Walmart unveiled its Agent Gateway on 21 October and plans to offer shoppers per-purchase approvals or spending limits for AI agents next month, while Amazon has begun blocking AI agents from making purchases on behalf of shoppers, TechCrunch reported. Walmart President and CEO John Furner announced the technology at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. It is intended to let approved agents search inventory and buy products on a customer’s behalf at Walmart and Sam’s Club.
Key points
- Agent Gateway gives approved AI agents a route to Walmart’s inventory and checkout.
- Agent Profiles, planned for November, will let customers approve each purchase or set a spending limit.
- Walmart says its returns process applies when an agent does not act as intended.
- Amazon blocked Muse on 20 September; Target permits four named shopping agents.
Agent Gateway gives approved agents a route to checkout
The gateway is an MCP server. Model Context Protocol, originally created by Anthropic, lets AI agents connect to external tools and data sources. Walmart is using it to provide approved agents with access to its online inventory and a way to place orders for shoppers.
Walmart says the gateway can help an agent find a customer’s usual products without giving that agent the customer’s personal information or purchase history. The retailer has also developed a way to distinguish orders placed through agents from purchases customers initiate themselves.
Customers will link an Agent Profile to their Walmart account when they first use a particular agent through the gateway. Each authorised agent gets a separate profile, allowing its purchases to be viewed apart from the customer’s own orders. Shoppers can delete a profile at any time, and Walmart says a Walmart+ membership is not required to use agent support.
Agent Profiles put limits on purchases
Approval for every agent purchase will be the default, The Verge reported. Customers will instead be able to allow purchases within a budget they set. The Verge gave up to $100 as an example of such a limit, rather than a fixed ceiling for the service.
Walmart says its rules prohibit agents from taking actions beyond a shopper’s instructions or accessing the shopper’s payment information. An agent may obtain only the information needed for its assigned task. The retailer says it will block agents that breach those rules and will apply its returns process even when an agent does not act as the customer intended.
Those conditions leave the customer in control of purchase authorisation while Walmart determines which agents may use the gateway. The arrangement extends beyond a shopping recommendation: an approved agent can proceed to a transaction, subject to the permissions the customer sets.
Amazon blocks Muse as Walmart expands access
Amazon began blocking Muse on 20 September, saying unauthorised agent access violated its Conditions of Use, Business Model Analyst reported. Amazon said Muse had not identified itself as an agent and might store customer credentials. Target takes a selective approach: its terms name its own assistant and agents from OpenAI, Google and Microsoft as permitted shoppers.
Walmart was already a Muse retail partner. It also offers integrations with ChatGPT and Gemini and has developed its own shopping assistant, Sparky. Its gateway adds a means for outside agents to search and transact under Walmart’s access rules rather than relying on an agent to navigate the website as a shopper would.
Walmart is also among the founding partners of the Personal Agent Protocol, which Sierra and Meta announced on 6 October to define how consumer agents identify themselves to businesses and act with permission, Times Square Chronicles reported. AI Affairs covered the shared standard backed by Meta, Walmart, Stripe and Sierra.
Bank of America analysts led by Christopher Nardone cited Walmart’s links to several AI ecosystems, Sparky and its Muse partnership in a note published on 19 October, Yahoo Finance reported. Nardone also said the effect on Walmart’s advertising business remains unclear if shopping agents take over purchases that customers would otherwise make while browsing.
