Walmart wants your AI agent to shop at Walmart. Amazon would rather it didn't. Retail's two giants have now taken opposite positions on whether software acting on your behalf is a customer or a trespasser.
On Wednesday, Walmart President and CEO John Furner announced the company's answer at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. It is a new Agent Gateway, a set of per-agent controls called Agent Profiles, and a rulebook for the agents themselves. All of it covers Sam's Club as well as Walmart.
Two doors, one locked
The timing is pointed. Amazon recently began blocking AI agents from making purchases for online shoppers. One report names two of its targets: Perplexity's shopping agent and Meta's Muse AI assistant. Plenty of travel and booking sites have done something similar, locking agents out entirely as consumer use of them grows.
Walmart went the other way. It had already announced a partnership with Meta's Muse, which one account describes as a leading agent in the space, and it offers integrations with ChatGPT, Gemini and other popular AI apps. So the same assistant is unwelcome at one retailer and a named partner at another. Agentic commerce, it turns out, has a distribution problem before it has a user problem.
Furner framed the new pieces as preparation for a world where agents become mainstream. Whether that world arrives on schedule is unknown. Walmart is simply making sure the front door is built in case it does.
The Agent Gateway
The Agent Gateway is Walmart's new MCP server. MCP is the Model Context Protocol, an open standard originally created by Anthropic that lets AI agents plug into external data sources, tools and workflows. Here, it lets an approved agent search Walmart's online inventory and buy things for its user.
There is a practical argument for this over the alternative. An agent that has to drive a normal web browser runs into all the hiccups browsers present to software. A purpose-built connection avoids them.
There is also a privacy argument, and it is the more interesting one. Walmart says the gateway can help an agent find a shopper's usual items without handing over the shopper's broader history. Its own example: if a customer tends to buy sourdough bread or a particular brand of milk, Walmart helps the agent find those items without sharing the wider purchase record. The retailer holds the memory, and the agent gets the milk.
Agent Profiles: a credit card authorized user, but for software
The control layer is called Agent Profiles, and it is due to roll out next month. Walmart compares it to adding an authorized user to a credit card. Their transactions are identified as theirs, and you can cap what they spend.
Here is how it works, based on what Walmart has described:
- One profile per agent. The profile is created the first time you shop through the Agent Gateway with a given agent. You authorize it, link it to your Walmart account and set your controls.
- Separate purchase history. What the agent bought is shown apart from what you bought yourself.
- Approval on your terms. By default, every agent purchase needs your sign-off. You can instead allow purchases within a limit you set. One report gives $100 as an example of such a budget.
- An off switch. You can turn the agent off or delete its profile whenever you like.
- No subscription required. Anyone with a Walmart account can use agent support. Walmart+ is not needed.
The design choice worth noticing is that the agent is treated as a distinct party, not as you wearing a different hat. That makes the audit trail legible, which is the thing people tend to want right after an agent buys the wrong forty-pound bag of dog food.
Terms for agents, and a returns promise
Walmart is also publishing terms that govern how agents must behave and what rights they have to transact on its site. The reported rules are short:
- Agents must not take actions beyond what the shopper intends.
- Agents cannot access or change the customer's payment details (more on the wording below).
- Agents may only access the information needed for the task at hand.
- Agents that break the terms will be blocked.
The most consumer-friendly line may be this one: Walmart says its normal returns process applies, including when an agent does not act as intended. That addresses the obvious fear of anyone considering being an early adopter, namely that a misbehaving agent leaves them stuck with something they never wanted. One report suggests this could sway hesitant shoppers. It does not say agents will never misbehave, only that the cost of misbehavior will not land entirely on you.
The arrangement also has a quiet logic for Walmart. If agents are going to shop anyway, it is better to have them arrive through a controlled entrance, with identified purchases and enforceable terms, than through a scraped checkout page.
Where the reports differ
The accounts agree on the substance, but a few details are worded differently:
- Payment rule. One account says agents cannot access a customer's payment information. Another says agents cannot change a customer's payment method. These are not the same restriction, and the exact text of the terms would settle it.
- Amazon's actions. One account says Amazon began blocking agents from making purchases. The other names specific agents it blocked, Perplexity's shopping agent and Meta's Muse. These are compatible, but only one gives names.
- Agent controls. One account says you can delete an Agent Profile at any time. The other says you can turn off the agent at any time. Both could be true.
What is still unknown
The reports leave several questions open. They do not say which agents count as approved, or how Walmart will decide. They do not describe how violations will be detected before the blocking happens. And they do not say whether the returns promise has any limits beyond Walmart's usual return policy.
Also unaddressed: how many shoppers actually want to hand a grocery list to a bot. The rollout is next month, so the first real evidence is not far off.
The takeaway
Retailers are splitting into two camps. One treats AI agents as a threat to be fenced out, the other as a customer segment that needs better paperwork. Walmart has chosen paperwork: profiles, limits, terms and a returns policy. It is not glamorous, but it is exactly the kind of boring infrastructure that tends to decide whether a new way of shopping becomes normal.
Amazon may yet be right that the gate should stay shut. But in the meantime, Walmart's gate has a sign-in sheet.