Meta’s new AI agent Muse has barely had time to settle in before running into a major obstacle. Amazon has blocked it from shopping on its website. The move puts two of the biggest players in the AI and e-commerce worlds on opposite sides of a growing question—who gets to control how AI agents shop online?
Amazon says it first asked Meta to stop Muse from access its website voluntarily, but the company declined. According to Amazon, the dispute centers on security and the bot appears to capture and store customer credentials, potentially creating privacy and security risks.
This isn’t the first shopping agent Amazon has moved to block. The company also sought to restrict agents from Google and OpenAI. Late last year, it sued Perplexity, alleging that its Comet agent had been disguised to look like a Chrome browser.
The Hot New App
Muse could be the biggest agentic threat to Amazon’s own protocol. After launching on September 8, it quickly became the No. 1 free app on Apple’s App Store, nosing out ChatGPT. That rapid adoption comes as retailers and technology companies are still working out how third-party AI agents should interact with their platforms.
“Just like physical retailers, e-commerce merchants spend a lot of time curating their store pages so customers spend time browsing and shopping,” said Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research. “The last thing they want is to be bot-shopped and reduced to a low-cost fulfillment house. You can’t appeal to a bot’s emotions and elicit feelings that lead to upsells and/or additional purchases. This really is the formation journey of agentic commerce in a nutshell—who is the agent working for?”
Amazon launched its own shopping agent, Alexa for Shopping, in May. It also offers an agentic shopping feature called Buy for Me, which searches for products on other companies’ sites. Amazon emphasizes that Buy for Me identifies itself and gives merchants the option to opt out.
That distinction is central to Amazon’s objection to Muse. Because Meta’s agent doesn’t identify itself, Amazon argues that it effectively operates as an undisclosed third party accessing customer accounts, processing transactions, and handling personal data.
Finding Common Ground
The dispute comes despite the companies’ history of working together. Earlier this year, Meta signed a multibillion-dollar contract to run its agentic AI workloads on Amazon’s cloud, and the companies have also collaborated on enabling Meta’s Facebook platform to interact with Amazon.com.
“It’s worth noting that Amazon and Meta already play nice when it comes to providing Facebook users with access to Amazon shopping,” said Apgar. “But that’s because the user moves into the Amazon store though a Facebook door, and the merchant can still influence the customer’s shopping journey.”
