The e-commerce giant claims Meta did not have permission for its agent to access the store on behalf of users.
Amazon has blocked Meta’s new personal AI agent, Muse, from shopping on its platform on behalf of customers.
The e-commerce giant had approached the Facebook-owner to voluntarily exclude Amazon.com from the bot experience, but Meta rejected the request.
As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon received a pop-up message, which read: “Continued access by an unauthorised AI agent violates Amazon’s conditions of use, to which our customers have agreed.”
Amazon is arguing it never agreed to allowing Muse to access its store and nor does the agent identify itself when browsing. This means an undisclosed third-party is accessing customer accounts, processing transactions, and handling sensitive data without its knowledge or consent
The e-commerce firm said when an AI agent shops our store on behalf of a customer, it bypasses the personalisation and insights it has built into the shopping experience.
As a result, customers may see products that do not reflect their browsing or purchasing history, leverage Amazon’s personalisation recommendations or include products that broaden discovery.
According to Amazon, Muse also appears to capture and store customer credentials and scrape account data, which raises serious questions about how that data is handled and protected.
A spokesperson from Amazon told Affiliate Leaders: “We think it’s fairly straightforward that 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.
“This helps ensure a safe, secure, and reliable customer experience, and it is how others operate including food delivery apps and the restaurants they take orders for, delivery services apps and the stores they shop from, and online travel agencies and the airlines they book tickets with for customers. Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we’ve requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience.”
Meta launched Muse earlier this month, an agentic assistant which can handle tasks such as sending emails, booking travel or shopping. It can make purchases directly on behalf of its users through an integration with Stripe.
The social media giant previously stated: “Muse has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods. Any credentials a person shares go into secure storage, so Muse can use them without seeing them, including passwords a person types into the browser themselves.”
This is not the first time Amazon has taken action against a third-party AI platform.
Earlier this year, Amazon escalated a dispute against Perplexity, claiming its AI browser, Comet, accessed its store without transparent identification, degraded customer experience and breached computer misuse laws.
AI chatbots have changed how consumers search, discover and even purchase products. A lot of talk has centred around a move towards zero-click, but this case highlights that some consumers may not even visit a brand or retailer website, which could have a significant impact on marketing strategies.
Affiliate Leaders has also reached out to Meta for a comment, but is yet to receive a response.
