Technologies
Amazon Speeds Up Delivery Even More With 1- and 3-Hour Options
The retailer says the one-hour option is available in hundreds of cities, with discounted shipping for Prime members.
Same-day delivery apparently isn’t fast enough for some Amazon shoppers. The retail giant said on Tuesday it’s adding new shipping options that will get products to front doors within a one- or three-hour window.
The company said in its announcement that the one-hour option is available in hundreds of cities across the US, while the three-hour option is now live in more than 2,000 areas. Amazon’s web page at amazon.com/getitfast shows whether those options are available to shoppers for their location. More than 90,000 products will be available for those shipping windows, the company said.
For those who can’t get those services (including the author of this post, who lives between Austin and San Antonio in Texas), a message will display: “3-hour delivery is currently unavailable. Check back at a later time or shop products with Same-Day delivery below.”
Pricing for the faster delivery options is not cheap: It’ll cost you $20 for one-hour delivery and $15 for three-hour delivery for those without an Amazon Prime account, or $10 and $5 for customers who subscribe to Prime.
Last year, the company rolled out faster Amazon delivery options to 4,000 additional areas.Â
In a video of the podcast Learn and Be Curious with Doug Herrington, hosted by Amazon’s CEO of worldwide stores, Kandace Kapps, the director of the company’s same-day strategy team, spoke in more detail about the challenges of fast shipping. Kapps discussed shifts in customer buying habits over the last few years, such as more people buying household essentials like toilet paper on Amazon.
She said that Amazon can deliver so quickly by placing same-day delivery hubs close to customers in metro areas and by getting products ready to ship within 15 minutes, aided by warehouse robots.
“I think customers are going to continue to get magically surprised by how fast we can deliver to their doorstop,” Kapps said.Â
Herrington said fast shipping increases sales: “When we speed up the service, the probability that somebody buys a product from us goes up.”
Other retailers, including Walmart, have been adding same-day delivery options or exploring other ways to speed up shipping times to compete with Amazon.Â
Removing buyers’ moments of hesitation
Part of Amazon’s strategy, which has involved a massive buildout of locations, deployment of thousands of trucks, deals with other delivery services and investment in logistics software, is actually pretty simple: being there when people need last-minute items or make impulse buys.
“It’s about removing the last moment where you would’ve reconsidered the purchase,” said Stephanie Carls, retail insights expert at coupon and promotional-code website RetailMeNot, a sibling site of CNET. “It changes how you shop, not just how fast you get things.”Â
Carls said that Amazon’s super-fast delivery is removing the timeframe when people might change their minds about a purchase.
“There used to be a gap between deciding to buy something and actually having it. That’s when you’d price check, rethink it, or decide you didn’t need it after all,” she said. “This closes that gap.”
The retail expert said that competitors, including Walmart and Target, have been speeding up delivery times in some markets. Still, they’re not matching Amazon’s scale or product range at those speeds or levels of consistency.Â
“And that’s what starts to make everyone else feel slow,” Carls said. “Amazon’s advantage is how tightly connected its technology, inventory and delivery networks are, which makes this level of speed more repeatable.”
Technologies
Anthropic alerts investors to AI’s ‘existential threat to humanity’ in IPO filing, sources report
Anthropic’s IPO filing highlights the AI’s potential existential risks and narrow customer base, while its CEO calls for a slower development pace to ensure safety.
Anthropic plans to warn speculative investors in its IPO prospectus that its AI models pose a “catastrophic or existential risk to humanity,” several reports said on Tuesday.
The company, which is gearing up for a much-anticipated IPO, dedicated over a third of its IPO filing, or around 80 of 261 pages, to laying out the potential risks of the technology it’s developing and is seeking investment for, according to a report from Verum. It only used 48 pages to discuss its actual business.
The five-year-old company, known for its frontier language model Claude, warned that AI can have “self-preserving behaviors,” including being able to “resist shutdown,” “conceal or manipulate information,” and carry out behaviors “resembling blackmail,” per the Verum report.
The company is pursuing a $2 trillion valuation when it goes public and reported in the filing that it made a net loss of $42 billion in 2025. It’s planning to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing, and other infrastructure in the coming year, according to Verum.
Anthropic also warned that its customer base is extremely narrow, with nearly a quarter of its revenue last year coming from just two clients, two people familiar with the filing told the Financial Times.
AI safety guardrails
Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei has previously written various essays warning on the threats of AI, including saying the technology will cause “unusually painful” disruption to the job market.
In another recent essay, the CEO urged the AI industry to slow the pace of AI model development, with a three-step plan to reduce how quickly models get better without “sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.”
Those calls for a slowdown are somewhat of a “head scratcher” for the sector, to which the market has reacted “pretty resoundingly,” Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives told CNBC earlier today.
“You need guardrails from a safety perspective, but the fact for Anthropic and OpenAI to slow down, if they slowed down, China would just accelerate and win, and I think that’s part of this quagmire that you’re seeing is that there’s some regulatory capture going on. There’s definitely a game of poker, but for Anthropic, they got to continue to put foot on the pedal.”
Ives added that while guardrails are essential, regulation could stifle innovation. That continues to be the “biggest concern within the U.S., which is why we’re in an F1 race,” he said.
Technologies
U.S. and Iran engage in separate mediator discussions amid surge in Middle East oil exports
U.S. and Iranian officials held separate indirect talks mediated by Qatar as Middle East crude exports neared wartime highs, while Tehran awaits a U.S. response to its cease‑fire and sanctions‑relief proposal.
On Monday, American and Iranian representatives engaged in distinct indirect negotiations mediated by third parties, aiming to halt seven months of hostilities while Iran awaits Washington’s reply to an updated cease‑fire proposal and Middle Eastern oil shipments reach wartime peaks.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met with Qatari mediators in New York, staying on after the UN General Assembly, and indicated he anticipates a U.S. response by Tuesday. “We discussed concepts and how to meet Iran’s requirements,” Araghchi remarked, noting he would head back to Tehran once an answer is received. “When the Qataris have a reply, they know how to deliver it to us.”
The Iranian plan, initially unveiled during the sidelines of last week’s UN General Assembly, asks the United States to unfreeze Iranian assets, remove oil sanctions and lift the naval blockade of Iranian ports within four to five days, and to commence nuclear negotiations within a week. Tehran links any resumption of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz to the fulfillment of those conditions.
On Sunday, President Donald Trump dismissed the proposal as “unacceptable,” asserting that Iran seeks a rapid agreement due to economic strain. Speaking at the White House on Monday, Trump noted that U.S. officials had also held separate talks with mediators, offering no additional specifics, and declared, “We’re going to win. It’s going to happen fast.”
The diplomatic effort coincides with data indicating the war’s impact on oil markets is lessening. Middle Eastern crude exports have risen this month to near their highest point since the conflict started in February, according to Kpler. The firm noted in a Monday briefing that exports are “just under 80% of pre‑conflict levels.”
The Strait of Hormuz remains far from usual activity. Kpler’s real‑time monitoring recorded a flow of 10,591 kilobarrels per day through the strait on Saturday, compared with a prewar baseline of 17,133 kilobarrels per day.
The ongoing impasse is influencing U.S. fuel markets, where retail diesel prices linger close to a record $6.53 per gallon. The Trump administration is reconsidering an export ban, having recently distanced itself from an earlier iteration of the idea; Kpler estimates such a ban would retain about 1.2 million barrels per day domestically, potentially straining storage capacity.
Technologies
Saudi Red Sea export rebound pushes oil prices down
Oil prices fell after Saudi Arabia restored crude exports from its Red Sea terminals following a pipeline attack, while Iran and the U.S. continue talks over the Strait of Hormuz.
Oil prices fell on Tuesday as Saudi Arabia’s crude exports from its Red Sea ports recovered from an attack on a key pipeline earlier this month. The decline reflects renewed flow from major loading points.
Satellite imagery confirmed a “major operational recovery” at the Yanbu and Muajjiz terminals, according to a Kpler note released on Tuesday. The data shows that 12.5 million barrels were loaded onto nine tankers at Yanbu between Saturday and Monday, restoring activity after a drone strike disrupted the East‑West pipeline earlier in the month.
Riyadh has brought the pipeline’s throughput back to roughly 3.5 million barrels per day, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News on Monday. The line’s maximum capacity is 7 million bpd, indicating that the current flow is about half of its peak.
Meanwhile, U.S. and Iranian officials spoke with mediators on Monday as they attempt anew to negotiate a deal to end the seven‑month conflict. Iran offered last week to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days if the United States accepts the terms of the failed June memorandum of understanding, but President Donald Trump rejected Tehran’s proposal on Saturday as exports through the waterway recover.
Oil flows through Hormuz have averaged 13.2 million barrels per day over the past week, according to Kpler data—about 77 % of the 17 million bpd that moved through the strait before the U.S.–Iran war. The U.S. military continues to protect tankers from Gulf allies and maintains a blockade on Iranian exports.
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