Amazon has announced that it has blocked Meta's AI assistant Muse from accessing Amazon.com to shop on behalf of users, citing violations of Amazon's terms of service, security risks, and lack of merchant consent. This is the latest case in Amazon's ongoing efforts over the past year to block third-party AI shopping agents.

According to information displayed on Amazon's page cited by GeekWire, unauthorized AI agents accessing the site from September 22 will violate its "Terms of Use"; Amazon specifically accuses Muse of scraping and storing user account credentials and information without authorization, failing to disclose its identity as an AI agent while browsing, and that Amazon had not received any prior notification or authorized its access.

An Amazon spokesperson stated, "Third-party applications that shop on behalf of customers should operate transparently and respect the service provider's decision on participation"; as of the evening GeekWire contacted Meta, there had been no response from Meta.

This action continues Amazon's systematic blockade against AI shopping agents over the past year—previously blocking OpenAI and Google's shopping agents, and filing a lawsuit against Perplexity's Comet browser, which initially received a preliminary injunction in March but was overturned by the Ninth Circuit Court in August; additionally, Amazon has recently added AI crawlers from companies like Meta, Google, Huawei, and Mistral to its robots.txt block list.

Amazon's own advertising revenue exceeded $68 billion last year, and this business model heavily relies on users directly browsing and clicking on sponsored products on the site. If AI shopping agents replace users in making decisions and placing orders, they would bypass Amazon's advertising display process, threatening its core monetization engine; meanwhile, Amazon is also accelerating its own similar functionalities, including testing a "buy-for-me" feature and upgrading its own shopping chatbot Rufus.

In market mechanisms, this blockade is essentially a battle between e-commerce platforms and AI agents over "user entry points" and "data sovereignty"—Amazon is concerned that third-party AI agents could divert its advertising revenue and potentially obtain proprietary data such as product pricing and inventory through scraping to train competing models; the blocked parties (Meta, OpenAI, Google, etc.) are forced to either bypass Amazon to connect directly with other e-commerce and brands or challenge the legality of the platform's unilateral restrictions through legal means.

Source: Public Information