Walmart launches Agent Gateway, lets approved AI agents into the store
The company is launching Agent Gateway, an MCP-based entry point for approved AI agents, while Amazon blocks and litigates. Customers get dedicated agent profiles with per-purchase approval — or a fixed budget, for example $100.
Walmart is formally committing to "agentic commerce." On Wednesday, October 21, 2026, the company announced Agent Gateway, a dedicated service that lets approved AI agents search Walmart's inventory and make purchases on a customer's behalf, according to TechCrunch (3b716df0). The announcement came as Walmart CEO John Furner spoke at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, and the technology is to apply to both Walmart and the warehouse-club subsidiary Sam's Club.
The launch marks a deliberate strategic fork in the road. While Walmart rolls out the red carpet for third-party agents, Amazon has blocked Perplexity's shopping agent and Meta's Muse assistant, The Verge reports (08d4feba).
How Agent Gateway works
Agent Gateway is built as an MCP server — MCP, the Model Context Protocol, was originally developed by Anthropic and has quickly become a common way for AI agents to connect to external services (3b716df0). In practice, this means the agents do not click through the online store as a simulated browser user, but get a structured program interface into Walmart's systems.
Walmart claims this design has two advantages: it lets agents shop without the technical problems they can encounter when navigating a browser, and it prevents agents from accessing the customer's purchase history and personal information. According to Walmart, the gateway should also let customers buy their usual brands without sharing personal information or purchase history directly with the agent. These are the company's own claims, not independently verified facts (3b716df0, 08d4feba).
Agent Profiles: one profile per agent
The control mechanism comes with Agent Profiles, which roll out next month. Every AI agent a customer uses gets its own profile in the account, so that the agent's purchases are shown separately from the customer's own. By default, Walmart requires approval for all agent purchases, but the customer can instead give the agent permission to shop within a self-chosen amount — The Verge mentions up to $100 as an example (3b716df0, 08d4feba).
The setup resembles adding an authorized user to a bank card: the agent becomes a recognizable party in the account, with its own transactions and its own limits.
Walmart's terms for the agents
Walmart has also published terms for what the agents may do, as the company presents them via TechCrunch:
- Agents may not perform actions beyond what the shopping mandate is meant to cover.
- They may not access the customer's payment information.
- They should only access the information necessary for the task.
Agents that do not comply with the terms are shut out from Walmart's side. And if an agent misbehaves anyway, Walmart's regular returns processes apply (3b716df0).
Amazon has chosen the opposite path
The contrast with Amazon is not only rhetorical but also legal. Amazon has blocked Perplexity's Comet shopping agent and Meta's Muse, and the conflict with Perplexity has gone through the courts: Amazon obtained a preliminary injunction in March 2026, but in August a federal appeals court vacated it, on the grounds that it was not Perplexity accessing Amazon's website — it was their customers, with the agent as a tool (6ac2e9a8).
The ruling points to one of the fundamental questions in the new market: who is actually shopping — the user or the agent? Walmart's approach effectively resolves the question in a different way, by making the agent an explicitly authorized party with its own profiles and terms, rather than something the store tries to lock out.
There are no statements from Amazon about Walmart's move in the available material.
The business backdrop — with caveats
Walmart's openness toward the agents comes in a period of strong digital growth. According to Crypto Briefing, citing the company's figures, Walmart's e-commerce sales rose 24 percent year over year in the second quarter of 2026 — the tenth consecutive quarter of growth above 20 percent (d5ced2de). Note that this figure has so far only been reported through one secondary source and is not independently confirmed. The same source relays a Bank of America note, dated October 20, 2026, that points to Walmart's agent partnerships as a strategic advantage.
Open questions
Several things remain unclear. "Next month" is the only timing given for the rollout of Agent Profiles — there is no precise launch date in the sources, and it is unresolved whether the scheme applies outside the United States. The details on terms and data handling come from Walmart's own presentations as relayed in the technology press, not from the company's primary documentation, so they should be verified against Walmart's own terms. And the most open strategic question remains: whether Walmart's invite-the-agents-in model becomes the template for the industry, or whether Amazon's block-first line ends up winning out.