Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon's warehouse workers and delivery drivers, the people critical to the company's ability to get you things fast via Amazon Prime, will soon get Prime subscriptions as part of their employment. The new perk was revealed along with other benefit updates, including an average pay raise, announced by the company on Wednesday.The free Prime subscription will be part of the benefits package for front-line" workers starting early next year," according to a blog post. They'll have free Prime for as long as they are a part of the Amazon team." Amazon Prime typically costs $14.99 per month or $139 per year.As for pay, Amazon says that the frontline workers will be getting at least" $1.50 more per hour beginning next month, which the... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon announced today that it's pumping another $4 billion into Claude AI maker Anthropic, bringing its total funding amount to $8 billion. This latest round follows $1.25 billion last September and another $2.75 billion in March.Along with the money, Amazon wrote in its blog post that Amazon Web Services (AWS) would be named Anthropic's primary training partner" and that the OpenAI rival would use Trainium and Inferentia chips for future models.The investment and deeper partnership align with previous reporting by Reuters that Claude will power Amazon's new Alexa voice assistant. The improved Alexa - the release of which has been delayed - reportedly performed better with Claude than it did when using Amazon's in-house model. The... Continue reading...