
Amazon won't release Sam Altman biopic focused on OpenAI's 2023 leadership crisis
Luca Guadagnino's Sam Altman biopic has to find a new studio after Amazon dropped it.
50 articles found

Luca Guadagnino's Sam Altman biopic has to find a new studio after Amazon dropped it.

German auto supplier Bosch is pivoting toward humanoid robotics and related sensor technology as its traditional auto parts business faces pressure from competition and weak demand. The company plans to expand production of MEMS sensors crucial for robotic dexterity and has partnered with robotics firm Neura, which recently raised $1.4 billion in funding from backers including Bosch, Nvidia, Amazon, and Tether to accelerate deployment of robots and physical AI systems.
NEURA Robotics announced a Series C funding round of up to $1.4 billion to accelerate development of physical AI and cognitive robots. The company is building an ecosystem called the Neuraverse that combines robotics, AI, sensors, and edge computing for manufacturing, logistics, and service applications, with strategic partnerships including Qualcomm, Amazon, NVIDIA, and Bosch.
Amazon researchers introduce Simple Strands Agent (SSA), a customizable harness designed to minimize the intent-execution gap in agentic AI systems, where mismatches occur between what language models intend and what the software harness actually executes. The research demonstrates that improving tool interfaces, feedback mechanisms, and balancing internal reasoning with external interactions can achieve state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, while also showing that effective agent design requires model-specific customization rather than one-size-fits-all approaches.
Amazon's natural-language upgrade to its Proteus robot marks a turning point in how humans and machines communicate at work. Instead of programming interfaces and specialized training, warehouse workers can now just talk to their autonomous colleagues—and the robots understand.
Amazon announced an upgraded version of its Proteus autonomous mobile robot with natural-language understanding capabilities, allowing warehouse workers to issue commands without programming experience. The company plans to deploy Proteus across Europe starting in the first half of 2025, alongside expanding deployments of its Vulcan picking robot and STARK collaborative tote-handling system, as part of a €10+ billion modernization investment in European fulfillment operations.
Amazon's AGI group presents a new "audit-then-score" protocol for evaluating AI-generated research reports, addressing the challenge that traditional static benchmarks fail for complex AI evaluation tasks. The approach uses AI models to actively scrutinize and refine human-generated benchmarks, improving fact-checking accuracy from 60.8% to 90.9%, and reframes ground truth as an evolving process rather than a fixed dataset.

Amazon announced 68 research award recipients from 49 universities across 11 countries for its Fall 2025 cycle, funding research in areas including AI for information security, agentic AI, automated reasoning, cryptography, cybersecurity, and sustainability. Award recipients gain access to Amazon's datasets and AWS AI/ML services, with Amazon providing consultation and collaboration opportunities to advance research in threat detection, AI safety, and abuse prevention.
The Robot Report Podcast features venture capitalist Ajay Agarwal from Bain Capital Ventures discussing his investment thesis in robotics and AI, drawing on his experience backing early-stage companies including Kiva Systems (now Amazon Robotics) and firms focused on industrial automation, supply chains, and humanoid robotics. The episode explores what makes successful robotics founders effective systems thinkers and covers recent news including Hello Robot's Stretch 4 and Automated Tire's autonomous tire-changing technology.
Amazon researchers introduce set-supervised fine-tuning (SSFT) and global forking policy optimization (GFPO) to train large language models that generate diverse reasoning paths. The approach uses global forking tokens to elicit distinct reasoning strategies, achieving 5-7% improvements in single-shot accuracy on benchmarks like AIME 2025 and LiveCodeBench while avoiding mode collapse where different reasoning modes become identical.
Colin Angle, co-founder of iRobot, has launched Familiar Machines & Magic, a startup developing consumer companion robots called Familiars designed to form emotionally intelligent, long-term relationships with users. The company, which emerged from stealth, combines Angle's 30+ years of consumer robotics experience with a team including veterans from iRobot, Amazon, Disney Research, MIT, and Boston Dynamics to build a platform for artificial life.
Amazon engineers developed advanced optimization tools combining machine learning and Monte Carlo methods to design resilient middle-mile delivery networks that can adapt to uncertainty. The approach stress-tests network designs across hundreds of plausible scenarios rather than optimizing for a single forecast, enabling the company to handle disruptions like demand spikes and logistical delays while maintaining same-day and next-day delivery promises.
Agentic mechanism enables Amazon and vendors to optimize supply chain management without disclosing private information.

Amazon, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Google, and xAI have all signed deals to provide AI to the Pentagon's classified networks. The speed and scale of this shift raises uncomfortable questions about who's really driving AI development—and for what purpose.
Amazon scientists and policy experts outline the company's responsible AI (RAI) pipeline, which integrates safety, fairness, and accountability throughout the AI development lifecycle across four phases: pretraining, post-training, evaluation, and frontier-risk assessment. The approach is supported by over 70 internal and external RAI tools, 500+ research papers, and tens of thousands of hours of employee training, guided by eight core pillars including safety, fairness, privacy, and transparency.

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Reflection AI have signed agreements to provide AI technologies to the Pentagon for use on classified military networks, joining OpenAI, Google, and xAI in similar deals. The announcements highlight the rapid adoption of AI by the US Defense Department, though Anthropic remains the only major US AI provider without a Pentagon agreement after refusing to remove safeguards on its Claude chatbot.
Amazon researchers demonstrate three attacks that can extract private training data from AI models—membership inference, gradient-based reconstruction in federated learning, and data extraction from shared models—and show how differential privacy and secure multiparty computation provide effective cryptographic defenses against these threats.
OpenAI and AWS are expanding their strategic partnership to bring OpenAI models (including GPT-5.5), Codex, and Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents to AWS customers. The integration allows enterprises to access OpenAI's frontier models and agentic capabilities within their existing AWS infrastructure, security protocols, and workflows, with all three offerings launching in limited preview.
Amazon researchers and UIUC colleagues introduced the C3LLM framework, a statistical method for assessing catastrophic failure risks in large language models during multi-turn conversations. The framework uses graph-based modeling and Clopper-Pearson confidence intervals to compute probabilistic bounds on attack success rates, addressing limitations of traditional red-teaming approaches that focus on isolated prompts rather than conversational contexts.
Google plans to invest up to $40 billion into AI startup Anthropic, with $10 billion upfront and $30 billion contingent on performance milestones, alongside a commitment to provide 5 gigawatts of computing capacity using Google's TPU infrastructure. This investment follows a similar $25 billion deal Anthropic announced with Amazon in April, exemplifying the circular investment and partnership patterns common in the competitive AI industry.
Mikell Taylor, head of robotics strategy at GM, will lead a Women in Robotics Breakfast at the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo in Boston to discuss trust and mentorship in the field, where women represent only 19% of robotics engineers. Taylor, who previously led Amazon Robotics' development of the Proteus autonomous mobile robot, will also deliver a keynote on robot design and trustworthiness at the event.

Amazon announced a $5 billion immediate investment in Anthropic with up to $20 billion in additional milestone-based payments, following previous investments in 2023 and 2024. As part of the deal, Anthropic committed to spending over $100 billion on AWS technologies over the next decade and securing up to 5 gigawatts of chip capacity, while Anthropic's Claude AI platform will be integrated into AWS for customer access.
The RBR50 Gala will return at the 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo on May 27 in Boston, honoring top robotics innovators and showcasing award winners including Amazon's Vulcan warehouse robot, Physical Intelligence's robot learning models, and Harvard's soft exoskeleton. The event will feature over 50 technical sessions, 70+ speakers from leading robotics and AI companies, and networking opportunities across artificial intelligence, design, healthcare, and logistics applications.
Three separate announcements in the past week signal a dramatic shift: AI is no longer an experimental tool in pharmaceutical research — it's becoming the primary infrastructure. From OpenAI's specialized GPT-Rosalind to Amazon's molecular prediction models and Johns Hopkins' antibody benchmark, the industry is racing to claim territory in what may be biotech's most consequential transformation.
Amazon's Generative AI Innovation Center developed customized Amazon Nova language models fine-tuned for molecular-property prediction in drug discovery, demonstrating that a single optimized LLM can match the accuracy of multiple specialized graph neural networks while providing improved usability and reasoning capabilities for medicinal chemists. The approach combines supervised and reinforcement fine-tuning to create a unified AI assistant that simplifies workflows and accelerates drug discovery by enabling chemists to query multiple molecular properties in one interaction rather than managing separate models.
OpenAI's paused UK data center and Amazon's delayed satellite internet reveal an uncomfortable pattern: the AI industry's grand infrastructure promises keep hitting the same wall of energy costs and regulatory friction. When deployment consistently trumps development, something's broken.
Amazon's satellite-based internet service, Leo, will enter service by mid-2026, so says company CEO Andy Jassy. Writing in his annual letter, Jassy claimed Leo would offer download speeds of up to 1Gb...
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy outlined the company's robotics strategy in its 2026 shareholder letter, emphasizing robotics as key to faster delivery and lower costs, with over 1 million robots currently operating in fulfillment centers. The company recently acquired RIVR (quadruped delivery robots) and Fauna Robotics (humanoid robot developer) and plans to invest $4 billion in rural delivery expansion and pursue drone delivery through Prime Air, aiming to serve 30 million customers and deliver 500 million packages by decade's end.

Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper) will launch mid-2026, according to Andy Jassy. On Wednesday, the Amazon CEO dropped the news in his annual letter to shareholders. The company says Leo will suppor...
Amazon has developed RuleForge, an agentic AI system that generates cybersecurity detection rules 336% faster than manual methods while maintaining high precision. The system uses specialized AI agents to decompose rule creation into stages (ingestion, generation, evaluation, validation) and employs a judge model that reduces false positives by 67%, enabling security teams to respond to new vulnerabilities at scale.
Amazon's acquisition of Fauna Robotics appears to be a strategic platform play focused on humanoid robot development rather than a consumer robotics venture. Fauna's Sprout humanoid robot, standing 1.07 meters tall with 29 degrees of freedom, emphasizes developer accessibility and real-world reliability through modular control systems, VR teleoperation, and constrained learned control policies rather than ambitious end-to-end autonomy, demonstrating a practical approach to humanoid development from founding in early 2024 to acquisition in March 2026.
The Trump administration's labor board has ordered Amazon to recognize and bargain with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union, which represents workers at a warehouse in Staten Island. This...
Amazon researchers describe techniques for improving LLM-based text-to-speech systems, addressing accent leakage in multilingual synthesis, enhancing expressiveness through classifier-free guidance, and improving robustness using chain-of-thought reasoning. The work demonstrates 5-20% quality improvements across nine locales in English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish using low-rank adaptation and data augmentation methods.
This roundup highlights the top 10 robotics developments from March 2026, featuring major announcements including humanoid robot debuts at industry conferences, acquisitions by Amazon (Fauna Robotics and RIVR), new humanoid startups like Noble Machines and Rhoda AI, and industrial applications such as BMW's deployment of Hexagon's wheeled humanoids in manufacturing. The month was marked by significant activity at Smart Factory & Automation World and NVIDIA GTC, showcasing advances in humanoid robots, perception systems, robotic manipulation, and physical AI for production-scale applications.

DoorDash, Amazon, and FedEx are all betting on autonomous delivery vehicles that look nothing like traditional cars. The scramble to automate last-mile logistics is creating a new category of robots designed specifically for packages, not people.
The 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo will feature a keynote panel on building reliable robots at scale, with experts from Amazon Robotics, Locus Robotics, QNX, and Universal Robots discussing architecture patterns, safety-certified processes, and real-time systems for commercial and industrial robotics. The session will cover practical approaches to designing reliable hardware and software, with speakers sharing insights from careers in collaborative automation, warehouse robotics, and AI-enabled systems.

DoorDash announced a strategic partnership with Also, a Rivian spinoff, to develop and deploy autonomous delivery vehicles at scale. Also manufactures the TM-Q, a four-wheeled electric vehicle designed to carry cargo while fitting in bike lanes, and has already secured a major order from Amazon for last-mile deliveries.

Amazon announced new food delivery ordering capabilities for its Alexa+ subscription service, enabling users to place orders through GrubHub or Uber Eats using natural language on Echo Show 8 and larger devices. The feature supports contextual requests like cuisine preferences, menu item matching, dietary questions, and special instructions, with real-time order updates displayed on screen.
Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, and Anthropic have launched AI health chatbots that allow users to get medical advice and connect their health records to large language models. While these tools address genuine demand for accessible health guidance, researchers emphasize that independent expert evaluation is needed before widespread deployment, as companies evaluating their own products may have blind spots that the broader research community could help identify.
Robot Talk Episode 150 features an interview with Vikas Enti, CEO of Reframe Systems, discussing the use of robotics and automation in construction to build climate-resilient homes faster and more predictably. Enti brings experience from a decade at Amazon Robotics, applying industrial automation principles to address housing shortages through localized fabrication and systems design.
Amazon's acquisition of Fauna Robotics reveals a fundamental shift in how tech giants approach robotics development. Rather than investing in years-long internal R&D programs, companies are increasingly buying small teams with proven expertise—a strategy that could reshape the entire robotics startup ecosystem.
Amazon has acquired Fauna Robotics, a startup founded by former Meta and Google engineers developing kid-size humanoid robots, with the company's employees joining Amazon's NYC office. Fauna's first product, Sprout, is a 59-pound bipedal robot that began shipping to R&D partners earlier this year. This is Amazon's second robotics acquisition this month, following its purchase of Rivr, a stair-climbing autonomous delivery robot startup.
Amazon's acquisition of Rivr and Rivian's massive robotaxi deal with Uber signal a fundamental transformation in how we think about autonomous delivery systems. The convergence of legged robotics, autonomous vehicles, and logistics infrastructure suggests we're entering an era where the 'last mile' problem isn't just being solved—it's being completely reimagined.
Amazon is reportedly planning to re-enter the smartphone market more than 10 years after its last attempt. According to a Reuters report, the mysterious phone is internally codenamed "Transformer" and...

Amazon has acquired Rivr, a Zurich-based autonomous robotics startup previously valued at $110 million, to enhance its logistics and package delivery capabilities. Rivr's four-legged robots with wheels are designed to navigate stairs and uneven surfaces, with the company having just released its second-generation model. The acquisition supports Amazon's broader automation strategy, including its goal to automate 75% of its operations.
While the tech industry chases cutting-edge AI applications, Amazon's AGI Lab is pursuing a counterintuitive strategy: training autonomous agents to navigate decades-old legacy systems that power critical infrastructure. This approach reveals a profound shift in how we think about AI's role in enterprise technology.
Amazon's Alexa+ next-generation AI assistant has launched its Early Access program in the UK, featuring improved conversational abilities, contextual awareness, and British-specific language understanding developed at Amazon's Cambridge Tech Hub. The service will be free during Early Access and for Prime members, with a £20/month subscription for non-Prime users, and includes partnerships with OpenTable, JustEat, Spotify, and other services.
A coalition of Big Tech companies is working on a more comprehensive solution to combat online scams. As first reported by Axios, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, Adobe and Match Gro...
Amazon's AGI Lab is developing agentic AI systems trained on high-fidelity simulations of legacy institutional systems to navigate and manage decades-old software architectures that power critical financial, governmental, and healthcare infrastructure. Rather than replacing brittle legacy systems, AI agents learn their quirks and idiosyncrasies to provide a unified interface that preserves institutional knowledge while enabling modernization without requiring risky system replacements.
As AI agents gain the ability to book flights, make purchases, and access sensitive systems, a cluster of recent incidents reveals the industry's uncomfortable truth: we're deploying autonomous capabilities faster than we can secure them. From Amazon blocking Perplexity's shopping bots to researchers struggling with prompt injection defenses, the gap between agent ambition and agent safety has never been more apparent.