Amazon Is Blocking Your AI From Shopping There. Its Own AI Gets a Pass.

Amazon's shopping agent is allowed to leave Amazon. A feature called Buy for Me finds products on other retailers' websites and completes the purchase for the customer, who never leaves the Amazon app, PaymentsJournal reported. Outside agents can't make the same trip in the other direction. Since the night of September 20, anyone who sends Meta's Muse to buy something on Amazon gets a pop-up saying the unauthorized agent is violating Amazon's Conditions of Use, GeekWire first reported.

Muse is the biggest name Amazon has shut out, and it joins a long list. Cybernews found Amazon's site rules naming ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Perplexity, Grok and Google's crawlers, and the retail agency Tinuiti counted close to 50 AI-related user agents in Amazon's robots.txt by early this year. State of AI has already covered why Muse keeps getting blocked across the web and the ad revenue behind most of these walls. Amazon's case adds a twist those stories didn't cover: the company keeping other agents out is building its own, and that agent is allowed to do on other retailers' sites what Amazon prohibits on Amazon.

Amazon's Agent Shops Wherever It Wants

Amazon retired the Rufus name in May and moved the technology into Alexa for Shopping, its agent for answering product questions and acting on a customer's behalf. Buy for Me sits alongside it and handles purchases from stores Amazon doesn't own, according to PaymentsJournal. Either way, Amazon keeps the customer, the transaction data and the session inside its own app.

Amazon says the comparison isn't fair. It told Adweek that it holds every agent to the same rules: identify yourself, let the site opt out, offer something in return and improve the shopping experience. Its specific complaints about Muse are that Meta never asked, that the agent doesn't say it's an agent, and that it appeared able to capture and store customer credentials. Amazon updated its Conditions of Use in August to require agents to identify themselves in every request, as State of AI reported last week.

The business reason shows up in Amazon's earnings. Its ad business took in $19.8 billion in the second quarter, up 26% from a year earlier, much of it from sponsored product listings. An outside agent comparing prices for a customer has no reason to look at them. Alexa for Shopping works inside Amazon's own pages, where Amazon decides what the customer sees first.

Amazon Lost in Court, Then Changed Its Terms

Amazon tried a lawsuit first. In November 2025 it sued Perplexity over the Comet browser under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and a district judge granted a preliminary injunction in March, Retail Insight Network reported.

The Ninth Circuit vacated that injunction on August 4. Judge Milan Smith, writing for the panel, said the user is the one accessing Amazon when Comet shops for them, and compared it to a person browsing in Safari, which no one would describe as Apple accessing Amazon, according to AI Weekly. Amazon asked the full court to rehear the case, and Ecosistema Startup reported that request was denied on September 10. The lawsuit itself is back in district court.

The panel didn't decide whether Amazon can enforce its own terms against customers who shop through an agent, Implicator noted. That is the theory behind the Muse pop-up. Rather than accuse Meta of hacking, Amazon is telling its own customers they violated an agreement they accepted. No court has ruled on whether that holds.

Walmart and Shopify Are Letting Muse In

Muse has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times since its September 8 launch, according to Sensor Tower data cited by Inc. Several of Amazon's competitors want those users. Shopify opened its checkout to Muse through Shop Pay, and Meta has named Walmart, Best Buy, Wayfair, Sephora, Gap and Expedia as partners, though not every integration is live yet. When NBC News tested Muse at several large retailers, some blocked it, including companies Meta lists as partners.

Walmart has said for most of this year that it wants outside agents in. Executives told Modern Retail in January that open partnerships are central to the company's AI strategy, and Walmart connected its catalog to Google's Gemini through the Universal Commerce Protocol, a checkout standard Google announced with Shopify, Target and Etsy among the early backers. OpenAI and Stripe released a competing open standard, the Agentic Commerce Protocol, in September 2025, according to Stellagent.

For a retailer that competes on price, the math is simple. If an agent compares every store before it buys, Walmart wants to be the easiest store for it to buy from. Amazon makes more money when shoppers browse its pages than when software skips past them.

Amazon Has a Point About Disclosure

Muse does try to pass as a person. Inc.'s Jason Aten examined the app and found that its browser switches off the standard signals that tell a website software is in control. An agent that logs into customer accounts with saved passwords and doesn't identify itself is a real fraud and liability problem for any store. Andy Jassy has also said many shopping agents get prices, delivery dates and stock levels wrong, according to Digiday, and those mistakes land on Amazon's customer-service team.

That argument would carry more weight if identifying itself got an agent through the door. Meta could add disclosure to Muse tomorrow and still need Amazon's permission, because Amazon's terms let it limit agents' access at its sole discretion, eMarketer reported. Jassy has said Amazon is talking with agent makers and expects to partner with some over time. He has also said any arrangement needs the right exchange of value, which suggests access will come with a price.

The industry is working on a technical fix. Web Bot Auth, a draft IETF standard, would let agents cryptographically sign their requests so sites can verify who sent them. That would answer Amazon's identification complaint, though Amazon could still turn verified agents away.

What Companies Should Do Now

If you sell online, set a policy on outside agents before a vendor or a platform default sets one for you. Amazon's approach works for a store customers won't leave. Most retailers are closer to Walmart's position and need to be easy for agents to buy from, which means product data, prices and inventory that software can read accurately.

If you're building a shopping agent of your own, plan for the retailers it visits to ask for the same disclosure and opt-out rights Amazon demands from Meta. Building those in now costs less than retrofitting them after a block.

If your company uses agents for purchasing or procurement, keep critical buying off sites that haven't agreed to agent access. Amazon is enforcing its terms against its own customers, so an employee who sends an agent to order supplies on Amazon could be putting the company's account at risk. Use a supported integration or keep a person at checkout.

Watch the Perplexity case now that it's back in district court. It is the likeliest place for a judge to rule on whether a retailer's terms of service can stop customers from shopping through the agent they choose.