2025 highlights: July

Technology highlights for July 2025 included:

- Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced new capabilities and tools to build AI agents, including a dedicated section for them on its Marketplace.

- The Australian government has added YouTube to the social media platforms to be banned for children under 16 in December 2025. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and X had been named previously.  

- Cloudflare introduced pay per crawl, a way for content owners to charge AI crawlers for access. Content was previously scraped by AI companies without payment. 

- The Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) signed a memorandum of collaboration in operational technology (OT) cybersecurity with ST Engineering. The move is part of CSA’s commitment to secure access to the latest tools and expertise and will also allow the engineering teams of both organisations to jointly study and develop solutions in OT cybersecurity.

- The European Commission has received the final version of the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, a voluntary tool designed to help industry comply with the AI Act's rules on general-purpose AI. The act will enter into application on 2 August 2025 and becomes enforceable by the AI Office of the Commission one year later as regards new models and two years later as regards existing models. 

Once the Code is endorsed by the Member States and the Commission, providers of general-purpose AI models who voluntarily sign the Code will be able to demonstrate compliance with the relevant AI Act obligations by adhering to the Code. 

- OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT agent, which carries out tasks using its own virtual computer, shifting between reasoning and action to handle complex workflows. According to OpenAI, ChatGPT "requests permission before taking actions of consequence", and users can "interrupt, take over the browser, or stop tasks at any point". The agentic function is available to Pro, Plus, and Team users. 

- Palo Alto Networks announced a definitive agreement to acquire CyberArk for approximately US$25 B. The move marks Palo Alto Networks' formal entry into identity security. Combining CyberArk's leading identity security and privileged access management (PAM) with Palo Alto Networks' AI-powered security platforms will extend privileged identity protection to all identity types including human, machine, and autonomous AI agents, Palo Alto Networks said.

- Singapore reported an attack on critical infrastructure. Singapore Minister for Digital Development and Information Mrs Josephine Teo subsequently announced that the government also intends to introduce new requirements for all critical information infrastructure (CII) owners. 

"They will need to report to CSA cybersecurity incidents that they suspect may have been caused by an APT," she said in a keynote address during the Operational Technology Cybersecurity Expert Panel Forum 2025. APT stands for advanced persistent threat.

Satnam Narang, Senior Staff Research Engineer at Tenable said: “The discovery of UNC3886’s campaign targeting Singapore’s critical infrastructure highlights the extraordinary challenges posed by advanced persistent threat (APT) actors. 

"Combating such stealthy opponents is becoming increasingly demanding as the scale and complexity of IT infrastructure that organisations and nations must defend continues to grow. These APT groups are not opportunistic hackers. They are patient, adaptive and adept in their tradecraft.

"Historically, the group has exploited zero day vulnerabilities in virtualisation, firewall and router platforms to gain entry, deploy custom malware and rootkits, harvest credentials, move laterally with stealth." 

"Today, Singapore officially designates 11 sectors, including energy, water, banking and finance, healthcare, transport (land, maritime, aviation), government, infocomm, media, and security and emergency services, as critical information infrastructure (CII). With digital technology now deeply intertwined with how we live and operate, it is likely that additional sectors could be designated as CII in the future,” Narang added.

- Stonepeak, an alternative investment firm, invested US$1.B in data centre operator Princeton Digital Group to support its continued expansion across Asia Pacific.

- The US government unveiled an AI Action Plan towards global AI dominance. 

- Zhipu released version 4.5 of its GLM AI models. GLM-4.5 is its flagship model, while GLM-4.5-Air is a 'lite' version that balances performance and cost. Also new is GLM-4.5 Flash, a free version that "excels at reasoning, thinking and coding", the GLM-4.1V-Thinking vision model, and the CogVideoX-3 model for video generation.

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