Amazon parcels moving along a conveyor belt

Amazon parcels on a conveyor belt. Image: Christoph Scholz / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

Amazon has blocked Meta’s new AI agent, Muse, from shopping on its website, in the latest and most high-profile fight yet over who gets to let AI agents buy things on your behalf. The block took effect on Sunday night, after Meta declined Amazon’s request to pull the bot, Bloomberg reports.

What Amazon says

Muse users who try to shop on Amazon now get a blunt message: “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use,” GeekWire reports.

Amazon has three complaints:

  • No permission: Meta never told Amazon that Muse would be accessing its store.
  • No identification: Muse doesn’t identify itself as an AI agent when it browses, so it looks like a regular customer.
  • Your logins: Amazon says Muse appears to capture and store customers’ credentials, and can reach account pages and order history as an undisclosed third party, creating privacy and security risks.

Third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions.

Amazon spokesperson, via GeekWire

What Meta says

Meta didn’t immediately comment on the block. But when it launched Muse earlier this month, it said the agent has “no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods,” and that credentials people share go into “secure storage, so Muse can use them without seeing them.”

Muse, which launched on September 8, is Meta’s bid for a personal AI agent that can handle everyday tasks like shopping and booking appointments. It works through official connections where they exist, and otherwise by operating a web browser the way a person would. That second approach is exactly what Amazon objects to.

Amazon has done this before

Meta isn’t the first. Amazon has spent the past year trying to keep outside AI agents off its site. It has moved to block shopping agents from Google and OpenAI, and sued Perplexity over its Comet AI browser. Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity in March, but an appeals court reversed it in August.

Amazon isn’t against AI shopping, as long as it’s Amazon’s own. It launched Alexa for Shopping in May, and its Buy for Me agent, which buys from other brands’ websites on customers’ behalf, identifies itself as a bot and lets brands opt out. Those are exactly the courtesies Amazon says Muse doesn’t offer.

The bigger fight

This is about more than one bot. Consumers may want a single assistant that can shop anywhere. Big retailers want to decide which software gets inside customer accounts, how it identifies itself and, crucially, who owns the customer relationship. If AI agents become the way people shop, whoever controls the agent could end up controlling where the money goes.

For now, if you’ve signed up for Muse hoping it’ll handle your Amazon orders, it can’t.

Sources: Bloomberg, GeekWire

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