Walmart opens its store to AI agents to shop for you, while Amazon blocks them

San Francisco — Walmart announced on Wednesday, October 21, its Agent Gateway, a front door for approved artificial intelligence agents to search products and buy at Walmart and Sam's Club on a customer's behalf. The announcement, made by president and CEO John Furner at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, puts the world's largest retailer on the opposite path from Amazon, which blocks outside agents on its platform.

Agent Gateway is a server built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the standard created by Anthropic for agents to connect with outside tools. Through it, an approved agent can check real-time inventory and complete a purchase without the customer having to hand over personal data or purchase history directly to the model. Walmart already works with Meta's Muse agent and offers integrations with apps such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

Agent Profiles arrive next month: each agent the customer authorizes will have its own profile inside the Walmart account, so its purchases appear separately from the user's. The customer will decide how each purchase is approved: authorizing every transaction or setting a spending limit, with examples of $50, $100 and $200. The profile is created the first time the agent is used, can be deleted at any time and does not require a Walmart+ membership. Walmart compares the arrangement to adding someone as an authorized user on a credit card.

The company also set rules for agents: they cannot access the customer's payment information or do anything beyond what the shopper intends, and Walmart's returns policy applies even when the agent makes a mistake — a condition meant to encourage consumers to try the system without fear of ending up with products they did not order. Agents that break the rules will be blocked.

Amazon, by contrast, has taken a hard line: last month it blocked Muse on its site, it sued Perplexity in November 2025 over its Comet agent, and it has also restricted agents from Google and OpenAI, while promoting its own tools such as Alexa for Shopping and Buy for Me. The contest comes amid a full agent race: Anthropic previewed Claude Duet that same Wednesday, OpenAI launched its Dots agents last month, and Meta's Muse has passed 10 million downloads, according to Sensor Tower data.

Photo: AFP

Source: TechCrunch