Walmart Lets AI Agents Shop While Amazon Builds a Wall
Walmart Lets AI Agents Shop While Amazon Builds a Wall
Walmart has drawn a sharp line in the emerging AI-shopping battle: rather than lock out outside agents, it plans to give them a supervised route into Walmart and Sam’s Club.
The retailer said its new Agent Gateway, built on the Model Context Protocol, will let approved agents search online inventory and make purchases for customers. The system is intended to spare agents the friction of browser navigation while limiting what data they can see; Walmart says it can help an agent locate a shopper’s regular items without handing over their broader purchase history.
The rollout, including Agent Profiles next month, puts the customer in the driver’s seat. Each agent gets a separate account profile, with purchases visible apart from the shopper’s own orders. Buyers can require approval for every transaction, set a ceiling such as $100, or delete the profile altogether. Walmart’s rules also say agents “must not take actions beyond what the shopper intends,” cannot alter payment methods and may access only information needed for the task.
That welcome mat arrives as Amazon has moved in the opposite direction. Amazon recently blocked Meta’s Muse from browsing and buying on its platform, saying it had not authorized the service to access accounts, scrape data or process transactions. It cited customer security and user experience.
The contrast is not merely technical. Analyst Neil Saunders told Axios that Amazon is defending “its closed ecosystem,” while also protecting an advertising model that could be weakened if third-party agents increasingly steer product discovery and purchases. Walmart, meanwhile, argues its governance model can preserve consumer choice: agent and human shoppers see the same prices, with offers and fees displayed before purchase.
For now, the stakes remain speculative. Only 16% of shoppers are comfortable letting an AI assistant find and buy products, according to Coveo research cited by Axios. But Walmart is positioning controls, not exclusion, as its answer to that hesitation.
Write a comment