Walmart will let AI agents shop for you, with spending limits, as Amazon keeps them out
Walmart's Agent Profiles give each AI agent its own account profile and spending limit, plus a developer gateway. Amazon is blocking agents instead.
The skim
- Walmart will let AI agents shop for you through Agent Profiles, launching within the next month. Each agent gets its own profile in your account, with its purchases shown separately and a spending limit you set.
- A new Walmart Agent Gateway, starting as a beta for companies and developers, gives agents a direct connection over the Model Context Protocol instead of making them click through a website built for people.
- It's the opposite of Amazon's approach. Amazon has been blocking outside shopping agents, including Meta's Muse, since September.
How it works
Today, an AI agent that shops at Walmart signs in as you, so its orders are mixed in with yours. Agent Profiles, announced October 21, change that. The first time you shop with an agent through Walmart's gateway, Walmart creates a profile for it. You link it by signing in to your Walmart account, then choose whether every purchase needs your approval or the agent can spend up to a limit, such as $50, $100 or $200. Walmart compares it to adding an authorized user to a credit card. You can delete a profile at any time, and it works for Sam's Club too.
The Agent Gateway is the plumbing. Walmart says agents that browse its site "following steps designed for people" are slow and get stuck, so the gateway lets them search and buy over MCP, the protocol Anthropic created for connecting AI to outside tools, TechCrunch notes. It can also help an agent find your usual sourdough or milk without handing over your purchase history. You don't need a Walmart+ membership.
The rules for agents
Walmart also published terms that agents must follow. Purchases need the customer's approval by default, and Walmart may ask for more approvals even within a spending limit. Agents can't act beyond what the shopper intends, can't see card numbers or change payment methods, and can only access the information a task needs. Walmart's normal returns process applies "including if an agent doesn't act as intended." Agents that break the rules get blocked. Walmart also says an agent sees the same prices a person sees on Walmart.com: "We price products, not people."
Why it matters
Agents are starting to shop for real. Mark Zuckerberg says more than 10 million people in the US and Canada have set up Meta's Muse agent, and Anthropic's new Claude Duet can check out with Stripe's Link wallet and Shopify's Shop Pay. Retailers have to decide whether to let them in. Amazon has said no. In September it cut off Muse, saying Meta never asked, the agent doesn't identify itself, and it appears to store customer credentials, GeekWire reports. Amazon has also sued Perplexity over its Comet browser and pushes its own Alexa for Shopping and Buy for Me tools instead. The stakes go beyond any one sale. Amazon made more than $68 billion from ads last year, and that business depends on people browsing its pages. Walmart is betting that being the easy, rule-bound store for agents will win it orders that Amazon turns away. The first test comes when Agent Profiles go live and shoppers see how well their agents stick to the budget.
Sources: Walmart, TechCrunch, GeekWire.
