AI shopping wars: Walmart welcomes AI agents while Amazon blocks Muse

The big picture: Walmart is throwing open the door to online shopping by outside AI agents just as Amazon is putting up walls to shield its platform from Meta's newly popular Muse.

• Walmart — which was already allowing external AI agents to shop — announced Wednesday that it will debut a new management system to make sure consumers can "use the agents they choose to shop with Walmart and Sam's Club, with controls over what each agent can do."
• Walmart Agent Gateway — together with Agent Profiles — will enable customers to set agentic spending limits, require them to approve or review the purchase, and cut off access, Walmart CEO John Furner announced.

Amazon, meanwhile, recently blocked Muse from perusing and buying products on its platform less than two weeks after it launched.

• Amazon said it did not authorize Muse to access customer accounts, scrape data or process transactions.
• The company cited concerns over customer security and user experience, and likened its decision to how food delivery and travel-booking apps operate in their industries.

What they're saying: Amazon is attempting to maintain "its closed ecosystem" and likely fears that agentic shopping could undermine its advertising business, GlobalData Retail analyst Neil Saunders tells Axios.

• "Amazon is also betting that its own AI tools will aid customers who want to use that technology," Saunders said in an email. But "the calculation could well change if third-party agents start to play a much bigger role in discovery and purchasing."

State of play: Both companies have their own in-house agentic shopping assistants. Amazon has Alexa for Shopping, which offers personalized recommendations, product comparisons, price histories and the ability to automate shopping with features like price alerts and auto-buy.

• Walmart continues to offer Sparky, which recently experienced 60% quarter-to-quarter growth, Walmart U.S. CEO David Guggina said in September at a Goldman Sachs conference.

The intrigue: But Walmart may be particularly well positioned to benefit from outside shopping agents too.

• One advantage is Walmart's longstanding emphasis on "everyday low prices," which could attract the attention of agents with marching orders to find the best possible deals.
• Another is the fact that customers are more likely to trust AI to recommend practical products than items "for pleasure or life experience," according to Luca Cian, a University of Virginia business professor who has studied AI shopping.
• Walmart happens to traffic heavily in practical items like groceries, clothes and home goods.

Friction point: Groundwork Collaborative CEO Lindsay Owens, author of the new book "Gouged," recently accused Walmart of using AI to extract the most value out of its customers, saying that the company had deployed "sneaky pricing practices" and had developed technology "specifically designed to vary prices based on consumers' behavior and demand."

• Walmart said those claims were misleading and inaccurate.
• "We price products, not people, so the prices that an AI agent sees are the same prices that a human would see on Walmart.com, with applicable offers and fees shown before purchase," Walmart said Wednesday in a blog post on its new agent management system.

Reality check: For now, agentic shopping is a sliver of overall retail spending.

• Only 16% of shoppers are currently comfortable letting an AI assistant find and purchase products on their behalf, according to Coveo's 2026 Commerce Relevance Report.
• Cian believes said many consumers will treat agents in the same way parents give car keys to teenagers: with serious limits.