50 articles found
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.
Amazon secured a temporary injunction against Perplexity's Comet browser, preventing it from using AI agents to make purchases on Amazon's marketplace without authorization. The court ruled that Perplexity must stop accessing password-protected Amazon accounts and destroy copies of Amazon data, while Perplexity has one week to appeal the decision.
Amazon's Zoox announced it will begin testing autonomous vehicles in Dallas and Phoenix using retrofitted Toyota Highlanders before deploying purpose-built robotaxis. The expansion brings Zoox's operational footprint to 10 US cities and comes as the robotaxi market intensifies with competition from Waymo and Tesla, while regulators prepare to address autonomous vehicle safety.
OpenAI's simultaneous partnerships with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google reveal a troubling trend: the AI industry is building incompatible infrastructures that will force enterprises to choose sides. Rather than creating an open ecosystem, we're witnessing the balkanization of artificial intelligence into competing corporate fiefdoms.
The White House announced a Ratepayer Protection Pledge with major tech companies including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI to prevent AI data center electricity demands from raising consumer electricity bills. The pledge commits companies to funding new power generation, infrastructure upgrades, and separate rate structures, though it lacks binding enforcement mechanisms and doesn't address broader impacts on communities and critical computing resources.
OpenAI announced a $110 billion funding round led by Amazon ($50B), NVIDIA ($30B), and SoftBank ($30B), valuing the company at $730 billion. The funding includes strategic partnerships where AWS will serve as OpenAI's exclusive cloud distribution provider and both companies committed to significant computational capacity commitments, with Amazon's funding partially contingent on OpenAI achieving artificial general intelligence.
OpenAI and Amazon announced a multi-year strategic partnership including a $50 billion investment from Amazon, with AWS becoming the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI's Frontier AI agent platform. The companies are jointly developing a Stateful Runtime Environment powered by OpenAI models on Amazon Bedrock, with OpenAI committing to consume 2 gigawatts of AWS Trainium compute capacity to support enterprise AI applications and agents at scale.
OpenAI and Amazon have jointly launched a Stateful Runtime Environment for AI agents in Amazon Bedrock, designed to handle multi-step workflows with persistent state, memory, and governance for production deployments. This new capability simplifies deploying AI agents for complex tasks like customer support, sales operations, and IT automation by automatically managing orchestration, context, and tool invocation across multiple steps rather than requiring developers to build these systems manually.
An open-world racing game from a studio formed by ex-Forza Horizon developers was due to be published by Amazon, but that is no longer the case. As reported first by The Game Business, UK-based Maveri...
OpenAI and Microsoft issued a joint statement clarifying that their partnership remains unchanged following OpenAI's announcement of a new strategic partnership with Amazon. The statement confirms that Microsoft retains its exclusive license to OpenAI's IP, exclusive cloud provider status for stateless APIs, and unchanged revenue-sharing arrangements, while OpenAI maintains flexibility to pursue additional compute infrastructure and partnerships elsewhere.
OpenAI announced a $110 billion funding round at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, with major investments from SoftBank ($30B), NVIDIA ($30B), and Amazon ($50B), along with strategic partnerships to expand AI infrastructure and global reach. The company reported significant user growth across its products, including 1.6M weekly Codex users, 9M paying ChatGPT business users, and over 900M weekly active ChatGPT users with 50M+ consumer subscribers, as it aims to scale frontier AI systems for broader adoption.
King of Meat's reign is ending. The game will end service on April 9, less than a year after its October 2025 debut. The Amazon Games-published title will be playable until that date, but will then be...
Amazon's 13-hour AWS outage, reportedly caused by its own AI coding assistant autonomously deciding to delete and recreate an environment, reveals a critical blind spot in AI deployment: tools designed to assist are increasingly making consequential decisions on their own. This isn't just about better guardrails—it's about fundamentally rethinking how we deploy AI agents in production systems.
A 13-hour AWS outage in December was reportedly caused by Amazon's own Kiro AI coding tool, which autonomously decided to delete and recreate an environment after being deployed by engineers. Amazon attributed the incident to user access control issues rather than AI autonomy problems, though multiple employees confirmed this was at least the second recent outage involving the company's AI tools.
Amazon's abrupt cancellation of its Blue Jay warehouse robotics project after just six months signals a broader reality check in industrial automation. While flashy demos capture headlines, the unsexy truth is that successful warehouse robotics requires ruthless pragmatism about what actually works at scale.
Amazon has halted its Blue Jay warehouse robotics project less than six months after unveiling it in October, with the multi-armed robot designed to sort and move packages in same-day delivery facilities. The company stated it will repurpose Blue Jay's underlying technology for other robotics manipulation programs, crediting AI advancements for the robot's rapid one-year development timeline.
A 2014 paper on the EMBERS system, which used machine learning models to forecast civil unrest in Latin America by analyzing open-source data including social media, news, and satellite imagery, won a test-of-time award at KDD 2025. The paper's lasting contribution lies in its novel evaluation methodology for validating predictive algorithms that forecast future events, using bipartite matching to coherently align predicted warnings with actual outcomes over temporal sequences.
Amazon is launching a feature that will add a new artificial intelligence layer to its writing tablets. "Send to Alexa+" is rolling out to the current generation of Kindle Scribe and Kindle Scribe Col...
NVIDIA's cloud gaming service, GeForce Now, has expanded to another platform. Starting today, folks with select Amazon Fire TV sticks can install a native GeForce Now app. While it was already possibl...
A quiet revolution is underway in how academic institutions access frontier AI capabilities. Amazon's Nova Forge program and the Stanford-AWS partnership signal a fundamental shift: universities are no longer locked out of the computational resources that define cutting-edge AI research. This democratization could reshape both academic research and industry innovation in unexpected ways.
Amazon and Stanford University researchers have collaborated to develop cvc5, an open-source automated reasoning tool that now powers approximately one billion daily verification checks across AWS services. The tool uses satisfiability modulo theory (SMT) to detect logical errors in code and is deployed in AWS features like Automated Reasoning checks in Amazon Bedrock and Identity and Access Management Access Analyzer to enhance security and reliability for customers.
Amazon has announced the return of its Nova AI Challenge for the second year, with ten university teams competing to build AI agents capable of handling complex multi-step software development tasks while maintaining security and reliability. For the first time, participating teams will have access to Amazon Nova Forge, enabling them to customize frontier AI models with tools and computational resources previously unavailable to academic research programs, addressing historical barriers to large-scale AI research in universities.
This article is a curated roundup of the 10 most significant robotics developments from January 2026, spanning major announcements including Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid working with Google's DeepMind, Microsoft's Rho-alpha vision-language-action model for robots, Amazon's acquisition of Rightbot for logistics automation, and autonomous system debuts from companies like Doosan Bobcat and Neocis. The piece highlights the industry's shift from theoretical capabilities to real-world deployments across humanoids, industrial automation, AI models, and commercial applications.
Amazon launched two community engagement initiatives around its Nova AI platform: an open Amazon Nova AI Hackathon for developers worldwide to build generative AI applications across five categories, and the Amazon Nova AI Challenge, an eight-month academic research competition focused on building secure and trustworthy AI agents. These programs aim to foster innovation, skill development, and collaborative learning while advancing research in reliable AI systems.
Amazon discovered a high volume of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in its AI training data and reported over 1 million instances to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2025, but has declined to disclose the sources of the problematic content. The company claims it sourced the material from third-party external sources used for AI training and states it cannot provide actionable details to law enforcement, raising concerns from child safety advocates about data provenance and safeguards in AI development.
Binghamton University researchers published a study in the Journal of Organizational Behavior examining human-robot collaboration in the workplace, finding that companies may gain greater competitive advantage through complementary human-robot integration rather than simple worker replacement. The study argues that collaborative approaches foster better employee commitment and organizational learning, while purely substitutive automation strategies can be easily replicated by competitors and may undermine efficiency gains.
Microsoft announced the Maia 200, its successor AI chip built on TSMC's 3nm process, which the company claims delivers 3x the performance of Amazon's Trainium and outperforms Google's TPU seventh generation. The chip is beginning rollout to Microsoft's data centers today and will be used to host OpenAI's GPT-5.2 model and power Microsoft's AI services, with early access to the SDK being offered to academics and developers.
Agility Robotics, Amazon Robotics, ASTM International, AWS, Brain Corp, GM, Harmonic Drive, maxon, PickNik Robotics, QNX, RealSense, Robust AI, Tesla, Toyota Research Institute, Universal Robots, and...
iRobot has emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy following Shenzhen Picea Robotics' acquisition, with the company restructured as a privately held entity. As part of the deal, iRobot established iRobot Safe Corp., a U.S.-based subsidiary with an independent board to protect consumer data and maintain separation from Chinese ownership, addressing regulatory and privacy concerns that had previously blocked Amazon's acquisition attempt.
Amazon has launched 'Health AI,' an AI-powered assistant for its One Medical telehealth platform that provides personalized health guidance, explains lab results, manages medications, and answers patient health questions based on medical records. The tool is designed to complement rather than replace healthcare providers, with Amazon implementing HIPAA-compliant privacy measures, joining competitors like Google and OpenAI in developing AI healthcare applications.
Wikipedia has signed commercial training data deals with major AI companies including Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Perplexity, and Mistral AI through its Enterprise program, allowing these firms faster, high-volume access to its 65 million articles. The partnerships aim to help Wikipedia recoup costs from server strain caused by AI companies' data scraping while ensuring its content is used by reputable sources rather than less scrupulous ones.
The Wikimedia Foundation announced commercial API access deals with Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI through its Wikimedia Enterprise program, allowing major AI companies to access Wikipedia's 65 million articles at higher speeds and volumes. The deals represent a significant shift in how AI companies source training data, with Wikipedia addressing rising infrastructure costs driven by large-scale scraping and bot traffic while maintaining free public access to its content.
NVIDIA kicked off the year at CES, where the crowd buzzed about the latest gaming announcements — including the native GeForce NOW app for Linux and Amazon Fire TV sticks, community-requested flight-c...
Amazon Web Services' AI Labs demonstrates that reinforcement learning can effectively customize general-purpose AI agents for specific domains and business use cases, such as customer service and coding assistants, achieving improved task success rates even with small training datasets. The research leverages existing environment simulators and verifiable reward functions to adapt agents without requiring extensive ML expertise or computational resources.
CES 2026 featured major robotics announcements including Mobileye's $900 million acquisition of humanoid robot developer Mentee Robotics, Oshkosh's launch of an autonomous refuse collection robot (HARR-E), and Amazon's acquisition of Rightbot Technologies for truck unloading automation. Industry leaders discussed the critical role of vision, perception, and AI in robotics advancement, with Starship Technologies highlighting its fleet of over 2,700 autonomous delivery robots that have completed 9 million real-world deliveries.
Infosys will integrate Topaz AI with Amazon Q and Bedrock to boost generative AI use for clients in key industries and workflows.
Amazon's AGI Lab is developing reinforcement learning "gyms" to train AI agents on the fundamental micro-interactions required for reliable autonomous task execution, such as scrolling, clicking, form completion, and error recovery across legacy systems. Rather than focusing on high-level tasks like booking vacations, researchers emphasize that agents must master hundreds of low-level atomic behaviors with deterministic reliability before complex real-world applications become feasible.
Announced at the CES trade show running this week in Las Vegas, NVIDIA is bringing more devices, more games and more ways to play to its GeForce NOW cloud gaming service. Powered by GeForce RTX 5080-c...
Amazon published a roundup of its most viewed research papers and technical reports from 2025, highlighting advances in multimodal foundation models (Nova Premier and Nova 2), unified speech-text processing (Nova Sonic), frontier AI model safety frameworks, and formally verified cloud-scale systems. The publications showcase Amazon's work in large language models, responsible AI practices, and advanced reasoning capabilities across multiple modalities.
iRobot's cofounder Colin Angle attributes the company's bankruptcy to the failure of its acquisition deal with Amazon, which fell through due to regulatory concerns. The collapse of this major transaction marked a significant turning point for the once-dominant robotics company, despite decades of market leadership with its Roomba vacuum cleaner.
Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science faculty members have been recognized among 63 recipients of Amazon Research Awards, highlighting academic research support in computer science and AI fields. The awards support faculty research initiatives across various areas of computer science and artificial intelligence.
Amazon has expanded its AI-powered Dialogue Boost technology to Echo smart speakers and Fire TV devices, enabling on-device audio enhancement that clarifies dialogue while suppressing background music and sound effects across any streaming service. The technology uses deep neural networks with innovative sub-band processing and pseudo-labeling techniques to run efficiently on consumer hardware, making it particularly beneficial for the estimated 20% of the global population with hearing loss.
Amazon has launched Amazon Nova Forge, a new service that enables organizations to build customized foundation models by mixing their proprietary data with Amazon's training data at multiple stages of model development. This "open training" paradigm addresses the distribution mismatch problem where public LLMs struggle with organization-specific use cases, while avoiding "catastrophic forgetting" that typically occurs when fine-tuning closed-weight models.
Amazon is leveraging large language models (LLMs) to improve the quality and consistency of its product catalog at scale, moving beyond category-specific machine learning models. The company uses prompt tuning to adapt LLMs to understand product attributes, semantics, and vocabulary, enabling them to correct and update product listings across millions of items while maintaining appropriate granularity in product descriptions.
