Walmart Opens Its Store to AI Shopping Agents as Amazon Shuts Them Out

Walmart CEO John Furner announced Agent Gateway on October 21 at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, an MCP server letting vetted AI agents from Meta's Muse, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini search Walmart and Sam's Club inventory and complete purchases on a shopper's behalf, with Agent Profiles giving each agent a dedicated identity in a customer's account starting next month. The move contrasts with Amazon, which sued Perplexity in November 2025 over its Comet browser agent and won a preliminary injunction from U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney, who ruled Comet accessed Amazon accounts "with the Amazon user's permission, but without authorization by Amazon"; the injunction is stayed for seven days while Perplexity appeals to the Ninth Circuit. Walmart is choosing to meter and monetize agent traffic rather than block it, a posture with near-term stakes as holiday shopping ramps up.

Walmart just handed AI agents a front door. Amazon is in court trying to keep them off the porch. On October 21, Walmart CEO John Furner stood on stage at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco and announced Agent Gateway, a new MCP server that lets vetted AI agents search Walmart and Sam's Club inventory and complete purchases on a shopper's behalf. Furner called agent-led commerce "the next great evolution in retail." Days earlier, a federal judge in San Francisco had granted Amazon a preliminary injunction against Perplexity, ordering its Comet browser agent to stop shopping on Amazon accounts and to destroy the customer data it had already collected. You don't need a business degree to read what's happening here. Two of the largest retailers on earth looked at the same technology and picked opposite sides of the fence. MCP, short for Model Context Protocol, is the connector standard Anthropic built so AI agents can reach outside tools and data sources without needing a custom integration for every site. Walmart's version of that pipe lets approved agents, including Meta's Muse, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Google's Gemini, check real-time stock and place orders without funneling a shopper's payment details or purchase history straight into the model itself. Next month, Walmart is rolling out Agent Profiles, a feature that gives each AI agent its own dedicated identity inside a customer's account, created the first time that agent shops through the gateway. Customers decide how far to trust it: require a sign-off on every purchase, or hand the agent a spending limit and let it buy on its own. That's a meaningfully different posture from treating agents as a security threat to be fought off. Walmart is choosing to meter and monetize the traffic instead of blocking it. Ninth Circuit Says Perplexity's Comet Can Shop on Amazon Again https://startupfortune.com/ninth-circuit-says-perplexitys-comet-can-shop-on-amazon-again/ The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a March injunction that had blocked Perplexity's Comet AI agent from shopping on Amazon, ruling that it's the user, not Perplexity, who legally accesses Amazon's platform. It's the first federal appeals ruling on whether AI agents can shop on third-party platforms without the platform's consent, and... - perplexity comet amazon shopping bot https://startupfortune.com/ninth-circuit-says-perplexitys-comet-can-shop-on-amazon-again/ - ai agent computer fraud and abuse https://startupfortune.com/ninth-circuit-says-perplexitys-comet-can-shop-on-amazon-again/ Amazon's approach has been the opposite, and its lawsuit against Perplexity shows exactly how far it's willing to go to enforce that. Amazon sued Perplexity in November 2025, accusing Comet of disguising its automated browsing sessions as ordinary Chrome traffic to dodge detection. According to Amazon's filing, it warned Perplexity to stop at least five times starting in November 2024, and when it finally deployed a technical block in August 2025, Perplexity pushed a software update within 24 hours that got around it. U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney sided with Amazon, ruling that Comet accessed Amazon accounts "with the Amazon user's permission, but without authorization by Amazon." Perplexity's defense, that Comet simply automates what a user already told it to do, got rejected at least at this preliminary stage. The injunction is stayed for seven days while Perplexity appeals to the Ninth Circuit. Frankly, Amazon's legal argument is a strange one for a company that spent the last decade selling itself as the easiest place on the internet to check out. It wants the convenience reputation and the gatekeeping power at the same time, and a federal court just told it, for now, that it can have both. Walmart's bet carries real near-term stakes. Holiday shopping is ramping up, and if agent-driven purchases become a meaningful slice of November and December traffic, whichever retailer agents can actually reach wins that volume by default. An AI assistant that gets stonewalled trying to buy a toaster on Amazon will simply route the purchase to Walmart instead, no debate required. Furner's gateway is a wager that frictionless access beats a walled garden, at least for the stretch of the calendar that matters most to a retailer's annual numbers. There's a trust question buried under all of this that neither company has fully answered. Letting a chatbot spend a shopper's money autonomously, even capped by a limit, assumes the agent reliably buys the right size, the right brand, the right quantity. Walmart's profile system puts a leash on that risk, with sign-off requirements and spending caps the customer sets. Amazon's court order sidesteps the question entirely by not letting the leash exist in the first place. One company is testing whether agentic commerce can be made safe. The other has decided, for now, that the safest answer is no agents at all. 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