In the six-year time frame established in the settlement, anyone who “unsuccessfully attempted” to cancel their Prime subscription online is eligible to get paid up to $51 from Amazon. People who signed up for Prime during that same period can also get up to $51 if they signed up through a “challenged enrollment flow”—a page with a confusing interface that may lead to people inadvertently making a purchase. Previous court filings established that in some cases, some users may have selected “two-day shipping” on an item and not realized that, in doing so, they were also signing up for Amazon Prime.

An FTC spokesperson tells WIRED that automatic payments will go out to some customers within 90 days.

“The rest of eligible consumers will receive a notification from Amazon, and will have the opportunity to submit a simple claim form,” the FTC says. “Amazon is required to post information about this to Amazon.com and the app. The settlement also requires Amazon to have an independent third party who will monitor their compliance with these claims.”

The court filing says that Amazon is also “permanently” barred from structuring Prime sign-ups with a confusing “negative option feature” where a customer is assumed to be making a purchase unless they actively refuse it.

For example, the filing says, a button that reads “No thanks, I don’t want free shipping” does not clearly indicate that a customer will be signed up for Prime unless they click it. Amazon also has to make it obvious when a person is choosing to sign up for Prime, and include language like “Join Prime” in its user interface. Similarly, Amazon has to clearly communicate when a Prime subscription is subject to auto-renewals by using words like “renew.”

The initial complaint, which was filed by the FTC in June 2023, alleged that while Amazon had improved its process for canceling Prime memberships, the company had spent years knowingly complicating the cancellation process.

An attachment on a May 7 court filing includes an email chain with Amazon employees from December 2020, which was described as “privileged and confidential” in the subject line. In the email, a manager of Prime content and marketing paraphrased key points that came up in a recent “US prime performance meeting.”

“Subscription is driving a bit of a shady world,” reads one paraphrased quote, attributed to an unnamed person at the meeting.

“We should lean away from experimenting with sign-up clarity, and focus more on driving overall members and increasing confirmation that you are prime,” reads a different paraphrased quote from another person at the meeting, included in the same attachment.

A different attachment shows that Amazon was aware that customers were frustrated. A company slide presentation dated September 17, 2017, focused specifically on customer service complaints about “unintentional” Prime sign-ups. (A different attachment, which includes an email chain dated September 25, 2017, appears to refer to the presentation. Two dozen people were asked to “delete the PowerPoint document” and send “confirmation” once they had.)

One customer complaint in the presentation claims that they were “tricked” into signing up for a free trial for Amazon Prime when they selected two-day shipping on a purchase, not knowing that this would also sign them up for a trial for Prime.

“I DO NOT LIKE YOUR SERVICE,” reads another complaint. “THIS IS CRAP THAT I ORDERED A PRODUCT IN AMAZON ADS [sic] ME TO A PROGRAM WITH AUTO BILLING THAT I DID NOT SIGN UP FOR. I WILL NOT USE AMAZON AND TELL EVERYONE ABOUT THIS TYPE OF CRAP YOU ARE PULLING.”

“IT IS SNEAKY AND BLOODY DISHONEST FORCING SOMETHING THE [sic] I NEVER WANTED,” reads another complaint.

The same Amazon slide presentation noted that confusing Prime sign-ups were leading to an increased burden on Amazon’s customer service workers, as well as a “loss of customer trust.”

A team led by Prof. Yin Huajie from the Hefei Institute of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a solar-powered system that produces green hydrogen directly from atmospheric moisture without relying on external water or energy sources.

The results are published in Advanced Materials.

Proton Exchange Membrane Water Electrolysis (PEMWE) technology is one of the primary routes for producing green hydrogen, drawing significant attention due to its high efficiency and high-purity hydrogen output. However, the PEMWE process heavily relies on high-purity water as the reaction raw material, limiting its application in water-scarce regions. Atmospheric water harvesting (AWH), as an emerging approach to obtaining pure water, holds promise as a viable solution to the water shortage issue in the production of green hydrogen.

In this study, the researchers developed a self-sustaining system that couples photothermal atmospheric water harvesting with proton exchange membrane electrolysis.

The system uses hierarchically porous carbon as an adsorbent to capture moisture from the air, which is evaporated by solar heat and fed into a custom-built electrolyzer for hydrogen production. The porous material is fabricated through template synthesis and calcination, followed by surface oxidation to improve water affinity.

It demonstrates remarkable performance. Even under low humidity conditions (as low as 20%), it maintains stable water collection and evaporation performance. Under 40% humidity, the system reached a hydrogen production rate of nearly 300 mL per hour with excellent cycle stability and long-term reliability.

Field tests further confirmed that it can continuously produce green hydrogen using only solar energy, with zero carbon emissions and no external energy input.

This work provides a new pathway for sustainable hydrogen production in water-scarce regions, according to the team.

Provided by
Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences

At its annual Oktane customer conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, identity and access management specialist Okta has been expanding its vision to be a first-port-of-call when it comes to securing non-human identities (NHIs) as a swelling wave of artificial intelligence (AI) agents causes their numbers to swell dramatically.

Among the announcements made today are new capabilities within both the Okta and Auth0 platforms that the supplier said will enable users to integrate AI agents seamlessly into their identity security fabrics.

A study released earlier in 2025 by Okta revealed that although 91% of organisations were already deploying agentic AI in search of productivity gains, but also that just 10% of organisations are today putting any form of cyber governance in place to manage agents – so Okta believes the risk is also rising, and fast.

Such risks are no longer theoretical; Okta cited incidents such as the now infamous breach which an AI bot built on the Paradox AI platform and used by fast-food giant McDonalds in its hiring process exposed the personal data of millions of job applicants to hackers who correctly guessed that its password was ‘123456’.

Okta CEO Todd McKInnon compared unleashing AI agents on an organisation’s environment to creating a lot of individual new insider threats.

“AI agents are a powerful new identity type. They can act independently, on their own or on behalf of a user or a team or a company,” said McKinnon. “They can access tools, apps or data, they can plan or complete tasks on their own. The pace here of innovation is absolutely stunning.

“These AI agents and the potential here, are getting very, very powerful and it’s happening very quickly.

“Without identity security AI security collapses. AI security is identity security, you can’t be successful in one without the other,” said McKinnon.