Anthropic Opens Claude Commerce Blueprint to Retailers With Visa, Mastercard and Shopify as Launch Partners
Anthropic Opens Claude Commerce Blueprint to Retailers With Visa, Mastercard and Shopify as Launch Partners #
Anthropic on Wednesday released an open-source blueprint that enables retailers, travel companies, telecoms and ticketing platforms to build autonomous AI commerce agents on top of its Claude model, with Visa, Mastercard, Accenture and Shopify signing on as launch partners.
The blueprint, released under an Apache-2.0 licence, includes two pre-built reference designs: a shopping agent that can search a product catalogue, compare items and assemble a cart on behalf of a consumer, and a merchant agent designed to handle back-office tasks including inventory management, pricing and marketing. According to Anthropic’s announcement, an engineering team can have a commerce agent running within days using the included harnesses, patterns and guardrails. A Claude Code plugin and live vertical demos are also included, released ahead of the holiday season planning window.
The blueprint does not include a checkout protocol, payment infrastructure or advertising mechanism; those remain the domain of retailers and their chosen partners. Claude functions as a reasoning layer on top of a merchant’s existing infrastructure rather than inserting itself between the store and its customers.
Visa and Mastercard are among those helping to extend the blueprint to their respective merchant networks and client bases, according to Digital Commerce 360. Jack Forestell, Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer, said in remarks included in Anthropic’s announcement that the collaboration is intended to “empower merchants to deliver better customer experiences while maintaining the relationships that drive their businesses forward.” Accenture is also working with retailers to accelerate deployments, citing its own research showing that 85 percent of consumers are now open to interacting with an AI agent during a shopping journey.
Shopify is contributing a public code repository with reference implementations that merchants can connect directly to their store catalogues. Priceline has already rebuilt its AI travel assistant, Penny, on Anthropic’s models.
Anthropics said retailers already running shopping agents built on Claude have seen average basket sizes grow by as much as 35 percent, with shoppers 60 percent more likely to complete a purchase. The company noted those figures are self-reported rather than independently audited.
The blueprint can be deployed through Anthropic’s own API as well as through Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry and Google Cloud Vertex AI. OpenAI and Google have made similar moves in agentic commerce in recent months.
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