AI Shopping Agents Divide Retail: Walmart Opens, Amazon Blocks

A split that is now out in the open

For most of this year, retailers talked about "agentic commerce" as something still to come. That changed in the last few weeks of October. Several of the biggest names in U.S. retail took public, opposing positions on whether software agents may shop on a customer's behalf. The arguments now running through those positions are about payments, identity and who gets to keep the customer.

The pressure came mostly from one product. Meta launched Muse, a personal agent that can use a browser, fill in forms and act for a user, on September 8. Mark Zuckerberg has told investors that more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada set up a Muse agent, and that shopping is the most common use.23 One report puts average Muse transactions above $200. It also notes that participating businesses pay Meta a fee on completed purchases rather than buying ads.5 Agents stopped being a demo once that many people had one, and they became a live traffic and checkout problem for retailers.

Who closed the door

Amazon moved first and furthest. It began blocking Muse on September 20, after asking Meta to remove Amazon from the agent's shopping experience. Users now see a message saying an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's conditions of use.25 Amazon has said Muse does not identify itself while browsing and appears to capture and store customer credentials. Meta says Muse has no visibility into passwords or payment methods, and no independent finding has settled the dispute. Amazon has also kept out other outside agents, reportedly including OpenAI's new Dots agents. Meanwhile it is pushing its own assistant, Alexa for Shopping, which merged Rufus and Alexa+ in May.3

Others followed in less absolute ways. Recent coverage lists TheRealReal, Tapestry, Kohl's, Chewy, Neiman Marcus, Delta and Adidas as blocking or restricting third-party agents. TheRealReal said Muse-based agents had exploited its 20-minute hold feature to keep items reserved for hours.23 Tapestry's position shows how fine the lines can be. Shoppers can buy Coach and Kate Spade through Google's AI Mode and Gemini with explicit approval for each order, but agents cannot check out on the brands' own websites. Tapestry cites fraud and inventory hoarding.2 Kohl's does not let agents buy at all, while QVC and HSN let agents complete purchases and send their catalogs to OpenAI and Google.21

The pushback extends beyond retail. Charles Schwab and JPMorgan Chase have reportedly kept agents out of customer accounts, and Yelp only admits agents that pay for its data.8

Walmart's controlled front door

Walmart took the other side on October 21. CEO John Furner used the Masters of Scale Summit to announce the Walmart Agent Gateway, an MCP server that lets approved agents search Walmart and Sam's Club inventory and buy on a shopper's behalf.7 Agent Profiles, due within a month, give each agent its own identity inside a customer's account. The customer either approves every purchase or sets a spending cap, with Walmart giving $50, $100 and $200 as examples.27 Walmart compares this to adding an authorized user to a credit card.1

The guardrails sit mostly on the payment side. Agents never receive card details and cannot add or change payment methods. Walmart may still ask for approval even when a purchase falls within the limit.27 The terms require agents to identify themselves and follow rate limits. Walmart also keeps the right to cap transaction value or frequency, reverse orders and suspend access.9 Walmart's normal returns process applies even when an agent does something the shopper did not want.1

It would be a mistake to read this as Walmart simply opening up. Its updated terms of use explicitly bar unauthorized agents from scraping, ordering or training models on its content.9 A Walmart executive described the company's earlier work putting its Sparky assistant inside ChatGPT and Gemini as "intermediation", not giving customers away.2 In my reading, Walmart and Amazon are not arguing about whether agents should be controlled. They disagree about who controls them, and through what route.

The rollout has been bumpy, too. Some users complained that Muse could not finish purchases on Walmart's site, and one said he could not sign in himself. Walmart told reporters those blocks were not intentional.

Payments: the real contest

The payments layer is where this goes beyond retail strategy. Retailers are deciding which agents can reach checkout, while card networks and processors build the systems that decide whether an agent's payment gets approved.

Mastercard expanded Agent Pay on September 30. The update added a probability score, now in U.S. testing, that estimates whether an AI agent started a transaction. It also brought in Skyfire's "Know Your Agent" identity technology.15 Mastercard is pairing its payment data with Cloudflare's view of agent web traffic, so a bank can check whether the agent that browsed is the same one that paid.14 On October 20 it opened early access to Agent Pay for Machines, built on the x402 protocol.14 A Mastercard product executive called the arrival of mass-market agents like Muse and Dots a "turning point."12

On October 28, Shopify said it is working with Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover so buyers can use Shop Pay through agents at any merchant, with the agent never seeing the card.16 On its earnings call a day later, Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach called the one-time virtual card arrangements some processors use for agents a temporary "bridge." Mastercard wants agents to keep the consumer's own card credential through network tokens, and it sees token features for agents as something it can charge for.18

The reporting is less consistent on how much of this actually works today. One trade newsletter described Mastercard as having rolled out Agent Pay "this week."6 Other accounts note that Agent Pay was first announced in April 2025 and reaches merchants through partners.13 They also say Mastercard has given no general-availability date for merchants. As of October 22, only Stripe's agentic suite could be confirmed as self-serve for merchants, and it runs on preview terms.19 One merchant guide found no dedicated dispute codes or liability shift for agent-initiated transactions at any major network or processor.13 That gap does more than any headline to explain why retailers are cautious. If nobody has settled who pays for a disputed agent purchase, blocking is the cheap option.

The protocol picture is messy as well. One count lists eight live standards across connectivity, checkout, authorization and identity: MCP, A2A, ACP, UCP, AP2, TAP, Agent Pay and MPP.11 Meta, Walmart, Shopify, Stripe and Sierra are drafting yet another, the Personal Agent Protocol.26 OpenAI's in-chat Instant Checkout was scaled back in March. Walmart reportedly said ChatGPT checkout converted at about a third of its own site's rate.3

Why Amazon is betting on the wall

The security case Amazon gives is real. Agents that don't identify themselves are hard to tell apart from scrapers. One security vendor argues that most blocking comes from poor visibility rather than a considered policy.8 Still, the business case looks like the stronger driver. Forbes points to Amazon's $68 billion advertising business and its wider retail ecosystem as what outside agents put at risk.5 One analysis estimates Amazon earns about 9.6 cents of advertising per dollar of net sales, against roughly 0.9 cents at Walmart. It argues that an agent which never scrolls past sponsored listings wipes out exactly what Amazon sells. That reading fits the fact that Amazon is happy to run agents itself, inside its own walls.

For now, Amazon also holds the strongest position in the data. In an October PYMNTS survey, 59.7% of consumers said their most recent AI-assisted purchase was completed on Amazon.2 It is less clear that Amazon can rely on the courts. The Ninth Circuit vacated a preliminary injunction against Perplexity's Comet agent in August, finding that the users, not Perplexity, were the ones accessing Amazon. One outlet's summary garbled that outcome as an order against Comet. The ruling actually went against Amazon.7

The verdict

Calling this a split between open and closed misses the point. Almost every retailer covered here is building a gate, whether that is Amazon's wall, Target's list of four approved agents or Walmart's metered gateway. They differ on whether that gate charges fees, carries the retailer's own ads or uses identity checks run through the payment networks. Walmart's approach looks more durable to me. Agent-verification rails from Mastercard, Visa and Shopify are maturing, and Walmart's model already treats agents as known, capped and accountable customers. Amazon's wall holds only as long as shoppers keep starting their searches on Amazon. With more than 10 million Muse users, that habit faces its first real test this holiday season.