As Amazon blocks AI agents, Walmart opens the door with an Agent Gateway

Walmart announced a set of technologies for agentic commerce on Wednesday, anchored by a new MCP server called Agent Gateway. President and CEO John Furner unveiled the plans at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, saying the technology will support agentic shopping for both Walmart and Sam's Club.

Agent Gateway is built on the Model Context Protocol, the standard originally created by Anthropic for connecting agents to external data sources, tools and workflows. In this case it lets an approved agent search Walmart's online inventory and complete purchases for the person it represents.

Walmart says the gateway can help customers buy their usual brands or items without handing their personal information or purchase history directly to the agent. That is an attempt to answer the most practical objection to agentic shopping: a useful agent needs a lot of personal context, and shoppers rarely want to hand all of it over.

The retailer also built technology to tell an agent's purchases apart from a customer's own. Agent Profiles, rolling out next month, create a dedicated profile in a shopper's account for each agent and show its transactions separately; shoppers can require approval for every transaction or set a spending limit that authorizes purchases automatically.

Walmart compares the controls to adding an authorized user to a credit card: transactions are identified and spending can be capped. A profile is created the first time a shopper uses a given agent through the gateway, can be deleted at any time, and requires only a Walmart account, not a Walmart+ membership.

Alongside the tooling, Walmart published terms for AI agents that specify how they must operate and what rights they have to transact. Returns apply even when an agent does not act as intended, agents cannot go beyond what the shopper intends or access payment information, and agents that do not comply get blocked from the site.

The contrast with Amazon is the story. Amazon recently began blocking agents from making purchases on shoppers' behalf, and travel and booking sites have locked agents out entirely; Walmart had already partnered with Meta's Muse and integrated with ChatGPT and Gemini, and is now building the underlying rails.

Opening the door is not the same as letting go. Walmart is trading a traceable account structure, explicit terms and hard limits for agent-driven sales, which is roughly the bargain retail will have to strike if agentic checkout is going to become ordinary. The near-term test is how Agent Profiles actually roll out next month, and whether agents operating under those terms convert.