Welcome to Tech Beat, your daily read on the stories shaping our digital world.
AI companies are under fresh scrutiny tonight after advocacy groups asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate a troubling practice: firms purchasing physical books, extracting the text for model training, and then destroying the originals. Eighteen organizations are calling it knowledge hoarding, and with active copyright litigation already naming Anthropic, the pressure on regulators is mounting.
Shifting to a quieter but significant antitrust story, the Department of Justice has spent nearly a year investigating Andreessen Horowitz over a conflict that sounds almost mundane on paper. Two of the firm's partners hold board seats at companies that now compete directly — Databricks and Fivetran. Prosecutors are reportedly dusting off a one-hundred-twelve-year-old law rarely applied to venture capital, which signals this could set real precedent for how Silicon Valley manages its tangled loyalties.
And for anyone who relies on AI agents to handle online shopping, a sobering finding from a developer who stress-tested twenty so-called agent-ready Shopify stores. One in four silently failed at the add-to-cart step — no error message, no fallback, just a broken transaction. As agentic commerce gets louder as a concept, the infrastructure quietly has some catching up to do.
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