AI Furnace Newsroom: AI Shopping Under Attack, Shopify Bets on Agentic Commerce & OpenAI Approaches $20B Revenue

💡 Furnace Insights

Perplexity & Amazon

Web Browser Wars: Amazon Files Lawsuit to Block Perplexity’s AI Agents Taking Actions on its Platform.

Last week, OpenAI launched its own AI browser. This week, Perplexity received a lawsuit from Amazon to stop AI-driven shopping via it’s Comet browser. Amazon says that Comet enters private account areas (e.g. carts, addresses and payments) and disguises bot traffic as human clicks, so Amazon’s systems can’t tell automation apart from real shoppers.

Amazon claims this degrades the personalized shopping experience, while Perplexity accuses Amazon of anti-innovation and bullying tactics. Indeed, Amazon is building its own AI shopping agents, like Rufus and Buy For Me.

If Amazon wins: Platforms tighten controls, AI agents must use official APIs. If Perplexity wins: Users gain the right to let AI act inside closed systems on their behalf.

The lawsuit is a fundamental question of digital autonomy. Can AI legally act as you on a website? The outcome of this action will determine the autonomy of AI agents for taking actions and paying on behalf of humans.

Shopify

Shopify Bets Big on Agentic Shopping

Shopify is teaming up with OpenAI, Perplexity, and Microsoft to make AI shopping mainstream.

Shopify said that traffic from LLMs and AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude to its storefronts increased by 7x and orders up 11x since January this year. It’s going all in on “agentic commerce” as it says that AI is the biggest shift since the internet.

This signals the change in online buying trends from SEO to AI optimized engines for search, a shift that is becoming top of mind for marketers.

If AI tools become the new shopping search engines, Shopify could be the platform that connects millions of merchants directly to AI-driven buyers.

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OpenAI

OpenAI Confirms it Does Not Expect a Taxpayer Bail-out, Eyes $20B in Revenue

Sam Altman took to X to counter rumours sparked by the OpenAI CFO’s comment that OpenAI is looking for a government backstop to its data centre investments (around $1.4T in compute commitments). This led to market panic, as it could mean that the taxpayer could foot the bill in the case that OpenAI were not able to fulfil it commitments, a haunting shadow of the sub prime mortgage scenario from 2008.

Altman rejected this, saying that taxpayers should not be on the hook and that AI firms should bear their own risk. He proposed a model where private firms chase upside with their own capital, and governments fund shared AI infrastructure that schools, hospitals, and public labs can tap into.

Altman also mentioned that OpenAI revenue could jump to $20B, driven by consumer devices and enterprise tools.

US Job Market

US Fed Chair Jerome Powell says AI Hiring Freeze is Real

Fed Chair Jerome Powell says that U.S. job growth has nearly flatlined and that AI could be the reason as companies shift more and more to AI systems.

CEOs from the likes of Amazon, Paramount and others are openly citing AI when announcing hiring freezes and layoffs.

Powell says once you strip out statistical noise from payroll data, job growth is “pretty close to zero.”

📈 AI Venture Deals of the Week

• Reevo, an AI-native revenue operating system that integrates marketing, sales, and customer success, raised its $80M Series A.

• DeepJudge, a precision AI search tool for legal professionals, closed its $41M Series A.

• Giga, a voice-based AI agent for customer support, raised $61M in its Series A.

• 1001 AI, an AI infrastructure builder for MENA, raised its $9M Seed round.

• Vivien, an AI digital twin for unavailable employees, raised $35M in its Seed round.

• Serval, an AI agent for IT service management, raised its $47M Series A.

• Resistant AI, an AI for fraud detection and combat, raised $25M in its Series B.

⚒️ New AI Product Launches You Don’t Want to Miss 

• Project Suncatcher by Google, Google’s new frontier space-based, scalable AI infrastructure.

• DeepCode, an open-source multi-agent AI platform that automatically translates texts into production-ready backend, frontend and algorithmic code.

• Kruncher AI, an AI-powered platform designed for venture capital and private equity firms that automates deal-flow screening, due diligence, and others.*

• Kosmos, an autonomous scientific research system that unifies literature review, data analysis, and hypothesis testing within one generative platform.

• Codemaps by Cognition, turns complex codebases into interactive visuals, streamlining understanding and debugging.

• NVivo AI, industry-standard qualitative analysis tool, powered by advanced AI capabilities.

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