AI Shopping Agents Split Retail as Walmart Launches Agent Gateway

Two retailers, two opposite answers

AI shopping agents can browse, compare and buy for consumers, and this fall the biggest US retailers stopped hedging about them. On October 21, Walmart launched an Agent Gateway in beta. It gives approved AI agents a dedicated way to search and buy from Walmart and Sam's Club without working through pages built for human shoppers.20 Amazon, Walmart's largest competitor, had already started blocking AI agents from buying on behalf of its shoppers.11

Most outlets described this as a split down the middle of the industry.15 That framing is accurate, but it leaves out a lot. Many retailers block agents without having decided to. The payments industry is building the infrastructure for agent purchases faster than stores are letting those purchases happen. And the most serious unsolved problem is not whether agents are smart enough to shop. It is whether a business can tell which agents to trust.

What Walmart built

Walmart's approach adds controls rather than simply opening the door. Starting next month, Agent Profiles will let customers authorize each AI agent with its own profile in their account. Each agent's purchases will appear separately, and the customer can either approve every transaction or set a spending limit.11 Walmart compares this to adding an authorized user to a credit card. It also says agents cannot act beyond what the shopper intends, cannot see payment details, and will be blocked if they break its terms.11 By default, Walmart still asks for approval even when a purchase falls under the limit the customer set.17

Walmart is also making a pricing promise. In its announcement, the company said it prices "products, not people," so AI agents will see the same prices humans do on Walmart.com, with discounts and fees shown before purchase.16 This also responds to a quieter worry that agent traffic could be used to discriminate on price.

The gateway builds on work Walmart had already done. The retailer had a partnership with Meta's Muse agent and integrations with ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI apps.11 Walmart also joined Stripe, Meta and the enterprise AI startup Sierra in publishing an open "personal agent protocol." It is designed to let businesses detect when a personal AI agent, not a human, is accessing their platform and to see what it is doing.10

Who is closing the door

The list of companies restricting agents is longer than the list welcoming them. In one week, TheRealReal, Tapestry, Kohl's, Chewy, Neiman Marcus, Delta and Adidas each moved to block or restrict third-party shopping agents like Muse.17 TheRealReal said it is strengthening its bot defenses after finding that Muse-based agents could abuse its 20-minute hold feature, keeping items on hold for hours so that human shoppers could not buy them.17

The restrictions go beyond retail. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said the bank blocks external AI agents from acting for retail customers because of security risks.16 Schwab CEO Rick Wurster asked who would be liable if something went wrong with an agent the firm cannot control.20 eBay's user agreement, updated in February, bans buy-for-me agents and order flows without human review unless eBay has given permission.20

Amazon's stance matters most because of its size. It began showing Muse users a message on September 20 saying the agent was not authorized under its Conditions of Use.14 Amazon's stated reason is that Muse does not identify itself while browsing, while Amazon's own Buy for Me feature does.14

Why the camps divide: security, advertising, or both

The coverage disagrees most about why Amazon is resisting. One view emphasizes security. A wave of incidents some observers call "Black October" made every unidentified automated visitor look more dangerous, and AI has sharply cut the effort needed to find weaknesses in websites.12 Banks have reportedly found AI agents working inside customer accounts, sometimes without clear authorization.12 Senators Mark Warner and Bernie Sanders have called for legislation in response.16

The other view centers on money. One analysis estimates Amazon's advertising revenue at $68.6 billion, about twice its store profit outside AWS. It puts Amazon's ad take at about 9.6 cents per dollar of net sales, compared with roughly 0.9 cents at Walmart.14 Because an agent buying for someone never scrolls past sponsored listings, this argument holds that a retailer's policy on agents follows how much it earns from that scrolling.14 Perplexity made a similar argument in court, saying agents "don't have eyeballs" to see Amazon's advertising.29 Another analyst pointed to Amazon's position as the starting point for most US e-commerce searches, with more than 45% market share, as a reason it will not give that role to outside agents.19

Our reading: The advertising explanation fits the evidence better, and security gives it a credible public justification. One observer pointed out that Amazon's Buy for Me itself acts as an agent on other brands' sites, which suggests the real issue is who controls the data, not whether agents shop at all.16 Still, the security concerns are real. Even the sharpest analysis of Amazon's ad economics accepts that requiring agents to identify themselves is a reasonable standard.14

Many retailers block agents without deciding to

An audit of 51 large US online retailers by Billions Network, an identity verification company, found that only 11 had taken a deliberate position on AI agents.13 Thirty-seven block shopping agents through old bot rules written for scrapers, and none offers a way for a verified agent to complete a purchase.16 Even the retailers closest to being ready for agents, Pottery Barn, West Elm and Williams-Sonoma, publish guidance files for agents but still block checkout.13 BrightEdge reports that only about 3% of the e-commerce companies it works with allow agents to complete a transaction.14

This changes how the industry split should be read. Most retailers have not taken a side at all. They are using tools like robots.txt that can allow or block a type of traffic but cannot tell a good agent from a bad one.13 One bot-management vendor calls this a visibility problem that looks like a policy decision.20 That vendor sells verification tools, so its view should be weighed with that in mind, but the Billions audit points the same way.

The payments infrastructure is ahead of the stores

Payment companies are working hard to build agent checkout. Visa announced a collaboration with OpenAI to let agents pay with tokenized Visa credentials, limited by spending caps, merchant categories and approvals the user sets.1 Most reports date it to the Visa Payments Forum on June 10.34 One report dates it to October 6.8 As of October, neither company had announced a consumer launch date.4

This is OpenAI's second try at in-chat checkout. Its Instant Checkout feature drew few merchants, partly because of a fee of about 4%, and OpenAI pulled back from it in March.4 At that point OpenAI said it would let merchants use their own checkouts while it focused on product discovery.5

Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines in June, letting agents and connected systems initiate and settle transactions programmatically.1 With Google, it also developed Verifiable Intent, an open standard meant to prove that a shopper actually authorized what an agent bought.6 Stripe's Shared Payment Tokens let an agent pay without seeing the card and carry a maximum amount and an expiry.10 Meta built Stripe's Link wallet into Muse, so the agent can check out at more than 1 million businesses that accept Link.10

Little of this is widely available yet. Of Stripe, PayPal, Visa and Mastercard, only Stripe's Agentic Commerce Suite could be confirmed as self-serve for merchants as of October 22, and it runs on preview terms.7 Visa describes its product as "in the process of deployment."7 Visa did report live agent transactions with more than 30 European card issuers in July.5

Liability is still unresolved. Neither Visa nor Mastercard has published final rules on who pays when an agent buys the wrong item.3 Stripe has made its position clear: a September update to its Services Agreement makes users solely responsible for what their AI agents do through Stripe.10 Federal Reserve governor Christopher Waller has described the main challenge as proving that an agent has the authority to pay for the buyer.14

The courts complicate blocking

Retailers that want to keep agents out also face legal limits. In March, a district judge granted Amazon an injunction against Perplexity's Comet browser agent. She found strong evidence that it had the user's permission but not Amazon's authorization to access accounts.28 On August 4, the Ninth Circuit vacated that injunction. It held that when a user directs the agent, the user, not Perplexity, is the one accessing Amazon under the federal anti-hacking law.22 The court said the decision is narrow and tied to how Comet is built, and the case continues.22 Amazon says it is considering its options.29

What it means for shoppers and personalization

Shoppers are more cautious than the technology suggests. CI&T data shows 74% of shoppers have used an AI tool while browsing, but only 27% are comfortable letting one handle the whole purchase.19 Visa's CEO has said about three-quarters of consumers do not trust agentic platforms to pay on their own.2 Meta still reports that more than 10 million people in the US and Canada have set up a Muse agent, mostly for shopping.17

The business case for welcoming agents is strong. Adobe found that AI retail visitors convert at a 60% higher rate than other traffic.20 For retailers that rely on personalization and sponsored placement, though, an agent that compares only price and availability weakens their recommendation engines.15

The likely outcome is not a clear winner but a messy holiday season. An agent might research gifts well and then get stuck at checkout because a retailer will not let it buy.12 Walmart is betting that identification plus spending limits is the model the industry will adopt. Given payment networks building around the same idea, a court showing reluctance to let platforms block agents, and Amazon's ad business facing real losses, that looks like the better long-term bet. However, Walmart is also the retailer with the least advertising revenue at risk.