Walmart AI Agent Gateway Adds Spending Caps as Amazon Blocks Muse

Two retailers, two opposite answers

The biggest U.S. retailers have split on AI shopping agents. On October 21, Walmart said it would build a system that lets outside AI agents shop for customers at Walmart and Sam's Club. Amazon, meanwhile, has blocked Meta's Muse from browsing and buying on its site, less than two weeks after Muse launched.21 Walmart CEO John Furner announced the plan at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco and pitched it as groundwork for a time when agent-driven shopping is normal.1

The question underneath is bigger than any one feature. It's whether the online store stays a place people visit or becomes a service that software calls on their behalf. Our view is that Walmart is betting on the second outcome, and that Amazon's resistance has more to do with its business model than with security. The security concerns are real, though, and they get fair treatment below.

What Walmart actually built

The plan has three parts. The first is Agent Profiles, due next month. Customers will register each AI assistant as its own profile inside their Walmart account, so the agent's purchases show up separately from the customer's own.24 Shoppers can require approval for every purchase, or let the agent buy on its own up to a limit they set. Walmart's examples are $50, $100 or $200, and a profile can be deleted at any time.24 Approval for every order is the default.29

The second part is the Walmart Agent Gateway, a server built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP). MCP is an open standard that Anthropic created so AI agents can connect to outside tools and data. The gateway gives agents a direct line into Walmart's catalog and checkout, so they no longer have to click through a website designed for people.29 Walmart says the gateway can find a customer's usual items without handing the agent their wider shopping history. Its example: a customer's regular sourdough bread or brand of milk can be found without the agent seeing everything else they buy.10

The third part is a set of terms that agents must follow. Agents may not go beyond what the shopper intends, may not add or change payment methods, and may only see the information a task needs and the customer allows.8 Walmart says it will block agents that break the rules. It also says its normal returns policy applies even when an agent gets an order wrong.1 None of this requires a Walmart+ membership.1

Outlets disagree slightly on timing. PYMNTS says the gateway is in beta for companies and developers, with Agent Profiles arriving in November.8 Another account lists the gateway as launched Wednesday.2 The beta description is more likely accurate: ordinary shoppers will feel the change when profiles go live, not before.

The payments angle: the authorized user model

For anyone following agentic payments, the key detail is Walmart's comparison to a credit card. The company describes an Agent Profile as similar to adding an authorized user to a card: the agent can pay, the account holder sets the limit, and access can be cut off at any time.29 Walmart says agents cannot reach card numbers.7

This model addresses a problem regulators have started to name. In a September 29 speech, Federal Reserve governor Christopher Waller said authentication now means proving "that an agent has the authority to pay on the buyer's behalf."26 Walmart's approach keeps the stored payment method inside its own systems and gives the agent a limited right to use it. That is a practical answer, though it only works inside one retailer's walls.

Others are attacking the same problem elsewhere. Shopify said Muse can check out with Shop Pay across Shopify stores, with Meta's direct checkout turned on by default in merchants' settings.26 Meta, Walmart, Stripe and others have started drafting an open standard for how agents talk to businesses, meant to separate legitimate agents acting for users from abusive bots.27 Meta also plans to make money from Muse transactions: Mark Zuckerberg said the company expects to take a small fee on each one.26 Meta has indicated that merchants, not shoppers, would pay that fee, but has not said how large it will be.26

Why Amazon is building walls

Amazon gives its reasons as security and user experience. It says it never authorized Muse to access customer accounts, scrape data or process transactions, and it compares its position to how food delivery and travel booking apps operate.21 Amazon has also complained that it got no notice or choice about appearing in Muse, raised concerns about how account credentials are handled, and noted that agents skip its personalized recommendations.28 Muse users trying to shop Amazon now see a notice that unauthorized agents violate its conditions of use.24

Analysts point to a different motive: advertising. GlobalData Retail's Neil Saunders says Amazon is protecting a closed ecosystem and probably fears that agents could weaken its ad business.21 One estimate puts Amazon's advertising revenue at $68.6 billion, about double its operating income outside AWS. The same estimate puts Walmart's global ad revenue at about a fifth of its operating income.26 A shopper who scrolls sees sponsored listings. An agent goes straight to the item and never sees the shelf brands paid for.

Amazon is not against agents in general. It runs its own assistant, Alexa for Shopping, which offers recommendations, price histories, price alerts and auto-buy.21 Amazon says more than 350 million customers used it in the past year, and it sells sponsored prompts inside it.26 A more accurate summary of Amazon's policy: agents are welcome if they are Amazon's and carry Amazon's ads.

The security case still deserves weight. Amazon says Muse does not identify itself while browsing, unlike Amazon's own Buy for Me tool.26 Meta says Muse never sees passwords or card numbers.26 Requiring agents to declare themselves is a reasonable standard. Walmart's terms effectively require the same thing, just with an open door attached.

The legal backdrop has shifted

Amazon blocked Muse after a legal setback. It sued Perplexity in November 2025, accusing the startup of disguising its Comet shopping agent as ordinary Chrome browser traffic.19 In March, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction, finding strong evidence that Comet accessed Amazon without authorization.11 In August, the Ninth Circuit overturned that order. Because Comet acts only when a user tells it to, the court found that the user, not Perplexity, is the one accessing Amazon.12 The lawsuit itself continues, and Amazon has said it disagrees with the appeals ruling.17

With the federal hacking law now harder to use against agents, Amazon has fallen back on its terms of service and technical blocks.1726 That makes this a commercial fight more than a legal one, and in a commercial fight, the retailer that makes agents' jobs easiest may win the traffic.

Walmart's bet, and its weak spots

Walmart's approach suits its business. Its "everyday low prices" positioning could attract agents told to find the best deal. And it sells mostly practical goods, the kind of purchase research suggests consumers are most willing to hand to AI.21 Its partnerships with OpenAI, Google and Meta, plus its Sparky assistant, give it reach beyond its own app. A Bank of America note called those ties a strategic advantage.23 Mizuho analyst David Bellinger said the new controls should build confidence in what is still an experimental way to buy.2

There are weak spots. Reporting earlier this month found Muse sometimes failing to finish purchases on Walmart.com because human-verification checks threw the agent out. Walmart said those failures were not intentional.27 Pricing criticism is also present. Groundwork Collaborative CEO Lindsay Owens has accused Walmart of using technology to vary prices based on customer behavior. Walmart rejects that and says agents see the same prices humans do.21

Demand is still small. Only 16% of shoppers are comfortable letting an AI assistant find and buy products for them, according to Coveo's 2026 Commerce Relevance Report.21 On the other hand, BrightEdge estimates that agent purchases are growing 43% a month.26 And Muse has been downloaded more than 10 million times, according to Sensor Tower data.24

The bottom line

Across the reporting, the facts line up: Walmart is opening a controlled door and Amazon is closing one. The disagreement is over why. Our reading is that ad economics explains Amazon's position better than security does. Walmart, for its part, is trying to set the rules for how agents pay before anyone else does. If the authorized user model becomes the industry norm, Walmart will have written the template for how AI agents pay. If it doesn't, Walmart has still lost little by being the store agents can actually use.