Walmart Opens Its Doors to AI Shopping Agents While Amazon Blocks Them

Walmart Opens Its Doors to AI Shopping Agents While Amazon Blocks Them

Walmart and Amazon have picked opposite sides in the biggest new fight in online shopping: whether artificial intelligence agents should be allowed to buy things for you. Walmart announced on October 21 that it is opening its store to approved AI agents through a new Agent Gateway, while Amazon has moved to block agents from making purchases on its site.

Walmart's gateway, built on the open Model Context Protocol, lets agents such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Meta's Muse search Walmart and Sam's Club inventory and complete checkout on a shopper's behalf. Next month the retailer will add Agent Profiles, giving each AI its own identity inside a customer's account, with purchases kept separate from the shopper's own orders. Shoppers can require approval for every purchase or set a spending limit, and agents never see payment card details or go beyond the shopper's stated intent. Agents that break the rules get blocked.

Amazon, by contrast, has blocked agents including Perplexity and Meta's Muse, citing customer security and data privacy, while promoting its own AI assistant inside its store. The split comes down to business models: Amazon earns huge advertising revenue from shoppers browsing its pages, which an agent skips entirely, while Walmart sees agents as a way to reach customers inside ChatGPT and Gemini. For shoppers, the question is now simple: do you want your AI to do the shopping, and which store will let it?

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