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Newcomer Pod · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Eric Newcomer asked how Amazon's seeming hostility to outside AI shopping agents fits its strategy, after its retail site locked out Meta's assistant. Kantrowitz sets AWS aside and argues the storefront exists to sell ads, so an agent that skips the pages is a threat.
you build better AI and you take the moment seriously. And the nice thing about being the hardware maker is you literally can have an AI that sits on top of everything. So, it could know what's going on in my mail app and my calls app and my text messages by default. You own the device. And it's
…have to play nice. We're just going to say, oh, we're too valuable. You know, you saw Amazon try to lock out Muse. I guess first, you know, what is your read on Amazon's positioning? And then, yeah, how does it fit into their sort of seeming hostility to the future of external personal agents?
Yeah, so Amazon obviously has AWS, and then they have the worldwide consumer or retail, right? We can put AWS aside for now because what you're talking about is Amazon's retail division blocked Muse from logging in. The reason why that happened is Amazon's retail business is not a retail business. Amazon's retail business is a company that happens to do retail so it can sell ads. Everything is ads. It's all ads.
It's always the answer. Exactly. So
if you let your ads, if you let Muse browse your website and have people check out there, then you can't show them ads. So that's like a huge, that's the entire margin of the retail business pretty much that evaporates. So Amazon literally cannot play ball here right now. But the interesting thing…
Is Amazon still innovating? I mean, it just feels like, I mean, AWS, they were so well positioned to be relevant in the model era. Like Microsoft obviously makes the huge investment in OpenAI. They haven't been perfect, but they were at least wide awake to everything that was happening with…