Amazon Blocks Meta's Muse Agent in Dispute Over AI Shopping Access
Amazon Blocks Meta’s Muse Agent in Dispute Over AI Shopping Access #
Amazon has blocked Meta’s Muse personal AI agent from its e-commerce platform, setting off a dispute over who controls online shopping access for autonomous AI systems.
The block came roughly twelve days after Meta launched Muse on September 8 as a multi-step agent capable of filling out forms, managing calendars, and completing purchases across the web. As of Sunday evening, users trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon.com saw a popup reading: “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed.”
Amazon said it first asked Meta to voluntarily exclude its platform from Muse’s scope and activated the block after Meta declined. An Amazon spokesperson said third-party applications making purchases on behalf of customers “should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate.” Amazon raised three objections: Meta never disclosed that Muse would access its storefront; the agent does not identify itself while browsing; and Amazon believes the agent captures and retains customer credentials, raising privacy and security concerns.
Meta disputed that characterization, arguing that Muse “has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods.” The company says credentials are held in secure storage and passed through for authentication without being exposed to the underlying model. For payment, Muse relies on Link by Stripe to generate single-use card numbers, and the agent runs inside a dedicated virtual machine monitored by an internal system called Sentinel, which governs what actions it can take.
The two companies are also business partners. Amazon has sold products through Facebook and Instagram since 2023, and Meta signed a multibillion-dollar agreement earlier this year to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon’s Graviton chips.
Amazon has taken similar steps against other outside shopping agents, previously suing Perplexity over its Comet browser and moving to block agents from Google and OpenAI. Amazon operates its own competing tools: Alexa for Shopping for product research and Buy for Me for purchases from external sites. The company notes that Buy for Me identifies itself to retailers and allows them to opt out.
The legal question is unresolved. Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity earlier this year but lost it on appeal in August, when the Ninth Circuit ruled that it was the user, not the AI firm, accessing Amazon’s systems under anti-hacking law. The current Muse block rests on contractual terms of service rather than that statute, a distinction that may matter given how the Ninth Circuit’s ruling came down.
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