Walmart will let AI agents shop its website for you starting next month. The retailer confirmed the plan this week and published a rulebook that outside agents must follow. Amazon has taken the opposite approach.
Shoppers get an “Agent Profile” inside their normal Walmart account. That profile keeps agent spending separate from your own. By default, every agent purchase needs your approval. You can also hand an agent a fixed budget, such as $100, and let it work inside that limit. The agent can be switched off at any time.
Walmart built an “Agent Gateway” that is currently in beta. It connects outside AI assistants through the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for plugging agents into online services. The company says the gateway avoids the broken checkouts agents hit when they click through a normal shopping site.
It also limits what the agent can see. If you buy sourdough bread or one brand of milk every week, Walmart helps the agent find those usual items. Your wider shopping history stays hidden from the assistant. The same setup will be offered on Sam’s Club.
The terms are blunt. Agents “must not take actions beyond what the shopper intends.” They cannot change a customer’s payment method. They may only read the data needed to finish their task. Walmart says agents that break these rules will be blocked outright.
Amazon is closing the door
Amazon has fought Perplexity over its Comet shopping agent and blocked Meta’s Muse assistant from its storefront. Retailers worry that agents will scrape prices, skip sponsored placements, and turn storefronts into nothing more than inventory lists. Walmart is betting it can keep control by writing the rules itself.
That bet is worth watching. Shopping agents only work when merchants cooperate. A single retailer that opens its catalog gets attention from every assistant builder on the market. Walmart has the scale to make that offer hard to refuse, with thousands of US stores and a grocery business that drives repeat visits.
The beta arrives as AI assistants move from chat windows into checkout flows. Meta said this week that ten million people have set up Muse agents, with about a quarter of them active on any given day. If those users start buying through an assistant, stores that block agents may lose the sale entirely.
Walmart has not said which agents will be supported at launch. The company also has not given a date beyond “next month.” For now the safest read is simple. Agents are arriving in retail, and Walmart wants to be the first store that hands them a key.
Source: The Verge
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