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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Podcast Episodes
New Gemini [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 21:26
Google launched Gemini 3.6 Flash and started pretraining Gemini 4. China weighed tightening AI export controls, Bessent said the US would probe Chinese model distillation, Apple prepped a Klarna-backed leasing program, a…
It's All China AI All The Time [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 21:10
Alibaba launched Qwen3.8 Max as Moonshot paused Kimi K3 signups amid demand. The Trump administration weighed a slow squeeze on Chinese AI, Hugging Face used China's GLM-5.2 after US guardrails blocked its breach forensi…
Kimi K3 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 19:58
Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8T-parameter model it says rivals Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5. Google fell months behind on Gemini 3.5 Pro, MLB banned dugout iPads from accessing GenAI for in-game calls, and The Verge tested…
The Delivery Space Consolidates [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 20:03
Uber agreed to acquire Delivery Hero for ~$14.8B, expanding into 99 markets. Thinking Machines released its first open-weight model, Inkling, SpaceXAI open-sourced Grok Build after a data-upload backlash, and sources det…
PayPal On The Block? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 22:32
New York became the first state to pause new data center permits, worrying the AI industry. Stripe and Advent offered $53B+ for PayPal, OpenAI's first device leaked as a screen-free speaker, and PrismML shrank a model to…
Let's Regulate This AI Stuff? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 19:55
Demis Hassabis proposed a US-based frontier AI standards body modeled on FINRA. IBM's stock cratered 20% on a Q2 miss from chip-spending shifts, Spotify launched a voice-control feature, Kalshi debuted an AI compute forw…
Apple Sues OpenAI [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 20:43
Apple sued OpenAI, alleging ex-employees stole trade secrets for its hardware push. Twelve states sued to block the Paramount-WBD merger, Anthropic extended free Fable 5 access as rivals raced on price, and Meta killed i…
The New GPT [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 21:39
OpenAI broadly released GPT-5.6 and launched ChatGPT Work, targeting Anthropic. Fidji Simo stepped down from OpenAI citing health, the EU found Meta's "addictive design" violates the DSA, Polymarket sought margin trading…
The Day Of All The Models [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 21:02
SpaceXAI debuted Grok 4.5 with Cursor, targeting Opus-level performance at lower cost. Meta launched Muse Spark 1.1 via API, OpenAI rolled out full-duplex GPT-Live voice models, PrismML ran the largest AI model on an iPh…