Is It Ironic If Amazon Is Shredding Books?

Is It Ironic If Amazon Is Shredding Books?

Author: Morning Brew August 17, 2026 Duration: 20:31
Stripe locked in a $7B+ deal for OpenRouter, and OpenAI leased a 10GW Ohio campus with Nvidia backstopping it. The Journal found $3T in off-balance-sheet AI commitments, an AirTag caught Amazon shredding rare books, and Anthropic detailed Claude's invisible watermarks. Links Sources: Stripe has finalized a deal to acquire AI model marketplace OpenRouter for more than $7B; founded in 2023, OpenRouter had a $1.3B valuation in May (Bloomberg) OpenAI signs a 20-year, 10GW data center deal in Ohio with SoftBank's SB Energy; Nvidia agrees to backstop a portion of the value of the completed data center (The Wall Street Journal) Analysis: nine top tech companies including Alphabet and Meta had ~$3T of AI-related off-balance-sheet commitments, far exceeding their $600B in reported capex (The Wall Street Journal) Anthropic explains how Claude's invisible text watermarks will work (The Verge) Investigation: Amazon is buying huge quantities of rare books, scanning them for AI, and destroying them; a tracked Biblio order went to its Las Vegas facility (The Decoder) Used bookstores are seeing a sales resurgence driven not by readers but by AI companies placing bulk orders in the thousands, with the books destructively scanned, then pulped (Fast Company) AI film startups are setting up studios in Hollywood, using US and Chinese AI models while touting lower production costs and a way around traditional financing (The Guardian) Subscribe to the ad-free feed.

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Author: Language: English Episodes: 50

Tech Brew Ride Home
Podcast Episodes
Hey, Want Some Models? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 21:26
Anthropic shipped Claude Fable and Mythos 5.1 with a 75% cache-price cut, Google countered with Gemini 3.8 Flash, OpenAI teased Astra's public release, a judge spared Google's ad exchange from a sale, and the FBI probed…
An... AI Toothbrush??!! [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 21:30
Tim Cook sent Apple staff a farewell memo on his last day as CEO, the FTC sued Amazon over $20B in hidden ad surcharges, Starman Optical bought GoPro for $285M, Waymo hit three cities, and Dyson made an AI toothbrush. On…
50% Toward AI Takeover? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 21:51
OpenClaw shipped 2.0 with shared sessions that aren't a security boundary. OpenAI's ads hit a $1B run rate, outcome-based AI pricing spread from Salesforce to OpenAI, and the Hugging Face postmortems landed, one calling…
Anthropic Is Street Legal Again [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 21:20
A judge blocked the Pentagon from blacklisting Anthropic, calling the retaliation illegal. OpenAI, Anthropic and 100+ companies warned the AI cyberattack window is closing, Apple TV got pricier again, Stripe walked from…
The Agentic Era [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 20:25
Nvidia posted $96B in quarterly revenue and guided to 70% growth next year, then agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B. Trump weighed sweeping chip tariffs, cybersecurity stocks ripped on AI threats, and Instinct raised…
Meta Settles [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 21:38
Meta agreed to pay up to $16.68B to settle state claims it hooked kids on Facebook and Instagram, with teen time limits attached. Z.ai unmasked Ox Alpha, Amazon killed Mechanical Turk, and Reuters detailed Zuckerberg's a…
New Macs [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 21:21
Apple refreshed the Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra and gave the Mac mini M6 silicon, at higher prices. OpenAI's Jalapeño chip beat Nvidia on efficiency, Perplexity went fully local, WhatsApp toughened logins, and Ub…
Hugging Face Next? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 20:26
Hugging Face explored a sale at $13B+, keeping the AI M&A wave rolling. Trump scolded towns that reject data centers while Abbott said the industry dug its own grave, Fable 5 spending plateaued, and Apple cut 200+ jobs.…
(Portfolio Profile) Onix [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:08:18
In this episode, we explore Onix, a platform that enables experts to train their own AI models to help millions with health, wellness, and personal development. Founders Nicholas Nadeau and David Bennahum discuss how the…
Tokens As The New Currency? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 20:56
Stripe made the OpenRouter deal official at $7.5B. Unitree's Shanghai debut popped 460% past a $50B market cap, YouTube dangled millions to keep creators off Netflix, Slack launched Slack Code, and Binance turned AI agen…