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Amazon blocks Meta’s new Muse AI agent from shopping on amazon.com

118 points by simianwords 5d ago

doctoboggan 5d ago
This is why the chrome driver plugin and similar tools are so important. The site shouldn't know or care if its me or my agent working on my behalf.
majorchord 5d ago
Why is it even Meta's job to announce that an AI agent is being used? Is there a law that actually forces them to make that known? Otherwise people could just use local agents on their own machine controlling their existing browser/logins as they likely already do, without issues.
- JumpCrisscross 5d ago
  I guess it’s more that Amazon’s server queries for an answer and intentionally obfuscating a bad one comes across as lying.
- ihsw 5d ago
  [dead]
- esafak 5d ago
  What do you mean? Declaring the agent is transparency. You should be congratulating Meta for their rare good deed.
- awongh 5d ago
  What's crazy is that the ToS is basically, "allow us, Amazon, to give you algorithmically higher prices- and if you try to circumvent that, you can't buy from us anymore". I think the arguments for these kinds of near-monopoly companies being true market-driven capitalism seem more and more false. The idea that Amazon will tell you that you don't even own the right to your own shopping experience tells you everything you need to know. Apple owns your device and Amazon owns the right to show you whatever price/product they want, regarless of your search intent.
  - Terr_ 5d ago
    I sometimes look around at people proposing technical solutions for these political/legal/economic problems, and think: "Was I that naive X decades ago, or were things really different then?"
- swatcoder 5d ago
  That's irrelevant from Amazon's perspective. If an agent is popular enough and has some fingerprint they can identify, they have a strong incentive to block it. Agents that scrape and digest web data are entirely anathema to brand-reliant and advertising-reliant vendors and marketplaces. Even human assistants could be trusted to develop brand attachment and respond to advertising meant to shape their preferences. And while LLM agents are still manipulable, that's a frontier that nobody really knows how to navigate effectively yet, at least not to the degree of optimization modern vendors and marketplaces (especially Amazon) have acheived. It's quaint to imagine what AI agents might do for consumers in the naive internet that preceded their emergence (if you ignore their vulnerabilities and flaws), but that's not what they'll be able to achieve as that same internet responds to them -- at least not at Meta scale. It's not very different than how social media companies once offered, and then aggressively withdrew and policed, API's to their graphs and feeds. Those open API's simply aren't compatible with the business objectives that keep these companies running, no matter what cool and profoundly user-friendly things could be built on them. The same kind of incompatibility applies to AI agents when it comes to e-commerce. It won't be a permitted thing until, and except for where, vendors/marketplaces can assert control over the agents themselves and manipulate them to ends comparable to what they can achieve with human consumer sentiment already.
geodel 5d ago
Thank you Amazon for standing up for everyman Rufus. We don't need AI agent from evil ad giants.
- majorchord 5d ago
  How do you know they are standing up for users? From where I'm sitting it looks like they just are trying to protect Alexa Shopping's revenue and/or monopoly.
  - suprfsat 5d ago
    Amazon: famously not evil ad giant.
  - kqgnkqgn 5d ago
    I assume it was sarcasm, Rufus is an Amazon AI product.
    - a4isms 5d ago
      And there go my Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure memories. George Carlin's Rufus was a "good 'un."
  - Brian_K_White 5d ago
    [dead]
  - digdugdirk 5d ago
    Ha. Amazon's in-app AI agent is called Rufus. It's incredibly annoying, and they love directing you to an 'Ask Rufus' page where you watch an AI agent not-quite-finish repeating your search terms back at you before you realize you're not actually on your search results page, and then spend some additional time trying to find the link to take you to said search results page. I assume somewhere there's a team hitting their AI query KPI's due to this, but I really wish they'd shut off a few server racks and save everyone the annoyance instead.
simianwords 5d ago
There's a lot to discuss here - agentic commerce, IMO, is where things are heading. I'm completely convinced that people _want_ to shop using agents. But I want to understand the dynamics at play here: will underlying inventory providers like Amazon give up control and allow agents to use their website? I find this question very interesting and I want to predict where things will head. On one hand Amazon has a lot to lose by giving up control on how their website is used. Ideally they'd like to control the full end to end experience. What happens to the work they put in their UI? All those endless A/B experiments to make the buttons look perfect? But on the other hand - this is where things are heading. They can't stop agents from using their website. Not for long. And they have a lot to gain because overall purchases will increase since. They can accept it and create a plugin and try to offer as much "branding" as possible inside it. Or they can completely go against agents and block it. Then you have to wonder, what really is the moat here? Amazon's logistics and its relations with partners and customers (return policy etc) and the trust it brings. The UI part dissolves and is no longer important. Maybe they want only an allowed list of agents access to Amazon? Maybe that's where things are heading? They sign deals with maybe just OpenAI (for example)? Its not like Amazon makes their own agent + model. I would hate it things fragment this much.
- majorchord 5d ago
  Anything is possible I suppose... I don't see a path that leads to Amazon actually further controlling the shopping experience inside a browser (where a local agent might have control that they can't reliably detect), short of forcing users into some kind of hardware-based attestation solution or something, but even that is not foolproof.
- dylan604 5d ago
  > On one hand Amazon has a lot to lose by giving up control The everyday person is told to get over it and accept that AI is here so adapt or die. Companies start reducing headcounts to be replaced with AI. So now, a company is having to accept that people are using AI in ways they don't like so they should adapt or die as well too, right? I have no tears to shed if Amazon loses control. Also, it'll be one billionaire battling another billionaire at that point, and I'm kind of okay with that chaos. My world is no longer in my control so fuck 'em is my stance
Jcampuzano2 5d ago
Agents don't click through or interact with ads or get influenced by things like lightning deals, snap promotions, "others who bought X bought Y" and such the same way a human does. This is likely a large portion of the reasoning. This is just going to get worse before it gets better. More large sites are likely going to block or attempt to block agents because they're so reliant on ads for revenue or exploiting human psychology.
- simianwords 5d ago
  Its a very good point. There are lots of orgs in company's whose whole job is to push shit from all possible points in the website - its probably called "real estate" internally. These orgs have a lot to lose. But the company? Not so much, they will make it up and more - agents are great to use. And yes ads are hard to place because agents let you bypass all this and give you a nice filtered view of exactly what you need. Where do you think the world will head? Maybe Amazon will sell their inventory for agents at a hefty API price?
- svachalek 5d ago
  Yeah subscriptions are another big one. So many profits today are generated by bleeding off customers that just can't deal with the hoops they need to jump through to get unsubscribed. Tasking that to an agent would destroy the whole model.
  - sejej 5d ago
    You’re deluded if you think it’s as an easy as ‘send agent task, hey Presto - done’.
- sejej 5d ago
  It’s funny watching all these large tech firms with so much resource commit the sin of innovation: starting with the tech and not the customer + economics of it all. I get it. It’s tempting and alluring. But no - reimagining something takes a lot more work than sticky taping an agent on. Impatiently waiting for all this agent stuff to fek off.
United857 5d ago
There's a difference between automated industrial scale scraping and well-behaved agents acting on the behalf of individuals. Right now there isn't a robust, standard way to distinguish between them, so sites just block known datacenter IPs and throw out the baby with the bathwater. That's a main advantage of running your own local claw setup using your residential connection -- difficult/impossible to block. That said, eventually a site blocking all agents would be like blocking all search engines, something that hurts more than it helps as agentic interactions become "the norm". WebMCP or similar support will likely be a basic expectation at some point.
- dgellow 5d ago
  > Right now there isn't a robust, standard way to distinguish between them There is, it’s called an API
- stephen_cagle 5d ago
  It's worse than that, they will block all agents and specifically make exceptions for maybe 2 search engines per country. Thereby strengthening existing players and weakening all incumbants. Cloudflare for instance does allow indexing by Google and Bing I think by default, but does challenge other bots. Double check me I am speaking from memory.
- oblio 5d ago
  > That's a main advantage of running your own local claw setup using your residential connection -- difficult/impossible to block. https://aws.amazon.com/waf/features/bot-control/ https://aws.amazon.com/waf/features/bot-control/
stbenjam 5d ago
It is a money grab from Amazon I'm sure. They want to make a deal with meta to get paid for access. Maybe also worried about liability I imagine on accidental unauthorized purchases?
- shagie 5d ago
  Returns cost money and if an agent generates more returns and hitting the margins or seller retention then that's something that's likely going to get increased scrutiny. The generally quoted return rate is 5% to 15% (and it varies by category). If Muse identified purchases are generating returns of 10% to 30%, then amazon is probably going to crack down on it. (Amazon Sellers pay from 30% to 50% for customer returns from their own pockets. https://medium.com/@myrealprofit/how-much-do-refunds-really-cost-amazon-sellers-60653f1c5985 https://medium.com/@myrealprofit/how-much-do-refunds-really-... )
llmslave 5d ago
Amazon cant hold this off for the long run, nobody wants to scroll through a list of two hundred near identical packages of toilet paper. Agents will intermediate, and they will remove demand for low value items
- gunalx 5d ago
  Theh will probably consolidate more. Less choices even if they are worse is also easier for llms to do. Just look at how they pick technologies to use. Almost always the same for a given model.
- micromacrofoot 5d ago
  Amazon is just trying to get you to use their agent, so they're not anti-agent, just anti-someone-else's
  - simianwords 5d ago
    I would hate it if every company comes up with their own agent and only their agent is allowed to access the API. EU do your thing instead of cookie banners plz.
    - micromacrofoot 5d ago
      that's what they're going to do, trying to get $20 out of the average person is terrible compared to giving away your product for free and getting an endless supply of metadata
- threetonesun 5d ago
  This is already solved by the existence of hundreds of other stores that actually do some level of filtering and curation of products. I don't know why we want to play some cat and mouse game of getting an LLM to find the best toilet paper on Amazon versus just finding a reliable source of toilet paper to begin with.
  - 5d ago
meowtimemania 5d ago
I'm really enjoying muse+have used it to make some amazon orders. This is a big bummer to me, in future I'll find an alternative to amazon OR find an alternative to muse. No matter what I'll continue to use some AI agent and some shopping provider.
- causal 5d ago
  Yeah I experimented with shopping and found it was really tedious jumping through the 2FA and other bot check hoops every third click. Agree it's a huge convenience if it would work though.
- strulovich 5d ago
  I’ve been purchasing more and more stuff from Walmart (good interaction with ChatGPT) and other stores. It’s clear why Amazon is doing this from a business perspective, but this is a stop gap for them. They will need figure out a better plan for people using their agents.
z0r 5d ago
I'm still annoyed that Amazon stopped sending order details in emails so that gmail can't show me when specific items are arriving. More recently 'getsauce.com' started to do the same thing, hiding order details behind an opaque link to their website. Every player in tech wants to force you to interact with their platforms purely on their own terms, to the detriment of the users.
- bflesch 5d ago
  We should blame Google for this, and not Amazon. Google added this data from your email to your advertisement profile and used it to increase their own revenue.
  - z0r 5d ago
    But I'm using Google, which is my choice (and my own fault). Why shouldn't I be allowed to let Google have that data if I find using Gmail to be beneficial to me? Amazon should be satisfied that I am purchasing goods and services through their platform without seeking to sacrifice my experience of their platform for some nebulous gain elsewhere.
    - deleted 5d ago
      [deleted]
    - bflesch 5d ago
      > Why shouldn't I be allowed to let Google have that data if I find using Gmail to be beneficial to me? The main issue is that this is not a conscious decision that google asks you to make. They offer a free mail service and then turn around and harvest your personal mail to increase their revenue, without most consumers realizing it. They could've been happy with your lock-in to the google ecosystem and to google search, but they wanted to more data and systematically scoured all transactions from users' inboxes for additional data. Like with physical mail, the digital mail has an envelope and a message. Gmail offers to handle your envelopes and assists you in viewing the message, but then went a step further and data mined all info from the messages. In the physical world, if a company handles my inbox, it would be forbidden to open the envelope and read the message without a proper consent. The company would just open the inbox, tell me there are two letters from the bank and one letter from the customer, without reading the actual message.
fnordpiglet 5d ago
I ask this in every thread on muse / OpenClaw / whatever platform. I’ve never gotten a clear answer beyond “yeah me too”: Does anyone have any meaningful use cases that have actually improved your life in some measurable way? I’ve tried hard and beyond filling out some tedious forms in about the same time and energy as just doing it myself, I’ve not personally. I’ve tried hard. So I figure it’s probably my lack of creativity given the prevalence of fans. But every time I ask, I get no meaningful responses. So it makes me wonder if all the fans are just product managers on those products?
- simianwords 5d ago
  I made appointment with my doctor and haircut all using chatgpt. Also bought some stuff on a local website. I hate having to work through random UI. I just wanna get stuff done.
- NullifyNAN 5d ago
  I use coding agents to fill out dunkin donuts surveys for me
- takerofnaps 5d ago
  I agree with you. I also wouldn't trust it calling on my behalf or doing the majority of what people say it can do. Putting aside it making mistakes and not even being beneficial, I definitely wouldn't want meta of all companies to have the relevant information to do those things.
- mariusae 5d ago
  For myself, it's been super helpful in at least two ways: 1) Staying on top of my kid's school obligations, homework, etc. School Learning Management Systems are a hot mess, and I use agents to consolidate and collate, to keep track of the homework that has been done, what needs to be done, and even pre-grade homework to give feedback (most of the work is done on digital platforms too). It's been immensely time saving for these kinds of things. 2) Multiple instances of watching things passively: hotel room prices, availability of tickets, finding the best place to sell things online. In general things that require a lot of browsing, collating, and watching. These are the kinds of things that specialized software products could do as well, but with an agent they are just a prompt away, and you get exactly what you want. (More or less.)
rr808 5d ago
It makes total sense for Amazon to block agents. It sucks having to manually check multiple sites for prices and delivery of something you want so is easier just to use Amazon which is usually very good. If people start using agents Amazon is less likely to get the sale and are more vulnerable to competition. Better to kill this trend off asap.
- tantalor 5d ago
  Sounds like Amazon is trying to use its monopoly position to give it an competitive advantage over smaller stores.
- fastball 5d ago
  Amazon is not usually very good anymore, quality has suffered massively.
  - herpdyderp 5d ago
    I still prefer the Amazon shopping experience to anything else, unless I already know the product is available locally. The primary quality problem I've run into is the quality of the products themselves.
- Buttons840 5d ago
  In general, preventing consumers from having fully featured AIs (especially local ones) will be worth about 10 trillion dollars to companies. That's my prediction. Amazon is one example. If my basement AI drives my browser and never clicks an ad, Amazon loses big. Or, the ad industry in general -- imagine the basement AI filtering out all ads at the analog level so nobody in my house ever sees an ad, and no software update can change that. Or other optimizations. Right now companies enjoy a power imbalance because they have people who ruthlessly optimize 24/7 to save a buck. I can't do the same, because I have to work, and also prefer to spend my personal time with family -- a foolish thing to do in a capitalist society, at least from a capital perspective. Imagine I have an AI wheeling and dealing on my behalf 24/7 too. Especially in an age of online shopping and product deliveries, my AI will absolutely order from your competitor to save a penny, my AI will absolutely spend 400 hours disputing a medical bill I don't think is right, barely an inconvenience to me.
rkagerer 5d ago
This is straightforward to counter. Meatbag-as-a-service to hit the Buy button. And so the cat and mouse game carries on...
- tantalor 5d ago
  That's already a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_shopper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_shopper
xnx 5d ago
With AI's capable of defeating every captcha short of ARC-AGI, I don't know how this cat-and-mouse game will continue. Services (now banks, later Amazon) will require attested hardware, but even that can be put in the hands of a robot. I wish services would get over trying to block how their customers want to use (or NOT use) their websites.
- snailmailman 5d ago
  How are AI's capable of defeating every captcha when I, a human, get sometimes entirely blocked by captchas all the time. I get captchas when trying to do google searches if I'm not logged in. Or a lot of the time its "please wait a moment. Don't refresh the page" (the google results will then never load until you refresh the page). A few weeks ago I couldn't get past a cloudflare checkbox on a modern iPhone, and I'm not on a VPN or anything either. Yesterday I tried to visit an old reddit thread I had bookmarked and got "You've been blocked by network security," without a chance to even attempt a captcha. What are bots doing to get past all of these?
  - xnx 5d ago
    It is unfair. I too (a human) have been caught in Cloudflare loops. Hopefully these are the dying gasps for captchas and sites will give up soon since they are becoming reverse-captchas.
oybng 5d ago
Amazon is genuinely unusable since forcing their own Rufus agent. A 300LOC userscript is the minimum to get it functioning again.
rajivjain 5d ago
The real big question is what happens to display advertising revenue on Amazon, if even a fraction of its traffic moves to these agents. Amazon ads is a relatively large portion of its retail profits. Display ads are meaningless to agents. And agentic commerce is a huge threat to Amazon’s profitability. No wonders, Amazon is actively banning these agents. but for how long is this even viable? Do we simply move our shopping to more agent friendly destinations? Is this an opportunity for Walmart to finally reclaim it’s throne?
- deleted 5d ago
  [deleted]
rkagerer 5d ago
The right way to do this is to create an API or MCP or whatever catering to bots, and implement corresponding terms in your legal agreements (i.e. after approving a bot to interact with us, you're responsible for purchases it makes), along with some limits to prevent runaway shopping when Muse decides to binge. Less friction = more shopping = more profits. That used to be a concept companies like Amazon understood well. (As well as companies like Google in the context of web browsing and keeping it user-friendly as opposed to user-hostile). If the bots mean customers are getting a better deal elsewhere, then you're doing something wrong elsewhere in your business model and need to go address that. Or eventually free market economics will, no matter how big an artificial moat you try to build.
- steve1977 5d ago
  But how can they serve product suggestions this way?
  - simonw 5d ago
    Right. Agents represent a direct attack on a significant portion Amazon's revenue model.
    - anthonypasq 5d ago
      maybe agentic commerce will finally realize the micro-payments based internet that crypto people had been wishing would happen for years? Should there be stablecoin based micropayments built into MCP to charge for agentic interactions to replace the micropayment of an ad into someones eyeballs?
  - nsvd2 5d ago
    If Amazon doesn't want to offer agent-first shopping I'm sure someone else will come along and eat their lunch. Adapt or die.
  - novok 5d ago
    The AIs are also providing the product suggestions, and it comes from what data they are given from their searches. I think they can put 2 and 2 together on how to make that happen with the right MCP response bodies.
adamsb6 5d ago
This is inevitably going to get looked at by antitrust regulators, either in this administration (depending on how much Trump likes the leaders involved), or in the next.
HardCodedBias 5d ago
A remarkable display of market power by Amazon. Probably to protect their advertising business which is very strong. We’ll see how this plays out.
simianwords 5d ago
Shopify seems to have no issues partnering with Muse >We are excited to announce we are partnering deeply with Muse to enable agentic checkout with Shop Pay on all Shopify stores, offering people an easy and delightful way to shop and check out with Muse.

118 points by simianwords 5d ago

This is why the chrome driver plugin and similar tools are so important. The site shouldn't know or care if its me or my agent working on my behalf.

majorchord 5d ago

Why is it even Meta's job to announce that an AI agent is being used? Is there a law that actually forces them to make that known? Otherwise people could just use local agents on their own machine controlling their existing browser/logins as they likely already do, without issues.

JumpCrisscross 5d ago
I guess it’s more that Amazon’s server queries for an answer and intentionally obfuscating a bad one comes across as lying.
ihsw 5d ago
[dead]
esafak 5d ago
What do you mean? Declaring the agent is transparency. You should be congratulating Meta for their rare good deed.
awongh 5d ago
What's crazy is that the ToS is basically, "allow us, Amazon, to give you algorithmically higher prices- and if you try to circumvent that, you can't buy from us anymore". I think the arguments for these kinds of near-monopoly companies being true market-driven capitalism seem more and more false. The idea that Amazon will tell you that you don't even own the right to your own shopping experience tells you everything you need to know. Apple owns your device and Amazon owns the right to show you whatever price/product they want, regarless of your search intent.
- Terr_ 5d ago
  I sometimes look around at people proposing technical solutions for these political/legal/economic problems, and think: "Was I that naive X decades ago, or were things really different then?"
swatcoder 5d ago
That's irrelevant from Amazon's perspective. If an agent is popular enough and has some fingerprint they can identify, they have a strong incentive to block it. Agents that scrape and digest web data are entirely anathema to brand-reliant and advertising-reliant vendors and marketplaces. Even human assistants could be trusted to develop brand attachment and respond to advertising meant to shape their preferences. And while LLM agents are still manipulable, that's a frontier that nobody really knows how to navigate effectively yet, at least not to the degree of optimization modern vendors and marketplaces (especially Amazon) have acheived. It's quaint to imagine what AI agents might do for consumers in the naive internet that preceded their emergence (if you ignore their vulnerabilities and flaws), but that's not what they'll be able to achieve as that same internet responds to them -- at least not at Meta scale. It's not very different than how social media companies once offered, and then aggressively withdrew and policed, API's to their graphs and feeds. Those open API's simply aren't compatible with the business objectives that keep these companies running, no matter what cool and profoundly user-friendly things could be built on them. The same kind of incompatibility applies to AI agents when it comes to e-commerce. It won't be a permitted thing until, and except for where, vendors/marketplaces can assert control over the agents themselves and manipulate them to ends comparable to what they can achieve with human consumer sentiment already.

geodel 5d ago

Thank you Amazon for standing up for everyman Rufus. We don't need AI agent from evil ad giants.

majorchord 5d ago
How do you know they are standing up for users? From where I'm sitting it looks like they just are trying to protect Alexa Shopping's revenue and/or monopoly.
- suprfsat 5d ago
  Amazon: famously not evil ad giant.
- kqgnkqgn 5d ago
  I assume it was sarcasm, Rufus is an Amazon AI product.
  - a4isms 5d ago
    And there go my Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure memories. George Carlin's Rufus was a "good 'un."
- Brian_K_White 5d ago
  [dead]
- digdugdirk 5d ago
  Ha. Amazon's in-app AI agent is called Rufus. It's incredibly annoying, and they love directing you to an 'Ask Rufus' page where you watch an AI agent not-quite-finish repeating your search terms back at you before you realize you're not actually on your search results page, and then spend some additional time trying to find the link to take you to said search results page. I assume somewhere there's a team hitting their AI query KPI's due to this, but I really wish they'd shut off a few server racks and save everyone the annoyance instead.

simianwords 5d ago

There's a lot to discuss here - agentic commerce, IMO, is where things are heading. I'm completely convinced that people _want_ to shop using agents. But I want to understand the dynamics at play here: will underlying inventory providers like Amazon give up control and allow agents to use their website? I find this question very interesting and I want to predict where things will head. On one hand Amazon has a lot to lose by giving up control on how their website is used. Ideally they'd like to control the full end to end experience. What happens to the work they put in their UI? All those endless A/B experiments to make the buttons look perfect? But on the other hand - this is where things are heading. They can't stop agents from using their website. Not for long. And they have a lot to gain because overall purchases will increase since. They can accept it and create a plugin and try to offer as much "branding" as possible inside it. Or they can completely go against agents and block it. Then you have to wonder, what really is the moat here? Amazon's logistics and its relations with partners and customers (return policy etc) and the trust it brings. The UI part dissolves and is no longer important. Maybe they want only an allowed list of agents access to Amazon? Maybe that's where things are heading? They sign deals with maybe just OpenAI (for example)? Its not like Amazon makes their own agent + model. I would hate it things fragment this much.

majorchord 5d ago
Anything is possible I suppose... I don't see a path that leads to Amazon actually further controlling the shopping experience inside a browser (where a local agent might have control that they can't reliably detect), short of forcing users into some kind of hardware-based attestation solution or something, but even that is not foolproof.
dylan604 5d ago
> On one hand Amazon has a lot to lose by giving up control The everyday person is told to get over it and accept that AI is here so adapt or die. Companies start reducing headcounts to be replaced with AI. So now, a company is having to accept that people are using AI in ways they don't like so they should adapt or die as well too, right? I have no tears to shed if Amazon loses control. Also, it'll be one billionaire battling another billionaire at that point, and I'm kind of okay with that chaos. My world is no longer in my control so fuck 'em is my stance

Jcampuzano2 5d ago

Agents don't click through or interact with ads or get influenced by things like lightning deals, snap promotions, "others who bought X bought Y" and such the same way a human does. This is likely a large portion of the reasoning. This is just going to get worse before it gets better. More large sites are likely going to block or attempt to block agents because they're so reliant on ads for revenue or exploiting human psychology.

simianwords 5d ago
Its a very good point. There are lots of orgs in company's whose whole job is to push shit from all possible points in the website - its probably called "real estate" internally. These orgs have a lot to lose. But the company? Not so much, they will make it up and more - agents are great to use. And yes ads are hard to place because agents let you bypass all this and give you a nice filtered view of exactly what you need. Where do you think the world will head? Maybe Amazon will sell their inventory for agents at a hefty API price?
svachalek 5d ago
Yeah subscriptions are another big one. So many profits today are generated by bleeding off customers that just can't deal with the hoops they need to jump through to get unsubscribed. Tasking that to an agent would destroy the whole model.
- sejej 5d ago
  You’re deluded if you think it’s as an easy as ‘send agent task, hey Presto - done’.
sejej 5d ago
It’s funny watching all these large tech firms with so much resource commit the sin of innovation: starting with the tech and not the customer + economics of it all. I get it. It’s tempting and alluring. But no - reimagining something takes a lot more work than sticky taping an agent on. Impatiently waiting for all this agent stuff to fek off.

United857 5d ago

There's a difference between automated industrial scale scraping and well-behaved agents acting on the behalf of individuals. Right now there isn't a robust, standard way to distinguish between them, so sites just block known datacenter IPs and throw out the baby with the bathwater. That's a main advantage of running your own local claw setup using your residential connection -- difficult/impossible to block. That said, eventually a site blocking all agents would be like blocking all search engines, something that hurts more than it helps as agentic interactions become "the norm". WebMCP or similar support will likely be a basic expectation at some point.

dgellow 5d ago
> Right now there isn't a robust, standard way to distinguish between them There is, it’s called an API
stephen_cagle 5d ago
It's worse than that, they will block all agents and specifically make exceptions for maybe 2 search engines per country. Thereby strengthening existing players and weakening all incumbants. Cloudflare for instance does allow indexing by Google and Bing I think by default, but does challenge other bots. Double check me I am speaking from memory.
oblio 5d ago
> That's a main advantage of running your own local claw setup using your residential connection -- difficult/impossible to block. https://aws.amazon.com/waf/features/bot-control/ https://aws.amazon.com/waf/features/bot-control/

stbenjam 5d ago

It is a money grab from Amazon I'm sure. They want to make a deal with meta to get paid for access. Maybe also worried about liability I imagine on accidental unauthorized purchases?

shagie 5d ago
Returns cost money and if an agent generates more returns and hitting the margins or seller retention then that's something that's likely going to get increased scrutiny. The generally quoted return rate is 5% to 15% (and it varies by category). If Muse identified purchases are generating returns of 10% to 30%, then amazon is probably going to crack down on it. (Amazon Sellers pay from 30% to 50% for customer returns from their own pockets. https://medium.com/@myrealprofit/how-much-do-refunds-really-cost-amazon-sellers-60653f1c5985 https://medium.com/@myrealprofit/how-much-do-refunds-really-... )

llmslave 5d ago

Amazon cant hold this off for the long run, nobody wants to scroll through a list of two hundred near identical packages of toilet paper. Agents will intermediate, and they will remove demand for low value items

gunalx 5d ago
Theh will probably consolidate more. Less choices even if they are worse is also easier for llms to do. Just look at how they pick technologies to use. Almost always the same for a given model.
micromacrofoot 5d ago
Amazon is just trying to get you to use their agent, so they're not anti-agent, just anti-someone-else's
- simianwords 5d ago
  I would hate it if every company comes up with their own agent and only their agent is allowed to access the API. EU do your thing instead of cookie banners plz.
  - micromacrofoot 5d ago
    that's what they're going to do, trying to get $20 out of the average person is terrible compared to giving away your product for free and getting an endless supply of metadata
threetonesun 5d ago
This is already solved by the existence of hundreds of other stores that actually do some level of filtering and curation of products. I don't know why we want to play some cat and mouse game of getting an LLM to find the best toilet paper on Amazon versus just finding a reliable source of toilet paper to begin with.
- 5d ago

meowtimemania 5d ago

I'm really enjoying muse+have used it to make some amazon orders. This is a big bummer to me, in future I'll find an alternative to amazon OR find an alternative to muse. No matter what I'll continue to use some AI agent and some shopping provider.

causal 5d ago
Yeah I experimented with shopping and found it was really tedious jumping through the 2FA and other bot check hoops every third click. Agree it's a huge convenience if it would work though.
strulovich 5d ago
I’ve been purchasing more and more stuff from Walmart (good interaction with ChatGPT) and other stores. It’s clear why Amazon is doing this from a business perspective, but this is a stop gap for them. They will need figure out a better plan for people using their agents.

z0r 5d ago

I'm still annoyed that Amazon stopped sending order details in emails so that gmail can't show me when specific items are arriving. More recently 'getsauce.com' started to do the same thing, hiding order details behind an opaque link to their website. Every player in tech wants to force you to interact with their platforms purely on their own terms, to the detriment of the users.

bflesch 5d ago
We should blame Google for this, and not Amazon. Google added this data from your email to your advertisement profile and used it to increase their own revenue.
- z0r 5d ago
  But I'm using Google, which is my choice (and my own fault). Why shouldn't I be allowed to let Google have that data if I find using Gmail to be beneficial to me? Amazon should be satisfied that I am purchasing goods and services through their platform without seeking to sacrifice my experience of their platform for some nebulous gain elsewhere.
  - deleted 5d ago
    [deleted]
  - bflesch 5d ago
    > Why shouldn't I be allowed to let Google have that data if I find using Gmail to be beneficial to me? The main issue is that this is not a conscious decision that google asks you to make. They offer a free mail service and then turn around and harvest your personal mail to increase their revenue, without most consumers realizing it. They could've been happy with your lock-in to the google ecosystem and to google search, but they wanted to more data and systematically scoured all transactions from users' inboxes for additional data. Like with physical mail, the digital mail has an envelope and a message. Gmail offers to handle your envelopes and assists you in viewing the message, but then went a step further and data mined all info from the messages. In the physical world, if a company handles my inbox, it would be forbidden to open the envelope and read the message without a proper consent. The company would just open the inbox, tell me there are two letters from the bank and one letter from the customer, without reading the actual message.

fnordpiglet 5d ago

I ask this in every thread on muse / OpenClaw / whatever platform. I’ve never gotten a clear answer beyond “yeah me too”: Does anyone have any meaningful use cases that have actually improved your life in some measurable way? I’ve tried hard and beyond filling out some tedious forms in about the same time and energy as just doing it myself, I’ve not personally. I’ve tried hard. So I figure it’s probably my lack of creativity given the prevalence of fans. But every time I ask, I get no meaningful responses. So it makes me wonder if all the fans are just product managers on those products?

simianwords 5d ago
I made appointment with my doctor and haircut all using chatgpt. Also bought some stuff on a local website. I hate having to work through random UI. I just wanna get stuff done.
NullifyNAN 5d ago
I use coding agents to fill out dunkin donuts surveys for me
takerofnaps 5d ago
I agree with you. I also wouldn't trust it calling on my behalf or doing the majority of what people say it can do. Putting aside it making mistakes and not even being beneficial, I definitely wouldn't want meta of all companies to have the relevant information to do those things.
mariusae 5d ago
For myself, it's been super helpful in at least two ways: 1) Staying on top of my kid's school obligations, homework, etc. School Learning Management Systems are a hot mess, and I use agents to consolidate and collate, to keep track of the homework that has been done, what needs to be done, and even pre-grade homework to give feedback (most of the work is done on digital platforms too). It's been immensely time saving for these kinds of things. 2) Multiple instances of watching things passively: hotel room prices, availability of tickets, finding the best place to sell things online. In general things that require a lot of browsing, collating, and watching. These are the kinds of things that specialized software products could do as well, but with an agent they are just a prompt away, and you get exactly what you want. (More or less.)

rr808 5d ago

It makes total sense for Amazon to block agents. It sucks having to manually check multiple sites for prices and delivery of something you want so is easier just to use Amazon which is usually very good. If people start using agents Amazon is less likely to get the sale and are more vulnerable to competition. Better to kill this trend off asap.

tantalor 5d ago
Sounds like Amazon is trying to use its monopoly position to give it an competitive advantage over smaller stores.
fastball 5d ago
Amazon is not usually very good anymore, quality has suffered massively.
- herpdyderp 5d ago
  I still prefer the Amazon shopping experience to anything else, unless I already know the product is available locally. The primary quality problem I've run into is the quality of the products themselves.
Buttons840 5d ago
In general, preventing consumers from having fully featured AIs (especially local ones) will be worth about 10 trillion dollars to companies. That's my prediction. Amazon is one example. If my basement AI drives my browser and never clicks an ad, Amazon loses big. Or, the ad industry in general -- imagine the basement AI filtering out all ads at the analog level so nobody in my house ever sees an ad, and no software update can change that. Or other optimizations. Right now companies enjoy a power imbalance because they have people who ruthlessly optimize 24/7 to save a buck. I can't do the same, because I have to work, and also prefer to spend my personal time with family -- a foolish thing to do in a capitalist society, at least from a capital perspective. Imagine I have an AI wheeling and dealing on my behalf 24/7 too. Especially in an age of online shopping and product deliveries, my AI will absolutely order from your competitor to save a penny, my AI will absolutely spend 400 hours disputing a medical bill I don't think is right, barely an inconvenience to me.

rkagerer 5d ago

This is straightforward to counter. Meatbag-as-a-service to hit the Buy button. And so the cat and mouse game carries on...

tantalor 5d ago
That's already a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_shopper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_shopper

xnx 5d ago

With AI's capable of defeating every captcha short of ARC-AGI, I don't know how this cat-and-mouse game will continue. Services (now banks, later Amazon) will require attested hardware, but even that can be put in the hands of a robot. I wish services would get over trying to block how their customers want to use (or NOT use) their websites.

snailmailman 5d ago
How are AI's capable of defeating every captcha when I, a human, get sometimes entirely blocked by captchas all the time. I get captchas when trying to do google searches if I'm not logged in. Or a lot of the time its "please wait a moment. Don't refresh the page" (the google results will then never load until you refresh the page). A few weeks ago I couldn't get past a cloudflare checkbox on a modern iPhone, and I'm not on a VPN or anything either. Yesterday I tried to visit an old reddit thread I had bookmarked and got "You've been blocked by network security," without a chance to even attempt a captcha. What are bots doing to get past all of these?
- xnx 5d ago
  It is unfair. I too (a human) have been caught in Cloudflare loops. Hopefully these are the dying gasps for captchas and sites will give up soon since they are becoming reverse-captchas.

oybng 5d ago

Amazon is genuinely unusable since forcing their own Rufus agent. A 300LOC userscript is the minimum to get it functioning again.

rajivjain 5d ago

The real big question is what happens to display advertising revenue on Amazon, if even a fraction of its traffic moves to these agents. Amazon ads is a relatively large portion of its retail profits. Display ads are meaningless to agents. And agentic commerce is a huge threat to Amazon’s profitability. No wonders, Amazon is actively banning these agents. but for how long is this even viable? Do we simply move our shopping to more agent friendly destinations? Is this an opportunity for Walmart to finally reclaim it’s throne?

deleted 5d ago
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rkagerer 5d ago

The right way to do this is to create an API or MCP or whatever catering to bots, and implement corresponding terms in your legal agreements (i.e. after approving a bot to interact with us, you're responsible for purchases it makes), along with some limits to prevent runaway shopping when Muse decides to binge. Less friction = more shopping = more profits. That used to be a concept companies like Amazon understood well. (As well as companies like Google in the context of web browsing and keeping it user-friendly as opposed to user-hostile). If the bots mean customers are getting a better deal elsewhere, then you're doing something wrong elsewhere in your business model and need to go address that. Or eventually free market economics will, no matter how big an artificial moat you try to build.

steve1977 5d ago
But how can they serve product suggestions this way?
- simonw 5d ago
  Right. Agents represent a direct attack on a significant portion Amazon's revenue model.
  - anthonypasq 5d ago
    maybe agentic commerce will finally realize the micro-payments based internet that crypto people had been wishing would happen for years? Should there be stablecoin based micropayments built into MCP to charge for agentic interactions to replace the micropayment of an ad into someones eyeballs?
- nsvd2 5d ago
  If Amazon doesn't want to offer agent-first shopping I'm sure someone else will come along and eat their lunch. Adapt or die.
- novok 5d ago
  The AIs are also providing the product suggestions, and it comes from what data they are given from their searches. I think they can put 2 and 2 together on how to make that happen with the right MCP response bodies.

adamsb6 5d ago

This is inevitably going to get looked at by antitrust regulators, either in this administration (depending on how much Trump likes the leaders involved), or in the next.

HardCodedBias 5d ago

A remarkable display of market power by Amazon. Probably to protect their advertising business which is very strong. We’ll see how this plays out.

simianwords 5d ago

Shopify seems to have no issues partnering with Muse >We are excited to announce we are partnering deeply with Muse to enable agentic checkout with Shop Pay on all Shopify stores, offering people an easy and delightful way to shop and check out with Muse.