AI Daily: Amazon sends cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity AI

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

CEASE-AND-DESIST LETTER: Amazon.com (AMZN) has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity AI demanding that the artificial intelligence search startup stop allowing its AI browser agent, Comet, to make purchases online for users, Bloomberg’s Shirin Ghaffary and Matt Day report. The e-commerce giant is accusing Perplexity of committing computer fraud by failing to disclose when its AI agent is shopping on a user’s behalf, in violation of Amazon’s terms of service, according to people familiar with the letter sent on Friday. The document also said Perplexity’s tool degraded the Amazon shopping experience and introduced privacy vulnerabilities, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

In a blog post, the Perplexity Team stated, “The point of technology is to make life better for people. We call it innovation, but it’s just the constant process of asking how to make things better. Bullying, on the other hand, is when large corporations use legal threats and intimidation to block innovation and make life worse for people. This week, Perplexity received an aggressive legal threat from Amazon, demanding we prohibit Comet users from using their AI assistants on Amazon. This is Amazon’s first legal salvo against an AI company, and it is a threat to all internet users… Perplexity is fighting for the rights of users. People love our products because they’re designed for people. User choice and freedom are at the heart of everything we build. Perhaps that’s what makes us a target for corporate bullies. But Amazon shouldn’t forget what it’s like to be our size and passionate about a world-changing product. They too once faced intimidating threats and fought aggressively in every case to give users a better choice. Amazon also forgets how it got so big. Users love it. They want good products, at a low price, delivered fast. Agentic shopping is the natural evolution of this promise, and people already demand it. Perplexity demands the right to offer it.”

2028 GOALS: Anthropic this summer hiked its most optimistic growth forecasts by roughly 13% to 28% over the next three years and projected generating as much as $70B in revenue in 2028, up from close to $5B this year, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s financials, The Information‘s Sri Muppidi says. The company expects demand from businesses for its AI models to drive that growth. In 2028, Anthropic projects it could generate as much as $17B in cash, compared to the nearly $47B of cash burn OpenAI has projected, the author writes.

BLACKWELL CHIPS: President Donald Trump wanted to discuss a request by Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang to allow sales of the company’s Blackwell artificial intelligence chips to China with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea, but top officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, told Trump the sales would threaten national security and would boost China’s AI data-center capabilities and backfire on the U.S., sources told The Wall Street Journal‘s Lingling Wei, Amrith Ramkumar and Robbie Whelan. Others against the approval included U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to Journal sources.

AI FACTORIES: Deutsche Telekom (DTEGY), together with Nvidia, is building one of the largest AI factories in Europe. Based in Munich, the new Industrial AI Cloud gives German companies the opportunity to further develop their AI models and applications with proprietary data. As early as the first quarter of 2026, companies will be able to book and use the computing power of the “AI factory” as needed. The construction of the factory will increase AI computing power in Germany by around 50 percent. Combined with Deutsche Telekom’s network and T Cloud, Deutsche Telekom and Nvidia are creating an ecosystem for German and European companies that delivers AI sovereignty. An existing data center will be completely renovated to build the Industrial AI Cloud, together with partner Polarise, to host more than one thousand Nvidia DGX B200 systems and Nvidia RTX PRO Servers with up to 10,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs. The computing power is 0.5 EFLOPS. The storage capacity is around 20 petabytes. The data center is connected with four 400 GB fiber optic connections. The server park has a size of several thousand square meters, is fully energy-efficient and meets the highest security and quality standards. A total of 75 kilometers of fiber optic cable will be laid to connect the GPUs and the site. The work is being carried out by robots from Agile Robots, among others. The AI data center will start operations in the first quarter of 2026. The expansion of the Munich data center to an AI factory of Deutsche Telekom is taking place independently of the EU project for the promotion of the construction of several AI gigafactories throughout Europe.

AI ADOPTION: Cognizant (CTSH) announced that it is now using Anthropic’s Claude, a family of large language models, to help its enterprise customers and internal teams move from AI experimentation to scaled business outcomes. This combines the Claude family of models and agentic tooling with Cognizant’s engineering platforms and industry blueprints to help deliver measurable impact at enterprise scale, Cognizant said. Cognizant plans to align its software engineering and platform offerings with Amazon-backed Anthropic capabilities – including Claude for Enterprise, Claude Code, the Model Context Protocol, and the Agent SDK – so clients can integrate AI with existing data and applications, orchestrate multi-step work with human oversight, and more effectively manage performance, risk and spend. “Enterprises are moving beyond simple productivity gains toward a more connected, agentic future,” said Ravi Kumar S, CEO of Cognizant. “By pairing Anthropic’s Claude models and agentic tooling with Cognizant’s suite of platforms and industry expertise, we will help clients build the foundations of an agentified enterprise where intelligent systems collaborate with people to accelerate modernization, engineering and industry transformation. We are equally excited to apply Anthropic’s technology to help us drive these transformation goals internally at Cognizant.”