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While Amazon is busy slashing thousands of white-collar jobs to make room for AI efficiency gains, another AI startup is doing something more audacious: replacing Amazon’s customers. Not ideal from Amazon’s point of view, and more consequential than you might think. The twist? One of that startup’s major investors is Jeff Bezos himself. Talk about coming full circle.
Amazon fired off a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity last Friday, demanding the AI search company stop its Comet browser agent from making purchases on Amazon’s behalf. The e-commerce giant accuses Perplexity of computer fraud, claiming the tool degrades the shopping experience and creates privacy vulnerabilities. More specifically, Amazon says Perplexity disguised its agents as Chrome browser users to evade detection, and when Amazon blocked them, Perplexity released updates to bypass those restrictions.
Perplexity, valued at $20 billion (€17.4 billion), fired back Tuesday with a blog post titled “Bullying Is Not Innovation.” The company’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, argues that user agents should have “all the same rights and responsibilities” as real humans (we’ve reached that point already). Amazon, meanwhile, says third-party shopping agents should “operate openly” and respect platform decisions on whether to participate.
The real stakes here aren’t about shopping convenience. Amazon generates tens of billions annually from advertising on its marketplace — those “sponsored” placements sellers pay for when you search for products. If AI agents start doing the shopping, those ads become worthless. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy acknowledged on last week’s earnings call that the customer experience for AI shopping agents was “not good,” citing a lack of personalization, bungled delivery estimates, and wrong prices.
The Plot Thickens
This isn’t their first rodeo together. Amazon requested Perplexity halt its shopping agents back in November 2024, and the startup complied — until August 2025, when Comet launched. The timing is particularly juicy because Amazon launched its own “Buy For Me” AI shopping feature in April 2025. So Amazon isn’t opposed to AI shopping agents per se, just ones it doesn’t control.
The irony? Jeff Bezos personally invested in Perplexity during a funding round in early 2024. Nothing says “it’s just business” quite like your investor’s old company trying to shut you down.
This isn’t even Perplexity’s first controversy this year. Cloudflare accused the company in August of accessing blocked websites by pretending to be a normal Chrome browser user, and Reddit sued Perplexity earlier this month for accessing Reddit posts without paying for a license. There’s a pattern emerging here about Perplexity’s relationship with... let’s call it “permission.”
The real question isn’t whether Amazon will win this fight (they probably will), but what happens when every platform has its own shopping agent and none of them play nicely with anyone else’s. We’re watching the battle lines get drawn for how AI agents will work — or not work — across the internet.
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Hippocratic AI Hits $3.5 Billion Valuation
Healthcare AI startup Hippocratic AI raised $126 million (€ 110 million) in Series C funding led by Avenir Growth. The company, which develops non-diagnostic patient-facing AI agents, has partnered with over 50 healthcare systems across six countries and completed 115 million clinical interactions without safety issues in just 15 months since commercialization. Backers include Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Google’s CapitalG, signaling strong investor confidence in AI’s role in addressing healthcare’s labor shortage.
The Infrastructure Underneath the Innovation
While everyone watches the AI circus, the real action is in who controls the plumbing and who’s willing to pay for it.
Three distinct power struggles emerged Tuesday, each revealing how quickly yesterday’s disruptors become today’s gatekeepers. We’ve covered how Amazon blocked Perplexity’s shopping agents. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund quietly suspended ethics rules to keep holding Big Tech. And Australia expanded its teen social media ban to include Reddit and Kick. The common thread: established players are asserting control just as new technologies threaten to redistribute it.
Norway’s move is particularly telling. The world’s largest sovereign wealth fund ($2.1 trillion, or €1.8 trillion) paused ethical divestments to avoid forced sales of Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet — despite pressure over their roles in Israeli military operations. Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s logic? “The world has changed” since the ethical guidelines were first adopted. Translation: we’re not selling the golden geese, no matter how much they honk.
Australia’s regulator took the opposite approach, widening its world-first teen ban effective December 10. Platforms that fail to block users under 16 face fines up to $32 million (€27.8 million). The message: if you’re enabling social interaction, we’re watching.
But the more consequential stories are about capacity and capital. Microsoft committed $9.7 billion (€8.4 billion) to IREN, a former crypto miner turned AI infrastructure provider, for access to Nvidia GB300 GPUs. IREN stock jumped 24%. The deal signals something crucial: Microsoft (closely tied to OpenAI) is so desperate for compute capacity that it’s willing to pay a former Bitcoin miner to build what it can’t build fast enough itself.
AMD beat estimates and guided higher, with Q3 revenue of $9.25 billion (€8.0 billion) and strong Q4 guidance of $9.3-9.9 billion (€8.1-8.6 billion). CEO Lisa Su called it a “clear step up” in the company’s growth trajectory. The signal: chip supply constraints are finally easing, which means the AI infrastructure bottleneck is starting to clear.
Netflix and ServiceNow announced share splits despite mixed operational signals — Netflix 10-for-1 after missing earnings, ServiceNow 5-for-1 after strong results. Stock splits don’t change fundamentals, but they do signal management’s belief in future growth and can increase liquidity. The timing suggests both companies are positioning for a broader rally — or at least trying to keep retail investors interested.
These moves matter less for what they say about individual companies than for what they reveal about where the real bottlenecks — and opportunities — lie in the next phase of tech evolution. AI agents and algorithmic shopping make for flashy headlines. Infrastructure capacity, capital allocation, and regulatory control? That’s where the current power struggle is taking place.
In Other News
Spotify reported Q3 revenue of €4.27 billion ($4.94 billion), up 7% year-over-year, but that’s down from 20% growth in Q2 2024 — the fifth consecutive quarter of deceleration. More concerning: advertising revenue dropped 6%, despite adding 73 million monthly users. The company expects ads to turn around in “the back half of 2026,” which in corporate speak means “we’re not sure when.” Daniel Ek is stepping down as CEO in January to become executive chairman, handing the reins to two co-CEOs.
Uber posted 20% revenue growth to $13.47 billion (€11.7 billion) in Q3, with gross bookings up 21% to $49.7 billion (€43.3 billion). The company generated $2.2 billion (€1.9 billion) in free cash flow — a remarkable turnaround for a company that was once synonymous with “burning cash.” Stock fell 5% anyway because Q4 guidance underwhelmed. Never change, Wall Street.
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