Amazon blocks Meta's new Muse AI agent from shopping on its site

Amazon has blocked Meta's new Muse personal AI agent from shopping on Amazon.com, citing security, privacy and transparency concerns. The retailer says it first asked Meta to keep its store out of the agent's reach, without success.

An "unauthorized AI agent"

By Sunday night, people using Muse to shop on Amazon were shown a popup: "Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed." Amazon told GeekWire it was not informed in advance that Muse would access its store and had not authorized it. The company says the agent appears to capture and store customer credentials and scrape account data, and does not identify itself while browsing; it can reach account pages and order history if a user prompts it to.

"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," an Amazon spokesperson said, adding that agentic apps such as Muse "have the same obligations." Amazon says it has asked Meta to remove Amazon from the experience and is in direct talks with the company, while declining to comment on possible legal action. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday night.

Partners and rivals at once

The standoff is notable because the two companies are also business partners: Amazon goods have been purchasable inside Facebook and Instagram since 2023, and Meta signed a multibillion-dollar deal in April to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon's cloud. For Amazon, the stakes include an advertising business that generated more than $68 billion last year and depends on shoppers browsing its pages. Over the past year the company has moved against outside agents — suing Perplexity over its Comet browser and blocking shopping agents from Google and OpenAI.

Muse, and the legal ground beneath the fight

Meta launched Muse on Sept. 8 as a U.S.-only agent that handles multi-step tasks — email, calendar, payments, dining and shopping. It runs on what Meta calls a secure virtual machine with its own browser, checks with the user before sensitive actions such as a purchase, and uses Stripe's Link to generate single-use card numbers. Meta's launch materials state that Muse "has no visibility into people's passwords or payment methods," and that where a service has no API, the agent "can use the service through a browser the way you would." A week after launch, Muse became the No. 1 free app in Apple's U.S. App Store, ahead of ChatGPT.

Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity in March, but the Ninth Circuit lifted it on Aug. 4, ruling that the user — not the AI company — was accessing Amazon's computers under federal anti-hacking law; a rehearing petition was denied on Sept. 10. That left claims built on contract and terms of service — and the message Muse users now see cites Amazon's Conditions of Use, not hacking.