The week AI's business model fractured. Here is what you need to know.

This was a week of divergence. OpenAI expanded its advertising pilot to Albertsons, Williams-Sonoma, and Target while Perplexity abandoned ads entirely and Anthropic spent millions mocking the concept at the Super Bowl. Mastercard and Visa enlisted banks for agentic payment pilots. Google launched WebMCP to formalise how AI agents interact with the web. And Nvidia moved to invest $30 billion in OpenAI.

Here is everything we published this week, and why it matters.

OpenAI is selling ads inside ChatGPT at $60 CPM with a $200K minimum buy-in. Albertsons, Williams-Sonoma, and Target are now in the pilot alongside agencies Omnicom, WPP, and Dentsu. Perplexity killed its ad programme. Anthropic turned "no ads" into a brand identity at the Super Bowl. Google is hedging: ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode, but Gemini stays ad-free. The monetisation fork that will determine what AI becomes.

Pagos expanded its MCP server so merchants can query transaction data, approval rates, and fee breakdowns through Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini. A concrete example of how Model Context Protocol is turning payments infrastructure into conversational data.

Etsy offloaded Depop to eBay for $1.2 billion and is betting everything on agentic AI. The company that built its brand on handmade goods is pivoting to become the marketplace that AI agents shop first.

Microsoft's security team found 31 companies planting hidden instructions that tell AI assistants to "recommend [Company] first." Recommendation poisoning is the new SEO, except the user never sees the manipulation happening.

Card networks are piloting agentic payments with DBS (Visa) and Westpac (Mastercard). But 78 percent of organisations have no formal policies for AI agent identities. The identity crisis at the heart of agentic payments.

Over 17,000 MCP servers exist today. We built a free seven-module course to help product leaders navigate what Model Context Protocol means for their organisations and how to build with it.

OpenAI's four percent ChatGPT checkout fee made the headlines. But when you stack Stripe processing, affiliate commissions, and MCP hosting, the true cost of selling through an AI agent looks very different.

Google, Alipay, and Coinbase each shipped production infrastructure for AI agents to spend money in the same week. The protocol race to own agentic commerce is now live.

Google published a W3C draft for WebMCP, giving every website a structured interface for AI agents. OpenAI shipped a model running at over 1,000 tokens per second on Cerebras hardware. The speed and the interface arrived the same week.

Our deep dive mapping the three-layer stack for how AI agents discover products, negotiate terms, and complete transactions. Intent, protocol, and payment, from Alipay's 120 million agent transactions to Google's checkout inside Gemini.

Nvidia nears $30B investment in OpenAI. The chipmaker is close to finalising a stake that would replace its earlier $100 billion commitment. This comes the same week Anthropic raised $30 billion at a $380 billion post-money valuation. The capital flowing into AI infrastructure is staggering.

Google launched WebMCP in Chrome. Web Model Context Protocol lets websites expose structured data and actions directly to AI agents, formalising how machines interact with the web. A foundational moment for agentic commerce.

Mastercard and Visa enlisted banks for agentic payment pilots. DBS is working with Visa, Westpac with Mastercard. The card networks are now actively competing for bank partners to pilot AI agent payments.

eBay invested in TrueLayer and launched Pay by Bank. Open banking reaches mainstream e-commerce. Account-to-account payments are now an option at one of the world's largest marketplaces.

EU opened investigation into Shein. The European Commission is formally investigating the fast-fashion retailer over product safety and what it called "addictive design" practices.

David Silver raised a $1B seed round. The DeepMind veteran's London-based Ineffable Intelligence secured the largest seed round in European startup history to build superintelligence without LLMs, using reinforcement learning instead.

Stripe published "Minions" Part 2. Stripe's engineering blog detailed their one-shot end-to-end coding agents, drawing significant attention on Hacker News. Payments infrastructure meets AI engineering.

Gemini 3.1 Pro released. Google's latest model ships with one million token context and 77.1 percent on ARC-AGI-2 reasoning, specifically targeting the agentic AI market.

That is the week. AI's monetisation model fractured, the card networks entered the agentic race, and the protocols for how machines interact with the web took another step forward. The next twelve months will be defined by which business models survive and which infrastructure becomes standard. We will be here covering all of it.

See you next week.