AI shopping agents meet retailer resistance as Amazon blocks Meta's Muse

The Verge described using an AI agent to shop as less like a personal assistant and more like sending an anxious and apologetic teenager to a store: the agent needs extensive instructions, runs into technical problems and often returns with a result that is not exactly what was requested. Meta, Google, OpenAI and others have introduced agentic shopping tools that promise to book flights and hotels, browse products and secure event tickets on a person's behalf. But the report said buying things requires the other party to be willing to sell to the agent.

Amazon has been the most prominent holdout. The retailer sued Perplexity, saying the AI company ignored Amazon's requests to stop its agent from shopping on the site. More recently, Amazon blocked Meta's Muse agent from shopping on Amazon. Amazon spokesperson Maxine Tagay confirmed that the company requested Meta remove Amazon from Muse. “We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate,” Tagay said in an email.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said the bank would not allow outside agents to access accounts, calling it “too risky” for clients and the company, according to The Verge. Some users also reported they could not use agents to book trips from providers including Delta and Amtrak. The report said agents can be caught by general bot-blocking systems, so even sites without a blanket ban can make agent access intermittent and less useful for tasks that AI companies promote.

Target's bot checks produced mixed results in The Verge's tests. When instructed to look for a specific face moisturizer, Meta's Muse was caught in Target's bot check one day but got through the next. Searching for the best price on granola bars, it suggested a listing from a grocery chain that did not ship to the reporter's address. When asked for mattress recommendations under a certain price point, Muse was blocked by Target again despite having pulled from the site a few minutes earlier. Target spokesperson Loni Monroe told The Verge that an agent's success may depend on how it went about the task and what safeguards are in place; agents may be able to access one part of the site but not another to protect customer data and the shopping experience. Monroe said Target has safeguards preventing unauthorized agents and bots from accessing customer accounts and initiating transactions on a human's behalf. Target has AI shopping partnerships with OpenAI, Google and Microsoft.

The absence of Amazon options inside agents was also hard to ignore. When asked to find the best per-piece granola bar price, Muse offered options from Sam's Club, Walmart and Costco but acknowledged that Amazon might have had the lowest-priced option; it said Amazon was hard-blocked from browsing, so Muse could not confirm. The Verge said that waiting for responses, directing Muse to search more sites and clarifying that a West Coast-based retailer would not ship to New York likely took longer than searching manually.

Amazon is not opposed to automated shopping on its own terms. The company has an on-platform agentic shopping feature that monitors prices, automatically reorders items and purchases products based on rules set by human users. Another feature uses an agent to buy products from other sites without leaving Amazon; smaller businesses said they did not consent to having their storefronts scraped and featured on Amazon. The dispute leaves agentic shopping companies seeking access to Amazon's catalog while Amazon defends control over how customers shop on its platform.