Walmart says AI agents will be able to shop on its site starting next month, with each agent getting its own profile in your account. Every purchase needs your approval by default, spending caps are optional, and agent orders are tracked separately. Amazon, for its part, has been blocking agents, not welcoming them.
Amazon shows agents the door, Walmart rolls out the welcome mat
Walmart announced that, starting next month, AI agents will be able to shop on its website on a customer's behalf. The mechanism is called Agent Profiles: each agent gets its own profile inside your Walmart account, with its own permissions and purchase history, kept separate from your own orders.
The controls are the substance here. By default, every agent purchase requires user approval. Shoppers who want more automation can set a spending cap and let the agent buy within it, for example anything under 100 dollars. Agent orders display separately from your own, and access can be revoked at any time.
The rules Walmart is writing for agents
Walmart's terms for agents are specific, and worth reading as a template for how agentic commerce might get governed. Agents may not act beyond the shopper's intent. They can't change a user's payment method. They get access only to the information needed to complete the task at hand. And agents that break the rules get blocked from Walmart's site.
That last part is the teeth. A retailer publicly reserving the right to ban misbehaving agents turns agent access into a privilege with conditions, closer to an API agreement than an open door. Walmart says the tools will be available to all account holders, no Walmart+ membership required.
The split with Amazon is the story
The contrast with Amazon couldn't be sharper, and TechCrunch framed it that way the same day: while Amazon blocks AI agents, Walmart rolls out the welcome mat. Amazon has moved to shut out Perplexity's shopping agent and Meta's Muse, treating third-party agents as a threat to its platform and its customer relationships. Walmart treats them as a channel.
There is a business logic on both sides. Amazon's moat is the destination: users come to its site, search, browse and buy, and every step generates data and ad revenue. An agent that completes purchases without anyone opening the Amazon app breaks that loop. Walmart's position is different. It isn't the default search destination for product discovery, so intercepting demand inside an agent conversation, wherever that conversation happens, is upside rather than loss.
Where agentic commerce goes from here
The timing lands in a hot moment for agentic shopping. OpenAI has been building instant checkout capabilities, Meta has cited strong average order values for Muse shopping, and retailers now face a choice that used to be theoretical: do you let software buy things on behalf of your customers or not?
Walmart is among the first large retailers to answer with a systematic yes, complete with per-agent identity, approval flows and enforcement rules. The risks are real, wrong purchases, account security, blame allocation when an agent errs, and Walmart's answer to the last one is that its existing return processes apply to agent purchases as well. If the experiment works, expect other retailers to copy the playbook quickly. If it stumbles, Amazon's wall starts looking less like paranoia and more like prudence. Either way, next month marks the first large-scale, retailer-sanctioned test of letting agents loose in a store aisle.
