Amazon cites its Conditions of Use to shut Meta's Muse agent out of its store

Amazon gave a contractual reason and it has a commercial one. Fortune reports that Muse bypasses the usual process of humans visiting Amazon's website or app and seeing the advertisements that are a key profit driver ^[9]. An agent that shops for the user completes the purchase without loading the page Amazon sells ads against.

The contract theory has been to court already. Amazon sued Perplexity last year over Comet, a tool that could reach Amazon accounts much as Muse does ^[10]. It then lost a ruling on that claim, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that users were ultimately choosing to access Amazon via Perplexity's bot, and Amazon is still fighting the issue ^[11].

Amazon runs a shopping agent of its own. Buy for Me performs tasks similar to Muse's, and brands are automatically opted in, so staying out of it takes an action ^[12]. Chief executive Andy Jassy has said the company is exploring AI shopping agent partnerships with third-party companies ^[13]. The reading that fits the block, the automatic opt-in and the partnership talk together is that Amazon will let agents transact on amazon.com when Amazon sets the terms of entry.

Nikesh Arora, chief executive of Palo Alto Networks, put the same thought in pricing terms on X. He said every services, marketplace or commerce app will have to make an existential decision about opening Application Programming Interfaces for consumer agents to interact with, that smaller players have no choice, and that either the consumer benefits or distribution aggregators will demand a higher transaction fare ^[14].

Fortune reported the App Store ranking without a download count, and nobody has put a price on agent access ^[20]. A top free ranking measures installs. It says nothing about purchases completed through the agent, or about merchants who have agreed to be bought from. Meta's answer to that second count, for now, is the Shopify partnership it announced for some of Muse's shopping features ^[7].

I'd expect this to settle as a priced API. Amazon has already lost a ruling on the contract theory ^[11] and says it is open to third-party agent partnerships ^[13], so what is left to negotiate is the fare. The counter-thesis favours Amazon: if the ad revenue per human session on amazon.com is worth more than any per-transaction fee Meta would pay, the block holds and Muse's commerce stays inside the set of merchants who sign. There is a third path, in which the appellate reasoning about user choice decides who reaches the checkout. If Muse holds the top of the chart for months with its shoppable inventory limited to signed partners, then distribution was worth more than catalogue access and the fee argument was wrong.

Users give the agent access to accounts across the phone, in exchange for it booking a vacation or handling restaurant reservations ^[3]. Meta says user logins are kept secret and that online purchases use a one-time card number that hides a person's actual card details ^[16]. The company faces multiple proposed class-action lawsuits over its smart glasses, including one alleging that it sent some captured footage, including highly personal material, to third-party human reviewers for annotation and AI development; Meta has disputed the allegations ^[17].