Amazon Blocks Meta's New Muse AI Agent From Shopping On Amazon.com
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DANDENONG, AUSTRALIA - DECEMBER 05: The Amazon website is seen on December 5, 2017 in Dandenong, Australia. Amazon has ended months of speculation by launching its local website overnight. The online retail giant has started taking orders and shipping products from its 'fulfilment centre' in Dandenong South, offering massive discounts on millions of items across more than 20 categories including electronics, toys, clothing, beauty and accessories. (Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)Getty ImagesMeta’s new AI agent was shut out of Amazon.com on Sunday night, twelve days after it launched.Meta introduced Muse on September 8 as a personal agent that can open a browser, fill out forms and check out for the person using it.
From Sunday, people who asked it to shop on Amazon started getting a popup instead: “continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed.”Amazon’s objections, as GeekWire reported them, start with disclosure: Meta never said Muse would shop the store. Amazon also says the agent does not identify itself when it browses, and that it appears to capture and store customer logins. It says it asked Meta to leave Amazon out before it acted.Meta’s launch post says Muse has no visibility into passwords or payment methods, and that logins go into secure storage the agent can use without seeing them.The dispute is over who owns the shopper, and Amazon has shown that the company holding the customer’s account can still decide which agents come in.Meta Sets Rules For Its AppsThe block shuts Muse out of the largest online store in the US, but Muse was built to shop the rest of the web too. It pays through Link, Stripe’s checkout service, which creates a one-time card number so the shopper’s real card stays hidden.Meta also knows this fight from Amazon’s side. Last October it changed WhatsApp’s business terms to bar general-purpose AI chatbots, ChatGPT and Perplexity’s among them, from the service businesses use to message customers. The rule took effect on January 15.Inside its own apps, Meta is the company deciding which agents get in. Meta says its own Business Agent is already used by more than a million businesses on WhatsApp and Messenger.The two companies already sell together when both agree to the terms. Amazon products have been for sale inside Facebook and Instagram since 2023.Amazon’s statement to GeekWire set out the rule it wants every agent to follow:“Third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions.”The payment industry is working on the same problem. On September 10, Visa, Mastercard and Ant International said they are working on common rules for AI agents that shop. The goal is for payment networks, merchants and online marketplaces to recognize an agent, see who runs it and check whether it is allowed to spend.Every one of Amazon’s three complaints is on that list. An agent that has to show its ID at the door leaves the store deciding who comes in.Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, Google and Perplexity all have agents that can shop. Far fewer companies own the account those agents have to sign into, or the app where the conversation happens.Amazon owns that account for hundreds of millions of shoppers. Meta owns the conversation between businesses and their customers on apps billions of people open every day.The agent era rewards the companies that own the customer and the checkout, and Amazon and Meta each own one.Own both. The agents will keep multiplying, and every one of them still has to come through somebody’s door.