Amazon blocks Meta’s new Muse AI agent from shopping on amazon.com

The right way to do this is to create an API or MCP or whatever catering to bots, and implement corresponding terms in your legal agreements (i.e. after approving a bot to interact with us, you're responsible for purchases it makes), along with some limits to prevent runaway shopping when Muse decides to binge.

Less friction = more shopping = more profits.

That used to be a concept companies like Amazon understood well. (As well as companies like Google in the context of web browsing and keeping it user-friendly as opposed to user-hostile).

If the bots mean customers are getting a better deal elsewhere, then you're doing something wrong elsewhere in your business model and need to go address that. Or eventually free market economics will, no matter how big an artificial moat you try to build.

I don't care about Meta even one bit so more power to Amazon. At the same time, Amazon is going downhill at an alarming rate. Is anyone else annoyed by the no name brands flooding every product listing there? There is no way to even enunciate the freaking names! How am I supposed to trust them?

The other issue is overpromising delivery times and vastly underperforming once the order is placed. The worst is when I purchase something that I want urgently. Let's say the price is $23. Amazon suggests buying something cheap to make it $25 and get overnight delivery. So I add some Chobani product from Amazon Fresh. The next morning I wake up to see Chobani delivered while the item I want is delayed until the next day. This has happened 3-4 times now so I have become wiser. But what a crappy customer experience from Amazon!

Everyone is bringing up ads or lock-in, but there's another reason companies (beyond Amazon) are going to be squeamish about allowing AI agents to make purchases:

The return rate for AI-purchased products is probably much higher than when a human reviews the page and makes the decision. There are going to be a lot of returns ranging from "I didn't mean to order this" to "It's not what I thought I ordered" because someone asked their agent to do something and an box showed up at their door 3 days later with something they would not have purchased if they were driving the browser.

It makes total sense for Amazon to block agents. It sucks having to manually check multiple sites for prices and delivery of something you want so is easier just to use Amazon which is usually very good. If people start using agents Amazon is less likely to get the sale and are more vulnerable to competition. Better to kill this trend off asap.

Why is it even Meta's job to announce that an AI agent is being used? Is there a law that actually forces them to make that known?

Otherwise people could just use local agents on their own machine controlling their existing browser/logins as they likely already do, without issues.

I ask this in every thread on muse / OpenClaw / whatever platform. I’ve never gotten a clear answer beyond “yeah me too”:

Does anyone have any meaningful use cases that have actually improved your life in some measurable way?

I’ve tried hard and beyond filling out some tedious forms in about the same time and energy as just doing it myself, I’ve not personally. I’ve tried hard. So I figure it’s probably my lack of creativity given the prevalence of fans. But every time I ask, I get no meaningful responses. So it makes me wonder if all the fans are just product managers on those products?

This all has been progressively looking more and more like Stanislav Lem's Washing Machine Tragedy. <Emoji of a monkey holding its eyes shut>.

I don’t get it.

Codex has full computer use capability. Surely such bans mean nothing even in the very near term.

There's a difference between automated industrial scale scraping and well-behaved agents acting on the behalf of individuals. Right now there isn't a robust, standard way to distinguish between them, so sites just block known datacenter IPs and throw out the baby with the bathwater.

That's a main advantage of running your own local claw setup using your residential connection -- difficult/impossible to block.

That said, eventually a site blocking all agents would be like blocking all search engines, something that hurts more than it helps as agentic interactions become "the norm". WebMCP or similar support will likely be a basic expectation at some point.

With AI's capable of defeating every captcha short of ARC-AGI, I don't know how this cat-and-mouse game will continue. Services (now banks, later Amazon) will require attested hardware, but even that can be put in the hands of a robot.

I wish services would get over trying to block how their customers want to use (or NOT use) their websites.

I'm still annoyed that Amazon stopped sending order details in emails so that gmail can't show me when specific items are arriving. More recently 'getsauce.com' started to do the same thing, hiding order details behind an opaque link to their website. Every player in tech wants to force you to interact with their platforms purely on their own terms, to the detriment of the users.

I'm really enjoying muse+have used it to make some amazon orders. This is a big bummer to me, in future I'll find an alternative to amazon OR find an alternative to muse.

No matter what I'll continue to use some AI agent and some shopping provider.

This is inevitably going to get looked at by antitrust regulators, either in this administration (depending on how much Trump likes the leaders involved), or in the next.

Amazon is genuinely unusable since forcing their own Rufus agent. A 300LOC userscript is the minimum to get it functioning again.

This is why the chrome driver plugin and similar tools are so important. The site shouldn't know or care if its me or my agent working on my behalf.

Agents don't click through or interact with ads or get influenced by things like lightning deals, snap promotions, "others who bought X bought Y" and such the same way a human does. This is likely a large portion of the reasoning.

This is just going to get worse before it gets better. More large sites are likely going to block or attempt to block agents because they're so reliant on ads for revenue or exploiting human psychology.

It is a money grab from Amazon I'm sure. They want to make a deal with meta to get paid for access. Maybe also worried about liability I imagine on accidental unauthorized purchases?

This is straightforward to counter. Meatbag-as-a-service to hit the Buy button.

And so the cat and mouse game carries on...

The real big question is what happens to display advertising revenue on Amazon, if even a fraction of its traffic moves to these agents.

Amazon ads is a relatively large portion of its retail profits.

Display ads are meaningless to agents. And agentic commerce is a huge threat to Amazon’s profitability.

No wonders, Amazon is actively banning these agents. but for how long is this even viable? Do we simply move our shopping to more agent friendly destinations? Is this an opportunity for Walmart to finally reclaim it’s throne?

Thank you Amazon for standing up for everyman Rufus. We don't need AI agent from evil ad giants.

Shopify seems to have no issues partnering with Muse

>We are excited to announce we are partnering deeply with Muse to enable agentic checkout with Shop Pay on all Shopify stores, offering people an easy and delightful way to shop and check out with Muse.

A remarkable display of market power by Amazon.

Probably to protect their advertising business which is very strong.

We’ll see how this plays out.

There's a lot to discuss here - agentic commerce, IMO, is where things are heading. I'm completely convinced that people _want_ to shop using agents. But I want to understand the dynamics at play here: will underlying inventory providers like Amazon give up control and allow agents to use their website?

I find this question very interesting and I want to predict where things will head. On one hand Amazon has a lot to lose by giving up control on how their website is used. Ideally they'd like to control the full end to end experience. What happens to the work they put in their UI? All those endless A/B experiments to make the buttons look perfect?

But on the other hand - this is where things are heading. They can't stop agents from using their website. Not for long. And they have a lot to gain because overall purchases will increase since. They can accept it and create a plugin and try to offer as much "branding" as possible inside it. Or they can completely go against agents and block it.

Then you have to wonder, what really is the moat here? Amazon's logistics and its relations with partners and customers (return policy etc) and the trust it brings. The UI part dissolves and is no longer important.

Maybe they want only an allowed list of agents access to Amazon? Maybe that's where things are heading? They sign deals with maybe just OpenAI (for example)? Its not like Amazon makes their own agent + model. I would hate it things fragment this much.

Amazon cant hold this off for the long run, nobody wants to scroll through a list of two hundred near identical packages of toilet paper. Agents will intermediate, and they will remove demand for low value items