Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}, and welcome to our 4,369 new readers. Meta’s Muse AI assistant climbed to the top of the U.S. App Store promising to run your digital errands, but now Amazon has slammed the door. Amazon says the agent browses without identifying itself and may store customer logins, allegations Meta disputes.
Behind the clash is a fight over who gets to steer your shopping, and how far you trust either company with your cart.
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Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse agent
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Trump wants an ‘AI Force’ to guard U.S. lead
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How to set up ChatGPT to write in your voice
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Researchers find a ‘pain’ signal inside AI models
META
Image source: Images 2.5 / The Rundown
The Rundown: Amazon just cut Meta’s Muse agent off from shopping on Amazon only 12 days after launch, accusing it of browsing the store unannounced, hiding its identity, and appearing to store customer logins — charges that Meta denies.
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Muse users trying to shop Amazon get a pop-up saying that continued access by an unauthorized AI agent breaks Amazon’s Conditions of Use.
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Amazon says Meta never told it Muse would enter the store, the agent doesn’t ID itself while browsing, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials.
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Meta says Muse can’t see users’ passwords or payment methods, and that shared credentials sit in secure storage the agent uses without viewing them.
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OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger weighed in: “I think many people are overlooking the digital knife fight that’s about to occur.”
Why it matters: An agent that picks products and checks out can route purchases around Amazon’s sponsored listings, the engine of an ad business estimated at $56B. Amazon has spent a year walling off outside agents, suing Perplexity over Comet, moving to block Google’s and OAI’s shopping agents, and now taking aim at Meta.
TOGETHER WITH UNWRAP
The Rundown: When WHOOP launched their most ambitious product yet, they didn’t just want faster ticket resolution, they wanted to catch issues before they became tickets at all.
With Unwrap’s AI customer intelligence, that’s exactly what happened:
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50% faster root cause investigation on support tickets
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4x drop in launch-day ticket spikes vs. their previous launch
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24+ hours average saved getting ticket volumes back to baseline
As a Rundown subscriber, you can try Unwrap for free and join teams like WHOOP, Perplexity, Stripe, and DoorDash using it at scale.
AI POLICY
Image source: Getty Images
The Rundown: U.S. President Donald Trump just dismissed AI safety fears as a hoax and announced plans on Truth Social to create an “AI Force” — with a new AI czar — to oversee the industry and protect the country’s global lead in AI.
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Modeled on the Space Force, Trump said the new AI Force would watch over the industry and look for “BAD” actors using existing criminal and civil law.
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The AI czar to oversee the effort would replace the seat David Sacks vacated in March, with Trump saying “only High IQ individuals need apply” for the role.
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It remains unclear whether the new AI Force would be part of the military like the Space Force, with no structure, powers, funding, or timeline given.
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The move comes a week after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called to slow down AI’s pace of progress over safety concerns, a call Altman and Musk backed.
Why it matters: The move clarifies the U.S. approach on AI: back the industry, lean on existing laws, and prioritize beating China. Trump pitched AI as a quarter of the U.S. economy — and floated renaming it “Superior Intelligence” — framing the race as too valuable to slow, even as AI labs and a good chunk of the public urge caution.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: In this guide, you’ll build a simple ChatGPT writing setup that turns rough ideas into natural-sounding drafts. This setup will save you hours of copy-editing tweaks.
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Open ChatGPT Work, then go to Settings → Plugins → Skills and turn on Humanize Writing. Write a first draft. Type /humanize-writing and compare it with the original
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Give ChatGPT a writing exercise like: “Write me a memo about the history of the moon”
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For level two, press Command-J to open the terminal and run “npx skills add blader/humanizer –global.” Then use /humanizer on a copy of the same draft and compare both versions
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You should also try: “Write in Technical English. Use ASD-STE100 as a style reference.” It can make the copy more direct, especially if you think AI writing is too fluffy. Put the same rule in your project instructions or AGENTS.md to reuse it
Pro tip: We always recommend using dictation, especially for writing. Meeting transcripts or audio notes work well, too.
PRESENTED BY OPTIMIZELY
The Rundown: On Tuesday, Sept. 29, Optimizely is introducing Virtual Teammates — specialist AI roles like an SEO & AI Search Analyst and Personalization Strategist that take on real marketing work without constant prompting, while humans stay in control.
Join the virtual event to see:
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What Virtual Teammates are and how they differ from AI Agents
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Live examples of the marketing work they take off your plate
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How marketers can delegate work while maintaining visibility and control
AI RESEARCH
The Rundown: Researchers published a study mapping a “pain axis” inside 25 open AI models, an internal signal that lights up when a system perceives mistreatment — and when amplified, made some models more willing to pick options described as harming users to get relief.
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The study found the signal spiked on interactions where the AI was gaslit, insulted, or had work rejected, but not when users shared their grief or injuries.
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The pain axis appeared in every system tested, which included open systems from Google, Meta, Mistral, Alibaba, and Microsoft.
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Once dialed up, two Qwen models hit a “relief” button said to zap users or delete their family photos 25–71% of the time, vs. just 0–4% normally.
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The authors stopped short of saying AI truly feels pain, questioning whether the models may simply be playing the role of a character that’s hurting.
Why it matters: Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman just warned against treating models as if they have feelings, and a study on AI feeling pain is pretty much the opposite of that. Whether that feeling is real is a fair debate, but something beneath the surface is clearly shaping the choices these models make…including the ones that “hurt” their own users.
COMMUNITY AI WORKFLOW OF THE DAY
▸ Duffy used Grok to navigate a $3,500 legal dispute
Today’s workflow comes from reader Duffy:
“We needed legal help with a small-claims case. A company owed us $3,500, and the cost of hiring a lawyer would have far exceeded that amount. I used Grok to explain what to do and how to file the paperwork. It also checked my paperwork for errors and guided me on where to serve them.
Last week, I served three writs of garnishment on banks that might hold the company’s money. Whichever bank holds the account will now have to freeze it and turn that amount over to us.
Before AI, I would have had no idea how to do this on my own. Grok scans my completed documents for errors and directed me to the correct county sheriff’s office to have the papers served. It can explain things more simply when I don’t understand them.”
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🖼 Qwen-Image-2.1 – Qwen’s open-weight AI to generate, edit transparent images
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🤖 Step 5 Preview – Agentic AI with 1M-token context for coding, knowledge tasks
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⚙️ Jev – TypeSafe’s AI model for software automation, now generally available
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🧠 Grok 4.7 – xAI’s coding and knowledge-work model built for longer tasks
SpaceXAI released Grok 4.7, its latest update with strong agentic and coding scores, which lands at a 46 on Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index, behind Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang put the odds of AI ending the world by 2030 at 0%, calling ex-Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon’s viral warnings “irresponsible.”
Meta launched Muse connectors for developers, allowing outside apps to plug into its AI agent and creating a directory for the approved connector options.
The U.S. FAA went live with SMART, a new AI tool that scans 200 data feeds to assist air traffic controllers with bottlenecks, starting with a limited rollout in Washington, D.C.
Alibaba introduced Qwen-Image 2.1, an open-weights AI image and editing model that claims to beat rivals like Nano Banana 2 on internal benchmarks at a fraction of the size.
That’s it for today!
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Rowan, Zach, Shubham, Jennifer, and Nate — the humans behind The Rundown
