Amazon is starting to test a new AI shopping agent, a feature it calls “Buy for Me,” with a subset users, the company announced in a blog post Thursday.
If Amazon doesn’t sell something that users are searching for, the Buy for Me feature will display products to users that other websites are selling. Then, users can select and request to purchase one of these products without ever leaving the Amazon Shopping app.
Amazon is the latest company to unveil an AI shopping agent, joining firms such as OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity, which have all showcased similar agents that can visit websites and help users make purchases. Amazon is already most people’s go-to platform for anything they’d want to purchase on the internet, but Buy for Me could allow Amazon to capture even more e-commerce business than it does today.
Behind the scenes, Amazon’s AI shopping agent will visit an external website, select a product that a user requested, and fill out the user’s name, shipping address, and payment details in order to purchase it, according to Amazon.
Amazon says the new agentic shopping feature is powered by its Amazon Nova AI models, in addition to Anthropic’s Claude. One of those models could be Nova Act, an AI agent Amazon unveiled earlier this week that can use websites autonomously.
Amazon said in the aforementioned blog post that Buy for Me uses encryption to “securely” insert your billing information on third-party sites, such that Amazon can’t see what you’re ordering from outside its platform. This is a unique approach compared to OpenAI and Google’s agents, which require humans to fill out credit card information themselves, as well as Perplexity’s AI agent, which has a prepaid debit card to make purchases.
Handing your credit card information over to AI, which is prone to hallucinations and mistakes, may give some users serious pause. In TechCrunch’s experience, AI shopping agents often take a long time to process requests, and often get stuck somewhere along the line.
Amazon is basically asking users to trust that its agent won’t accidentally purchase 1,000 pairs of socks instead of 10, for example. It’s also asking that they accept less control over the shopping experience. If a customer needs to return or exchange an order, Buy for Me will direct them to the digital storefront from which the AI agent made the purchase.
We’ll soon see how many people are willing to take the plunge.
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Social media users have noted that there appears to be no logic behind the tariffs.
Amazon is introducing a new “Recaps” feature for Kindle users to help them recall plot points and character arcs before picking up the latest book in a series. While the company’s press release for the new feature doesn’t mention AI, Amazon confirmed to TechCrunch that recaps are AI-generated.
“We use technology, including GenAI and Amazon moderators, to create short recaps of books that accurately reflect book content,” Amazon spokesperson Ale Iraheta said in an emailed statement.
Users have taken to Reddit to share their concerns about the use of AI for the feature, with some questioning how accurate recaps will be. Although the company has said that it ensures recaps accurately reflect content, TechCrunch has asked for more information about the process.
Kindle device users in the United States can now view short recaps for books they’ve either purchased or borrowed for thousands of best-selling English-language e-books in series. Amazon plans to bring the recaps feature to the Kindle app for iOS soon.
To access recaps, users need to be on the latest Kindle software. Users can check if a series has a recap by looking for the “View Recaps” button on the series page in their Kindle Library or through the “View Recaps” option within the series grouping three-dot menu.
Before you can read the recap, you will be warned that it includes spoilers about major plot points and characters. Once you acknowledge this, you will be taken to the recap.
“By adding a new level of convenience to series reading, the Recaps feature enables readers to dive deeper into complex worlds and characters without losing the joy of discovery, all while ensuring an uninterrupted reading experience across every genre,” Amazon wrote in the blog post.
The company says recaps are available for all sorts of series, from epic fantasy series to mystery thrillers, including trending titles and longtime favorites.
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Generative AI has vastly expanded the toolkit available to hackers and other bad actors. It’s now possible to do everything from deepfaking a CEO to creating fake receipts.
OpenAI, the biggest generative AI startup of them all, knows this better than anyone. And it has just invested in another AI startup that helps companies defend against these kinds of attacks.
New York-based Adaptive Security has raised a $43 million Series A co-led by OpenAI’s startup fund and Andreessen Horowitz, it announced Wednesday. This marks OpenAI’s first investment in a cybersecurity startup, OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch.
Adaptive Security simulates AI-generated “hacks” to train employees to spot these threats. You might pick up the phone to listen to the voice of your CTO asking for a verification code. That wouldn’t be your actual CTO, but a spoof generated by Adaptive Security.
Adaptive Security’s platform doesn’t just spoof phone calls: It also covers texts and emails, while scoring which parts of a company might be most vulnerable and training staff to spot the risks.
The startup focuses on hacks that require a human employee to do something they’re not supposed to, like click on a bad link. These kinds of “social engineering” hacks, while basic, have led to huge losses — think of Axie Infinity, which lost over $600 million due to a fake job offer for one of its developers in 2022.
AI tools have made social engineering hacks easier than ever, co-founder and CEO Brian Long told TechCrunch. Launched in 2023, Adaptive now has over 100 customers, with Long saying positive feedback from them helped attract OpenAI to the cap table.
It doesn’t hurt that Long is a veteran entrepreneur with two previous successes: mobile ad startup TapCommerce, which he sold to Twitter in 2014 (reportedly for over $100 million) and ad-tech firm Attentive, which was last valued at over $10 billion in 2021 according to one of its investors.
Long told TechCrunch that Adaptive Security will use its latest funding mostly on hiring engineers to build out its product and keep up in the AI “arms race” against bad actors.
Adaptive Security joins a long list of other cyber startups working on the boom in AI threats. Cyberhaven just raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation to help stop staff from putting sensitive info in tools like ChatGPT, Forbes reported. There’s also Snyk, which partly credits the rise of insecure AI-generated code for helping push its ARR north of $300 million. And deepfake detection startup GetReal just raised $17.5 million last month.
As AI threats become more sophisticated, Long has one simple tip for company employees worried about getting their voice cloned by hackers. “Delete your voicemail,” he recommends.
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Semiconductor giants Intel and TSMC are reportedly teaming up.
The two firms are said to have reached a tentative agreement to create a joint venture that will operate Intel’s chipmaking facilities, according to The Information. TSMC will have a 20% stake in the new venture.
Instead of funding its stake with capital, TSMC will share some of its chipmaking practices with Intel employees and train them, added The Information.
The Trump administration reportedly kindled the discussions in an effort to boost Intel’s turnaround efforts. Intel executives are worried about mass layoffs.
The development comes less than a month after investor and entrepreneur Lip-Bu Tan was appointed CEO of Intel. At the time, it was reported that Tan was looking to make sweeping changes at the company.
TSMC declined to comment. TechCrunch reached out to Intel for comment.
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Zach Yadegari, the high school teen co-founder of Cal AI, is being hammered with comments on X after he revealed that out of 18 top colleges he applied to, he was rejected by 15.
Yadegari says that he got a 4.0 GPA and nailed a 34 score on his ACT (above 31 is considered a top score). His problem, he’s sure — as are tens of thousands of commenters on X — was his essay.
As TechCrunch reported last month, Yadegari is the co-founder of the viral AI calorie-tracking app Cal AI, which Yadegari says is generating millions in revenue, on a $30 million annual recurring revenue track. While we can’t verify that revenue claim, the app stores do say the app was downloaded over 1 million times and has tens of thousands of positive reviews.
Cal AI was actually his second success. He sold his previous web gaming company for $100,000, he said.
Yadegari hadn’t intended on going to college. He and his co-founder had already spent a summer at a hacker house in San Francisco building their prototype, and he thought he would become a classic (if not cliché) college-dropout tech entrepreneur.
But the time in the hacker house taught him that if he didn’t go to college, he would be forgoing a big part of his young adult life. So he opted for more school.
And his essay said about as much.
He posted the whole thing on X. It repeatedly said how he never planned on going to college and documented his experience making ever more money as a self-taught coder. He wrote how VCs and mentors reinforced the idea that he didn’t need college.
All until he had an epiphany: “In my rejection of the collegiate path, I had unwittingly bound myself to another framework of expectations: the archetypal dropout founder. Instead of schoolteachers, it was VCs and mentors steering me toward a direction that was still not my own,” he wrote.
College would help him “elevate the work I have always done” so he now wanted to learn from humans, not just books and YouTube.
His penultimate paragraph declared, “Through college, I will contribute to and grow within that larger whole, empowering me to leave an even greater lasting, positive impact on the world.”
Despite the grades, test scores, and real-world achievements, he was rejected by Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Duke, and Cornell, among others. He was, however, accepted by Georgia Tech, University of Texas, and University of Miami.
Still, his tweet about the many rejections went viral, with over 22 million views, more than 2,700 retweets and upwards of 3,600 comments.
Many of the comments blasted the essay as “arrogant,” saying that was the problem.
Others blasted the college acceptance system as the problem (with all the usual criticisms there).
Probably the more insightful comments were the ones pointing out that colleges are looking for candidates who seem thirsty for education and will likely graduate. His essay read like he had barely convinced himself to attend.
Even Y Combinator’s Garry Tan weighed in on X, not with feedback for Yadegari, but with his own “confession” that he was also widely rejected and waitlisted on his college apps “because I rewrote my essays after reading Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead.’” and’s Objectivism philosophy appears to be a permanently controversial topic, it seems. (Tan, however, did get into and attended Stanford.)
Yadegari tells TechCrunch that he’s still figuring out his next steps but was fascinated by the response his X post received. “It was interesting to see many different perspectives, but ultimately, I’ll never know exactly why I was turned down. At the end of the day, when I wrote my essay, I hoped admissions offices would perceive me as authentic because that’s all I ever want to be.”
Yadegari also says he’s come to realize that business success isn’t the greatest achievement of his 17-year-old life. Having obtained some of that, “I realized that life was not just about financial success,” he said, “it is about relationships, and about being a part of a larger community.”
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