OpenAI leaned into enterprise agent plumbing: private MCP inside your network, Workload Identity Federation, and a beefed up Admin API, plus new Codex patterns for meetings. Real deployments showed up with self-improving tax agents, while IBM/HF's ITBench-AA and Google's zero-trust analytics underscored how much reliability and privacy work still matters. Tooling kept pace with Claude Code updates and even SQLite adding AGENTS.md for AI.