AI agents are ready to shop. Some retailers are wary.

The lack of Amazon options within agents is also impossible to ignore. Sometimes, the agents will say as much: When I asked Muse to find the best per-piece granola bar price, it offered options from Sam’s Club, Walmart, and Costco, but acknowledged a big caveat: Amazon might have had the lowest-priced option, but it was hard-blocked from browsing, so Muse couldn’t confirm. Between waiting for a response, directing Muse to search for more sites, and clarifying that a West Coast-based retailer wouldn’t ship to New York, it likely would have been faster to search myself. It also explains why agentic AI companies would really like to have Amazon on board — and why Amazon is so fiercely protective of how customers shop on its platform. It’s not that Amazon is against robots shopping in place of humans — the company has its own on-platform agentic shopping feature that monitors prices, automatically reorders items, and purchases products based on rules set by human users. Another feature that uses an agent to purchase products from other sites without leaving Amazon angered smaller businesses, who say they didn’t consent to having their storefronts scraped and featured on Amazon.