It’s a trend that poses a threat to Amazon’s margins and relationships with customers. When a consumer uses ChatGPT to initiate a purchase, for example, OpenAI collects “a small fee” from each transaction.

“With an agent on ChatGPT, retailers risk relinquishing transactions on their site to pay a toll on someone else’s highway for the same transaction,” Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester, said in an interview.

Gee, Mr. Amazon, that sounds terrible. Only some kind of monster would make you pay a “small” fee for every single transaction between two third parties, just because they set up a server to have it take place on. I’m so sorry that that happened to you.