alt Hacker NewsThis is my read of the situation too. Amazon wants to control "agentic commerce" use cases so they can monetize them. A generic agent using amazon.com undermines that effort, so they're trying to use the courts to prevent it.
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Legal issues asside, I find this agentic commerce goal naive. Its like expecting me to buy a different microwave so the popcorn button works with the official amazon popcorn. Theres no way they will be able to replace the context and tooling I have setup for my own personal agents. And theres no way in hell im going to give Amazon every piece of information in my life so they are slightly better equipped to recommend which usbc dongle I need.
I understand that the sheer size of Amazon, and industry standard of forcing AI into every tool, makes them think its worth investing in. But from my outside perspective this is not a winable strategy.
Don't they already do something similar but with Shopify? Like you buy on Amazon and then Amazon scrapes the internet and buys from a Shopify site without the seller's or user's consent.
Exactly right. With LLMs, you can go directly to the website and checkout instead of going thru Amazon so they can collect their commission.
It’s actually why I’m building an open-source, decentralized Amazon alternative that’s powered by agentic commerce and MCP-UI that brings the cart and storefront into the chat directly.
Amazon and every marketplace’s days are numbered. It’s why you see so many of them trying to push their own sort of agentic commerce protocol because they want to control commerce in the age of AI. It’s exactly why I chose MCP-UI and not their protocols.
They're going to be confronted with the ADA soon enough. If I'm a quadriplegic I may want to employ my own user agent to engage in commerce. Amazon doesn't have any standing to dictate how I access their services.