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MILAN (AP) — The European Commission has fined luxury fashion houses Gucci, Chloé and Loewe a total of over 157 million euros (nearly $183 million) for anti-competitive practices restricting independent retailers’ ability to set prices for their goods.

The commission said the companies’ fixing of resale prices, discovered in a 2023 investigation, breached the bloc’s competition rules and harmed consumers.

“The decision sends a strong signal to the fashion industry and beyond that we will not tolerate this kind of practice in Europe, and that fair competition and consumer protection apply to everyone, equally,’’ Commission Vice President Teresa Ribera said in a statement on Tuesday.

Gucci owner Kering acknowledged the decision “related to past commercial practices” and said in a statement that “a cooperative procedure” allowed for a swifter resolution of the case. Gucci’s fine was cut in half to nearly 120 million euros for its cooperation revealing additional breaches, the commission said. Kering said funds were set aside for the fine in the first half of 2025.

Chloé, which is owned by the Richemont group, saw its fine reduced by 15% to nearly 20 million euros.

The French fashion house said in a statement that since the 2023 investigation it had reinforced its compliance training and adopted enhanced measures to ensure “strict” adherence to competition law, including annual training and reports.

“We take this matter extremely seriously and acted with the utmost diligence to address it,’’ Chloé said in a statement.

Loewe owner LVMH did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Loewe’s fine was halved to 18 million euros for its cooperation.

The commission said that the three brands restricted the ability of independent retailers to set their own prices for high-end apparel, leather goods, footwear and accessories sold both online and in physical stores.

The brands required the retailers to stick to recommended prices, set maximum discount rates as well as periods for sales, mirroring practices in the brands’ own direct sales channels.

The practices “deprived the retailers of their pricing independence and reduced competition between them,” the commission said.

NEW YORK (AP) — OpenAI is partnering with Walmart to let shoppers make purchases directly within ChatGPT, furthering the artificial intelligence company’s push to turn its chatbot into a virtual merchant as it seeks to boost revenue.

In an Tuesday announcement, Walmart said the new offering will give customers the option to “simply chat and buy.” That means the retailer’s products would be available through instant checkout in ChatGPT — allowing users to buy anything from meal ingredients or household items, to other goods they might be discussing with the chatbot.

“For many years now, eCommerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses,” Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said in a prepared statement. “That is about to change.”

Sam Altman, cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, added that the partnership would “make everyday purchases a little simpler.”

The companies didn’t immediately specify when ChatGPT users would be able to start purchasing Walmart products within the platform. Tuesday’s announcement from Walmart just noted that the offering would be available “soon.”

But the partnership marks OpenAI’s latest expansion into online commerce. The company has recently launched similar offerings for Shopify and Etsy sellers.

Teaming up with Walmart — the nation’s largest retailer — marks an even more sizeable leap for OpenAI in this space. And competing with the likes of Amazon and Google for purchase fees from digital shopping could be a new source of money for the company. OpenAI hasn’t made a profit and has relied on investors to back the costs of building and running its powerful AI systems.

When announcing its Etsy and Shopify partnerships last month, OpenAI said it worked with payments company Stripe on the technical standards to enable purchases through its “Instant Checkout” system.

Separately, Walmart has worked to boost its own integration of AI across operations and its consumer-facing offerings in recent years. On Tuesday, the Bentonville, Arkansas-based company pointed to its AI shopping assistant named Sparky — as well as other uses of AI technology in product catalogues and customer care for both Walmart and Sam’s Club. Members of Sam’s Club, which is owned by Walmart, will also be able to shop through the coming ChatGPT offering.

Shares of Walmart were up more than 5% by Tuesday afternoon trading.

NEW YORK (AP) — Artificial intelligence is a matter of design — not destiny.

That’s the message from ten philanthropic foundations aiming to loosen the grip that the technology’s moneyed developers, fueled by an investing frenzy, hold over its evolution. Launched Tuesday under the name Humanity AI, the coalition is committing $500 million across the next five years to place human interests at the forefront of the technology’s rapid integration into daily life.

“Every day, people learn more about the ways AI is impacting their lives, and it can often feel like this technology is happening to us rather than with us and for us,” MacArthur Foundation President John Palfrey said in a statement. “The stakes are too high to defer decisions to a handful of companies and leaders within them.”

Artificial intelligence has been embraced as a productivity booster in fields such as software engineering or medicine. It could help students with a range of visual, speech, language and hearing impairments to execute tasks that come easily to others. Humanitarian groups are testing its ability to translate important documents for refugees. And some farmers find it useful for detecting pests in their hard-to-survey fields.

But others question whether its deployment is actually improving their quality of life. Some point out that real harms exist for children turning to AI chatbots for companionship. AI-generated deepfake videos contribute to the online spread of misinformation and disinformation. The electricity-hungry systems’ reliance on energy generated by fossil fuels contributes to climate change. And economists fear AI is taking jobs from young or entry-level workers.

The problem, according to Omidyar Network President Michele L. Jawando, is that tech giants aren’t investing en masse in the first set of use cases. They’re focused on products that may or may not help humans thrive.

Jawando pointed to OpenAI ‘s recent entrance into the online marketplace as an example. At its DevDay last week, the company touted ChatGPT’s new capabilities as a virtual merchant that can sell goods directly for Etsy sellers or deliver food from Uber Eats.

The coalition recognizes the private sector’s desire to maximize profits and governments’ interest in spurring innovation, according to Jawando. But between tech companies’ great influence and the Trump administration’s regulatory rollbacks to speed up AI technology construction, she said philanthropic leaders recognized the need for more capital and more collaboration to amplify the voice of civil society.

“We feel like Humanity AI can really answer the question: what do humans need for flourishing? What does that actually look like?” Jawando said. “Most of what we’re offered right now is efficiency. But that’s not flourishing. I don’t want my life to be efficient. I want my life to flourish. I want it to feel rich and robust and healthy and safe.”

Led by the MacArthur Foundation and Omidyar Network, Humanity AI seeks to take back agency by supporting technology and advocates centering people and the planet. Members must make grants in at least one of five priority areas identified by the coalition: advancing democracy, strengthening education, protecting artists, enhancing work or defending personal security.

The alliance of a broad range of philanthropies underscores the widespread concern. Its ranks represent humanities supporters such as the Mellon Foundation, tacklers of inequality in the Ford Foundation, an open internet grantmaker in the Mozilla Foundation, leading education funders such as Lumina Foundation, charitable behemoths such as the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and groups like the Siegel Family Endowment that explore technology’s societal impacts.

They’re not the first philanthropic coalition to emerge this year with the goal of ensuring everyday people don’t get left behind. The Gates Foundation and Ballmer Group were among the funders who announced in July that they’d spend $1 billion over 15 years to help create AI tools for public defenders, parole officers, social workers and others who help Americans in precarious situations. Other efforts seek to improve AI literacy and expand access for entrepreneurs in low-income countries.

Humanity AI hopes to expand its coalition. Partners began coordinating grants this fall and will pool new money next year in a collaborative fund managed by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Grantees include the National Black Tech Ecosystem Association, which builds diverse leadership pipelines in STEM; AI Now, a research institute at New York University studying AI’s social implications; and a Howard Law School initiative dedicated to developing AI solutions that advance civil rights.

“We can choose participation over control,” Mozilla Foundation Executive Director Nabiha Syed said in an emailed statement. “The systems shaping our lives must be powered by people, open by design, and fueled by imagination.”

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Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A sharp slowdown in hiring poses a growing risk to the U.S. economy, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Tuesday, a sign that the Fed will likely cut its key interest rate twice more this year.

Powell said in a speech in Philadelphia that despite the federal government shutdown cutting off official economic data, “the outlook for employment and inflation does not appear to have changed much since our September meeting,” when the Fed reduced its key rate for the first time this year.

Fed officials at that meeting also forecast that the central bank would reduce its rate twice more this year and once in 2026. Lower rates from the Fed could reduce borrowing costs for mortgages, car loans, and business loans. Powell spoke before a meeting of the National Association of Business Economics.

Powell reiterated a message he first delivered after the September meeting, when he signaled that the Fed is slightly more worried about the job market than its other congressional mandate, which is to keep prices stable. Tariffs have lifted the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation to 2.9%, he said, but outside the duties there aren’t “broader inflationary pressures” that will keep prices high.

“Rising downside risks to employment have shifted our assessment of the balance of risks,” he said.

Economists said Powell’s remarks solidified expectations for further rate cuts, starting at its next meeting Oct. 28-29.

“While there was little doubt the (Fed) was angled to cut rates at its next meeting, today’s remarks were strong confirmation of that expectation,” Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase, said in a note to clients.

Powell also said that the central bank may soon stop shrinking its roughly $6.6 trillion balance sheet. The Fed has been allowing roughly $40 billion of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities to mature each month without replacing them.

“We may approach that point in coming months,” Powell said.

The shift could slightly lower borrowing costs over time. Economists at BMO Capital Markets estimated that the yields on Treasury securities ticked down slightly after Powell’s remarks.

Separately, Powell spent most of his speech defending the Fed’s practice of buying longer-term Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities in 2020 and 2021, which were intended to lower longer-term interest rates and support the economy during the pandemic.

Yet those purchases have come under a torrent of criticism from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as well as some of the candidates floated by the Trump administration to replace Powell when his term as Chair ends next May.

Bessent said in an extended critique published earlier this year that the huge purchases of bonds during the pandemic worsened inequality by boosting the stock market, without providing noticeable benefits to the economy.

Other critics have long argued that the Fed kept implementing the purchases for too long, keeping interest rates low even as inflation began to spike in late 2021. The Fed beginning in 2021 stopped the purchases and then sharply boosted borrowing costs to combat inflation.

“With the clarity of hindsight, we could have—and perhaps should have—stopped asset purchases sooner,” Powell said. “Our real-time decisions were intended to serve as insurance against downside risk.”

Yet Powell said that moving earlier would not have prevented the COVID-era inflation spike: “Stopping sooner could have made some difference, but not likely enough to fundamentally alter the trajectory of the economy.”

Powell also said the purchases were intended to avoid a breakdown in the market for Treasury securities, which could have sent interest rates much higher.

The Fed chair also addressed a move by a bipartisan group of senators to stop the central bank from paying interest on the cash reserves banks park at the Fed. A measure to prevent the Fed from doing so was defeated in the Senate last week by the lopsided vote of 83-14.

Still, it garnered support from both parties, including Republican senators Rand Paul from Kentucky and Ted Cruz from Texas, as well as Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Powell said that without the ability to pay interest on reserves, the Fed “would lose control over rates” and wouldn’t be able to carry out its mission. The Fed lifts the short-term interest rate it controls when it wants to cool borrowing and spending and slow inflation, while it cuts the rate to encourage borrowing, growth, and hiring.