Amazon blocks Meta's Muse Agent, Trump Rebands AI, Newsom Create AI Kill Switch

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Today on the podcast, Amazon is blocking Meta from access, the new Muse AI agent from shoppingonamazon.com. We have Gemini that is autonomously hacking three different companies, and there's some interesting comments on this particular quote unquote security threat. There is a viral AI safety claim that you might have seen Andrew Yang, he was a former presidential candidate, he was making, and we're gonna break down if it was real, if these safety concerns that he has are fair and accurate or not. Then we have Apple, if you know anything about Apple, you'll know that they got super excited about Apple Intelligence a while back, when the iPhone 15 was first coming out, and they never delivered, it was late. Because of that, there's a $250 million Siri AI settlement, and they're paying up to $95 per device. We're gonna talk about that claim right now. The US and China are opening talks right now on an AI incident notification framework. We have a lot of big high-profile talks going on between China and the Trump administration. At the same time, we have the Trump administration that is floating an AI rebrand. Trump has been tweeting all over True Social. It's sort of hilarious. Some people call it pretty cringy. In my opinion, it's very entertaining, but we'll see what happens. He's promised an AI force and a new AI czar, so there's a lot going on there. We also, on the other side of the political spectrum, have Gavin Newsom of California, who has requested that legislators in the state draft a quote-unquote AI kill switch, and he would like those rules to be written in two months, in case something went wrong. California could kill switch all AI. If you want to test out all of the different AI models that exist out there, perhaps before the kill switch happens and they all die, I'd love for you to go check out aibox.ai. That's my own startup. You get access to over 80 different AI models all in one place. The thing that I love most about it is all of these incredible new AI agents that have come out. You have Meta's Muse, which we'll talk about on the show. We have Claude Cowork, which you've heard me talking about for the last six months. You have ChatGPT Work, which I replace Claude with, if I'm being honest, and it's phenomenal. And then you have a Grokbot, which I haven't really tested much. But those are kind of the four main agents that can, you know, you can download these things on your computer. They can run. They can do tasks for you. They're incredibly useful. Now, the problem is that all of them have different strengths and weaknesses, and none of them do everything. Basically, you have Google, which is an incredible company. They don't even have one of these agents, and they have the best, basically, video maker on the market, which is Google VO3, and maybe you could argue C-dance or some other ones. But, you know, you can't access that with any of these agents. So AI Box was designed to take all of the AI models and all of the AI capabilities that exist. There's 80 to 90 different AI models, and you can get our connector and plug them into any of these tools that you use. So if you're using Cloud Cowork, you can get AI Box, plug it in, and all of a sudden Cloud Cowork can generate images, audio, video, and the same with everyone else. They can all generate video on Google VL3. They can all generate audio using 11 labs. So you get access to all of it. It's only $8.99 a month. I would love for you to try it, plug it into whatever you're using to get work done. And yeah, hope this is something that saves you a ton of money and is super useful. Let's talk about what's going on with Amazon first. So this isn't the first time we've seen Amazon blocking a company from shopping on their website. Proplexity famously had the Comet Browser, which came out, I guess I should have mentioned that when I was talking about those other four kind of co-working tools. The Comet Browser got blocked early on and there were some lawsuits that happened between Proplexity and Amazon. And they basically said, look, you're not a real, you're not like a real person. So, you know, you have to identify yourself as a bot. And if you do identify yourself as a bot, Amazon blocks you. Same thing's happening with the Meta AI Muse agent. People are like, well, why would they do that? Like who cares if a human goes and buys something on Amazon versus, you know, an agent goes and buys something on Amazon for you? Like, wouldn't you be happy for, you know, the extra traffic? And to that, I would say you should. However, Amazon actually makes $86 billion a year on ads. And ads, right, if you have one of these bots running around on your site, running around on Amazon, it's not a real human. It can't click on ads. It can't, I mean, I guess it technically could click on ads, but it's probably programmed in a way where it's going to just always avoid ads and go and search through the results. It's probably never going to, and they know that this $86 billion segment is going to be at risk, because if they're showing, look, we have a million people a day looking at these products, and they're selling ads to that, and impressions, if they're bots, it's not gonna count. So they're blocking them completely. In my personal opinion, I think this is a big losing move for Amazon. I think they probably should sacrifice the ad business for the bot business. Have a way, I mean, if they can block them, they can obviously classify them. I'd say just pull that out of the ad business. They're worried about, you know, what if everyone uses shopping bots and removes, you know, the ad business entirely? Well, if that's the case, then you probably should change your product because everyone's using shopping bots. Like, if the consumer is using something, adapt to the consumer, it's not like, you know, when they say they're blocking Meta's Muse, they're not blocking Meta's Muse, they're blocking a consumer that is asking Meta to go buy something for them. So they're blocking the consumer. In my opinion, this is ridiculous. And what other news just came out today? Well, it turns out Shopify on the back of the block Amazon Shopify went all in in the other direction. Toby Lutke of Shopify just tweeted and said, We're excited to announce we are partnering deeply with Muse to enable a gentic checkout with shop pay on all Shopify stores, offering people an easy and delightful way to shop and check out with Muse. OK, I don't know why everyone says delightful. That's just the most annoying term in in tech jargon. Whatever. OK, the point is Muse can use go on Shopify, can buy things on Shopify sites. Does Shopify care one spec who's buying the product? No, if you authorize your agent to go spend money on a new pair of shoes, it goes to Shopify site and buys some shoes. Fantastic. Everyone's happy. So that makes a lot of sense. There is a tweet from Craig West, who said Amazon cutting off Muse is a sign of an aging business. I personally agree with that. And then there was an interesting point from Nikita Biair, who kind of runs X. I don't know. I think he's head of product at X. But he tweeted and said, How important is AI to Meta? Here's one easy tell.