Amazon has blocked Meta’s new Muse AI agent from shopping on Amazon.com, opening another front in a growing battle over who controls online shopping when artificial intelligence starts buying things for people.
Muse is designed to do more than answer questions. The AI agent can carry out tasks for users, including shopping, booking travel and managing appointments. But Amazon says Meta did not have permission for Muse to access its shopping platform and raised concerns about how the agent identifies itself and interacts with customer accounts.
The dispute reaches far beyond Meta. Amazon has also pushed back against other companies developing AI shopping agents, including Perplexity, Google and OpenAI. The stakes are enormous because these agents could fundamentally change how people shop online. Instead of searching through dozens of products, comparing listings and clicking advertisements, a shopper could simply tell an AI agent what to buy and let the software handle the rest.
That could threaten one of Amazon’s most lucrative businesses. The company makes billions of dollars from advertising tied to product searches and shopping activity on its platform. If outside AI agents begin choosing products and completing purchases for customers, they could bypass much of the browsing, sponsored listings and product discovery that currently generate revenue for Amazon.
And there is a striking twist to the fight: Amazon and Meta are also major business partners in artificial intelligence. Meta has reportedly agreed to use Amazon’s cloud infrastructure for AI workloads even as the two companies clash over whether Meta’s own AI agent should be allowed to shop inside Amazon’s marketplace. The unusual relationship shows how complicated the next phase of the AI race is becoming — the same companies can be partners building the technology while competing fiercely over who gets to control what that technology does.
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The fight over Muse offers an early look at a much larger question facing the internet. As AI agents move from recommending products to actually buying them, retailers, technology companies and consumers will have to determine who gets to control that new shopping relationship. Amazon’s decision suggests the biggest online marketplaces may not be willing to hand that control to outside AI companies without a fight.
