Amazon

The Competition and Markets Authority says it has “sufficient information” to launch a merger inquiry into Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic. The regulator has until October 4th to launch a more in-depth probe.

Amazon told the Financial Times that its Anthropic deal “does not raise any competition concerns or meet the CMA’s own threshold for review.”

The feature, called Maven, lets you type prompts like, “show me fantasy audiobooks that I can complete on an 8-hour road trip.” Audible will then use AI to come up with matching audiobooks.

Audible is rolling out Maven as a beta to half of US-based users on Android and iOS. Amazon just debuted an AI-powered discovery feature on its Music app as well.

Scroll through the pictures below and try to match each desk chair with the platform it’s for sale on: Amazon, AliExpress, or Shein.

The correct answer doesn’t really matter — as John Herrman writes, this is the state of online shopping, where products that look the same are for sale everywhere, often at different prices or by different sellers. Everywhere you look, products are cheap, fast, and anonymous.

“When high profile things happen [like] the assassination attempt a couple of weeks ago, you do see that people shift their attention to news,” Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said to reporters, according to Axios. The Olympics have also apparently disrupted consumer spending.

Amazon reported Q2 2024 earnings today.

“The reality right now is that while we’re investing a significant amount in the AI space and [on] infrastructure, we would like to have more capacity than we already have today,” Jassy said on Thursday’s Q2 2024 earnings call. “We have a lot of demand right now, and I think it’s gonna be very, very large business for us.”

Earlier, Jassy said that AWS’ AI business has a “multi-billion dollar revenue run rate.”

AWS earned $26.3 billion in net sales during Amazon’s second quarter — a jump of 19 percent over last year. In Amazon’s Q2 earnings press release, CEO Andy Jassy lauded AWS as a top choice for its AI offerings.

But Amazon’s stock price is down after hours due to lower revenues than expected and disappointing Q3 guidance, CNBC reports.

The principles have helped define Amazon and many of the company’s huge successes. But how the principles are used may be shifting, according to a report from Fortune:

Several longtime managers told Fortune that they felt the overall intent of the leadership principles has now shifted in many situations from guidelines on how to make the right decision, to more punitive usages that come across mainly intended to point out flaws.

Amazon reports its latest earnings tomorrow.

AES has given its Atlas solar robot some AWS smarts and redubbed it “Maximo.” It helped complete an Amazon-backed solar farm in Louisiana and is now moving on to Bellefield, California, home of the largest solar-plus-storage project in the US. According to Amazon, it can “reduce solar installation timelines and costs by as much 50 percent:”

Besides automating heavy lifting, Maximo can also perform in nearly any weather or lighting condition, which is especially useful for the Bellefield project, which is located in a sandy desert area known for extreme heat. Once Maximo arrives there later this year, the robot will work alongside crews to lift hundreds of heavy solar panels into place.

When Amazon’s Invincible series returns for its third season, Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun) is going to be rocking some new blue threads that might become his signature look as the show continues into its just-announced fourth season.

That means mapping developers can access the 2.3 billion unique buildings, 54 million places of interest, 200 million addresses, and other global data collected by the Overture Maps Foundation. The open-source initiative launched in 2022 with the goal of offering a free alternative to mapping data provided by Google and Apple.

There will be plenty of traditional television series like Shōgun and The Bear in the running at the 76th Emmys in September. But given how many Netflix, HBO, Apple TV Plus, Disney Plus, and Amazon projects were just nominated for awards, this year’s competition seems like it could easily go to the streamers.

The agency wants more information about Amazon’s maneuver to hire most of the Adept team and license its technology. Adept said its plans to build “useful general intelligence and an enterprise agent product” would have required “significant attention on fundraising.” The informal inquiry might not lead to an investigation or enforcement, but enforcers are keeping close watch of tech giants and AI.

A report from Bloomberg highlights how a couple’s washable swim diaper business suffered after Amazon’s returns service recirculated a used diaper, leading to a scathing review that hurt sales:

The Barons told Amazon repeatedly that they weren’t at fault and that the review should be taken down. Yet it remains on the site, inflicting lasting harm. The couple says they’re $600,000 in debt, including a loan secured by their home that complicates the prospect of filing for bankruptcy.

Amazon’s brand-specific reordering buttons only lasted from 2015 through 2019, but in that time, they made enough of an impact to earn an eventual featured spot as a Button of the Month.

Some people did try to keep using them — let us know if your hacks are still working.

As explained by Front Office Sports, the NBA is waiting to see if TNT parent Warner Bros. Discovery will try to match any part of the reported $76 billion in offers from NBC, ESPN, and Amazon.

WBD’s (not-HBO) Max could try to match Prime Video, but with a smaller audience than Amazon’s service, matching might not be enough.

The tech giant and comedian Dax Shepard agreed to an $80 million deal for his Armchair Expert podcast, The Wall Street Journal reports. Spotify had landed the show as an exclusive in 2021 before allowing it to be on other platforms last year.