Amazon, JPMorgan, Target block AI shopping agents — SkimNews
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Amazon has sued Perplexity and recently blocked Meta's Muse from shopping on its site, with spokesperson Maxine Tagay saying third-party purchase agents should 'respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate.'
- JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said the bank won't allow outside agents to access accounts, calling it 'too risky' for clients and the company.
- Target has spotty agent access — Muse was caught in its bot check one day but got through the next — even as Target maintains AI shopping partnerships with OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft and adds safeguards against unauthorized transactions.
- Delta and Amtrak are among travel providers where users report being unable to use agents to book trips, and general bot-blocking firewalls make agent access inconsistent across the web.
- The RealReal allows third-party agents to browse but its 20-minute cart hold can be exploited: The Verge's Muse agent repeatedly re-added 10 of the newest listings from a favorite brand all day, locking other shoppers out.
- Amazon also runs its own on-platform agentic shopping feature and a cross-site purchasing tool that has angered smaller businesses whose storefronts were scraped and featured on Amazon without consent.
Why it matters: The Verge's hands-on testing found AI shopping agents already returning incomplete results without Amazon access and enabling cart-hoarding exploits on The RealReal. With Amazon, JPMorgan, Delta, and Amtrak blocking alongside general bot firewalls, the seamless agentic shopping future tech companies are marketing is running into a wall of retailer resistance before it can scale.
Ask SkimNews
