One of the world’s leading online shopping platforms is locking a rival tech giant’s artificial intelligence agent out of its store.
Amazon banned Meta’s Muse AI agent from making purchases on the company’s website Sunday after requesting that Meta remove its site from the agent’s shopping circuit, GeekWire reported. This follows Amazon’s Aug. 4 loss in federal court to the smaller company Perplexity AI, when the Ninth Circuit threw out Amazon’s injunction and said the conglomerate was “unlikely” to win on its claim that Perplexity’s shopping assistant hacked its website.
“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 told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “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,” the spokesperson added.
Meta launched Muse on Sept. 8 as a personal AI agent that can accomplish a series of tasks for a user, such as sending emails, booking travel, creating documents and shopping. The app ranked No. 1 for free apps in the U.S. on Apple’s App Store on Friday, overtaking ChatGPT, according to 9to5Mac.
“Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed,” Amazon states on its website when a user tries to shop Amazon through Muse, according to an X post showing a screenshot of the website’s message.
Amazon said Meta never warned it that Muse would shop its site, that the agent does not flag itself as a bot while browing and that it appears to save customer login, according to GeekWire.
Meta, however, said Muse cannot see users’ private information.
“Muse has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods,” Meta said in its Sept. 8 announcement of Muse. “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.”
Muse can make payments with a one-time Stripe Link card, so it never sees a user’s real card, according to Meta’s announcement. Stripe also covers mistakes, returns, and price drops on those purchases.
Meta did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Despite this standoff, the two tech companies currently have ongoing business relationships.
Meta signed a multi-year agreement with Amazon in April to power its AI systems on Amazon’s computer chips, Reuters reported at the time. Amazon products have been accessible for purchase on Facebook and Instagram since 2023, according to TechCrunch.
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