Amazon CEO Andy Jassy may have been the source of security concerns that led Anthropic to cut off worldwide access to two models on Friday.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Jassy told Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other government officials that Amazon researchers used Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 to obtain information that could be used in cyberattacks. The government subsequently imposed an export control ban on the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models.

An Amazon spokesperson said in a statement that while it’s “not uncommon for governments to seek our counsel on potential security risks,” the company does not “share the details of those discussions.”

The spokesperson also pointed to an update stating that AWS has been affected by the model cut off.

The Information and Reuters similarly reported that Amazon (a major Anthropic investor) had communicated concerns about the security of Anthropic’s models.

David Sacks, Trump’s former AI czar who now co-chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, offered his own account of the discussions, claiming that “a highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG […] came forward with a jailbreak.”

Sacks added, “The Admin asked [Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei] to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused.”

Anthropic said in a blog post that the capabilities apparently causing government concern are already available in other publicly accessible models.

This post has been updated with a statement from an Amazon spokesperson.

Amazon was sued on Monday over alleged privacy violations from its Ring doorbell cameras. The class action lawsuit, filed in Seattle by Virginia resident Charles Sigwalt, claims that Ring’s Familiar Faces feature stores images of passersby without consent.

Ring announced the Familiar Faces feature last September and faced pushback from consumer protection organizations like the EFF, as well as Senator Ed Markey (D-MA). But the company moved forward with its plans to launch the feature in December.

Familiar Faces lets Ring users identify people who regularly come to their home through AI facial recognition. That way, if a regular guest, like a family member, mail carrier, or neighbor, comes to the door, the device will be able to recognize them and deliver more specific notifications like “Dad is at the door,” rather than “A person is at the door.” Ring users have to opt in to this feature, but privacy advocates noted that the people who walk past these Ring doorbells have not consented to these facial-recognition scans. That same concern is at the center of this class action lawsuit.

According to the lawsuit, “Millions of other Americans passed by a Ring ​security camera and unknowingly had their facial recognition information collected.”

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. At the time the feature was released, the company stated that face data is encrypted and never shared; unidentified faces are automatically removed after 30 days.

Amazon’s Ring has a record of concerning behaviors regarding user privacy. In 2023, Amazon settled with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and paid a $5.8 million fine over allegations that the company’s staff and contractors had improperly accessed private videos from women customers; the FTC’s complaint said that every employee had full access to every customer video, even if the worker had no need to access that footage. Ring has also maintained relationships with law enforcement and once granted police the ability to request Ring footage from users without a warrant.

After airing a Super Bowl ad to introduce Search Party, an AI-powered feature that uses Ring footage to find lost pets, the company faced similar backlash. Days later, Ring canceled its plans to partner with video surveillance company Flock Safety, which has reportedly given footage to ICE and other federal agencies. When Ring founder Jamie Siminoff spoke with TechCrunch after Ring canceled its arrangement with Flock Safety, he indicated that the deal would’ve created too much of a “workload.”

Before Zack Eakin sold investors on his new startup, he practiced on Palmer Luckey.

When Eakin left Luckey’s defense startup, Anduril, in 2024 to start a new composites company called Layup Parts, Luckey — along with Anduril co-founders Brian Schimpf and Matt Grimm — let him workshop the pitch.

He got different feedback from each, Eakin told TechCrunch. Grimm helped him think about how to pitch VCs, Schimpf (Anduril’s CEO) pushed him on strategy, while Luckey — ever the fundraiser — guided him on the storytelling.

This miniature boot camp appears to have worked. Two years ago, Eakin raised a $9 million seed round. The startup announced Tuesday it has raised another $42 million in a Series A funding round led by dual-use venture fund Marlinspike, with participation from new investors Cerberus Ventures and Pinegrove Venture Partners, and existing backers Founders Fund and Lux Capital.

It’s a tidy sum for the Huntington Beach, California, startup, which employs just 60 people or so. And much of it will go toward people. Layup Parts used most of its seed money on capital expenditures. Eakin wants to use the new funding to grow the startup’s ranks and move into a bigger facility this year. The goal is to make ordering custom parts made of carbon fiber or fiberglass as easy as if they were sold on Amazon.

Eakin has been working with composite materials for around two decades, dating back to his time in motorsports, he told TechCrunch. The engineer started his professional career at Chip Ganassi Racing, where he worked with carbon-fiber structures and bodywork, especially for the company’s IndyCar entries and the radical (and radically controversial) DeltaWing prototype.

Eakin took a bit of a detour to become the first engineer at Elon Musk’s Boring Company in 2017. But by 2021, he was once again elbow-deep in composites when he took the role at Anduril.

It was at that point Eakin realized how, during his time digging tunnels, something of a revolution had started in the worlds of industrial fabrication and manufacturing. Startups like SendCutSend and Protolabs had dramatically reduced the time and cost required to prototype and ship parts to customers. But no one was doing this for composites, he said.

“It just kind of dawned on me that, like, all these other manufacturing verticals are getting better, [and] we are struggling to find people to make our composite parts for us,” Eakin said. “Why is there nobody trying to make this better?”

It’s not that Eakin didn’t know the answer. Composites tend to be harder to deal with in general — or, as he put it, there are “a lot more fingers and eyeballs involved.” Plus, there had been a lot of consolidation among composite companies, according to Eakin.

This meant bigger firms were less likely to try to innovate and risk their dependable revenue streams. And even if they wanted to, he said, these companies don’t have the software talent to build the tools required to reach that goal of getting to a one- or even zero-click solution.

“If we have stock materials, and you have a good understanding of those materials, we can build software that has an order of magnitude reduction in the amount of clicking it takes for an engineer to produce those — and ultimately gets to zero clicks, where it just takes customer data and poops out shapes,” he said with a smile.

Eakin said it became obvious that the best way to do this was to start a whole new composites company and that these challenges made the idea all the more valuable.

“I just decided this might be the best thing I can do for Anduril, is to go fix this part of the supply chain, because I don’t think it’s just an Anduril problem,” he said.

So far, he’s been right. In the two years since Eakin founded Layup Parts, his team has been rapidly prototyping and producing parts for a variety of customers, including motorsports, design studios making show cars, and even pickleball paddle companies. The company has already cut the time between receiving customer data and manufacturing a part down from weeks to hours in some cases.

The biggest business lines, unsurprisingly, are aerospace and defense. That includes both startups and the more traditional defense primes, according to Eakin.

The opportunity is evident in the cap table. There’s the lead backer Marlinspike, which is already invested in Anduril and a number of other defense-focused manufacturing companies. Cerberus Ventures was started in 2023 by Chris Darby, who spent nearly 20 years running the CIA-backed venture firm In-Q-Tel.

While Eakin looks back fondly on what he learned from Anduril and its leaders, he’s also carrying over skills he learned at The Boring Company. Despite not working with composites there, he said a lot still applies to a startup. Working at The Boring Company involved a lot of “first-principles engineering stuff, very similar to what we would do in racing,” he said.

“Elon has a very high sense of urgency, so as much as it was a new type of thing to make, it felt familiar with the crazy deadlines and just developing stuff as fast as you can,” he said.

Audiobook, ebook, or both? Now, you won’t have to choose. The Scribd-owned reading subscription service Everand wants to make the choice unnecessary. On Tuesday, the company took the wraps off a combined subscription that brings together Everand’s catalog of over 1.5 million audiobooks and ebooks with the social book club app Fable, which Everand acquired in 2025, into a single plan, directly challenging Amazon’s dominance in digital reading.

The new subscription is available to two apps’ 5 million combined readers and provides access to that over 1.5 million title library of audiobooks and ebooks, plus Fable’s nearly 200,000 online book clubs. As you read or listen in one app, that activity is synced to the other.

The entry-level plan offers one book for $11.99 per month in the U.S., while a $16.99 per month plan offers three books, and a $28.99 per month plan lets you dive into five. Because the subscription covers both ebooks and audiobooks, that’s a fairly competitive deal compared with Audible Premium Plus ($14.95/month), which offers one credit for an audiobook along with its streaming catalog of originals and podcasts.

The hope on Everand’s part is that this bundled approach could help smaller players like itself make a dent in Amazon’s reading empire, which today spans Audible audiobooks, Kindle ebooks, and the still-popular reading recommendation and logging app Goodreads.

It’s a textbook case of using an acquisition to create switching costs and deepen user engagement — exactly the playbook Amazon has run for years. By combining the properties, Fable’s more than 100 million ratings and reviews can now be surfaced in Everand, while Everand readers can jump into communities associated with the book they’re currently reading.

The company notes that last year, 820,000 Fable readers joined a new club in its app. With the new subscription plans, Fable Plus is included, offering advanced reading stats, custom reading goals, and an ad-free experience.

Everand isn’t the only one circling Amazon’s turf. Spotify has also entered this market with its own audiobooks offering and, oddly, physical books. To help users move between formats, Spotify offers a “page match” feature that syncs your place between a physical book and the audio version.

Everand believes the new combined experience could attract readers who want a subscription that covers both audiobooks and ebooks in one place, citing its own survey of over 1,600 U.S.-based adult readers conducted in 2025, which found that over half of readers regularly consume both formats.

Timing matters here, too. Thanks to BookTok’s influence and a general resurgence of offline (or “analog“) activities, particularly among Gen Z, readers today are interested in not just consuming content but forming communities around the content, where they can discuss their latest reads, rate and review titles, share favorite quotes and passages, and more.

Fable’s community app caters to this trend, offering a book tracker, reading goals, daily streak trackers, lists, book clubs, and discussion rooms.

The app is not without its competition. Today, there are numerous reading companion apps to choose from, including Hardcover, Storygraph, Margins, PageBound, Bookshelf, Bookly, TBR, Reading Journey, and Bookwise, and many others. The crowding has already claimed one casualty; Tome announced a shutdown earlier this month, citing overwhelming competition.

In addition to the combined subscription for U.S. readers, Everand is also expanding its Standard, Plus, and Deluxe subscription tiers to worldwide markets. It has also modified how “unlocks” work, allowing unused credits to roll over for up to six months, instead of expiring at the end of a subscriber’s billing period.

Amazon’s annual Prime Day event is taking place June 23-26, the company announced on Tuesday. This year, the e-commerce giant is holding the deals event earlier than usual, as Prime Day is typically held in July.

“Members can save on top brands, trending products, and items exclusive to Amazon, plus fresh groceries, summer essentials, and back-to-school must-haves—all with fast, free delivery,” the company wrote in a blog post.

In the past, Prime Day was largely about scoring deals on indulgent items, but in recent years, shoppers have increasingly focused on essentials. Amazon told CNBC that groceries and household essentials will be a main focus of this year’s deals event.

The move makes sense, especially since data from the University of Michigan showed that U.S. consumer sentiment dropped in May to a record low as people navigate a difficult economy.

During last year’s Prime Day event, U.S. retailers saw $24.1 billion in online spend, representing 30.3% year-over-year growth.

Amazon Prime Day is back, it is four days long again, and, for the first time in Prime Day’s history, it’s kicking off in June rather than July. 

So, if you spent last summer waiting until mid-July to buy that thing at a discounted price, you now have about two fewer weeks to make up your mind.

When is Prime Day 2026 sale?

Prime Day 2026 runs through June 23–26, kicking off at 12:01 a.m. PDT on June 23. That brings it roughly two weeks ahead of the Prime Day 2025 sale, which ran July 8–11. 

Amazon has not explained the shift, but I think there’s a reasonable explanation here. Moving to late June positions the event squarely ahead of the back-to-school shopping season, rather than overlapping with it. 

The change, in my opinion, could benefit both buyers and sellers. What’s even more interesting is that you don’t have to wait until June 23 as early deals are already live across Amazon’s devices, books, Audible, Prime Video, groceries, and items sold by small businesses. 

What deals are available right now before Prime Day starts?

If you’re a Prime member, you can save up to 65% on select Kindle, Echo, Ring, Fire TV, Blink, and eero devices right now. In fact, Amazon Haul has deals starting at $1, which, if you ask me, add up quite fast to your cart’s bill. 

Books are up to 65% off in print and up to 80% off on Kindle for the e-reading enthusiasts. You can read more about the early Prime deals here. Apart from these, you should also get deals on products from other brands that the e-commerce platform would either unveil a few days ahead of the event or during the event. 

Prime members in other regions like Australia, Brazil, India, and Japan will get their version of Prime Day later this summer. The event otherwise covers 23 countries including the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and others.

Amazon has decided its big summer sale should arrive a little sooner. Prime Day 2026 will run from June 23 to 26, the company confirmed, starting at 12:01am Pacific time on the first day and keeping the four-day format Amazon adopted last year. The shift pulls the event out of its now-familiar July window and into late June.

This is less of a departure than it first looks. Prime Day has drifted around the calendar before, and June is not new territory: Amazon ran the event in June back in 2021 before it settled into a July rhythm.

What has stuck more recently is the length. Prime Day began as a single day in 2015, the company’s twentieth-anniversary promotion, and has since stretched to two days and then to four, a creep that tells you most of what you need to know about how the event has grown.

The mechanics are unchanged. The sale is open only to Prime subscribers, which is the entire point of it. Prime Day exists to make the membership feel worth its annual fee and to pull forward spending that might otherwise drift to rivals, and Amazon says this year’s edition will carry deals across more than 35 categories, from clothing and beauty to kitchen, home and electronics.

The deals are the lure; the subscription is the product. Amazon also uses the event to push its own devices and services, the Kindles, Echo speakers and Fire tablets that tend to carry some of the steepest discounts of the four days, precisely because they pull shoppers deeper into its ecosystem. That ecosystem is increasingly an AI one, with the company moving its Alexa shopping assistant into the main search bar as agentic commerce takes hold.

The timing is the only real news here, and it is the kind of decision that ripples outward. When Amazon moves Prime Day, the rest of retail tends to move with it. Competitors have learned to schedule their own counter-promotions around the same window to catch shoppers already primed to spend, so an earlier Prime Day generally means an earlier wave of rival sales rather than an isolated Amazon event.

Pulling the sale into June also lengthens the runway between Amazon’s mid-year event and the autumn shopping season, which the company has in recent years bridged with a second, autumn Prime event aimed at early holiday buyers. Whether an earlier June date changes that autumn calendar, Amazon did not say.

The event has also grown into a global fixture rather than a US one, running across dozens of countries on overlapping dates, which makes the scheduling decision a logistical one as much as a marketing one.

What the announcement does not include is any projection of sales, discount depth, or which products will anchor the event, details Amazon never trails in advance and tends to recap only afterward, in the superlatives it reserves for its own promotions. For now, the useful fact is the date. Prime Day is June 23 to 26, and the rest of retail can set its watch accordingly.