Walmart opens its store to shopping agents as Amazon keeps Muse out

Walmart will let AI agents shop its website on customers’ behalf starting next month, The Verge reported, taking the opposite approach to Amazon, which has blocked Perplexity’s shopping agent and Meta’s Muse.

Each agent gets an Agent Profile inside the customer’s Walmart account. By default every agent purchase needs approval, though shoppers can set a budget the agent may spend on its own, review its purchases separately and switch it off at any time. Walmart’s terms say agents may not go beyond what the shopper intends or change the payment method, and agents that break the rules will be blocked.

Agents connect through a new Agent Gateway, in beta, built on the Model Context Protocol. Walmart says that lets agents find a customer’s usual items without seeing their wider shopping history. The same setup will work at Sam’s Club.