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Walmart just decided your AI agent is welcome to shop — as long as it plays by the rules. Amazon, watching the same trend, decided the opposite.
Agent Profiles are landing within the month, giving outside shopping agents like Claude Duet and Meta’s Muse their own spending limits and purchase records, while Amazon keeps rivals like Perplexity’s Comet at arm’s length. If your AI assistant can shop for you, should it have to ask permission first, or just a budget?
Today in AI Brief:
Walmart opens the door for AI shopping agents
Unitree’s guardian robot video sparks a reality check
Legora raises $550M to build the AI lawyer
Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads
Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:
After a test campaign reached 211,000 households and achieved 1,010% ROAS, the brand went all in to promote its annual sales event. It removed age and income constraints to expand reach and shifted budget to custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.
The results speak for themselves. As Blu Dot increased their investment by 10x, ROAS jumped to 2,308% and more page-view conversions surpassed 50,000.
“For CTV campaigns, Roku has been a top performer,” said Claire Folkestad, Paid Media Strategist, Blu Dot. “Comping to our other platforms, we have seen really strong ROAS… and highly efficient CPMs, lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”
Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.
Walmart Opens the Door for AI Shopping Agents
In Brief: Walmart is rolling out Agent Profiles, giving outside AI shopping agents — including Anthropic’s Claude Duet and Meta’s Muse — their own separate purchase records and spending limits within the next month. Amazon is taking the opposite approach, pushing back on third-party agents while promoting its own shopping assistant instead.
The Details:
Shoppers can set a spending limit so an agent can handle small purchases on its own, require approval for every purchase, or let Walmart demand a second sign-off even under budget.
Agents can’t touch a shopper’s payment details directly, and any profile can be deleted at will — a response to banks warning that shopping bots could enter card info themselves or steer buyers toward weaker payment protections.
Amazon, by contrast, pushed back on third-party agents like Perplexity’s Comet, even asking it to stop offering Amazon shopping after complaints about the experience it created.
Take Away:
Retailers are racing to decide whether AI agents work for shoppers or against them, and Walmart and Amazon just picked opposite sides. Whoever gets the guardrails right first could decide which stores your AI assistant actually buys from.
Unitree’s H2-X Robot Lifts Cars, Fights Off Attackers
In Brief: Unitree released a new demo video showing its H2-X humanoid flipping cars, taking down a knife-wielding attacker, and pulling a bystander out of a vehicle’s path — though the company says the stunts are staged, not autonomous.
The Details:
Unitree is warning people to keep a six-to-ten-foot distance from the robot during operation, a hint at how much force the H2-X generates mid-stunt.
The company hasn’t said how much human direction the choreographed scenes required, and the video’s advertised “eight hours” refers to standing endurance, not continuous stunt performance.
The release lands alongside Unitree’s own warning that humanoid commercialization remains early-stage, with slower-than-expected adoption posing a risk to its post-IPO valuation.
Take Away:
The video is a marketing reel, not proof that H2-X can judge a threat or run a rescue on its own, and Unitree says so itself. The real story is the gap between viral robot theater and the slow, unglamorous work of getting humanoids into paying customers’ hands.
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Legora Raises $550M to Build the AI Lawyer
In Brief: Legal AI startup Legora raised a $550 million Series E at an $8.8 billion valuation, led by Atreides Management with new backing from Fidelity, Capital Group, and J.P. Morgan.
The Details:
Legora’s annual recurring revenue has crossed $200 million, after going from $1 million to $100 million in under 18 months and adding the next $100 million in less than six.
More than half of the AmLaw 50 now use Legora, with the U.S. becoming its largest market by revenue less than two years after opening its first American office.
The new valuation is 57% higher than the $5.6 billion Legora was worth at its last round, as in-house legal teams made up over 40% of its new customers last quarter.
Take Away:
Legal work is becoming one of the clearest proving grounds for AI agents that handle multi-step work, not just draft text, and investors are paying a premium to back whoever wins that shift. Legora’s growth curve suggests law firms are adopting agentic AI faster than most other white-collar industries.
Everything else in AI
OpenAI acquired Orchestra Bio, bringing tools for coordinating drug-development work into its Rosalind biology platform.
Meta proposed a new class of nonvoting stock to help cover up to $825 billion in future AI spending, alongside a 26% jump in Q3 revenue.
PPG expects its data center paint sales to triple this year, as AI construction drives demand for coatings that resist fire, rust, and static electricity.
GM tested more than 300,000 battery designs through computer modeling before building a single physical prototype for its fourth-generation EV platform.