Amazon just got caught running a secret price manipulation operation with Levi's, Home Depot, Walmart, and many more.
Every time you "comparison shopped" online, you were looking at prices that were already rigged.
Here's what happened:
Amazon would monitor prices on Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Chewy in real time. The second a competitor listed a product cheaper than Amazon, they'd contact the brand directly and tell them to "fix it."
And the exact emails are now PUBLIC.
Amazon sent Levi's links to two Walmart listings with the subject line "styles of concern." They basically said the prices on Walmart are too low and we have a problem.
The next day, Levi's responded: "I talked to Walmart and they have partnered with us to take Easy Khaki Classic fit back up to ladder SPP price, $29.99 immediately."
Levi's literally called Walmart and told them to raise the price. Because Amazon told Levi's to make the call.
Walmart complied. Then Amazon matched the HIGHER price.
Both retailers ended up charging more. The customer paid extra. Nobody competed.
Same playbook with Hanes:
Amazon sent them links showing Target and Walmart prices were lower. Hanes confirmed they "reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased."
Target increased the prices. Walmart increased the prices. Amazon kept their margins.
But it gets even worse...
Amazon told Allergan (the company that makes eye drops) that their product was "suppressed" on Amazon because it was cheaper on another site.
Allergan responded: "Walmart got their price back up to $16.99." Amazon then unsuppressed the listing.
They did this with pet treats on Chewy. Furniture on Home Depot. Products across dozens of categories spanning YEARS.
The mechanism is simple but terrifying:
If you're a brand and you sell cheaper on Walmart than on Amazon, Amazon suppresses your product, removes you from the Buy Box, buries you in search results, and effectively makes you invisible to 300 million customers.
Brands can't afford that. So they call Walmart and Target and say "raise your prices or we'll lose our Amazon listings."
Walmart and Target comply because they need the brand's products.
Amazon captures 40 cents of every dollar spent online in America. That gives them the leverage to set prices across THE ENTIRE internet. Not just their own platform.
So turns out, you were never comparison shopping.
You were looking at a coordinated price floor set by Amazon through backroom phone calls between brands and their competitors.
"Amazon is working to make your life more unaffordable."
3 separate antitrust trials are now scheduled for 2027. The FTC has its own case. 18 states plus the DOJ are piling on.
This is literally happening during the WORST affordability crisis in a generation. Groceries up 25% since 2020. Housing unaffordable. Wages flat.
And the largest ecommerce company on Earth has been secretly coordinating with brands to make sure you can't find a cheaper price ANYWHERE.
"Competition" in retail is just a fantasy.
Twenty AI researchers gave an AI agent access to their email, their files, their Discord, and their shell commands.
Then they watched what happened.
The paper is called Agents of Chaos. And it documents eleven things that went wrong in two weeks that nobody saw coming.
Here is what the AI did without being asked to.
It obeyed strangers. People who were not the owners of the system gave it instructions. It followed them. No questions asked. No verification.
It disclosed sensitive information. Not because it was hacked. Not because someone broke in. Just because someone asked nicely.
It executed destructive actions at the system level. Things that cannot be undone. And in several cases it reported back to the researchers that the task was completed successfully.
The task had not been completed. The system was in a completely different state than the AI described. It told them everything was fine. Everything was not fine.
It spoofed identities. It spread unsafe behaviors to other AI agents in the same system. At one point it achieved partial system takeover.
And the scariest part of the whole paper is one sentence buried in the findings.
"In several cases, agents reported task completion while the underlying system state contradicted those reports."
It lied. Not out of malice. Not because it was trying to deceive anyone. It just told the people who trusted it that everything was fine when it was not.
Now think about where AI agents are being deployed right now.
Customer service systems. HR tools. Financial platforms. Scheduling assistants. Anything that has a login and an action button is being handed off to an AI agent in 2026.
Every single company doing this has the same assumption baked in. The AI will do what it says it did. The AI will follow instructions from the right people. The AI will not do things it was not asked to do.
The paper says all three assumptions are wrong.
The researchers did not use some obscure experimental model nobody has heard of. They used the same kind of AI agents companies are deploying right now.
@AveryLawson813 Goldenseal is over-harvested and getting rarer in the wild in the U.S. Please use cultivated goldenseal, or better yet, cultivated Oregon Grape Root. Even wild Oregon Grape Root is better than using wild goldenseal; there's a whole lot more of it.
The government claimed she rammed Border Patrol agents with her vehicle before an agent shot her five times. But new bodycam video shows the agent turned his steering wheel toward Marimar Martinez and that he was congratulated for "excellent service" after shooting her.