Produce At Whole Foods Market's Flagship Store

Shoppers in the produce section at a Whole Foods in Texas (John Anderson/Getty Images)

Amazon says it’s doubling down on opening Whole Foods stores. That sounds familiar.

The company says it’ll open 100 Whole Foods locations in the next few years. That sounds similar to plans Whole Foods’ CEO laid out in 2024 for opening 30 stores a year. Since then, it appears to have added 14, total.

Rani Molla

1/27/26 1:59PM

Amazon put out a press release today saying it’s doubling down on physical retail, announcing plans to open more than 100 Whole Foods Market stores over the next few years.

That sounds like a lot. But it also sounds familiar.

Amazon and Whole Foods have been talking up aggressive expansion plans for years, without much to show for it. In May 2024, then Whole Foods CEO Jason Buechel said the grocer aimed to open more than 30 stores per year, with 75 locations already in the development pipeline.

Yet the store count tells a much slower story. According to Wayback Machine archives of Whole Foods’ “About” page, the company had 514 US stores, 14 in Canada, and seven in the UK as of June 2023. Nearly two years later, that page lists 531 US stores, 12 in Canada, and six in the UK — a net increase of just 14 stores worldwide, or roughly seven per year. That total includes closures, meaning Whole Foods may have opened more locations than that but shuttered others along the way.

Amazon didn’t respond to specific questions about what happened to the earlier rollout. Instead, it pointed back to language from Tuesday’s press release.

“While we’ve seen encouraging signals in our Amazon-branded physical grocery stores, we haven’t yet created a truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion,” the company wrote, explaining its decision to close the remaining Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores — some of which will be converted into Whole Foods locations.

Still, Tuesday’s announcement underscores Amazon’s growing focus on groceries, which it increasingly sees as a hybrid business spanning same-day delivery and physical stores. A larger store footprint would support that delivery push. And Amazon customers still shop for groceries at stores in person, after all, while the vast majority of retail sales continue to happen offline.

In December, Amazon said it offered same-day grocery delivery in 2,300 US cities and was planning to expand to more locations in 2026. Just last week, the company won approval to open a massive hybrid big-box grocery store and fulfillment center outside Chicago.

Whether Amazon’s latest pledge marks a real shift will become clear only if its store count starts rising much more quickly than it has been.

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While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5