Amazon blocks Meta's Muse AI agent from shopping on its site as agentic commerce fight escalates

Amazon has shut Meta's new personal AI agent, Muse, out of its store. As GeekWire reported, users who tried to shop on Amazon.com through Muse as of Sunday night were shown a popup reading: “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed.” Amazon cited security, privacy and transparency concerns, and said it had tried unsuccessfully to get Meta to exclude the e-commerce site from the experience.

Amazon told GeekWire that it was not made aware in advance that Muse would access its store and did not authorize it. The company said Muse appears to capture and store customer credentials and scrape account data, and that the agent does not identify itself when it browses. “We think it's fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate,” an Amazon spokesperson said. Amazon added that it has asked Meta to remove Amazon from the experience.

The standoff is notable because the two companies are partners as well as rivals: Amazon products have been purchasable inside Facebook and Instagram since 2023, and Meta signed a multibillion-dollar deal in April to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon's cloud. Amazon said it is in direct conversation with Meta about the issue, and declined to comment on whether it would take legal action. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday night.

At the centre of the dispute is how Muse works. Meta launched Muse on September 8 as a U.S.-only personal agent that carries out multi-step tasks rather than answering one-off questions, connecting to services including email, calendar, payments, dining and shopping. It runs on what Meta calls a secure virtual machine with its own browser, is free with paid subscription tiers, and is available on iOS, Android, muse.ai and WhatsApp. Meta's launch materials spell out the mechanism now in dispute: if a service has a public API, Muse can connect using credentials the user provides; if it has no API at all, the agent “can use the service through a browser the way you would”.

Muse has caught on fast. A week after launch it became the No. 1 free app in Apple's U.S. App Store, ahead of ChatGPT, and early users have described it switching an auto insurance policy, hunting down discount codes at checkout and loading an online grocery cart. Amazon says Muse can reach account pages and order history if a customer prompts it to, which the retailer characterises as an undisclosed third party moving through customer accounts and processing transactions without its knowledge.

The legal backdrop makes the block more pointed. Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity in March, then lost it on August 4, when the Ninth Circuit held that the user — not the AI company — was the one accessing Amazon's computers under federal anti-hacking law; the court denied Amazon's petition for rehearing on September 10. The ruling did leave claims built on contract and terms of service available, and the message Muse users now see accuses no one of hacking, citing instead Amazon's Conditions of Use.

The fight is part of a broader debate over who controls the shopping experience and the customer relationship when AI agents buy on behalf of consumers. Amazon has spent the past year trying to keep outside agents off its site, suing Perplexity over its Comet browser and moving to block shopping agents from Google and OpenAI. The business stakes are direct: beyond its flagship store, Amazon generated more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year, a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products. Amazon's own agentic shopping feature, Buy for Me, fetches items from external brands' sites, but the company notes that it identifies itself and lets brands opt out.

What to watch next is whether the direct talks between Amazon and Meta produce an access arrangement both can live with, or whether Amazon escalates into fresh litigation. For platforms and assistant makers alike, the signal is that when agents start placing orders, retailers want advance notice, visible identification and an opt-out — and the rules for who represents the consumer are still being written through commercial fights.