

Shopify Inc. rose about 8% in early Tuesday trading after Meta Platforms wired its Muse AI agent into the Canadian company's Shop Pay checkout, giving the agent a way to complete purchases on Shopify merchants without the shopper leaving the chat. The move hands Shopify a distribution channel that reaches Meta's user base and puts its checkout inside one of the largest consumer AI agents now shipping. "Checkout is where the agent stops being a demo," Jay Shah, Stripe's business lead for Link, said in the company's announcement of the payment rail Muse uses. "Stripe is building the infrastructure that lets agents buy from businesses." The integration matters because of what Shop Pay is worth per transaction. Shopify's take rate — the share of gross merchandise volume it keeps as revenue — has run in the low-2% range across its merchant solutions business, so every incremental dollar of agent-originated GMV converts to revenue at roughly the same rate as a human-driven order. Meta has not disclosed how many Muse users have connected a payment method, and Shopify has not quantified expected volume from the channel. Muse, launched Sept. 8, is not a chatbot that answers questions and stops. It opens a browser, fills forms, and keeps working after the user closes the app, returning only when it needs approval to send an email or complete a purchase. In a PYMNTS test, Muse took more than five minutes to return toilet-paper options, and it could not shop Amazon or Walmart until account credentials were shared through a secure link. Payment ran through Link, Stripe's checkout wallet, which Stripe says has more than 300 million users. ## Amazon's block caps the near-term volume The ceiling on the Shopify upside is Amazon.com Inc., which has stopped Muse from shopping its site. Users attempting it saw a pop-up reading: "Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed." An Amazon spokesperson told CNET that third-party applications offering to buy on customers' behalf "should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate." Amazon has blocked agentic rivals before. It won a court order in March to stop Perplexity's Comet AI browser from scraping its site, and updated its robots.txt file in November 2025 to keep ChatGPT's agents out. Amazon runs its own competing agent, Buy for Me, launched in beta for some US customers in April 2025, which lets shoppers buy from brand sites without leaving the Amazon app. That leaves Shopify collecting agent-driven volume from the long tail of independent merchants rather than from the largest single US marketplace — a smaller pool, but one where Shopify already owns the checkout relationship. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said more partnerships are coming, without naming them. The competitive field around agentic checkout is filling quickly. Visa and Mastercard have both introduced infrastructure to support agent-initiated payments, and Stripe's Link issues a single-use virtual card scoped to an approved purchase everywhere Muse cannot check out with a saved method — meaning Stripe captures the transaction even when Shopify does not. Instinct, a text-message-based agent from a startup still running a waitlist, lets users make purchases in their name with total liability capped at $100 or the product price. Consumer willingness is real but conditional. About 69% of consumers are interested in handing grocery shopping and subscription management to an agent, PYMNTS Intelligence found in a survey of 2,299 US adults, and 49% of those would let an agent complete larger purchases as well. Payments draw more caution: while 72% of consumers have used an AI assistant, only 23% trust generative AI to handle payments for them. ## What the market is pricing Shopify's 8% move prices in a channel that has not yet produced disclosed volume, which makes the next two data points decisive. The first is Shopify's third-quarter gross merchandise volume and merchant solutions revenue, where any agent-originated contribution would show up as a take-rate tailwind rather than a new line item. The second is whether Meta extends Muse checkout to merchants outside Shop Pay, which would route the same demand through Stripe's Link rails instead. The read-through cuts both ways for the payments complex. PayPal Holdings Inc. and Stripe both compete for the checkout button that agents now reach programmatically, and Amazon's refusal to participate shows that the largest merchants can simply opt out of the agent channel. For Shopify, the integration is a distribution win with a dependency attached: the volume arrives only as long as Meta keeps Muse pointed at its merchants. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

Zealand Pharma A/S began its registrational Phase 3a ZUPREME program for petrelintide, launching three placebo-controlled trials that will enroll about 7,000 people with overweight or obesity and are designed to support marketing applications for the once-weekly amylin analog in chronic weight management. "The Phase 3a program is designed to confirm the first-choice potential of petrelintide — supported by the data we have seen throughout the clinical trials with petrelintide: clinically meaningful double-digit weight reduction and a tolerability profile that supports the long-term adherence that chronic weight management requires," David Kendall, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Zealand Pharma, said. The Copenhagen-based company (Nasdaq: ZEAL) is running the program with Roche Holding AG under a 2025 collaboration and licensing agreement to co-develop and co-commercialize petrelintide. ZUPREME-3, the largest of the three, will enroll roughly 3,900 participants with a body mass index of at least 27 with one weight-related comorbidity, or at least 30, without type 2 diabetes. ZUPREME-4 takes about 600 participants with overweight or obesity and type 2 diabetes. ZUPREME-5 enrolls about 2,500 people with overweight or obesity and established cardiovascular disease, with or without type 2 diabetes. All three trials measure percentage change in body weight from baseline to week 64 as the primary endpoint. ZUPREME-3 and ZUPREME-4 run a screening period, 12 weeks of dose escalation, then maintenance through week 64 and safety follow-up to week 77. Participants completing the week 64 visit can enter an optional open-label extension offering petrelintide regardless of their original treatment arm. ZUPREME-5 adds an event-maintenance phase after the week 64 primary assessment and can run up to three years. Secondary endpoints include waist circumference, HbA1c, cardiometabolic risk factors, physical functioning and eating behaviors. The design leans on Phase 2 results that showed double-digit weight loss with a tolerability profile largely comparable to placebo — the combination Zealand argues is the differentiator in a market where gastrointestinal side effects drive discontinuation. Petrelintide is a long-acting amylin analog engineered for chemical and physical stability with no fibrillation around neutral pH, which allows co-formulation and co-administration with other peptides. Human amylin is co-secreted with insulin by pancreatic beta cells; amylin receptor activation reduces body weight by restoring sensitivity to the satiety hormone leptin, producing earlier fullness. ## Roche's enicepatide readout lands the same day The Phase 3 start arrived alongside a competing data point from the same partner. Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, reported that enicepatide (CT-388), a once-weekly dual GLP-1/GIP receptor agonist, cut HbA1c by 2.65% and body weight by 15.5% at 48 weeks at the 24 mg dose in the Phase 2 CT-388-104 trial of 447 adults with type 2 diabetes and overweight or obesity. Treatment discontinuation from adverse events was 2.0% in enicepatide arms versus 0.0% on placebo. Zealand and Roche plan a Phase 2 trial combining petrelintide with enicepatide in the second half of 2026, a pairing that would put the amylin asset alongside the incretin rather than against it. The competitive bar is set by Eli Lilly's tirzepatide, which produced 16% to 22.5% mean weight reduction in the SURMOUNT-1 trial in people without diabetes, and by Novo Nordisk's semaglutide, both of which hold approvals in diabetes and chronic weight management with years of real-world prescribing data behind them. Zealand has more than ten invented drug candidates that have entered clinical development, two products on the market and three candidates in late-stage development. The company reported no stock price reaction in the announcement, and no enrollment completion date or regulatory filing timeline has been disclosed. For holders, the ZUPREME program converts petrelintide from a Phase 2 tolerability story into a registrational asset with a defined path to a chronic weight management filing, and the 7,000-participant scale signals Zealand and Roche expect the data to carry a label broad enough to compete for first-line use. The next visible milestones are the start of the petrelintide-enicepatide combination trial in the second half of 2026 and any disclosure of ZUPREME enrollment pace, which will indicate whether the week 64 primary readouts can land before the end of the decade. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

GoDaddy Inc. shareholders who lost money when the stock fell 14.28% in a single session now have a court date to watch: Oct. 20, 2026, the cutoff for moving to lead a securities fraud case built on what the company did not tell investors about discounting. The complaint, captioned *Johnson v. GoDaddy Inc. et al.*, No. 26-cv-7144, is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and asserts claims under Sections 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Schall, Brown & Schwartz LLP, which issued the reminder, said the company "misled investors about its customer strategy" and that "the Company's bookings growth sharply decelerated based on this strategy." The class period runs from Sept. 3, 2025 to Feb. 24, 2026. According to the complaint, GoDaddy told investors its strategy targeted "high-intent" customers while failing to disclose a $4.99 one-year dotcom offer, which contradicted public messaging that front-end discounting had been "turned off." The promotion, the suit alleges, encouraged shorter-term, lower-value contracts and reduced upfront bookings, making statements about demand, average order size and bookings growth misleading. GoDaddy disclosed on Feb. 24, 2026 after the close that total bookings growth decelerated to 5% in the fourth quarter of 2025, down from 9% in the prior quarter and below analyst expectations. The company also said it had expanded its go-to-market approach and introduced a promotional price for one-year dotcom domains, adding that the offer lifted new customer volume while the shift in term mix and promotional pricing cut upfront bookings and near-term revenue. Shares fell $13.18, or 14.28%, to $79.12 on Feb. 25 from $92.30 the prior day. Deadlines for the case are not uniform across the firms soliciting plaintiffs. Bleichmar Fonti & Auld LLP and Kaplan Fox & Kilsheimer LLP both list Oct. 20, 2026, while a GlobeNewswire notice distributed by Bleichmar Fonti & Auld on Sept. 21 cited Oct. 26, 2026. Appointment as lead plaintiff is not required to share in any recovery, and the class has not yet been certified. The suit targets the credibility of GoDaddy's prior disclosure on discounting and bookings rather than the promotion itself, which the company has already described in its own results release. That distinction matters for holders: the alleged misstatement concerns what investors were told before Feb. 24, not the promotional pricing that followed. GoDaddy's next scheduled disclosure is its fourth-quarter and full-year 2026 results, expected in February 2027, when investors will see whether bookings growth has stabilized above the 5% fourth-quarter reading. The stock's Feb. 25 close of $79.12 remains the reference level for measuring any recovery tied to the litigation. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.