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Supermarket Sweep

Grocery purchases on Amazon have more than doubled in 10 years

37% of US Amazon customers included traditional grocery store items in their most recent order.

8/20/25 10:49AM

Getting people to buy grocery items online has long been a tall order. But it’s one that Amazon may be on the cusp of cracking.

Last week, the e-commerce giant sent fear through the hearts of grocery store investors when it announced that Prime subscribers across the country could access free same-day delivery for perishable grocery items for the first time. “This marks one of the most significant grocery expansions for Amazon,” the company said.

New data shared by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) shows that 37% of US Amazon customers purchased traditional grocery store items — perishable and nonperishable — in their latest order. That’s up 7 percentage points from five years ago and is more than double what it was a decade ago, according to the firm’s surveys.

While only a small percentage of those grocery items likely included perishables — the share of grocery shoppers on Amazon who used Amazon Fresh as a delivery method was just 3% — any headway into the grocery category is major.

“It’s not easy to persuade US consumers to change grocery buying habits, much less to persuade them to buy that stuff online and get it delivered, so that’s quite an achievement,” CIRP partner and cofounder Michael Levin told Sherwood News.

Amazon’s latest announcement will only send its portion of the grocery store market up.

“Since the early days of supermarkets, premium perimeter offerings bring in customers who then shop the center-of-the-store,” the CIRP report reads, noting that Amazon has taken the opposite approach with perishables. “Amazon is gaining center-of-the-store market share to tee up its ultimate perimeter business.”

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5