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Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse personalized AI agent from accessing its shopping site, Amazon confirmed, saying that agents such as Muse “should operate openly and respect provider decisions about whether or not to participate.”

The block appeared to even prevent Muse from browsing Amazon’s site. When this reporter asked Muse to check on an item, it reported that Amazon had “put up a notice blocking automated access, so I can’t browse it on my own right now.”

Meta didn’t contact Amazon before Muse started trying to browse on Amazon. The shopping giant has previously blocked shopping bots from OpenAI and Google from browsing its site, and Amazon sued to stop Perplexity’s AI agent scraping its website.

OpenAI released a proposal on Monday that would create international coordination around AI safety. In a blog post, OpenAI called for national AI safety institutes, such as the U.S. Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation, to set standards around areas including model evaluation, risk assessment and incident reporting. The proposal said that the standards would not serve as a system of licenses or mandatory prelease review, which has been a sticking point in U.S. negotiations for safety measures.

OpenAI has previously advocated for international action. In a blog post earlier this month, global affairs head Chris Lehane argued that the U.S. needed to first establish standards at home in order to lead internationally, though he added that international standards would soon be necessary. Any U.S. action, however, has hit stumbling blocks, as the White House waffles on regulatory policy and Congress debates a wide-range of legislative options. Meanwhile, OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic continue to discuss an industry-led standards body, The Information previously reported.

OpenAI’s proposal on Monday argued that international AI standards will be crucial as AI research moves toward recursive self-improvement, or the concept of AI systems being able to train themselves. Those standards should include human oversight over automated AI research and reporting around alignment, OpenAI said.

The post comes ahead of a summit between the U.S. and China, where the two superpowers will discuss AI development and safety. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met a Chinese delegation on Sunday night in Manhattan. They discussed a possible notification mechanism for AI incidents that rise to the national security level, Bessent told reporters.

Xbox is planning to lay off hundreds of employees this week in its second major staff reduction this year, according to someone briefed on the plans. The Microsoft-owned firm also plans to consolidate several of its game studios, this person said.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma in July told staff she would eliminate 1,600 roles by the end of the year on top of 1,600 roles the company cut that month. At the time, Xbox also sold four of its game studio subsidiaries.

An Xbox spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The layoffs and restructuring come as Sharma aims to improve profit margins at the gaming unit, which have lagged behind peers. Sharma has also pushed Xbox to focus more on developing new games from its biggest franchises like Elder Scrolls and Fallout while cutting back on smaller game studios it had acquired in recent years.

Sharma moved quickly to overhaul Xbox’s business after being appointed its leader earlier this year. Microsoft CEO Nadella and CFO Amy Hood have previously discussed restructuring Xbox or spinning it out entirely, The Information previously reported, and have more recently supported Sharma’s plans to overhaul the unit.

Z.ai said that it has open-sourced its coding tool, ZCode, after the Chinese AI firm faced intense backlash from developers who found out that their data was being uploaded to cloud servers without their consent.

“In response to the ZCode product security issues reported by the community, we have completed the necessary remediation and sincerely apologize to all our users,” ZCode’s official X account said in a post on Monday.

“With respect to the code data referenced by the community, we confirm that no such data is retained and that it has never been used for model training,” Beijing-based Z.ai, whose shares are listed in Hong Kong, said in the post.

On Friday, a tech blogger known as Ferstar published an analysis of ZCode, revealing that the desktop coding app automatically bundles, encrypts and uploads users’ local repository data—including the entire timeline of the project and stored files—directly to Z.ai’s cloud servers without asking for user consent. Ferstar’s X post about ZCode has amassed 1.6 million views.

The discovery triggered widespread outrage from developers on social media and shook users’ trust in Z.ai. Earlier this year, xAI’s Grok Build faced similar controversies when a security researcher discovered that the coding tool was uploading users’ code repositories to cloud servers without user consent. In response to users’ backlash, xAI open-sourced Grok Build, just like Z.ai did with ZCode this time.

Alibaba on Tuesday unveiled a powerful new AI chip for training and running models, highlighting the rapid progress in China’s domestic semiconductor capabilities.

During its annual Apsara tech conference, Alibaba said its new AI chip, Zhenwu V900, delivers three times the performance of its predecessor, Zhenwu M890, which was released in May. The V900 is scheduled for mass production and commercial release in the first quarter of next year, it said. Alibaba also plans to launch new central processing units designed for agentic AI workloads, Yitian 720 and Yitian 730, next year.

CEO Eddie Wu said the company aims to boost the total capacity of its data centers around the world to more than 20GW by 2032, as it tries to narrow the gap with U.S. hyperscalers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Liu Dayiheng, Alibaba’s head of LLM development, said that the company’s next-generation model, Qwen4, is currently in training and will be coming out soon. Liu also announced a roadmap for future generations of models including Qwen4.5 and Qwen5, which are expected to be much larger in size, with 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters.

Alibaba’s chip unit, T-Head, has an important role to play as China accelerates its adoption of domestic chips to reduce its dependence on Nvidia. On Sunday, DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng told investors that a major priority for his company is to use more domestic chips to train its models, adding that he expects Huawei Technologies to start delivering training chips to DeepSeek as early as the fourth quarter this year.

Paramount Skydance settled a lawsuit filed by 12 states that had threatened to stop its $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery. The settlement, filed in court on Monday, clears the way for the deal to close.

Under the settlement, Paramount agreed to release at least 30 films into movie theaters a year, although that commitment will rise to 32 films after two years. Paramount promised to keep the movies in theaters for at leat 45 days and not to make them available on a streaming platform for at least 90 days. The company also promised to spend at least $50 million on one-fifth of the films.

In a statement, California attorney-general Rob Bonta said the settlement guaranteed “massive investment in domestic film production,” helping resolve antitrust concerns about the deal. Shares of Paramount, which is taking on a lot of debt to complete the deal, fell 3%.

SB Energy’s initial public offering is facing investor skepticism, The New York Times reported Monday.

The SoftBank majority-owned company is planning to raise $5 billion to $7 billion in a public offering to help develop a massive data center complex OpenAI plans to lease, which is set to be backed with a $105 billion credit guarantee from Nvidia and use Nvidia chips. Nvidia has pledged to invest up to $3 billion in the IPO, The Information first reported. But investors have been worried about the high expected valuation of $50 billion, the report said.

The IPO was expected to list as soon as this month but it’s more likely to happen next month, the report said. SB Energy, which currently generates revenue from the sale of electricity to power authorities, had no data center capacity operating but reported future contracted revenue of $439 billion, per a securities filing earlier this month.

Oura is looking to sell $2.2 billion in shares during its initial public offering, the company said in its updated S-1 filing on Monday. Oura, which makes smart rings that track biometrics including sleep quality and heart health, could reach a $15.6 billion fully-diluted valuation from the sale.

The company itself is offering 13.5 million shares, while existing shareholders are offering 36.5 million shares, with a stock price expected to be between $40 and $44, according to the filing. The bulk of the shares sold will be from early investor Forerunner Ventures, which is selling its entire 9.3% stake in Oura during the IPO.

The filing notes that pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly could buy up to $100 million in shares in the IPO, and funds affiliated with Dragoneer Investment Group were interested in buying up to $300 million in shares at the IPO price. Oura said it intended to use $526.4 million of $567 million proceeds to satisfy tax obligations from vesting employees’ restricted stock units, and use the remaining proceeds for its corporate expenses.

Oura’s net income for the nine months ended in June rose from $1.6 million in 2025 to $60.8 million in 2026. Its revenue grew 74% year-on-year to $1.2 billion, with revenue from memberships more than doubling to $240 million, the filing shows. Oura reached a $11 billion valuation in a round led by Fidelity Management & Research Company last October.