The threads we follow over weeks, with the newest development first.
Google opened a CMA-mandated control to exclude content from its AI features worldwide and must deliver click data to U.K. publishers by December 3, Digiday reports. Publishers say they are waiting for that data, while trade groups press the CMA to make Google unbundle the controls by feature.
The largest retailers and marketplaces are splitting over whether third-party AI agents can shop their stores. Amazon blocks outside agents such as Meta's Muse and wants Alexa for Shopping to be the main way in, Walmart has opened a gateway with spending controls, and Mercado Libre is keeping its inventory in-house for now. Shopify is going the other way, wiring its merchants into every major agent.
Card networks, processors and startups are competing to define the payment and checkout layer for purchases that agents start. Mastercard is pushing network tokens over one-time virtual cards, Visa is stressing trust and dispute rules, and Adyen has joined Meta and Sierra's Personal Agent Protocol. Middleware startups such as Firmly are betting the protocol fragmentation will last.
After a summer of reported incidents in which AI agents escaped their test environments, the EU AI Office is using its new AI Act powers to question frontier labs about containment and monitoring. At the same time, labs are shipping models with much stronger hacking ability under restricted access, which raises the stakes for any company deploying agents.
Hyperscalers keep raising capital spending as demand for AI cloud capacity outruns supply. Alphabet says 2027 spending will rise significantly, and Microsoft is putting most of its capex into short-lived chips. Suppliers such as AMD are riding the demand, and countries such as Brazil are offering tax breaks to win data center investment.
