Episode Details

Good day %%first_name%%. Amazon threw Meta's shopping agent out of the store overnight, the startups that built on OpenAI and Anthropic are doing the math on open models, and a Chinese coding tool turned out to be shipping entire Git histories to the cloud. Let's get into it.

Amazon Just Bounced Meta's Shopping Agent at the Door GeekWire

* What happened: Late Sunday night Amazon started blocking Meta's new Muse AI agent from shopping on Amazon.com on users' behalf. Ask Muse to buy something there now and you get a popup: “continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use.” Amazon says it asked Meta to take Amazon out of the agent's scope voluntarily first, and Meta declined.

* Why it matters: Muse launched two weeks ago and is already the No. 1 free iPhone app in the US, ahead of ChatGPT. It shops the way you would: opens a browser, logs in with the credentials you gave it, clicks buy. Amazon's complaint has three parts: Meta never told them, the agent doesn't identify itself as a bot, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials. Amazon also made more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year from humans looking at product pages, and an agent doesn't look at anything.

* What everyone's saying: The Verge flags the timing. Amazon sued Perplexity over its Comet browser last year and lost in August, when the Ninth Circuit ruled the user, not the AI company, is the one accessing Amazon's computers. So this time Amazon isn't calling it hacking. It's calling it a terms-of-service violation, the one door the court left open. Meanwhile The Information reported Monday that OpenAI is building its own always-on agent features to answer Muse and SpaceXAI's Grok Bot, so the door is about to get more crowded.

* My read between the lines: These two are business partners. Amazon products have been buyable inside Facebook and Instagram since 2023, and Meta signed a multibillion-dollar deal in April to run agent workloads on Amazon's chips. This isn't a hacking case, it's a custody fight over who owns the customer once the customer stops showing up in person. Amazon's own agent, Buy for Me, identifies itself and lets brands opt out, which is a fine principle, and also exactly the principle that keeps Amazon in the room for every purchase.

📖 Further reading: Cloudflare Built an Agent Browser You Can't Have. This One Has 108,000 Stars. — the agent-in-a-browser mechanic at the center of this fight, and the open-source version anyone can run.

Amazon spent its Sunday night bouncing an agent that wouldn't say who it was. Viktor introduces itself. It's the AI agent that lives in Slack (and Microsoft Teams), connects to 3,000+ of the tools you already pay for, and does the job end to end: the weekly report, the dashboard someone promised in Q1, the campaign draft, the script nobody wanted to write. Not a chatbot you supervise, a coworker you assign. New readers get $50 off their first month. Hire Viktor →

The Startups Are Leaving OpenAI and Anthropic. For Kimi. Bloomberg Law

* What happened: Bloomberg reported Monday that a growing group of startups are moving their products off OpenAI and Anthropic and onto open-weight models. Exhibit A is Harvey, the $15