Walmart bets on agentic shopping — while Amazon blocks AI shopping agents

Walmart bets on agentic shopping — while Amazon blocks AI shopping agents

While Amazon keeps AI shopping agents out, Walmart is going the other way: the US retail chain has launched an "Agent Gateway" that lets approved AI agents search its inventory and shop on a customer's behalf — but under strict terms, with approval required for all purchases by default and optional spending limits. Next month, "Agent Profiles" roll out to all Walmart accounts.

What's new

Walmart announced the launch of Agent Gateway, a so-called MCP server designed to help approved AI agents connect to Walmart, at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco this week. CEO John Furner framed it as preparation for a world where AI agents become mainstream, according to TechCrunch's coverage of the presentation (TechCrunch via MSN).

The Gateway is part of a broader initiative: next month, customers will get access to "Agent Profiles" — dedicated profiles within Walmart's system where the AI agent can operate, with guardrails in place. The details were reported by The Verge, which describes it this way: next month, Walmart will let you connect your own AI agent to the site, with systems for approving and reviewing purchases and setting spending limits (The Verge).

How it works

The technical core of the system is the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a protocol originally developed by Anthropic to let AI models connect to external tools and data sources (Traders Union). In Walmart's case, that means an AI agent can search the store's online inventory and purchase items on a customer's behalf — directly against Walmart's systems, rather than clicking through the web store like a human user.

Walmart claims this approach has two advantages: it is supposed to spare agents the technical problems they often encounter when navigating a browser, and it is supposed to prevent agents from accessing the customer's shopping history and personal information. It is important to stress that these are the company's own claims, made ahead of a wider rollout — they have not been independently verified. The Gateway is also set to work for Sam's Club, Walmart's membership-based warehouse chain.

The controls customers get

Agent Profiles are designed to set limits on what an agent can actually do, according to The Verge:

• Approval by default. As a starting point, Walmart requires that all AI agent purchases be approved by the customer. This is not an agent that can freely place orders.
• Optional budget. Customers who do not want to approve each individual purchase can instead let the agent shop within a set amount — for example, up to $100.
• Separate overview. Purchases made by the agent can be reviewed on their own, so they do not get mixed into regular order history.
• Switch off at any time. The agent can be turned off at any time.

According to TechCrunch's reporting, the offering is available to anyone with a Walmart account — Walmart+ membership is not required.

The rulebook for agents

Walmart has also outlined a set of terms for which agents are allowed to connect. According to The Verge, the terms state that "agents cannot take actions beyond what the shopper intends," and that they cannot change a customer's payment method. Agents that violate the terms will be blocked.

The company further states that the standard returns process applies, even when an agent does not act as intended — meaning the customer is not left holding the bag if the agent shops incorrectly. This, too, is Walmart's own account, and how the terms are enforced in practice remains to be seen.

The industry split

The context is an industry that is splitting into two camps. Amazon has blocked Perplexity's shopping agent and Meta's Muse AI assistant, choosing to shut third-party agents out of its platform (Crypto Briefing). Walmart's move stands as a deliberate counterpoint to that defensive line: instead of blocking, the company is opening a controlled entrance — with a rulebook attached.

It is worth keeping the interpretation strict here: while the timing makes the causal explanation tempting, there is no documentation showing that Amazon's blocking directly triggered Walmart's push. It could just as well be a long-planned part of the company's AI strategy — Walmart launched its Sparky assistant back in June 2025, has tight integration with ChatGPT, has a Gemini integration on the way, and counts OpenAI, Google and Meta among its AI partners, according to Crypto Briefing.

Why it might matter

Walmart's model is one of the most concretely designed consumer-facing frameworks yet for "governed agentic commerce" — AI agents shopping on a customer's behalf, but within limits the owner sets themselves. If the model works as described, it can address three problems at once: consumers do not have to blindly trust the agent (approval and budget), agent developers do not have to navigate web stores built for humans (the MCP interface), and Walmart keeps control of the customer relationship rather than letting external agents scrape and interpret its website freely.

It also confronts the industry with a concrete choice of principle: either block agents and keep all the traffic yourself, like Amazon, or open a controlled entrance and try to steer the development — as Walmart is now doing.

What we don't know yet

Several caveats are worth keeping in mind. All the coverage rests on secondary reporting of company announcement material, much of it stemming from the same TechCrunch article, and Walmart's claims about privacy, returns and technical stability have not been independently verified. The exact launch date for Agent Profiles has not been given — only "next month." And the questions of how strictly the terms will actually be enforced in practice, and which agent providers will qualify, remain open. Answers will come only once the rollout actually begins and independent testing of the system is available.