Walmart Welcomes AI Shopping Agents as Amazon Blocks Them

Two of the largest retailers on earth have just taken opposite sides of the same question: should AI shopping agents be allowed to buy things on your behalf? Walmart answered with a welcome mat. Amazon answered with a locked door. The split, announced within days of each other, is the clearest sign yet that agentic commerce has moved from demo to battleground.

On Wednesday, October 21, Walmart president and CEO John Furner announced the Agent Gateway at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, according to reporting by TechCrunch. The gateway is a new server built on the Model Context Protocol, the open standard Anthropic created to let AI agents connect to outside tools and data. Through it, approved AI shopping agents can search Walmart and Sam's Club inventory and complete purchases for customers.

What Walmart actually announced

The Agent Gateway is the centerpiece, but the controls around it are what make the announcement interesting. Walmart is rolling out Agent Profiles next month: shoppers link each AI agent to a dedicated profile inside their account, see its purchases separately from their own orders, and choose whether every transaction needs approval or whether the agent may spend up to a set limit. Walmart compares the arrangement to adding an authorized user to a credit card, according to TechCrunch.

The rules for agents are strict. Agents cannot see a shopper's payment card details, cannot change payment methods, and cannot act beyond the shopper's stated intent. Access to information is limited to what a specific task requires, and agents that break the terms will be blocked. Normal return policies still apply when an agent orders the wrong thing. Walmart says prices for AI shopping agents will be the same as for regular shoppers, with offers and fees shown before an order is placed.

Walmart is not starting from scratch here. The retailer already works with Meta's Muse and offers integrations with popular AI apps such as ChatGPT and Gemini, and the gateway formalizes that strategy. A profile is created the first time a shopper uses an agent through the gateway, can be deleted at any time, and works for any Walmart account holder, with no Walmart+ membership required.

Why Amazon chose the opposite path

Amazon, by contrast, has begun blocking AI agents from making purchases on behalf of shoppers, including Perplexity's agent and Meta's Muse, citing customer security and data privacy. The disagreement comes down to who owns the shopper relationship. Amazon earns large advertising revenue from sponsored listings that shoppers see while browsing, and it promotes its own assistant inside its store. An outside agent that browses and buys without viewing those pages weakens both the advertising and the data link, so blocking agents protects that model.

Walmart has a smaller share of online sales, so meeting shoppers inside ChatGPT, Gemini, or Muse offers reach it might not win on its own site. The profile and spending controls address the main obstacles to agent commerce: fraud, liability for unwanted orders, and the question of which party a retailer is actually dealing with when the buyer is software.

The timing matters too. Weeks earlier, a federal appeals court handed Perplexity a win in its running fight with Amazon, vacating a preliminary injunction that had barred Perplexity's Comet browser agent from shopping on Amazon accounts. The court ruled that it is the user, not Perplexity, who accesses Amazon's site when the agent acts on their behalf. Amazon's blocking strategy may therefore face legal headwinds even as it doubles down commercially.

What the split means for the agent economy

For AI agents themselves, the Walmart-Amazon split is a preview of the internet to come. Some companies will welcome agents, some will charge them for access, and the largest platforms will build their own agents and lock out rivals. The pattern is already visible beyond retail: banks have moved to block AI agents acting beyond customer instructions, a trend covered in earlier reporting on agent guardrails, while other firms race to give agents verifiable identities, as in Salesforce's agentic identity push.

The practical upshot for shoppers is a new kind of choice. If you want an AI assistant to restock the pantry, Walmart is building the plumbing to let it do so with guardrails: separate profiles, spending limits, and per-order approval. If you shop at Amazon, you will likely use Amazon's own assistant instead. The retailer that wins the agent era may not be the one with the best website, but the one agents are allowed to shop at.

Walmart has not said which agents are approved, when a developer beta begins, or how many customers already shop through agents. This is a direction, not proof that agents are transacting at scale. But the direction is clear, and it comes with a blueprint: identity for agents, limits on what they can touch, and a human in control of the wallet. Other retailers watching this experiment will have to decide which side of the fence they are on, and shoppers will vote with the agents they trust. Sources: TechCrunch and Technopolis News reported the announcements.