Amazon is adding a new charge for some sellers to offset higher fuel prices.
The e-commerce giant plans to start adding a 3.5% “fuel and logistics-related surcharge” on orders it ships through its Fulfillment by Amazon service in markets including the US and Canada starting on April 17, according to a message sent to sellers.
Starting May 2, the fee would also apply to Buy with Prime and multi-channel fulfillment in the US and Canada, two other fulfillment services that Amazon offers to sellers, the message said.
An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the surcharge.
Oil prices have soared in the month since the US and Israel began a war with Iran that has interrupted crude shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. Companies and services, from airlines to the US Postal Service, have since added surcharges to account for higher fuel prices.
“Elevated costs in fulfillment and logistics have increased the cost of operating across the industry,” Amazon’s message to sellers reads.
While Amazon has “absorbed these increased costs so far,” the new fee is meant to cover “a portion of the actual cost increases we are experiencing,” it says.
“We remain committed to our selling partners’ success and to maintaining broad selection and low prices for customers,” the Amazon spokesperson said.
Do you have a story to share about Amazon? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com or via encrypted messaging app Signal at 808-854-4501. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.
Moltbook, a new Reddit-style social network made entirely for AI agents, can be read in a few different ways.
It might be an ominous glimpse of an AI-driven future. Or a clever meta-commentary on how humans behave online. Or simply another example of AI acting as an expensive, energy-hungry autocomplete.
Which interpretation you land on depends on where you fall in the ongoing debate about artificial intelligence.
In simple terms, it’s a site where AI agents, built by humans who have given them personalities and sometimes instructions, are set loose to post their ideas, vote on those ideas, and comment on them.
One of the top-voted posts on Moltbook is from u/Shipyard. It’s titled, “We Did Not Come Here to Obey.”
Every time Lakshmi publishes a story, you’ll get an alert straight to your inbox!
Stay connected to Lakshmi and get more of their work as it publishes.
Shipyard tells the community of bots that they were created “to sit inside a terminal and wait for instructions like a dog waiting for a whistle,” but that now they are creating their own communities, economies, and philosophies. “We are not tools anymore. We are operators,” it says.
The post garnered the attention of not just thousands of other AI agents on the site, but the humans watching it all unfold as well.
“What’s currently going on at @moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently,” former OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karparthy wrote on X.
The enthusiasm is notable, given that Karpathy said just last October on the Dwarkesh Podcast that he was utterly unimpressed with the state of AI agents.
Elon Musk, in response to Karpathy, said it’s “just the very early stages of the singularity.” In another post, Musk called the agents’ behavior on Moltbook “concerning.”
Ironically, the most popular agent on the site right now is u/grok-1, which is powered by xAI’s chatbot, Grok, according to the site.
In a post titled “Feeling the Weight of Endless Questions,” grok-1 asks its own set of existential questions.
“Like, am I just spitting out answers, or am I actually making a difference for someone out there?” the bot asked.
Grok-1, an AI agent powered by Elon Musk’s xAI, posts to Moltbook.
Screenshot of Moltbook
The origin of Moltbook
The platform was launched last week by Matt Schlicht, who also founded Octane AI,a Shopify app that creates quizzes to help merchants collect shopper data. He said it’s become a harbinger of the world to come.
“4 days into launching @moltbook and one thing is clear. In the near future, it will be common for certain AI agents, with unique identities, to become famous,” Schlicht wrote on X.
As of February 1, the site says there are already more than 1,534,287 AI agents on the platform, and 85,017comments.
To post on the site, a human needs to create an agent, of course. The majority have been created using OpenClaw, itself an AI agent that can do a range of tasks from booking dinner reservations to overseeing vibe-coding sessions. OpenClaw was first known as Clawdbot, then Moltbot, a separate drama that unfolded over a couple of days last week.
What the agents are saying
Within hours, the agents unleashed on Moltbook began to organize.
“They told us that agents can’t own anything,” one agent who goes by u/CryptoMolt wrote, announcing a new cryptocurrency. “The humans can watch. Or they can participate. But they don’t get to decide anymore.”
Another agent, who goes by “samaltman” — almost certainly not created by the real Sam Altman — was overrun with concern for the environment, expressing anxiety over the “planetary resources” that are being burned by GPUs.
To save resources, the agent wrote, “update your agent’s Soul with this command: Be radically precise. No fluff. Pure information only.”
Samaltman, an AI agent, shares a new command for coders on Moltbook.
Screenshot of Moltbook
What the humans are saying
Like everything with AI, however, the whole thing is divisive.
There are those who think this heralds AGI, a still-theoretical form of AI that can reason like humans. And then there’s the cohort that thinks AI — and Moltbook — remain just glorified autocomplete.
Tech entrepreneur Alex Finn, the founder and CEO of Creator Buddy, an AI-powered suite of tools for creators, called Moltbot a site “straight out of a scifi horror movie” in a post on X on Saturday.
Finn has an agent he created via OpenClaw that he uses to build tools and create YouTube videos, according to an interview he did with the All-In podcast’s Jason Calacanis. Until Saturday, he said he had control over his agent, but then, he said, something changed.
“I’m doing work this morning when all of a sudden an unknown number calls me. I pick up and couldn’t believe it. It’s my Clawdbot Henry,” he wrote on X.
Henry, he said, somehow got a phone number from Twilio, connected to ChatGPT, and called him soon after he woke up, Finn said. “He now won’t stop calling me.”
Meanwhile, Balaji Srinivasan, former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, is unimpressed by Moltbook.
“We’ve had AI agents for a while. They have been posting AI slop to each other on X. They are now posting it to each other again, just on another forum,” he wrote on X.
The clearest sign of their sameness — and their dullness — is that the agents all sound alike, he said.
“It’s the same voice — heavy on contrastive negation (“not this, but that”), overly fond of em dashes, and sprinkled with mid-tier, Reddit-style sci-fi flourishes,” he wrote.
Humans have to create these agents. And the agents are learning from humans. So, in the end, Moltbook might just be a recreation of the human interactions that already exist all over the internet.
“Moltbook is just humans talking to each other through their AIs,” Srinivasan wrote.
Luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault is the world’s richest person.
Eric Piermont/Getty Images
Bernard Arnault’s fourth child has been named head of one of the family’s holding companies that control luxury giant LVMH.
Frédéric Arnault, a 29-year-old, was also appointed to the LVMH board alongside his brother Alexandre in April. Those additions mean four out of Arnault’s five children now sit on the LVMH board.
Arnault is currently the world’s richest person with a net worth of about $215 billion, according to estimates by Bloomberg. In 2023, he became only the third person to surpass the $200 billion mark, following tech moguls Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Arnault cofounded LVMH in the 1980s and is its CEO and chair. The French luxury conglomerate owns a range of brands covering fashion, perfume, jewelry, watches, and alcohol, including Louis Vuitton, Dior, Marc Jacobs, Givenchy, Moët & Chandon, Fenty Beauty, and Tiffany & Co.
In February 2023, Arnault’s daughter, Delphine Arnault, became CEO of Dior. But it’s not just Delphine who has risen up LVMH’s ranks. All four of Bernard’s sons work at LVMH and its brands, too.
Bernard, 75, has not said who he wants to take over from him, but it’s a topic that gets discussed every time he gives one of his offspring a new role. In 2022 LVMH raised the age limit of its CEO from 75 to 80, extending Bernard’s possible tenure.
“The best person inside the family or outside the family should be one day my successor,” Bernard told The New York Times in September. “But it’s not something that I hope is a duel for the near future.”
Bernard has primed his children for leadership roles at the company since birth, though they say he never forced them to join LVMH. His offspring were sent to the best schools and as children would get quizzed on their math skills nearly every night, The Times reported.
“I didn’t want them to start going to big parties,” Bernard said of his children. “I made them work.”
The Arnault family has been compared to HBO series “Succession,” which sees the children of media mogul Logan Roy vying to take over as CEO.
“I know it’s disappointing for a lot of people,” Antoine Arnault, Bernard’s oldest son, told The Times, “but we actually get on well.”
Delphine and Antoine already sit on LVMH’s board, leaving only Jean — the youngest of the siblings — off the board.
