Amazon locks Meta's Muse out of its store

A popup started appearing to Muse users on Sunday night: continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, as first reported by GeekWire. Amazon says Meta never disclosed that Muse would shop its site, never had the agent identify itself in requests, and appears to capture Amazon login credentials without proper authorization, according to TechCrunch. Meta's counter is that Muse never sees passwords or payment details and that credentials sit in secure storage invisible to staff. The real fight is about who owns the customer relationship once an AI agent does the browsing and buying. Shopify has taken the opposite bet, switching on direct checkout by default for eligible US merchants through its Universal Commerce Protocol, according to Yahoo Finance. Amazon just told the market it would rather lose the convenience argument than hand Meta a toehold inside its checkout flow.

Twelve state attorneys general, led by California's Rob Bonta, have settled their antitrust suit against Paramount Skydance in exchange for $1.5 billion in extra US film production spending over five years and a mandated output of 30 films annually rising to 32, according to Reuters. Miss the target and Paramount owes $30 million per missing film into union health and retirement funds, plus risks forced divestiture of Miramax. The company also agreed to keep both studio lots in California for five years and fund a $47.5 million worker transition pool. This was never really about market power. Paramount faces a $7 million-a-day penalty if the deal doesn't close by 30 September, which explains why regulators extracted five years of enforceable commitments rather than a breakup. Early October now looks like the real closing window for the $110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery deal.

Meta stock jumped 11% on Monday and US semiconductor names rallied more than 4% as a group, with AMD crossing $1 trillion in market value for the first time, according to Bloomberg. Arm gained roughly 13-15%, Intel around 12-13%, on the theory that AI agents like Muse will drive CPU demand the way large model training drove GPU demand. South Korea's Kospi rose more than 2% in the following session as Samsung and SK Hynix rode the same wave. None of this rests on Meta disclosing a single usage or revenue number. Muse reaching the top of the App Store is the entire evidentiary basis for a trillion-dollar re-rating. If Meta's next earnings call lacks retention data to match, this unwinds fast.

The US wants $5 billion of its own money plus a matching $5 billion from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Iraq and Jordan to rebuild Gulf energy infrastructure damaged in seven months of fighting with Iran, according to Bloomberg. The vehicle, provisionally named the Partnership for Allied Trust and Construction, would sit under the US International Development Finance Corporation, an agency built for emerging markets now being asked to underwrite reconstruction in some of the wealthiest states in the region. A core goal is building export routes that skip the Strait of Hormuz entirely. The EIA already expects Middle East crude output to stay below pre-war levels until at least the second quarter of next year, so this fund is really a bet that the war ends before the money is needed.

To Lam told Bloomberg at the UN General Assembly that Vietnam is close to a deal on reciprocal tariffs with Washington, and pledged Vietnam will buy more US aircraft, energy and tech, according to Bloomberg. He explicitly denied Vietnam accepts transshipment of Chinese goods, the accusation underpinning the current 40% US tariff on rerouted exports versus 20% on ordinary Vietnamese goods. Internal documents show roughly 29 corporate agreements ready for signing in New York this week, spanning Vietnam Airlines, VietJet, Sun Group and PetroVietnam, per Reuters. Talks have run over a year through six rounds without a final text. Lam needs a deal signed before the transshipment tariff becomes permanent policy rather than a negotiating threat.

Brent has slid to around $103-105 a barrel and WTI briefly dipped below $100 for the first time in nearly two weeks, snapping a run that took Brent above $107 earlier this month on fears over Saudi's East-West pipeline, according to Reuters. The pullback tracks diplomatic signals rather than fundamentals: Washington has granted UN General Assembly visas to Iran's president and foreign minister, and Trump said this week he hopes the war is near its end. The EIA still expects Middle East output to stay below pre-war averages into next year's second quarter, so the discount is a bet on negotiation, not a resolved supply picture. A failed round of UN diplomacy this week would send both benchmarks straight back through $100.

The Financial Times reviewed hundreds of thousands of internal documents from a payments network called A7, describing forged customs codes, shell companies and fabricated corporate stamps used to move money for sanctioned Russian entities after Swift access was cut in 2022, according to the FT. Standard Chartered's Hong Kong accounts alone handled roughly $1.1 billion of the flows, DBS processed $273 million, Citigroup clients received $74 million and Deutsche Bank clients in Europe took in $18 million. Seventeen A7-linked entities also ran over $1.8 billion through First Abu Dhabi Bank, with early routing through three Kyrgyz banks. This is a compliance failure at some of the world's most scrutinised institutions, not a story about clever sanctions-busting. Expect UK, Hong Kong and Singapore regulators to ask why trade-document checks missed a network this large.

Trump barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House on 18 September, and by Monday the Secret Service was confiscating reporters' press passes on the grounds, according to NBC. When CNN's scheduled turn running the White House TV pool came up Monday, the administration left the slot empty rather than assign a replacement, and rival networks refused to fill it in solidarity, per CNN. The result: Trump's remarks at a Monday press event went out with no usable broadcast audio at all. Three media organisations have now filed suit in federal court in Washington seeking an emergency ruling that the ban is unconstitutional. The case will test whether a president can revoke access based purely on coverage he dislikes.

The first written prescription in a consultation is now capped at £21, with £12.50 for each additional medicine, both figures uprated for inflation annually, following the competition regulator's finding that online pharmacies sell the same drugs 50-60% cheaper, according to the BBC. Practices must now actively tell owners a written prescription is available and that medicines may be cheaper elsewhere. One estimate puts household savings at £200-300 a year for owners who switch to online dispensing. The original draft proposed a £16 cap before lobbying pushed it to £21, a reminder that final rules rarely match first drafts.

Kemi Badenoch says a Conservative government would restore tax-free shopping for non-EU visitors, reversing Rishi Sunak's 2021 decision to scrap the scheme, with EU tourists added later if the economics hold up, according to the Telegraph. The party cites analysis projecting 2.35 million extra visitors and £4.1 billion in additional spending, funded partly by tighter recovery of NHS charges from ineligible foreign patients. Non-EU visitor spending in the UK sits at roughly 75% of 2019 levels, against 166% in Spain and 159% in France, per the same reporting. London retailers have already welcomed the pledge publicly. It is still an opposition promise with no costed government backing, competing against Labour's own high-street agenda.

A Columbia scholar told the New York Times Xi is now 'in the driver's seat' ahead of this week's summit, a role reversal from May's Beijing meeting where Trump left with no breakthrough on trade or Iran.

A generational shift in retirement spending that has obvious implications for wealth managers still modelling client portfolios on intergenerational transfer assumptions.