Meta’s Muse is prepared to make purchases, but Amazon has decided not to allow it.
Users who attempt to use the personal AI assistant to shop on Amazon receive a warning that ongoing access by an unauthorized AI agent breaches the retailer’s terms of service.
Amazon’s spokesperson said in a statement that the company has asked Meta to take its marketplace out of Muse.
While chatbots mainly answer queries, AI agents are built to act on a user’s behalf, such as making purchases. Amazon’s restriction demonstrates that even popular personal agents cannot assume the entire web is open for business.
The action has been noted by some Muse users on X, where startup founder Jonathan Wegener posted a screenshot of the warning, commenting, “Muse vs Amazon bot detection. Uh oh.”
Amazon’s spokesperson stated: “Third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate.” “Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations,” they added.
Amazon said it was never informed beforehand that Muse would access its store and did not give permission for the activity. The company noted that Muse does not disclose its identity, appears to capture and store user credentials, and scrapes account data, raising concerns about how sensitive information is managed.
Amazon added that agents can bypass the personalized shopping experience, possibly presenting items that don’t match a user’s history or recommendations, and expects them to be transparent, let retailers opt out, and provide a reciprocal value exchange.
Meta did not immediately respond to a Themoneytimes request for comment.
GeekWire was the first to report on Monday that Muse users were encountering Amazon’s bot blocker.
Amazon’s terms of use do not specifically mention AI shopping assistants, but the site‑access license forbids the use of “data mining, robots, or similar data gathering and extraction tools.”
Amazon has been working to keep third‑party agents off its marketplace for a while. It sued Perplexity over shopping activity carried out via its Comet browser and has also moved to restrict agents from Google and OpenAI.
Meta launched Muse on September 8 as a versatile assistant capable of handling multistep tasks across email, calendars, dining, payments, and shopping. It quickly climbed to the top of Apple’s US free‑app chart within a week.
In its launch announcement, Meta said Muse cannot view users’ passwords or payment details, and that credentials are stored securely so the agent can use them without actually seeing them.
Amazon’s stance carries a commercial risk. As Themoneytimes’s Alistair Barr previously reported, blocking ChatGPT bots could mean missing purchases from OpenAI’s roughly 1 billion monthly users.
Amazon and OpenAI’s recently announced advertising partnership also suggests that the two companies may eventually need to find a way for agents and retailers to collaborate.