Snippings

Muse caught on quickly and only a week after launch was the No. 1 free app in Apple’s U.S. App Store. Early users have described it switching an auto insurance policy, hunting down discount codes at checkout, and loading an online grocery cart.

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Amazon generated more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year — a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products.

From: Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse AI assistant in new standoff over agentic shopping – GeekWire.

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The London Stock Exchange is assessing a UK tokenised equity structure designed to broaden access to capital markets whilst preserving the shareholder rights, protections and governance standards that underpin public markets today. The work will consider how LSEG’s Digital Securities Depository (LSEG DSD) could support settlement and asset servicing, subject to regulatory approval.

From: London Stock Exchange to launch UK tokenised equity structures and announces partnership with Payward to explore tokenised public equity markets | LSEG.

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The London Stock Exchange’s partnership with Payward will focus on exploring how digital-native access, wallet-based interaction and partner infrastructure could connect with LSEG’s regulated market ecosystem to facilitate seamless connectivity between tokenised and traditional infrastructure. Together, the two firms will explore opportunities to connect regulated capital markets with on-chain ecosystems, building a route for issuers and investors to make greater use of private and public blockchains, where relevant regulatory obligations, including AML and operational resilience, can continue to be met.

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Meta, Google and X all launched Personal AI this month. Payments spent two years preparing for this. Retail, travel and insurance did not.

From: (2) Nobody Agreed What A Trusted (Personal) Agent Is | LinkedIn.

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Data science helps determine who receives betting incentives, but the company has resisted using similar technology to protect gamblers at risk of addiction.

From: At DraftKings, AI Targets the Gamblers Likeliest to Lose – The New York Times.

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The most popular AI models from ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Grok and Gemini provided wrong answers to financial queries 57 per cent of the time on average, according to research from technology firm Saturn.

When asked more complex questions, such as those which involved more than one calculation, the AI models made mistakes in 88 per cent of cases on average. Some models gave wrong answers to 99 per cent of these harder questions.

From: AI chatbots give wrong answers to financial queries ‘most of the time’.

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Total losses to financial fraud worldwide hit $442bn last year, according to an estimate by the Global Anti-Scam Alliance trade body based on its survey of 46,000 people across the world.

From: Cyber criminals use AI to supercharge scams, watchdog warns.

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The European Central Bank’s presentation to the Euro Retail Payments Board in April 2026 describes the offline digital euro as comparable to a bearer instrument: funds spendable without connectivity, immediately re-spendable offline, held in an applet on a secure element that debits and credits a balance, with settlement final locally between the two devices.

From: The offline digital euro: when the secure element fails, what remains? – OMFIF.

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Futures regulation was shaped by the Great Maine Potato Default of 1976 — when short-sellers led by McDonald’s chip supplier JR Simplot made huge wrong-way bets on potato prices dropping, then torpedoed market confidence by refusing to deliver.

The chaotic default ruined lots of farmers and cost JR Simplot’s cartel a few million dollars in fines, but also entrenched their positions as potato price setters. To restore trust, the recently formed Commodity Futures Trading Commission abandoned self-regulation in favour of structural risk controls like cash settlement and position size limits, with its agricultural benchmarks redesigned so they couldn’t be cornered so easily. The scandal also established the principle in US law that market participants harmed by manipulation or negligence could sue the exchange for damages.

From: Frites don’t fail me now – FT Alphaville.

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Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

Amazon Web Services was “unable to restore access to the resources and data” hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15. The development was first reported by Reuters and suggests that the Iranian strikes inflicted catastrophic damage on the data centers.

Customer data was irretrievably lost in one of three AWS availability zones in the United Arab Emirates region, specifically the mec1-az2 availability zone. Each availability zone is serviced by one or more Amazon data centers.

From: Iran strikes on Amazon data centers caused permanent loss of customer data – Ars Technica.

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