Amazon has a new cure for long supermarket lines: a smart shopping cart.

The cart, which Amazon unveiled on Tuesday, uses cameras, sensors and a scale to automatically detect what shoppers drop in. It keeps a tally and then charges their Amazon account when they leave the store. No cashier is needed.

It’s the latest attempt by Amazon to shake up the supermarket industry and offer a solution to long checkout lines. The online shopping giant opened a cashier-less supermarket in Seattle that uses cameras and sensors in the ceiling to track what shoppers grab and charge them as they leave. Amazon.com Inc. also has roughly 25 cashier-less convenience stores with similar technology.

The cart, called Amazon Dash Cart, will first show up at a new Los Angeles supermarket Amazon is opening later this year. The store will have cashiers, but Amazon said it wanted to give shoppers a way to bypass any lines. In the future, it could be used at Amazon’s Whole Foods grocery chain or other stores, if Amazon sells the technology, but there are no plans for either right now.

Several startups are already making similar smart shopping carts that are being tested in stores, but many require scanning groceries before dropping them in.

There’s no scanning on the Amazon cart. A screen near the handle lists what’s being charged, and the cart can detect when something is taken out and have it removed from the bill. And there’s also a way to let the cart know if you need to throw a jacket or purse in the cart so you don’t have to carry it around.

Amazon shareholders Wednesday turned back a series of proposals put forth by critics at the company's annual meeting aimed at creating new social responsibility goals for the tech giant.

The virtual shareholder meeting rejected all 11 dissident proposals while adopting four measures on board membership, executive compensation and other company business, an Amazon spokesperson said, without elaborating.

The dissident proposals included one to create an independent chair to oversee chief executive Jeff Bezos.

The measures were backed by a group called Amazon Employees for Climate Justice which contended that "toxicity" pervades the Seattle-based company.

Losing proposals also targeted food waste, racism, environmental justice, and sales of technology such as facial recognition software that could be used to violate civil rights.

The meeting comes amid heightened tensions over Amazon's workplace policies as it struggles with the COVID-19 epidemic.

The pressure has led to walkouts at some Amazon facilities and brought out more calls for Amazon to step up efforts for workplace safety -- even as the company has touted dozens of new incitatives.

None of the shareholder proposals opposed by the Amazon board got enough votes to pass.

Amazon defended its corporate responsibility efforts in a document provided to shareholders.

"Certain of the shareholder proposals relate to environmental, sustainability, social, or governance issues, often requesting that we prepare a report, adopt a policy, or take some other particular action," the document said.

"In many cases, we already support some of the initiatives or share the concerns addressed in such proposals, and we often already have taken actions that we believe address the underlying concerns of a proposal, but we may disagree with how the proposal seeks to prescribe the manner in which we approach or report on the issue."

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Amazon said Friday that it is buying self-driving technology company Zoox, which is developing an autonomous vehicle for a ride-hailing service that people would request on their phones.

Seattle-based Amazon did not disclose how much it is paying for Zoox, which was founded six years ago in Foster City, California. Analysts pegged the purchase price at over $1 billion.

The online retailing giant said Zoox will keep running as a separate business and continue to develop its own autonomous vehicle.

“We’re excited to help the talented Zoox team to bring their vision to reality in the years ahead,” said Amazon’s Jeff Wilke, who runs the company’s retail business.

The deal could drive Amazon into an entirely new business: transporting people from one place to another. But some industry analysts think Amazon’s ultimate goal is to repurpose the Zoox vehicle for its core business, delivering packages to shoppers.

“My guess would be in the near term that Amazon is probably more interested in taking that platform and adapting it as an alternative or complement to its existing fleet of delivery vans,” said Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst for Guidehouse Insights, who follows autonomous vehicle developments.

Abuelsamid said Zoox has a good autonomous system and was planning to deploy a ride-hailing service next year. It’s also building its own vehicle that can travel in two directions — both ends can be the front and the back — making it ideal for urban deliveries. He sees Amazon converting the small vehicles into mobile lockers that would stop at delivery sites for people to pick up packages.

Amazon didn’t directly answer a question about whether autonomous package delivery is its goal, but said Zoox would “continue working toward their mission to transform mobility as a service by developing a fully autonomous, purpose built vehicle.”

The company cautioned that widespread use of autonomous vehicles is still years away and will require a substantial capital investment in a crowded field. The deal puts Amazon, which has grown rapidly from its start as an online bookseller 25 years ago, in competition with Google’s self-driving technology spinoff called Waymo, and General Motors’ Cruise autonomous vehicle unit.

Autonomous delivery would fit with Amazon’s plans to deliver more of its packages on its own and rely less on UPS and the U.S. Postal Service. In recent years it has expanded its fleet of planes, built package sorting hubs at airports and launched a program that lets people start businesses that deliver packages in vans stamped with the Amazon logo.

The investment could complement the $700 million that Amazon put into electric vehicle startup Rivian in 2019. Rivian, with operations in suburban Detroit and California, has a contract to make 100,000 electric delivery vans for Amazon. The company also has a factory in Normal, Ill., with extra capacity that could be used to build the Zoox vehicles for Amazon, Abuelsamid said.

Amazon’s acquisition changes the landscape in the autonomous vehicle business by bringing in a deep-pocketed competitor, Abuelsamid said. It increases pressure on smaller companies that are building delivery vehicles, he said.

The Zoox acquisition isn’t Amazon’s first foray into autonomous vehicles. Early in 2019, it joined other investors in a $530 million stake in Aurora Innovation. Aurora recently has focused on a self-driving system for heavy trucks.

Amazon has used autonomous technology to get orders to shoppers: self-driving robots shuffle products around its warehouses and a cooler-sized robot with six wheels has delivered orders in a Seattle suburb. It’s also working on self-piloted drones that fly small goods to customers’ homes.

The deal comes at a time when the power of Amazon and other technology stalwarts such as Google, Facebook and Apple have drawn increasing scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers and antitrust regulators. The pandemic-stricken economy is making it more difficult for startups to raise money to continue work, creating opportunities for the industry’s still-thriving giants to make acquisitions at bargain prices.

Privately held Zoox received $990 million in funding from investors, according to Crunchbase, which tracks investments in startups.

Roughly five hours after an internal email went out Friday to Amazon employees telling them to delete the popular video app TikTok from their phones, the online retailing giant appeared to backtrack, calling the ban a mistake.

“This morning’s email to some of our employees was sent in error,” Amazon emailed reporters just before 5 p.m. Eastern time. “There is no change to our policies right now with regard to TikTok.”

Company spokeswoman Jaci Anderson declined to answer questions about what caused the confounding turnaround or error.

The initial internal email, which was disseminated widely online, told employees to delete TikTok, a video app increasingly popular with young people but also the focus of intensifying national-security and geopolitical concerns because of its Chinese ownership. The email cited the app’s “security risks.”

An Amazon employee who confirmed receipt of the initial email but was not authorized to speak publicly had not seen a retraction at the time of Amazon’s backtrack.

Amazon is the second-largest U.S. private employer after Walmart. Moving against TikTok could have escalated pressure on the app in a big way, particularly if other companies did the same. The U.S. military already bans TikTok on employee phones and the company is subject to a national-security review of its merger history.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said this week that the government was “certainly looking” at banning the app, setting off confused and irritated posts as well as jokes by TikTok users.

Chinese internet company ByteDance owns TikTok, which is designed for users outside of China; it also makes a Chinese version called Douyin. Like YouTube, TikTok relies on its users for the videos that populate its app. It has a reputation for fun, goofy videos and is popular with young people, including millions of Americans.

But critics have cited concerns, including the possibility of TikTok censoring videos, such as those critical of the Chinese government, sharing user data with Chinese officials, and violating kids’ privacy. TikTok has said it doesn’t censor videos based on topics sensitive to China and it would not give the Chinese government access to U.S. user data even if asked.

TikTok said earlier in the day that Amazon did not notify it before sending the initial email around midday Eastern time Friday. That email read, “The TikTok app is no longer permitted on mobile devices that access Amazon email.” To retain mobile access to company email, employees had to delete the TikTok app by the end of the day.

“We still do not understand their concerns,” TikTok said at the time, adding that the company would welcome a dialogue to address Amazon’s issues. A TikTok spokeswoman declined to comment further Friday evening.

TikTok has been trying to appease critics in the U.S. and distance itself from its Chinese roots, but finds itself caught in an increasingly sticky geopolitical web.

It recently named a new CEO, former Disney executive Kevin Mayer, a move experts said could help it navigate U.S. regulators. And it is stopping operations in Hong Kong because of a new Chinese national security law that led Facebook, Google and Twitter to also stop providing user data to Hong Kong authorities.

Pompeo said the U.S. government remains concerned about TikTok and referred to the administration’s crackdown on Chinese telecom firms Huawei and ZTE. Washington has tried to convince allies to root Huawei out of telecom networks with mixed success. President Donald Trump has also said he is willing to use Huawei as a bargaining chip in trade talks. Huawei has denied that it enables spying by the Chinese government.

A U.S. national-security agency has been reviewing ByteDance’s purchase of TikTok’s precursor, Musical.ly. Meanwhile, privacy groups say TikTok has been violating children’s privacy, even after the Federal Trade Commission fined the company in 2019 for collecting personal information from children without their parents’ consent. Concerns aren’t limited to the U.S. India this month banned dozens of Chinese apps, including TikTok, citing privacy concerns, amid tensions between the countries.

Amazon may have been concerned about a Chinese-owned app’s access to employee data because the U.S. government says China regularly steals U.S. intellectual property, said Susan Ariel Aaronson, a professor at George Washington University and a data governance and national-security expert.

Part of Amazon’s motivation with the ban, now apparently reversed, may also have been political, Aaronson said, since Amazon “doesn’t want to alienate the Trump administration.”

Seattle-based Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, are frequent targets of Trump. Bezos personally owns The Washington Post, which Trump has called “fake news.” Last year, Amazon sued the U.S. government, saying that Trump’s “personal vendetta” against Amazon, Bezos and the Post led it to lose a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon to rival Microsoft. Meanwhile, federal regulators as well as Congress are pursuing antitrust investigations at Amazon as well as other tech giants.