Walmart opens checkout to ChatGPT, Gemini and Meta's agents — with per-agent spending caps
Customers will be able to let AI assistants shop for them at Walmart and Sam's Club — but only through a dedicated profile with a spending limit, per-purchase approval and the ability to delete everything at any time. The Gateway is, according to The Verge, still in beta, and Agent Profiles roll out next month.
Walmart announced on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, two new tools — Walmart Agent Gateway and Agent Profiles — designed to let approved external AI agents such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Meta's Muse search its inventory and complete purchases on a customer's behalf. The announcement came as chief executive John Furner presented it in person at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. The launch lands amid a clear split in the industry: Amazon sued Perplexity in November 2025, according to AFP, and blocked Meta's Muse last month — making Walmart, as far as the coverage shows, the first major retailer to formally let external AI agents into the purchasing process.
How it works technically
The core is the Agent Gateway, a so-called MCP server that approved agents connect to via the Model Context Protocol. The protocol was originally developed by Anthropic and allows AI agents to connect to external data sources, tools and workflows. In Walmart's version, it means an AI agent can search the online store's inventory and complete purchases on the user's behalf — directly, without having to navigate a browser like a human user, as TechCrunch reports.
Walmart itself highlights two advantages of this approach, according to The Verge: agents avoid the errors they often run into when clicking through a webpage built for humans, and Walmart says the setup prevents agents from accessing the customer's purchase history and personal data beyond what the task requires. It is worth noting that the Gateway is, according to The Verge, still in beta, while other coverage describes it as launched — the exact availability status is therefore not settled.
Control sits with the customer
The other half of the announcement, Agent Profiles, rolls out during the next month. The idea is that each AI agent a customer uses gets its own dedicated profile in the account. That yields three concrete benefits:
- A separate purchase history per agent. The customer's own purchases are shown separately from what the agent has bought, making it easy to see exactly what each assistant has done.
- The customer decides on approvals. Either the agent must have approval for every single transaction, or the customer can allow the agent to shop on its own up to a spending limit — Walmart mentions examples such as $50, $100 or $200. The company compares the arrangement to adding an authorized user to a credit card, according to AFP via the Jamaica Observer.
- Full retreat. The profile can be deleted at any time.
According to TechCrunch, Agent Profiles are available to anyone with a Walmart account — a Walmart+ membership is not required.
The conditions Walmart imposes on agents
Walmart has also drawn up a set of rules the agents must follow. According to The Verge, they state that "agents must not take actions beyond what the shopper intends." Agents cannot change the customer's payment method, and they should only have access to the information needed to complete the task. Walmart says it will block agents that do not follow the rules.
The contrast with Amazon
The announcement lands amid a clear fault line in the industry. Amazon, the largest online retailer in the US, has chosen the opposite course: in November 2025 the company sued Perplexity, accusing the startup, according to AFP, of using its Comet browser agent to make purchases on its marketplace covertly. Last month, Amazon blocked Meta's Muse from its site, with a message to users that unauthorized AI agents violate Amazon's terms of use. The company has also restricted agents from Google and OpenAI, and is instead betting on its own tools such as Alexa for Shopping and Buy for Me.
The significance, according to the coverage, is that Walmart wants to be where customers' assistants already are, rather than shutting them out. The consequence for ordinary customers is that they will soon be able to have their assistant buy groceries at Walmart directly, with mechanisms intended to limit both financial and personal exposure.
The pushback and the pricing question
The announcement has not escaped criticism. Lindsay Owens, executive director of the think tank Groundwork Collaborative, accused Walmart, according to BigGo Finance, of "behavior-based pricing" — that is, different customers could see different prices. According to BigGo Finance's coverage of the dispute, Walmart rejected the accusations as "misleading and inaccurate." A blog post states, according to the same source: "We price products, not people, so the prices an AI agent sees are the same prices a human would see on Walmart.com, with applicable offers and fees shown before purchase."
It is worth noting that this is Walmart's own promise, not an independent verification — that kind of guarantee is difficult for customers to check in practice, and Owens's criticism points to a real concern in a channel where the agent, not the human, sees the screen.
The demand: how big are the numbers so far
How many will actually use this? The coverage points in two directions. On the one hand, BigGo Finance quotes analysts saying the control mechanisms could build trust in an experimental channel — while noting that only 16 percent of customers today are comfortable delegating purchases to AI. That figure should be treated with caution: it is vaguely attributed to "analysts" with no named source in the coverage, and should be read as indicative, not documented.
On the other hand, Walmart points to growth in its own assistant Sparky: 60 percent quarter-over-quarter growth, given by Walmart's US chief David Guggina at a Goldman Sachs conference in September. That, too, is the company's own figure, but it at least suggests that interest in AI-assisted purchases is not theoretical.
What remains unresolved
Several questions are still open. The Agent Gateway is, according to The Verge, in beta, while other reports describe it as launched — the precise status is unconfirmed. Agent Profiles has, so far, only a relative time frame, "next month," with no exact date beyond what was given on October 21. And Walmart's promises on data security, pricing parity and limited information access are, for now, the company's own statements, presented through secondary coverage — not independently verified.
That does not make the announcement less significant. But it sets the agenda for an important industry debate: should AI agents be met with firewalls and lawsuits, as Amazon has chosen, or with controlled gateways where the customer holds the keys? Walmart has now laid its cards on the table — and is set to become the benchmark for whether openness and customer control can actually move agent-based shopping out of the experimental stage.