While some retailers, like Amazon (and Adidas, apparently!), are blocking AI agents from making purchases on users’ behalf on their respective platforms, e-commerce platform Shopify has moved in the other direction.

On Monday, the company announced that browser-based AI agents can now complete purchases on Shopify merchants’ sites, extending their capabilities beyond just searching for products and adding items to carts.

Shopify previously supported WebMCP for its storefronts and carts, allowing browser-based AI agents to comb through a Shopify retailer’s inventory, search for products, and add them to a cart. The addition of WebMCP support for checkout, including Shop Pay, means these agents can now read the checkout screen, update it, and submit the transaction with the buyer’s authorization, without relying on screenshots or scraping webpages, the company said.

This update introduces three new tools — get_checkout, update_checkout, and complete_checkout — that allow agents to inspect a checkout, change things like the customer’s address or delivery option, and then place an order after the buyer authorizes it.

The feature is rolling out to all eligible Shopify merchants, said Gil Greenberg, a staff product manager who works on agentic commerce at Shopify, in a post on X.

Shopify already offers a hosted Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which allows agents to work server-to-server. The proposed standard WebMCP, meanwhile, is designed for agents that work inside the buyer’s browser. Both leverage Shopify’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which provides a common way to search for and discover products, build carts, and check out.

Top AI agents like Muse and Instinct already have direct partnerships with Shopify for agentic commerce. The Instinct partnership was announced today.

“If your agent is operating in the buyer’s browser, use WebMCP tools provided on storefront and checkout to efficiently complete order placement, instead of navigating HTML built for humans,” Greenberg wrote on X. “These WebMCP tools provide structured and efficient APIs, purposely designed — via UCP — to ensure accurate commerce facts, required disclosures, and handoff requirements.”

Tesla is pushing back the reveal of its redesigned, second-generation Roadster once again, this time due to a forecast of severe weather.

Originally slated for October 1 in Waco, Texas, the event is being pushed to October 15, Tesla said.

“We’ve been tracking the weather closely with local meteorologists, but given the severe conditions predicted & because this event can only be held outdoors, we’ve made the difficult decision to reschedule,” the company wrote in a post on X.

The event presumably needs to be held outdoors because Tesla has been working on integrating cold gas thrusters from SpaceX that are supposed to make the Roadster fly in some capacity.

This reveal has been delayed many times before, and Musk has pushed it for months altogether before this scheduled date. At one point, Musk even planned to hold the event on April Fools’ day of this year. He said during Tesla’s annual meeting in 2025 — the same one where he was awarded a $1 trillion pay package — that an April Fools’ day event would offer him “some deniability” if it got delayed again.

“Like, I could say I was just kidding,” he said at the time.

Tesla first showed off its concept of a second-generation Roadster in 2017 at an event where it debuted the Semi, the company’s electric big rig. The new-look roadster was supposed to be the first supercar the company designed from the ground up, as the original Roadster, which got the company its start in the early 2010s, was largely based on the Lotus Elise.

At the time, Tesla promised the new Roadster was just a few years away. It collected $50,000 deposits from prospective customers of the car, which had an estimated base price of around $200,000. Some people even paid the company $250,000 to reserve one of 1,000 “Founders Series” versions of the supercar.

The project languished for years, until Musk reportedly tasked the Tesla team with redesigning the second-generation Roadster, and committed to the idea of using the SpaceX thrusters.

The promise of something outrageous like a flying car hasn’t been enough to tame critics of Musk and Tesla. Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X that “7.5 years has felt like a long time to wait” for his own new Roadster, though Musk claimed Altman had gotten a refund.

Much like the Roadster will be at this event, the ship date for the vehicle is up in the air. Musk himself has said he expects it to take a year or more before the new Roadster goes into production after it is finally revealed.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times … I’ll spare you the rest, but the cliché Dickens line really does sum up this year’s New York Climate Week.

Much of the climate tech community — like the rest of the U.S. economy — is eagerly riding the AI wave. Some have reservations about the sheer quantity of natural gas power plants being built to power AI data centers. But because many climate tech startups are energy-focused or energy-adjacent, the buildout has been embraced as an opportunity to get companies through the valley of death. 

The singular focus also means some promising sectors risk being overlooked.

It’s a continuation of a trend that’s emerged over the last year. As climate tech companies struggled to get financing — either because of canceled federal grants or investor hesitancy — those that could change their pitch to match the AI mania did so.

The pivot has helped many climate tech startups land fresh funding from investors. Total venture deal value has risen for four consecutive quarters, cresting the $14 billion-mark in the first quarter of this year, according to the most recent available data from PitchBook. It’s the best fundraising environment for climate tech in the last few years, with most of the deal value driven by sectors boosted by data center construction, including the built environment, grid infrastructure, and dispatchable energy that can be turned on or off when it’s needed.

It’s an opportunity few have wanted to pass up.

One exchange during a panel at New York Climate Week captured the moment: Two founders, when asked whether they’d prefer the AI buildout to proceed at its current pace or at a more climate-responsible speed, said without hesitation that faster was better. Unsurprisingly, both of their startups were in energy.

And yet not everyone agrees.

I heard from several founders who felt that the data center boom was distracting from other promising segments of climate tech, including those that were meeting their targets without having to rely on AI mania.

“Corporates are still interested in climate,” one founder told me. The difference today is that large companies don’t want to crow about it, mostly for fear of drawing the Trump administration’s ire. 

There were also signs that the AI boom was beginning to wear thin on some. For many startups, money for scaling was hard to find three years ago, even if they were showing promising results. Now, customers are clawing their way into demos. “Where was this money three years ago?” I asked several people. I received more than a few knowing eye rolls in reply.

It’s the world they live in these days, they acknowledged. The smart entrepreneurs are all finding ways to meet customers where they are. 

Ultimately, the undercurrent at New York Climate Week was that the data center party won’t last forever, but it might last long enough to help startups build durable businesses. Once that happens, they can refocus on the carbon-cutting mission they were founded to pursue.