Latest AI News
Perplexity Ordered to Stop Deploying Shopping AI Agents on Amazon: Report
Amazon, on Monday, reportedly won a court order blocking Perplexity from deploying its artificial intelligence (AI) shopping agents on its e-commerce platform. The decision was said to be given by a California federal judge, who found that the Seattle-based tech giant had strong evidence of unauthorised access by Perplexity's bots. With this, Amazon has received preliminary injunctive relief, which will take effect in seven days. Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the AI browser maker reportedly filed an appeal. Notably, in November 2025, Amazon objected to Perplexity's Comet browser using agents to automate shopping on its website.
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Canopii looks to succeed where past indoor farms have not
David Ashton grew up outside of Sacramento, California, and went to college in San Luis Obispo during the historic drought of the late 2000s. He spent years driving the 300-mile stretch between Sacramento and San Luis Obispo, enthralled by the never-ending lettuce farms, acres of leafy green plants against a bleak, dry background. The fact that these lush, green crops were grown in drought conditions to be shipped to other parts of the country stuck with Ashton and later became the inspiration for his robotic farming startupCanopii, which looks to shrink produce supply chains. Portland, Oregon-based Canopii builds robotic greenhouses that can autonomously run the whole crop-growing process from seeding to harvest without human intervention. These greenhouses can produce up to 40,000 pounds of produce a year while requiring only one spigot of water and taking up the same space as a basketball court. The farms are manufactured by GK Designs and are currently designed to grow herbs and specialty greens like baby bok choy and gai lan, a Chinese broccoli. Ashton told TechCrunch that he started really sowing the seeds for Canopii after the Portland-based agtech company he was set to work at filed for bankruptcy while he was driving up the coast to move there. He worked on the plans at night while his wife was in medical school. After three years, he applied for a $250,000 grant with the National Science Foundation to build a prototype of his vision. After that was successful, he applied for a $1 million-dollar grant to build a full-scale prototype. “Now, five years later, we have hit a major milestone [for] the farm,” Ashton said. “We have an autonomous farm that grows everything from seed to harvest without any human intervention, and we did so with a very small team and very little capital, which I think is very different from what the rest of the industry had experienced.” The company has raised approximately $3.6 million thus far, with $2.3 million largely from grants, and the rest from strategics. Ashton is aware of what many investors and VCs think about the indoor farming category. The once hot sector saw companies likeBowery FarmingandPlentyraise hundreds of millions of dollars before going bankrupt and before seeing strong success. He argues their product is fundamentally different than vertical farms and that the company’s decision to move intentionally slow, and without venture capital, has allowed them to avoid many of the same hurdles. “The capital stack has to be diversified beyond VC,” Ashtons aid. “We’re five now, and we’re still just iterating on one farm, which has allowed us to learn so much. I think if we got VC right away, and we try to scale after year one or two, that’s not possible with food infrastructure.” The company has gotten inbound interest from schools, restaurants, casinos, and more. Now that the company has hit its automation milestone, it looks to build out its first commercial farm in downtown Portland. Down the line, Canopii plans to franchise these farms in the future — and yes, raise venture capital, once it’s ready. “We can mass produce it like a car,” Ashton said. “I think a big achievement on this farm is that the whole thing runs off of 100 AMPs and 240 volts. That’s house power. You can literally put this in a backyard. And that speaks to the level of resource management that we’ve achieved in this farm.”
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Amazon expands a program that lets customers shop from other retailers’ sites
Amazon is expanding access to a program calledShop Directthat lets U.S. customers discover and buy products not sold in its own online store. The retail giant on Wednesday said it will now support third-party product feeds, which merchants use to provide information about their inventory, pricing, and catalog to other partners. With this information, Amazon can direct shoppers to a merchant’s website via its search results or its AI shopping assistant, Rufus, and even let customers use AI to make a purchase. The company hasadded supportfor third-party product feeds from Feedonomics, Salsify, and CEDCommerce, which provide Amazon access to merchants’ inventory and product information in real time. More feed providers will be supported in time, and an Amazon merchant portal with a merchant-direct feed is said to be coming soon. InFebruary 2025, Amazon began beta testing a new shopping feature that would link to a retailer’s website when its own search results didn’t include the product the customer was seeking. Customers would see the product information on Amazon, but could click through to the retailer’s site to learn more, check pricing, and view delivery options. Customers would be notified that they were leaving Amazon’s website so they wouldn’t be confused into thinking they were buying from the company itself. The program was being offered to a range of brands and wasn’t limited to partners using Buy with Prime — a way to offer checkout using a customer’s saved payment information on Amazon. While the move to be included on Amazon could certainly boost a brand’s exposure and potential sales, it could also give Amazon insights into which brands, products and price points are most appealing to customers. The company could use this information to improve its own business by providing data on competing products, tracking trends, identifying potential Buy with Prime partners and more. It could also help Amazon solidify itself as the starting point for product search. The company says it now supportsBuy for Me, which has Amazon use an AI agent to complete purchases, on third-party merchant sites as well. TheAI bothandles the entire purchase process on the customer’s behalf, and the customer simply has to confirm their order details on the checkout page, including their delivery address, taxes, shipping fees, and payment method. Amazon’s AI then completes the checkout from the merchant’s website using the required information. Customers can track these orders in the same “Your Orders” tab where they track their Amazon purchases, or in a special “Buy for Me Orders” tab. Shop Direct is live for U.S. customers on Amazon.com, in the Amazon mobile app, and in Amazon’s Rufus AI assistant.
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Meta didn’t buy Moltbook for bots — it bought into the agentic web
When news broke Tuesday morning thatMeta bought Moltbook, the social network for AI agents, it may have left some people scratching their heads. What on earth would Meta — an ad-supported company — want with a social network where the users are bots? Bots, after all, are not the target audience of brand marketers and advertisers. Meta isn’t saying much. Its only official comment was a brief statement that the Moltbook team was joiningMeta Superintelligence Labs, which would open up “new ways for AI agents to work with people and businesses.” Reading between the lines, this was an acqui-hire. A network built for bots isn’t exactly a natural home for brand advertising — even if Moltbook was never entirelynon-human. What Meta really wanted was the talent behind it — people who are having fun brainstorming and experimenting with AI agent ecosystems. And that, counterintuitively, could be a boon for its advertising business. As Meta CEO Mark Zuckerbergsaid last year, he believes in a future where “every business will soon have a business AI, just like they have an email address, social media account, and website.” On an agentic web, one where AI systems act independently on users’ behalf, AI agents could interact with each other, doing things like buying ads, making bookings, and responding to customers. AI is alsobeing usedto generate ad creative and tailor its output based on who’s viewing it. AI systems could also manage product pricing or generate personalized offers. On the consumer side, agents could be used tofindthe best prices and deals, manage bookings, andshopfor products. Insomelimitedcases,agentscan already check out and pay on consumers’ behalf. (Agentic commerceis still in its early days, and these systems don’t always work as well as advertised. But the market has been moving fast, and improvements seem likely soon enough.) As Facebook once built the “friend graph” — a network defined by social connections between people, where every individual is a node — an agentic web could benefit from an “agent graph,” a system that maps out how various agents are connected and what actions they can take on each other’s behalf. For an agentic web where businesses’ agents and consumers’ agents can work together, though, the agents first need to be able to find each other, connect, and coordinate their activities. As Facebook once built the “friend graph” — a network defined by social connections between people, where every individual is a node — an agentic web could benefit from an “agent graph,” a system that maps out how various agents are connected and what actions they can take on each other’s behalf. This could span areas like travel, online shopping, media and research, productivity tools, and more. This, too, could be where advertising slots in. Today, humans view and click on ads when they see something of interest, but on an agentic web where agents are shopping on users’ behalf, ads might look quite different. Instead of influencing a human to buy a product, a business’s agent may need to negotiate directly with a consumer’s agent to make the sale. Maybe the consumer wants to buy that shirt or that lipstick, but only in a certain color and at a certain price. Maybe the systems become so complex that these considerations go beyond product and price — perhaps the consumer prefers to support small businesses, or shops only with eco-friendly companies. Maybe the consumer only buys items when they’re on sale or purchases generic versions if the ingredients are the same. And so on. In that case, it’s not just a matter of connecting the AI agents but also ranking products by whichever one best fits that individual customer’s needs. If Meta could capitalize on that market — AI at the orchestration layer, meaning the system decides which agents talk to each other and in what order — it could potentially expand its ads business into entirely new territory. This all depends on whether or not consumers actually embrace the agentic web, or ever trust AI enough to let it act on their behalf. But the very existence ofOpenClaw, the personal AI assistant that populated Moltbook with content, suggests that at least some people are already leaning into autonomous AI agents. Of course, there’s another possible reason Meta bought Moltbook. The companylost the acqui-hireof OpenClaw’s creator, Peter Steinberger, to rival OpenAI, so it went after Moltbook, the platform Steinberger’s tool helped build, instead. Petty? Maybe. But it kept Meta’sSuperintelligence Labsin the news.
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Wipro Signs Multi-Year Deal with US-Based TruStage to Modernise Retirement Services
Designit, Wipro’s experience innovation company, will help redesign TruStage’s technology stack and customer delivery model.
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Cyient, Prospecta to Build Unified Data Platform for Asset-Intensive Industries
The alliance aims to create a trusted master data foundation to power AI, analytics, and digital twins.
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Microsoft Warns Pentagon Move Against Anthropic Could Disrupt Military Systems
Without court intervention, Microsoft said tech providers working with the Pentagon would be forced to immediately reconfigure products and contractual arrangements that currently depend on Anthropic’s technology.
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How Ford's India GCCs are Aiding Its E-Commerce Buildout With Agentic AI
The work supported by the Chennai and Bengaluru teams has helped Ford receive the highest rankings for mass-market automaker websites.
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Canva Introduces Magic Layers to Make AI-Generated Images Fully Editable
The feature addresses a common limitation of generative AI design tools, where outputs are typically delivered as static image files that cannot be easily edited.
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Behind the Tech That Powers Rapido’s 6 Mn Rides a Day
Rapido CTO Srivatsa Katta talks about the platform’s highly distributed backend system, mapping India’s roads, and why bike taxis have a different model.
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Google Upgrades Gemini Side Panel in Workspace Apps With New Features
Google added new capabilities to the Gemini assistant in Workspace apps on Tuesday. The Mountain View-based tech giant said that Gemini in Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive is now more personalised, capable, and collaborative. The biggest upgrade is that the artificial intelligence (AI) tool can now create a final draft from scratch with a single prompt, something it could not do earlier. While this is not on the same level as Claude Cowork or the recently launched Copilot Cowork, it does bring some level of automation to Google's productivity ecosystem.
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AlphaGo Turns 10: How DeepMind’s Breakthrough Set the Stage for AGI
While generative artificial intelligence (AI) gained mainstream attention after the launch of GPT-3 in 2020, the underlying technology, machine learning, is decades old. From typing prediction in keyboard apps to recommendation algorithms in social media platforms, all rely on the same technology and have contributed to what AI has become today. One definitive precursor of modern-day AI is said to be AlphaGo, a system created by Google DeepMind in 2016. In fact, it showcased a single moment which convinced researchers and domain experts that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is possible.
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