Organizations can now embrace agentic AI without giving up control of their environments

ORLANDO, Fla., Oct. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — ThreatLocker®, a global Zero Trust cybersecurity provider, today announced the launch of Zero Trust AI Control (ZTAIC), giving organizations a tool to deploy agentic AI without surrendering control of their environments. ZTAIC enables security teams to give AI agents exactly what they need to perform their jobs while keeping everything else out of reach, even as agents invoke other applications and processes to take action.

AI guardrails aspire to define how an agent should behave, but AI continues to find ways around self-enforcement of those rules. ZTAIC solves that challenge by independently governing what agents are allowed to do. By applying controls outside AI deployments, ZTAIC keeps security boundaries in place even if an agent behaves unexpectedly.

“The security challenge has fundamentally changed because AI agents aren’t just providing information anymore. They’re being used to take actions across an organization’s environment,” said Danny Jenkins, CEO and co-founder of ThreatLocker. “Organizations around the world need a way to adopt AI with the peace of mind that they aren’t handing over the keys to their environments.”

ZTAIC takes much of the work out of securing AI with recommended policies ready to put into action. Security teams can start with pre-built guardrails, tailor them to their environment, and quickly establish strong boundaries around how AI agents operate.

In today’s deployments, a single request to an AI agent can trigger actions across applications, scripts, browsers, and other services. ZTAIC keeps security boundaries in place throughout that workflow, controlling what agents can access, execute, and connect to without allowing them to bypass existing protections.

Together with ThreatLocker Allowlisting and Web Content Control, ZTAIC gives security teams control across the AI lifecycle, from which AI applications and browser-based services are allowed in the environment to what authorized AI agents can access and do once they are running. Organizations can embrace AI on their terms, with Zero Trust controls that keep them in command every step of the way.

About ThreatLocker:
ThreatLocker is a global cybersecurity leader that stops cyberattacks before they happen. The company’s Zero Trust Platform prevents breaches from both known and unknown threats by allowing only explicitly trusted software and activity across endpoints, networks, and cloud systems. Built to deploy quickly and scale across complex environments, the platform reduces operational overhead while keeping business running uninterrupted. Headquartered in Orlando, Florida, with offices in Dublin, Reading, Dubai, and Brisbane, ThreatLocker protects over 70,000 organizations worldwide.

Contact:
press@threatlocker.com

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SOURCE ThreatLocker, Inc.

Company leaders are presenting four sessions today covering educator-led course design, trust in AI-generated curriculum and personalized learning

ATLANTA, Oct. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — StrongMind, a provider of digital curriculum and learning technology for K-12 schools and educators, is unveiling StrongMind CoursePro, an AI-powered course creation platform for educators and curriculum teams, at DLAC Ignite this week at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis. Attendees can see StrongMind CoursePro demonstrated at Booth 504 throughout the conference, Oct. 19-21.

StrongMind CoursePro helps educators build high-quality, multimedia-rich, standards-aligned courses faster and with less complexity. The platform is powered by StrongMind Intelligence, the company’s proprietary AI layer, and is designed to support educator expertise. By taking on much of the production work involved in building a digital course, it gives teams more time for quality, creativity and the learner experience.

“StrongMind CoursePro is about giving educators more control over how great learning experiences are built,” said Damian Creamer, CEO and Founder of StrongMind. “We believe the future of digital curriculum should be faster, more flexible and more responsive to the needs of schools and students. StrongMind CoursePro combines over two decades of expertise in curriculum design, learning science and technology to help teams transform ideas into high-quality, state standards-aligned courses in a fraction of the time, while significantly reducing course development costs for schools.”

The AI curriculum development work behind StrongMind CoursePro earned StrongMind recognition as a 2026 AWS EdTech Champion from Amazon Web Services. The platform is built on Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, and its agentic architecture automates the generation and evaluation of K-12 courseware, producing curriculum units 1.6 times faster than StrongMind’s previous approach.

StrongMind will announce availability details for StrongMind CoursePro in the coming weeks.

Four sessions on AI and curriculum development

StrongMind leaders are presenting four sessions at DLAC Ignite today, Tuesday, Oct. 20, drawing on the company’s work developing StrongMind CoursePro and its broader use of AI in K-12 curriculum.

Building Smarter: How AI-Powered Course Builder Is Reshaping K-12 Digital Curriculum, presented by Dr. Scott Neil, Chief Learning Officer, and Megan Morkert, Learning Innovation Prompt Engineer. 9-9:50 a.m., International C.

From 18 Months to 4 Weeks: What Happens When Educators Build Their Own Courses, presented by Damian Creamer, Megan Morkert and Dr. Scott Neil. 10:30-10:50 a.m., M106-107.

When Wrong Looks Right: Building Evidence-Based Trust in AI Curriculum Development, presented by Dr. Scott Neil and Megan Morkert. 11:30 a.m.-12:20 p.m., International C.

From Content to Comprehension: How AI-Powered Knowledge Infrastructure Is Personalizing K-12 Learning at Scale, presented by Mike Kunz, Vice President of Data and Technology Operations, and Max Creamer, Director of AI Strategy. 2-2:50 p.m., International 9.

“Any school using AI to build curriculum has to be able to show that what it produces is accurate and instructionally sound,” said Dr. Scott Neil, Chief Learning Officer at StrongMind. “Our sessions at DLAC walk through how we approach that with StrongMind CoursePro, including the review practices that keep educators in control of what reaches students.”

At Booth 504, StrongMind will also share information on the StrongMind CoursePro Fellowship Program, with program details and participation information to be announced. The StrongMind team will be meeting with educators, school leaders and curriculum teams throughout the conference.

About StrongMind

StrongMind is a learning experience company creating innovative technology and curriculum for families, educators and schools. Its growing portfolio includes StrongMind CoursePro, an AI-powered course creation platform unveiled at DLAC Ignite in October 2026 that helps educators and curriculum teams build engaging, standards-aligned learning experiences, and StrongMind Campus, a next-generation K-12 learning platform launching for the 2027-28 school year. Both StrongMind CoursePro and StrongMind Campus are powered by StrongMind Intelligence, the company’s proprietary AI layer designed to enable more personalized, intuitive and meaningful learning experiences.

Founded in 2000 and rebranded as StrongMind in 2015, the company’s work is grounded in decades of experience in digital learning and research-backed curriculum. StrongMind has earned multiple Regional Emmy Awards, recognition as a Top 25 Global Impact-Certified EdTech Company and recognition as a 2026 AWS EdTech Champion. Its mission is to empower learners through innovative tools, flexible learning experiences and a deeply supportive community, advancing its vision to unleash the full potential of every learner. Learn more at strongmind.com.

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SOURCE StrongMind

New Platinum members include Nebius, Nscale and Shopify, deepening the PyTorch Foundation’s role as the intelligence layer for open source AI development

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The PyTorch Foundation, a community-driven hub for open source AI under the Linux Foundation, today announced the addition of nine new members at PyTorch Conference North America 2026. Expansion of the PyTorch Foundation ecosystem signals increased advancements to come in open source AI, with the foundation serving as a compounding hub for innovation.

The Foundation welcomes the following new members:

Platinum: Nebius, Nscale, and Shopify Inc.Silver: LightSeek Foundation and Lablup Inc.Associate: SKOPOS INDIA FOUNDATION, Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan, Messiah University, and Valencia College

AI innovation now happens across all stack layers simultaneously, with research, models, infrastructure, hardware, and production continuously driving each other forward. The PyTorch Foundation serves as the central hub of this interconnected ecosystem, uniting researchers, developers, and companies building open AI. Membership growth advances PyTorch as the critical enabler of AI hardware, with the future of AI innovation built on projects like PyTorch, vLLM, DeepSpeed, Ray, Helion, and Safetensors.

“Open systems learn faster when more people, projects, and organizations are working together, creating compounding gains,” said Mark Collier, executive director of the PyTorch Foundation. “Open source ecosystems let breakthroughs travel between organizations instead of staying locked inside one company. We are thrilled that these new members will share their advancements with the foundation in the pursuit of accelerated, open intelligence.”

Ecosystem Growth: PyTorch Foundation Member News 

Recent milestones across the PyTorch ecosystem highlight how AI itself is joining the learning loop to improve code, kernels, and research workflows. Updates include:

Bringing ExecuTorch to Arm Cortex-M CPUs – ExecuTorch now provides a direct path from PyTorch training to on-device inference. The Cortex-M backend enables PyTorch models to run directly on Arm Cortex-M CPUs with Arm CMSIS-NN acceleration. It supports all capability tiers (Scalar, DSP, and MVE/Helium) from a single workflow.The announcement of TorchNeuron –TorchNeuron is an open source native PyTorch backend for AWS Trainium (and corresponding Amazon EC2 instances: Trn2 and Trn3), enabling AI researchers and practitioners to experiment and run PyTorch workloads with a single configuration change. With eager execution, torch.compile, and native support for PyTorch APIs (DTensor, torch.distributed) and libraries like TorchTitan, TorchNeuron enables workflows from research experimentation to production deployment.Native PyTorch is now publicly available for TPUs – Google is proud to announce TorchTPU, native PyTorch for TPU developers, enabling developers to deploy models on TPUs with minimal code changes and access popular ecosystem projects (vLLM, SGLang, Ray, LLM-d).Extending Inductor for the IBM Spyre Accelerator – In a recent blog, IBM’s AI-native Spyre software stack extends PyTorch’s Inductor compiler and native runtime, reducing Spyre-specific compiler code by 7x while maintaining performance parity on tested workloads. AI-assisted development enabled support for thousands of models with just 44 adapters and approximately 10,000 lines of code, complemented by hardware-agnostic vLLM integration and continuous testing against upstream PyTorch updates.A new case study in which Shopify built a continual learning loop with PyTorch and vLLM – Using a continual learning loop with PyTorch and vLLM, Shopify compresses production failures into model weights every day, beating frontier-model quality, and cutting serving costs by 96%.

The open source community is gathering in San Jose for PyTorch Conference North America this week. From bare-metal infrastructure to applications and agents, the conference covers the entire AI stack, exploring the interconnected system building AI in the open. The foundation brings together practitioners focused on training, inference, kernel engineering, and responsible AI work, creating a hub for the future of open intelligence.

To learn more about the next breakthrough in open source AI, visit https://pytorch.org/foundation.

Supporting Quotes

“Lablup has built Backend.AI as an open-source project from the beginning, and PyTorch workloads run on our platform every day. We have benefited greatly from the PyTorch ecosystem over the years. Joining the PyTorch Foundation is our way of supporting the community that has helped us grow and contributing what we have learned from operating AI infrastructure at scale.”
– Jeongkyu Shin, Co-founder and CEO, Lablup Inc.

“Efficient inference is essential to making AI accessible at global scale, and we believe the infrastructure behind it must be open. PyTorch brings developers, researchers, and hardware innovators together around a shared foundation. Joining the PyTorch Foundation allows us to contribute directly to that ecosystem and help turn advances in models and hardware into practical improvements in performance, cost, and accessibility for the next generation of AI applications.”
– Yineng Zhang, President and Governing Board, LightSeek Foundation

“At Nebius, we believe the future of AI depends on a strong, connected ecosystem, from training to deployment. Joining the PyTorch Foundation as a Platinum member allows us to collaborate more deeply with the community and contribute our expertise in high-performance infrastructure and applied AI. Together, we can help developers and enterprises move more easily from experimentation to production and scale their AI applications.”
– Ryan Hanrui Wang, Senior Vice President, Applied AI, Nebius

“Most infrastructure providers treat the framework and the data center as two separate problems. We treat them as one. PyTorch has remained the base layer of AI because it kept the Pythonic style researchers know, while getting serious about performance. Ray, also part of the PyTorch Foundation, does something different: getting that work to run across thousands of GPUs. With Anyscale, the creators of Ray, set to join Nscale, we’re not just using that ecosystem, we’re building the infrastructure underneath it. Joining the PyTorch Foundation as a Platinum member is us backing that directly, not just benefiting from it.”
– Nick Jones, VP of Cloud Native Platform Engineering, Nscale

About the PyTorch Foundation
The PyTorch Foundation is the vendor-neutral home for the open source intelligence layer developers use for training, optimizing, serving, and running models on any chip in any cloud for any agent. As a community-driven hub hosted by the Linux Foundation, the PyTorch Foundation supports the core PyTorch framework alongside a growing portfolio of innovative projects including vLLM, DeepSpeed, Ray, Helion, and Safetensors. Through open governance, strategic support, and a global contributor community, the PyTorch Foundation empowers developers, researchers, and enterprises to build and deploy AI at scale. Learn more at https://pytorch.org/foundation. 

About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects, including Linux, Kubernetes, Model Context Protocol (MCP), OpenChain, OpenSearch, OpenSSF, OpenStack, PyTorch, Ray, RISC-V, SPDX and Zephyr, provide the foundation for global infrastructure. The Linux Foundation is focused on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact
The Linux Foundation
pr@linuxfoundation.org 

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SOURCE PyTorch Foundation