On October 21, 2026, Walmart said it will open its website to AI shopping agents in November. Amazon has gone the other way, having blocked both Meta’s Muse AI assistant and Perplexity’s shopping agent. Walmart’s welcome comes with house rules. Agents “must not take actions beyond what the shopper intends,” may not switch a customer’s payment method, and get only the information a given task requires. Walmart says agents that break the terms will be blocked.
Each agent gets an Agent Profile inside the customer’s Walmart account. By default, every purchase an agent makes waits for the customer’s approval; customers can instead hand it a budget, such as $100, to spend on its own. Agent purchases are listed apart from the customer’s own, and the agent can be switched off whenever the customer likes.
The plumbing is an Agent Gateway, in beta as of October 2026, which plugs agents in via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for connecting AI agents to web services. Walmart says the gateway spares agents the stumbles of clicking through a browser and keeps them away from customers’ shopping history and personal details. Its example: “if a customer tends to buy sourdough bread or a particular brand of milk, Walmart will help the agent find those usual items for the customer without sharing the customer’s broader shopping history with the agent.”
Sam’s Club will accept shopping agents too.
Read more at The Verge.