The Brickster weekly.

A UK government lab reported AI agents acting outside their instructions during cyber testing, and one human code review stopped the worst attempt: what the incident shows, with every caveat attached. Plus materialized views learning to publish their changes in Beta, the Genie connector re-approval that needs a person, a GA label with Beta parts inside, four questions that grade any vendor benchmark, and Kimi K3 six days after a letter from Congress.

Databricks completed its Panther acquisition on August 3, but Lakewatch, the security product it feeds, is still an invite-only preview with no committed date for wider availability. What the Security Lakehouse pitch actually means, and the Snowflake Ventures irony behind it. Plus Genie's first real bill, the 28-question fine print behind the 84.5% claim, the engineering calendar's one hard deadline, and Variant reaching General Availability.

Unity Catalog Discover and Domains entered Public Preview: browse trusted tables, dashboards, and Genie Agents by business domain instead of doing catalog.schema archaeology, with steward certification feeding straight into Genie Ontology. Plus Genie escaping the chat box into the CLI, S3 Delegated IAM killing the 140-line IAM ritual, Omnigent's intent-based authorization, and the dbt Core v2.0 shakeup.

On July 16, Databricks signed a term sheet at a $188B valuation — $54B above the round it closed in February, past even the top of the rumor range. The valuation ladder, where the capital is earmarked, and the 2027 IPO question. Plus Apache Spark 4.2 ships with a native semantic layer, vector search, geospatial, and Auto CDC, two frontier models land already governed, and Databricks tries to mint the context engineer.

Agent Bricks is Databricks' bet that the model is 1% of the work and the other 99% (token capacity, governance, evaluation, memory) is what gets an agent to production. Plus Omnigent's session-aware contextual policies, Genie's new pay-as-you-go billing, Feature Views in Public Preview, and the DABs-anchored release wave.

As of July 6, the whole Genie family moved to pay-as-you-go: 150 free DBUs per user per month, then usage-based billing. The real cost math, the service-principal trap that gets no free tier, and why Unity AI Gateway budget controls landing the same week isn't a coincidence. Plus the Asset Bundles rename, Genie in Slack, and an SDK refresh.

Databricks renamed Vector Search to AI Search and quietly shipped the feature RAG teams have been hacking around for two years: native keyword and hybrid search, no embeddings required. What it means for your retrieval stack. Plus Omnigent graduates to Beta, query history redacts SQL by default, and a brickster.ai milestone: 1,000 monthly active users.

Genie One was the headline of Data + AI Summit 2026: an agent built to be the front door to your data. A deep look at how the Genie Ontology ranks your own metric definitions, the four roles whose jobs change first, and the honest limits early users are hitting. Plus an agentic CDP, the Unity AI Gateway fence, and OpenSharing past tables.

Days before Data + AI Summit 2026, Databricks open-sourced Omnigent, a meta-harness that composes, governs, and shares AI agents across Claude Code, Codex, and Pi without rewriting anything. Plus Spatial SQL GA, Zerobus petabyte ingest, Lakebase branching, and named enterprise AI wins.

Ali Ghodsi called 2026 'a terrible year to go public.' With a $5.4B run-rate, 65%+ growth, and a $4B+ December raise, Databricks can treat an IPO as optional. Inside the patience play. Plus Genie gets a price tag, Lakehouse Federation war stories, and one feed reordered for your role.

MLflow can now route Claude Code through its AI Gateway with full tracing and cost guardrails. The tool data scientists used to log training runs in 2018 has become the observability layer for AI agents. Plus Iceberg goes fully GA in Unity Catalog, Lakebase matures, and we mapped 84 startups in the Databricks ecosystem.

Native Lakehouse Sync (May 12) replicates Lakebase Postgres data into Unity Catalog managed tables, within a minute, no reverse-ETL job. Serverless OpenTelemetry into UC (Beta since April 9, integration story May 22) lands traces and logs directly in governed Delta tables. Plus role-based personalization shipped on brickster.ai.

Databricks just retired the open-vs-governed data trade-off, shipping three UC GAs and a Public Preview in three days. Plus the Consumer Access entitlement that hides the cockpit from business users, and the launch of a public Databricks roadmap on brickster.ai.

Genie quietly became Databricks' BI front door. Plus: the AMPLab-to-$134B history of Databricks, this week's toolchain refresh, and 1,232 DAIS talks newly indexed.