AI News
Walmart Just Gave AI Agents the Keys to Its Checkout — and Amazon Said No
Walmart announced on October 21 that it will formally let AI agents shop on behalf of its customers — with the customer's rules attached. The plan, unveiled by president and CEO John Furner at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, has three parts: Agent Profiles for shoppers, an Agent Gateway for the agents themselves, and a set of terms every agent must follow. It is the most complete answer yet from a major retailer to the question of who is responsible when software does the buying. Amazon, facing the same question, has gone the other way and blocked outside agents from its store.
The problem Walmart is fixing
Today, when an agent shops at Walmart, it signs in with the customer's own account. Its orders land in the same history as the customer's, with nothing to show which purchases the human made and which the machine made. Walmart's fix is the Agent Profile. Launching within the next month, it gives each authorized agent its own profile inside the customer's account, so agent purchases are listed separately and can be reviewed on their own.
The controls are the point. Approval is required by default: the agent proposes, the customer signs off. A customer who wants more autonomy can instead set a spending limit — Walmart's examples are $50, $100 and $200 — under which the agent may buy on its own. Walmart compares the arrangement to adding an authorized user to a credit card: the agent gets a way to pay, the account holder sets the ceiling, and the profile can be deleted at any time. Two qualifications matter. Walmart may still ask for approval on a purchase that falls inside an agent's limit, and no Walmart+ membership is required — any Walmart account works. The same setup covers Sam's Club.
A door built for agents
The second piece is the Agent Gateway, a server built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard Anthropic created for connecting agents to outside tools and data. At present, agents shop Walmart through a website designed for people, which Walmart itself calls slow and error-prone. The gateway gives them a direct route into the catalog and checkout instead. It is rolling out in beta for businesses and developers, and a profile is created automatically the first time a customer shops through an agent on it.
The gateway is also where Walmart sets its terms. An agent can be pointed toward a customer's usual items — a specific brand of milk, say — without being shown the customer's entire purchase history. Payment-card data never reaches the agent, agents cannot add or change payment methods, and they may access only the data relevant to the task at hand. Agents that break the terms are blocked. Prices are not part of the negotiation: Walmart says agents see the same prices as a person on Walmart.com, with offers and fees shown before purchase. "We price products, not people," the company said. Its returns process applies to agent orders too, including when an agent does not act as intended.
Two retailers, two answers
The contrast with Amazon is sharp. Amazon has reportedly shut its door on outside agents, blocking shoppers' agents from Perplexity and Meta's Muse agent rather than admitting them under conditions. Walmart's bet is that agents are coming either way, and that a retailer is better off admitting them through a gate it controls — with identity, limits and an off switch — than forcing them to imitate human browsers. Amazon's bet is the reverse: keep the storefront human, and let its own assistants do the agent work inside it.
The takeaway
Strip away the retail rivalry and Walmart has published a workable template for agentic commerce: the agent gets its own identity, never touches the money directly, spends only inside a limit the customer set, and can be cut off in one step. Whether shoppers actually hand an agent a $200 allowance is a separate question — but the first big retailer to answer "here is how" has now done so, and it is not the one most people expected.