Walmart Opens Its Doors to AI Shopping Agents as Amazon Shuts Them Out
The retailer is rolling out a dedicated connection point, spending controls, and return protections for AI agents just as Amazon moves to keep them off its site.
Walmart wants AI agents to shop on its site. Amazon wants them gone. That split became official this week, as Walmart announced a new system for letting AI agents browse its inventory and complete purchases on behalf of customers, just days after Amazon started blocking agents from buying things on its own platform.
The centerpiece of Walmart's push is something called Agent Gateway, a new server built on the model context protocol, or MCP. MCP is the connective tissue that lets AI agents reach outside their own walls to pull data, trigger actions, and use tools from other services. Anthropic created the protocol, and it's quickly become the standard plumbing for agentic AI. Walmart's version of it lets an approved agent search the company's online catalog and place orders without the customer doing any of the clicking themselves.
Walmart President and CEO John Furner announced the move Wednesday at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, framing it as groundwork for a future where shopping through AI agents is routine rather than novel. The rollout covers both Walmart's main site and Sam's Club, its membership warehouse chain.
This isn't Walmart's first move in this direction. The company already has a partnership with Meta's Muse agent and supports shopping through other popular AI tools, including ChatGPT and Gemini. Agent Gateway extends that strategy with infrastructure built specifically for the job, rather than ad hoc integrations.
Privacy and spending controls built in
One detail worth noting: Walmart says Agent Gateway lets customers shop for familiar brands and past purchases without handing over their personal data or purchase history directly to the AI agent itself. The retailer is positioning this as a way to get the convenience of agentic shopping without giving a third-party AI tool a full read on someone's shopping habits.
Walmart is also building a way to tell the difference between what a customer buys themselves and what an agent buys on their behalf. Starting next month, customers will be able to set up Agent Profiles, dedicated accounts for each AI agent they use that keep that agent's purchases separate and visible. Shoppers can require approval on every single transaction, or set a spending cap and let the agent purchase freely underneath it.
Walmart compares the setup to adding someone as an authorized user on a credit card: their charges show up clearly, and you decide how much they're allowed to spend. The profile gets created the first time a shopper uses a given agent through the Gateway, at which point they link it to their Walmart account and set whatever limits they want. Profiles can be deleted anytime, and the feature works for any Walmart account holder, no Walmart+ subscription required.
Returns still work even if the agent gets it wrong
Walmart is pairing the technical rollout with a new set of terms specifically for AI agents, spelling out what they're allowed to do on the site. Agents can't go beyond what the shopper actually asked for, can't touch the customer's payment details, and only get access to the information needed for whatever task they're handling. Agents that violate those terms get cut off from the site entirely.
The most consumer-friendly piece of the terms: Walmart's standard returns policy applies even when an agent messes up and buys something the customer didn't want. That matters more than it might sound. One of the obvious worries about letting an AI agent spend your money is what happens if it buys the wrong size, the wrong brand, or something you never intended to order. Walmart guaranteeing normal returns removes a lot of that risk for anyone willing to try agentic shopping early.
Why the two approaches are colliding now
The timing makes the contrast between Walmart and Amazon hard to miss. As AI agents capable of autonomous shopping become more common, retailers are facing a real choice: open up and let outside AI tools transact on their behalf, or wall off the site and insist customers come through directly. Amazon picked the wall. Walmart picked the open door, and it's not alone among big platforms doing so, even as various travel and booking sites have gone the Amazon route and shut agents out altogether.
Walmart's bet is that agentic commerce is coming whether individual retailers like it or not, and that building the infrastructure, privacy protections, and guardrails now gives it an edge once AI-driven shopping becomes mainstream rather than a novelty. Amazon, as the dominant force in e-commerce, has less incentive to hand that relationship over to a third-party AI assistant it doesn't control.
Whether shoppers actually want AI agents doing their buying for them is still an open question. But Walmart is clearly betting the answer is yes, and it wants to be ready before the demand arrives rather than scrambling to catch up after.
