Laid-off Oracle workers tried to negotiate better severance. Oracle said no.

Oracle’s abrupt termination of an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 employees via email on March 31 has sparked significant employee pushback over what many regarded as inadequate severance. The company offered four weeks of base pay plus one additional week per year of service, capped at 26 weeks, but crucially did not accelerate unvested stock grants — meaning […]

Oracle plans to issue security patches for its ERP, database, and other software on a monthly cycle, rather than quarterly, to respond to the increased pace of AI-enabled software vulnerability discovery. Other software vendors, notably Microsoft, SAP, and Adobe, already release patches on a monthly beat, always on the second Tuesday of each month. Oracle, though, is taking an off-beat approach: It will release the first of its monthly Critical Security Patch Updates (CSPUs) on May 28, the fourth Thursday, and after that, it will release its patches on the third Tuesday of each month — a week after the other vendors — with the next batches arriving on June 16, July 21, and August 18, it said earlier this week. The new CSPUs “provide targeted fixes for critical vulnerabilities in a smaller, more focused format, allowing customers to address high-priority issues without waiting for the next quarterly release,” Oracle said. It will issue a cumulative Critical Patch Update each quarter, so

The Pentagon says it has reached agreements with eight AI companies to use their technology in classified defence settings. The military will have access to resources provided by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Oracle, OpenAI, SpaceX, and the startup Reflection. Absent from the list is Anthropic, following its public dispute and legal battle with the Trump administration over AI ethics. Peter O’Brien looks at how these developments came about.

Oracular spectacular? | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge If you want to know whether the AI bubble is bursting, there's only one publicly traded company that will tell you: Oracle. That's right, the database company. Oracle has burned its boats and pivoted to AI, but not in any kind of usual way. It is not a foundation model builder like OpenAI or Anthropic, obviously. It's not quite a neocloud, though it has entered the same bare-metal business as CoreWeave. It is a software-as-a-service company that has made an audacious bet on a very specific future version of AI as Oracle's traditional business has gracefully declined. It is significantly older than any of its AI competitors, save Microsoft, … Read the full story at The Verge.

Software companies Oracle and Drivestream developed a simulated environment for administrators and IT leaders from 15 institutions to see how AI agents could augment university operations.

Huge bond offering comes amid concerns over tech giant’s debt load and recent flood of AI-related issuance

Oracle says its new Trusted Answer Search can deliver reliable results at scale in the enterprise by scouring a governed set of approved documents using vector search instead of large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Available for download or accessible through APIs, it works by having enterprises define a curated “search space” of approved reports, documents, or application endpoints paired with metadata, and then using vector-based similarity to match a user’s natural language query to the most relevant of pre-approved target, said Tirthankar Lahiri, SVP of mission-critical data and AI engines at Oracle. Instead of retrieving raw text and generating a response, as is typical in RAG systems that rely on LLMs, Trusted Answer Search’s underlying system deterministically maps the query to a specific “match document,” extracts any required parameters, and returns a structured, verifiable outcome such as a report, URL, or action, Lahiri said. A feedback loop

The deal comes amid growing interest in onsite energy options, as AI compute vendors struggle to meet power demands.