Amazon’s Shopping Agent Controversy

Edition 149 | January 8, 2025

GPT 5.2 wins at poker, Gemini plays fast, Claude folds politely, and DeepSeek checks the cost per hand.

All jokes aside, fun benchmarks like these put into perspective just how fast model reasoning is advancing.

Welcome back to Building AI Agents, your biweekly guide to everything new in the field of agentic AI!

In today’s issue…

• xAI raises $20B at a ~$230B valuation

• Amazon’s “Buy for Me” agent sparks an agentic-commerce backlash

• Massive capital shift toward AI infrastructure over apps

• Regulatory risk is now a first-class agent constraint

• Brex’s Agent Mesh shows agents coordinating together

…and more

🔥 INCASE YOU MISSED IT

Readers’ favorite items from the past week

1. Salesforce adds over 6,000 Agentforce customers

2. Google Cloud’s AI Agents Handbook, 64 pages on everything AI agents

3. Course on building social media agents to automate LinkedIn & X

4. 2026 framework review compares the top 8 agentic libraries

5. Browser agents are going mainstream

📌 THE BRIEFING

⚠️ Amazon's AI agent lists 180+ retailers' products without consent

The incident is sparking a backlash that could define the ethics of agentic commerce. The "Buy for Me" feature scrapes external websites and lets shoppers purchase items through Amazon without the merchant ever opting in. Retailers report incorrect pricing, out-of-stock listings, and AI-modified product descriptions appearing on Amazon, all while the company aggressively blocks competitors' agents from scraping its own marketplace.

In November, Amazon sued Perplexity for the same behavior it's now scaling. For anyone building shopping agents or agentic workflows that touch third-party data, this story is a warning sign, as consent frameworks and opt-in standards are coming whether we build them ourselves or regulators impose them.

💰 xAI raises $20B in Series E funding

The funding came from Nvidia, Fidelity, Cisco, and Qatar Investment Authority at a ~$230B valuation. The round exceeded its $15B target and will fuel Grok 5 training and continued expansion of the Colossus supercomputer, which now runs over 1 million H100 GPU equivalents. The announcement comes just a week after OpenAI's $22.5B raise from SoftBank, signaling unprecedented capital concentration in the AI race.

Investment continues to pour into infrastructure, and Musk is betting that owning compute end-to-end beats renting from cloud providers. The timing is awkward though, as xAI faces regulatory probes in the EU, UK, India, and Malaysia over Grok generating illegal content including CSAM.

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 🤖 AGENT OF THE WEEK

👋 Welcome back to Agent of the Week!

If you're like me, you're subscribed to way more newsletters than you can actually read in a morning.

AI news, tech trends, market updates, industry deep dives—I want to stay informed, but I don't have two hours to spend in my inbox before my day even starts. And when I skip a few days? I'm 47+ unread emails deep with no clue what actually mattered.

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I have it scheduled so when I sit down at my desk by 9am, it's already compiled and waiting for me.

No more skimming 12 newsletters hoping I don't miss something. No more "I'll read that later" (I never did).

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That's the power of having your own AI employee.

Let me show you how to build one.

🧠 How It Works

1. Schedule Trigger → Daily Inbox Scan: Every morning at 9am, the agent checks your Gmail for newsletters with a specific label

   1. I have all my newsletters automatically labeled “Newsletter” when they get delivered

2. Gmail → Pull Newsletter Content: Digest grabs the full text of each newsletter from your inbox

3. Mini Summarizer Agent + Loop→ Extract Top Insights: An AI agent reads each newsletter, ignores ads, and identifies the 5 most important things ranked by relevance. This loops till all newsletters have been read by the agent

4. Code Node → Consolidate Everything: All insights from all newsletters get merged into one structured dataset (code generated with chatgpt!)

5. Main Summarizer Agent → Synthesize Your Daily Brief: A second AI agent reviews all the ranked pieces of news from each newsletter, removes duplicates, and writes my "Top 10 Things to Know Today" email with sources

6. Gmail → Send Your Daily Digest: The agent emails a clean, readable summary

7. Label Cleanup → Mark as Processed Digest removes the newsletter label so those newsletters don't get processed again tomorrow

This agent has saved me so much time, and let’s me still stay up to date on everything important. And it runs with ZERO daily input from me.

Want to build an agent like Digest yourself? I walk through the full setup step-by-step inside our Building AI Agents Community.

Till next week,
✌️ AP