No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service: Amazon Blocks Meta’s Muse AI From Shopping

Meta’s Muse AI has hit a roadblock. Amazon, the world’s largest online marketplace, has stopped another tech giant’s agentic AI from shopping on its site.

Meta launched the Muse agent, designed to take tasks and projects off your plate, on Sept. 8. One of those tasks was online shopping, with its own announcement showing the agent purchasing a stroller.

Yet GeekWire reports that people using Muse to shop on Amazon were met with a pop-up notice that read: “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed.”

CNET’s Katelyn Chedraoui said there’s a growing movement in the AI industry to make it possible for automated agents, like Meta’s Muse, to purchase things for you online, and both Visa and Mastercard have introduced infrastructures to support this. The current dispute highlights a broader conflict over ownership of the consumer relationship within the digital shopping ecosystem.

Meta didn’t immediately respond to CNET’s request for comment.

An AI agent turf war?

An Amazon spokesperson told CNET in an email that third-party applications offering to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses “should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate” and that “agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations.”

This isn’t the first time Amazon has blocked a third-party AI agent from accessing its site. Amazon won a court order in March to block Perplexity’s Comet AI browser from scraping its site, and Amazon updated its robots.txt file in November 2025 to keep ChatGPT’s agents from scraping its site, too.

While Amazon’s spokesperson said blocking Meta’s Muse AI assistant helps ensure a “safe” and “secure” online experience, Meta writes in a company blog post that “Muse has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods,” and that the AI agent “shows people a complete audit trail of everything it has done and plans to do.”

Amazon’s blocking of Meta could be a way to encourage customers to use the retail giant’s own AI tools. Amazon launched its Buy for Me AI shopping agent in beta for some US customers in April 2025. That AI agent can find and purchase items not sold on Amazon stores, allowing people to buy items from brand sites without leaving the Amazon app on Android and iOS devices.

“This new feature uses agentic AI to help customers seamlessly purchase from other brands within the familiar Amazon Shopping app,” Oliver Messenger, Amazon’s shopping director, wrote online.

“If Meta’s AI agent isn’t allowed to make Amazon purchases, that is a huge blow to the AI’s usefulness,” CNET’s Chedraoui said. “If e-commerce is going to be a big part of our agentic future, this is going to be a significant road bump.”

Zachary McAuliffe

Senior writer

Zach began writing for CNET in November, 2021 after writing for a broadcast news station in his hometown, Cincinnati, for five years. You can usually find him hanging out with his wife, son and dog. You can reach him at zmcauliffe@cnet.com.

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