Y Combinator founder Paul Graham stated that Amazon's ban on external agents presents the first opportunity for startups to compete since Amazon's inception. He believes that people will want agents to shop on their behalf, which could become a primary use case, and they will be reluctant to use Amazon's own agents.

The post did not provide product solutions, only defining the ban as a vacancy. The background is that Amazon cut off Meta's Muse from shopping access to amazon.com around September 21. Muse, launched on September 8, can open browsers, fill out forms, and check out after authorization, providing up to $1,000 in coverage for damages, losses, and price drops. Amazon claimed it requested Meta to exclude the site, which was refused; subsequently, Muse accessed the store, scraped and saved login credentials without indicating its agent status, continuing access that was deemed a violation of the terms of use agreed upon by users.

The block list is not limited to one entity. Amazon's site rules and crawler files mark ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Perplexity, Grok, and Google's AI crawlers as prohibited. The company also retains its own shopping AI, Alexa, which can add items and make purchases on third-party websites. CEO Andy Jassy mentioned in a earnings call that the company is in talks with companies looking to run commercial agents.

The legal line has already been drawn. Amazon sued Perplexity last November, accusing its browser Comet of shopping on-site using customers' own accounts; it obtained a preliminary injunction in March, but on August 4, the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that the anti-hacking claim was unlikely to succeed and lifted the injunction, stating that it was the user, not the AI company, accessing the computer. A request for rehearing on September 10 was denied. Elon Musk stated that if user IP and cookies are used, Amazon cannot distinguish whether the buyer is a person or an agent.

The advertising account explains why the gatekeeping is necessary. Amazon's retail profits are thin, while advertising revenue exceeded $68 billion last year, relying on people browsing pages rather than agents jumping directly to checkout. Third-party agents bypass search positions, recommendation spots, and sponsored products, effectively removing advertising inventory from the purchasing path. Graham's judgment is that users want agents on their side, not agents sent by the store owner.

This is an event-driven battle for entry. Buyers are consumers and agent developers who want to delegate price comparison and ordering to external agents, while sellers are Amazon, which guards accounts, pages, and advertising spots. Beneficiaries are new entry points that can complete purchases legally without being controlled by a single retailer; those under pressure are advertisements that rely on in-site browsing for monetization, as well as agents from Meta, OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity that have been specifically blocked. Funds have not yet moved away from Amazon's product sales, but the pricing power of purchasing actions has shifted from the shelves to the agents.

Source: Public Information