2026.39: Begun, the Aggregator Wars Have

Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery! As a reminder, each week, every Friday, we’re sending out this overview of content in the Stratechery bundle; highlighted links are free for everyone. Additionally, you have complete control over what we send to you. If you don’t want to receive This Week in Stratechery emails (there is no podcast), please uncheck the box in your delivery settings. On that note, here were a few of our favorites this week. Meta vs. Amazon. One of the best agent use cases is taking care of mundane things that are necessary but annoying. One of the best utilities Amazon provides is reliably delivering mundane things that are necessary and mundane. That means Muse is better if it can use Amazon, but that’s a problem for Amazon because Muse doesn’t see ads. As I explained on Tuesday, that’s why Amazon blocked Meta’s new agent, and they can get away from it because their differentiation is rooted in the physical world. To bridge that moat Meta will need help from one specific company: Walmart. GM Bends the Knee to CarPlay. Three years ago on Sharp Tech we had a few weeks’ worth of lively discussion of GM’s controversial decision to abandon Apple CarPlay in favor of its own smartphone software (which would afford it access to proprietary data). I wasn’t sure it would be a problem, whereas Ben was incensed at GM’s myopia. Three years later now … Well, Ben was right, GM has announced it is re-integrating CarPlay after three years of customer and dealership backlash, and I was chuckling throughout Tuesday’s Dithering laying out how and why this outcome was inevitable. — Andrew Sharp Profiling the Profiler. This week’s Stratechery Interview was with a writer I wasn’t familiar with and a body of work I’d never seen before. If you, like me, are a Colossus neophyte, then Ben’s conversation with Jeremy Stern is a good place to start. They discussed Stern’s journey to tech and business writing, why Ben considers him “the best profile writer working today,” and, in addition to quick hit takeaways from profiles of Scott Wu, Shyam Sankar, Josh Kushner, Neil Mehta, and Jake Sullivan, Stern’s recent profile of Mark Zuckerberg. Come for a great conversation, and stay for a behind-the-scenes discussion of Zuckerberg that appears to be much truer to life than that new Social Network sequel. — AS Stratechery Articles and Updates Frontier Overhangs — Pacing the frontier may be sincere, but it would also be strategically useful for the frontier labs to have time to reduce overhangs caused by model advancement. Amazon Blocks Muse, Amazon’s Moat, Aggregator v Aggregator — Amazon predictably blocked Muse, but there is room for a deal based on the reality that Amazon’s physical world investments are an AI moat. More on Muse, Amazon, and Walmart; Muse and Expedia; Whither Google? — Meta needs Walmart to wait out Amazon; Expedia seeks to keep its middleware position; meanwhile, where is Google? An Interview with Colossus EIC Jeremy Stern About Profiling Mark Zuckerberg — An interview with Colossus EIC Jeremy Stern about profiling Mark Zuckerberg and other prominent tech figures. Sharp Text by Andrew Sharp Too Many Stadiums with Roofs — On the new Washington Commanders stadium and a modern epidemic. Dithering with Ben Thompson and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber GM and CarPlay Muse Delivery Vehicles Asianometry with Jon Yu Intel’s Optane Memory: A Promise Unfulfilled High Bandwidth Flash Is Coming Sharp China with Andrew Sharp and Sinocism’s Bill Bishop Xi Jinping Comes to Washington; US-China Agenda, Questions and Expectations; The September Politburo Meeting Greatest of All Talk Breakouts, Breakdowns and Bouncebacks, The Jalen Duren Hostage Crisis, Surveying the Central Division Sharp Tech with Andrew Sharp and Ben Thompson Three Weeks of Meta Momentum, The Ultimate Muse Upside, A King Kong vs. Godzilla Aggregator War This week’s Sharp Tech video is on why Anthropic or OpenAI can’t unilaterally slow down.