Amazon stopped Meta’s Muse assistant from buying things on its storefront over the weekend. Shoppers who tried to check out through the agent hit a warning saying that continued access by an unauthorized AI agent broke Amazon’s conditions of use.
GeekWire reported that Meta never told Amazon the agent would be browsing. Amazon also raised privacy concerns, saying Muse does not announce itself as software and appeared to capture customer credentials. A spokesperson for the retailer said third-party tools that buy on someone else’s behalf should operate openly and respect whether a merchant wants to take part.
Meta said at launch that Muse cannot see passwords or card numbers. Testers had managed to buy tank tops from Amazon through it, and the agent became the most downloaded free app in the US App Store within a week of its September 8 debut.
The block fits a pattern. Amazon sued Perplexity last November over its Comet shopping agent and lost in August, and it has trimmed item names and images from confirmation emails since July to starve outside AI services of data. The two companies still do plenty of business together: Meta signed a billion-dollar deal for Amazon cloud chips in April.
