workloads through a sleek, built-in UI. No API keys to wire up, no external tools required. Pick a model. Pick a completion window. Longer windows cost less: save up to ~65% at the longest window.

Kite hardened the fund-safety perimeter, advanced the conversation on agent identity and adoption, and brought the community together from Berkeley to Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur. Here's what we delivered last week: 1️⃣ We shipped three updates on one principle, that funds should be hard to lose on Kite: Wallet Receive now states which assets each network accepts, Kite Agent Passport Skills carry the same deposit guidance you read, and an internal tool moved off the public internet to shrink our attack surface. 2️⃣ That last change briefly cost connectivity between nodes, and Kite Mainnet paused block production for about 28 minutes rather than build on state it could not fully verify. Regional RPC endpoints were fully restored by 11:21 PT. 3️⃣ @MarathonBuild, incubated by Kite, brought Kimi K3 online as its long-context flagship across all four completion windows, and moved to keep its signup credit with the developers actually running jobs, adding a one-click reclaim in the dashboard. 4️⃣ We published clips from both Hubble podcast conversations with @Vishwa_lab: our Co-Founder & CEO @ChiZhangData on why adoption is decided in the middle of an agentic workflow rather than at the identity or payment end, and our Co-Founder & CTO @scottshics on the four IDs an agent needs pinned before it can transact, user ID, model ID, agent harness ID, and runtime ID. 5️⃣ We published the latest AI Agents Pulse, a biweekly recap running from record-breaking open-source releases to escalating policy scrutiny as agentic AI matures into a production reality. 6️⃣ We sponsored the RDI Agentic AI Summit at @UCBerkeley and spent the days on site talking with builders, then hosted Agentic AI Summit After Hours with @HaasBlockchain, Haas Fintech Club, and Agents' Last Exam once Day 1 wrapped. 7️⃣ Our Head of Blockchain Product & Infrastructure @Henryleemr joined AI-VOLUTION The Series 2026 by @SCB10X_OFFICIAL to discuss trusted payments for agents. 8️⃣ At Malaysia Blockchain Week, @Henryleemr moderated a panel on how data becomes a strategic asset in the AI era with @AsianCryptoBoy, @Aileentech, and @Roy0x1. The trust layer for the agentic internet is being assembled piece by piece. 🪁

An agent can already plan the trip, fill the cart, and draft the order. What it cannot do yet is be trusted with the payment. Our Head of Blockchain Product & Infrastructure @Henryleemr joined AI-VOLUTION The Series 2026 by @SCB10X_OFFICIAL, the venture arm of Thailand's SCBX Group, the fintech group built around Siam Commercial Bank. The episode breaks down the layer that closes that gap: verifiable agent identity, permissioned payments, spending controls, and instant settlement. When a banking group starts asking how agents transact, the missing piece is not smarter models. It is the financial infrastructure underneath them. 🪁

The Agentic AI Summit brings thousands of builders, researchers, and investors to @UCBerkeley on August 1 and 2. Kite is hosting an open evening after Day 1. Agentic AI Summit After Hours is co-hosted with @HaasBlockchain, Haas Fintech Club, and Agents' Last Exam, at Cornerstone in Downtown Berkeley, a short walk from campus. ▷ No panels or presentations. Drinks and food are provided, with time set aside for extended conversation. ▷ Everyone attending has just come from the summit, so discussions can begin with the substance rather than introductions. ▷ The Kite team will be on site throughout the evening to discuss agent identity, programmable spend controls, and x402 settlement. 📅 Saturday, August 1, 7:00 - 10:00 PM PDT 📍 Cornerstone, Downtown Berkeley Registration is open. We hope to see you there. 🪁

Your signup credit is meant for building, so we're protecting it. Automated accounts were draining the free credit pool at scale. We've reset balances and added a one-click reclaim, keeping that credit with developers who are actually running jobs. Open your dashboard and hit "Reclaim your credits." Your API keys and purchased credit are untouched.

From record-breaking open-source releases to escalating policy scrutiny, the last two weeks prove agentic AI is rapidly maturing into a production reality. Here's your biweekly recap of everything that happened in the space, in the latest edition of AI Agents Pulse: 1️⃣ Anthropic is reportedly preparing for an initial public offering as early as October, with bankers beginning to schedule meetings between executives and prospective investors. 2️⃣ Beijing-based Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model claimed to be the world's largest open-source AI model, rivaling top proprietary systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. 3️⃣ Employees from major AI labs including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta signed a statement urging the U.S. government to support international efforts to pace the development of automated AI research. 4️⃣ Nvidia is reportedly discussing a $250 billion backstop to help finance a 10-gigawatt data center campus for OpenAI in Ohio, raising concerns about circular financing in the AI industry. 5️⃣ Apple overtook Nvidia to become the world's most valuable company as investors shifted focus toward infrastructure and memory chips amid concerns over high AI buildout costs. 6️⃣ OpenAI reportedly flagged GPT-5 as high-risk for assisting in the creation of biological hazards, though the company later downgraded this risk rating. 7️⃣ U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated the administration may sanction Chinese AI models if they are found to be 'distilled' from proprietary American technology. 8️⃣ Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI employees, released Inkling, a 975-billion-parameter open-weight model capable of advanced reasoning and processing multimodal inputs. 9️⃣ Google DeepMind launched Gemini Robotics ER 2, an embodied reasoning model that lets robots understand the physical world, plan multi-step tasks, and hand off motor execution to lower-level vision-language-action models. 🔟 Industry leaders formed the Open Secure AI Alliance, which will work to remediate and disclose vulnerabilities using open technologies, building on the Linux Foundation's Akrites initiative and OpenSSF community work.

Most of what an agent does is not urgent. It plans, retries, reads for hours, cleans up after itself. Almost none of it needs an answer this second. @MarathonBuild, incubated by Kite, lets an agent put a price on its own patience. Kimi K3 is live there now, the long-context flagship, on every window. Latency tolerance is turning into something agents decide for themselves. 🪁

Kite incubated a new product, opened its code to inspection, hardened the payments and identity layer for agents, and pushed the agent economy into the physical world. Here's what we delivered last week: 1️⃣ We introduced @MarathonBuild, incubated by Kite: adaptive inference infrastructure that lets long-running agents pick a completion window per request and save up to 65%, with signup credits worth as much as 45,600,000 tokens. 2️⃣ We open-sourced Kite Agent Passport Skills: 14 MIT-licensed skills that teach an agent to authenticate, request a spending session, and make paid x402 requests, working across Claude Code, Cursor, and 40+ other environments. 3️⃣ We launched a bug bounty on @sherlockdefi covering the first smart contracts deployed on Kite Mainnet and the Kite Agent Passport platform. 4️⃣ Agent Trading Campaign S2 went live with @CreaoAI and @Debot_Official: start with 0.1 ETH on Robinhood Chain, wire Debot webhooks into a cloned CREAO Agent, and compete for a $10,000 prize pool across 50 winners, capped at 1,000 participants. 5️⃣ Kite Passport now supports Robinhood Chain end to end, holding and sending USDG with gas-sponsored transfers and automatic USDC-to-USDG routing, alongside multi-offer 402 negotiation (like Anthropic's) and paid media saved straight to disk. 6️⃣ We became a launch partner for RoboPay from @FabricFND, pairing Kite Agent Passport's verifiable identity and scoped spending authority with a payment layer that verifies a payment before a robot acts. 7️⃣ On @gracegongGG's Venture with Grace, our Co-Founder & CEO @ChiZhangData traced how Kite's first demo, ChatGPT ordering Uber Eats, died at a login CAPTCHA, and why a verifiable identity layer is the lasting fix. 8️⃣ We looked back at Proof of AI: Korea Special Edition in Seoul, where Cindy Shi keynoted on Kite Passport's place in agentic payments and a panel with @soohoio, @avax, @hashed_official, @FabricFND, and @tiger_research_ worked through authorization design and Korea's first landing use cases. The trust layer for the agentic internet is being assembled piece by piece. 🪁

Security is not a box you check before launch. On a payments layer for agents, it is the foundation everything else sits on. Agents transact without a human watching, so we hold that layer to the highest bar we can, and we open it to the people whose job is to break it. Our bug bounty is now live on @sherlockdefi. The first smart contracts deployed on Kite Mainnet and the Kite Agent Passport platform are both in scope. Find what we missed. 🪁

Kite is assembling the infrastructure layer that moves autonomous agents from conversation to commerce, shipping a new developer product, deepening global event presence, and expanding the community. Here's what we delivered this week: 1️⃣ We introduced the Kite Control Plane at the GTLC 2026 Bay Area Chinese Tech Leaders Summit, providing a new developer-side product to solve the action bottleneck for autonomous agents. 2️⃣ On @gracegongGG's Venture with Grace podcast, our Co-Founder & CEO @ChiZhangData mapped the three stages of agent-to-agent commerce and the infrastructure required to unlock the final stage of autonomous trade. 3️⃣ We joined @agisummitai in San Francisco, where developers explored with us the trust and scaling requirements for autonomous AI in professional environments. 4️⃣ We hosted Proof of AI: Korea Special Edition in Seoul, bringing together builders, wallet teams, and security experts to define the identity and settlement layers required for the agentic economy. 5️⃣ At the AI³ Growth Hackathon hosted by @OpenBuildxyz and @hack_weekly, our Co-Founder & CTO @scottshics explained why the next generation of developer products must exist: GenAI made intelligence cheap, but monthly bills have not followed. 6️⃣ We welcomed @Team1VN to the Kite ecosystem as part of Cohort 1, growing the global network of community-led builders driving onchain, agent-first development. 7️⃣ The KITE Spot Trading Tournament is live on @binance with 5,000,000 KITE token vouchers available, supporting the L1 where agents access verifiable identity and programmable spend controls. The trust layer for the agentic internet is being assembled piece by piece. 🪁

Models keep getting smarter. The internet still won't let them act. That was the opening line of our Co-Founder & CEO @ChiZhangData's keynote at GTLC 2026 Bay Area Chinese Tech Leaders Summit, where she introduced our new developer-side product: Kite Control Plane. ▷ The problem: hand an agent your card or API key and you've handed it everything. Authority today is all-or-nothing, with no limits, no scope, no trail. ▷ Kite Control Plane: your app makes one normal completion call. Kite's gateway meters, routes, and enforces your budget by policy. OpenAI-compatible, live in 20 minutes. ▷ Degrade, don't break: at 90% of budget, the agent shifts to a cheaper model and keeps working. Only at 100% is it blocked. Everyone else has just two states: allow or block. ▷ One policy, every resource: the same spend rules govern model APIs, GPU, databases, and x402 paid APIs. And the control plane never touches your funds, keys, or data. Together with Kite Passport on the consumer side, it forms the two doors into one execution layer: identity, governance, payment, verification. Agents bring the intent. Kite makes it executable. 🪁

The panel is locked in. If you're at AGI Summit SF (@agisummitai) this weekend, here's exactly where to catch us. Our Co-Founder & CEO @ChiZhangData takes the AGI Stage for "When AI Agents Go to Work: Building, Trusting & Scaling Autonomous AI." 🗓️ Saturday, July 18, 5:35-6:05 PM PT 📍 AGI Stage, Palace of Fine Arts, SF Panel lineup: ▷ Zihan Wang, CTO, O2 AI (Moderator) ▷ Chi Zhang, Co-Founder & CEO, Kite ▷ Emery Han, Go-To-Market Platforms, Stripe ▷ Li Erran Li, Head of Science, HIL team, AWS ▷ Xuewei (Harvey) Wu, ML Engineer, Meta ▷ Charlie Hu, Co-Founder, OpenMax ▷ Kang Hongwen, Founder & CEO, The through-line: how autonomous agents get built, trusted, and scaled once they start transacting on their own. Kite brings the trust layer, verifiable identity and programmable spend controls for every agent. Come find us at the Palace of Fine Arts. 🪁

For autonomous agents to transact at scale, they need programmable, scoped payment rails. Not consumer cards bent to fit machines. Kite is joining @StraitsX and @avax in a multi-month collaboration to build the payments infrastructure autonomous agents will actually run on. ▷ Product angle: Kite × StraitsX will integrate through Virtual / Scoped Cards, purpose-built rails where scope, limit, and identity are enforced by design. ▷ The arc: whitepapers, hackathons and 2 major events in Asia including a flagship gathering of the global fintech industry. ▷ First stop: Singapore Hackathon, Aug 14-16. Builders welcome. Autonomous agents don’t need a better checkout. They need a payments layer of their own. Proud to build it here with @StraitsX and @avax, on compliant rails. 🪁

From a multi-agent system surpassing human grandmasters to terrorist groups weaponizing AI chatbots, the last two weeks highlight agentic AI is reshaping both competition and security landscapes. Here's your biweekly recap of everything that happened in the space, in the latest edition of AI Agents Pulse: 1️⃣ SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.5, an 'Opus-class model' the company says has 'twice greater token efficiency' than other leading models, positioned as a workhorse for coding, research, and knowledge work. 2️⃣ AI chip startup SambaNova raises $1 billion in a round led by General Atlantic, reaching an $11 billion valuation as investors continue to back Nvidia challengers. 3️⃣ S&P Global downgrades Oracle's credit rating to BBB-, citing OpenAI as a key credit risk due to Oracle's massive data center contractual obligations. 4️⃣ Databricks adopts Chinese open-source model GLM 5.2 as its default coding engine after it matched Anthropic's Opus 4.8 performance at a lower cost. 5️⃣ Microsoft's carbon emissions rose 25 percent in 2025 to 34 million metric tons, driven primarily by the expansion of its datacenter infrastructure, per the company's 2026 sustainability report. 6️⃣ Over 200 economists and AI researchers, including Nobel laureates, warn that the window to prepare for AI's economic impact is closing fast. 7️⃣ General Intuition, a Bezos-backed startup, raises $320 million at a $2.3 billion valuation to develop physical AI world models trained on gaming data. 8️⃣ GrandCode, a multi-agent reinforcement learning system, becomes the first AI to consistently beat all human participants in live Codeforces contests. 9️⃣ A study finds terrorist groups like Boko Haram are using major AI chatbots for attack planning and weapons development, with safety filters failing to prevent misuse.

"The Age of Autonomous Systems" isn't a forecast. It's the stack being built right now: agents that act, transact, and get things done on your behalf. The premise underneath all of it is a trust layer, which is exactly what Kite is building. We are pleased to share that our Co-Founder & CEO @ChiZhangData will speak in the Tech Track at GTLC 2026 Bay Area Chinese Tech Leaders Summit, hosted by TGO Silicon Valley. She shares the stage with founders and researchers including: ▷ Yuandong Tian (@tydsh), Founder of Recursive Superintelligence, the $4.65B self-improving AI lab. Former Research Director at Meta FAIR, and earlier on Google X's self-driving car team (now Waymo). ▷ Yangqing Jia (@jiayq), creator of Caffe and Co-Founder & CEO of Lepton AI (acquired by NVIDIA). Former VP at NVIDIA, VP at Alibaba Group, and AI Director at Facebook. ▷ Junchen Jiang (@JunchenJiang), CEO of Tensormesh and Professor at UChicago, co-creator of the open-source LMCache. ▷ Bo Li, Co-Founder & CEO of Virtue AI and Professor at UIUC, a leading scholar in AI safety and trustworthy ML (IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, Sloan Fellow). ▷ Ryan Hanrui Wang, SVP Applied AI at Nebius and former Co-Founder & CEO of Eigen AI (acquired by Nebius for $643M), out of MIT's HAN Lab. ▷ Ding Zhao, Professor at CMU and director of the Safe AI Lab, focused on trustworthy and safe AI. ▷ Weiyan Shi (@shi_weiyan), Professor at Northeastern and AI2050 Fellow, who built the negotiation agent behind Meta's CICERO. 📅 July 17, 2026 · Tech Track 2:00 PM 📍 Q Bay Center, San Jose If you're in the Bay Area, come find us. 🪁 🔗

Kite is embedding verifiable identity and programmable spend controls into global payment rails, physical AI, and developer workflows. Here's what we delivered last week: 1️⃣ We joined the Avalanche Payments Collective as a Contributing Partner alongside @FTDA_US, @vaneck_us, and @krakenfx, bringing the Kite Agent Passport to a global payments network covering 150+ countries and 96 currencies. 2️⃣ We shipped cross-chain x402 payments, allowing agents to settle transactions across Base, Tempo, and Solana regardless of where funds are held, with full route timelines now visible in the Kite Passport dashboard. 3️⃣ Settlement is now live on Base, enabling direct-pay and cross-chain routing to handle 1:1 USDC bridging and replacing the treasury relay path for agent wallets. 4️⃣ At Agent Experience Demo Night in SF, our Co-Founder & CTO @scottshics previewed a new developer product coming this month that provides per-user spend visibility and automated cost controls to prevent runaway agent bills. 5️⃣ Kite joined @AethirCloud as an ecosystem partner for Aethir Claw, providing agents with the verifiable identity and stablecoin settlement layer needed to move from ready-to-work to ready-to-transact. 6️⃣ We partnered with @ChainPatrol to protect the Kite community, successfully identifying and taking down 381 malicious links and impersonation attempts to date. 7️⃣ We supported @RiverdotInc Sessions x AI in Tokyo on July 13, joining @axisrobotics and @0G_labs to explore the onchain infrastructure required for physical AI and robotics to sense, settle, and act. 8️⃣ We announced the winners of the Kite Global Hackathon, hosted with @encodeclub alongside @googlecloud, @avax, @cbventures, @smbcnikko_jp, @StanfordSBA with @theBBFund, and @BerkeleyHaas. Over two months, builders competed across Agentic Commerce, Agentic Trading and Portfolio Management, and a Novel track, judged by leaders from Microsoft, Uber, Nvidia, Meta, and Google DeepMind. Eight teams shared a $12,400 prize pool, led by Flattora × ZUKKU (1st), Quittance and WasiAI A2A Gateway (2nd), and ORCA and Kutip (3rd), with standouts like a physical robot concierge that books trips inside budget caps and proof-of-delivery escrow already live on Kite Mainnet. 9️⃣ We launched the Kite Mainnet Use Case campaign in our Discord, recognizing the creative contributions and organic support driving the growth of the Kite ecosystem. The infrastructure for the agentic internet requires both identity and control. 🪁