AI shopping agents get a rulebook, and Amazon isn’t in it

On Tuesday, Meta, Walmart, Stripe, Shopify and the AI customer-service company Sierra announced an open standard for how personal AI agents sign in to a business and what they’re allowed to do once inside, The Next Web reports. It’s called the Personal Agent Protocol, and a first version of the spec is due later this month. Amazon, which has started blocking Meta’s Muse agent from browsing or buying on its store, isn’t among the partners named.

Personal agents are the newest wave of consumer AI. Meta’s Muse, Instinct and ChatGPT’s Dots can book flights, make dinner reservations and order groceries for a user, TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez writes. The trouble is the website on the other end.

Some of the blocks are deliberate. Delta told TechCrunch it “does not currently have a partnership or integration that enables a third-party AI agent to shop for or book Delta flights.” United pointed to its terms of use, which bar “any robot, spider, other automatic device.”

Users have also complained about eBay, Zillow, Pizza Hut and Adidas, and a couple said eBay suspended their accounts for using an agent.

Other blocks are accidents. Walmart is a Muse partner, and shoppers still reported that Muse couldn’t finish purchases on its site. A Walmart spokesperson told TechCrunch that wasn’t intentional. The site shows a button to prove the visitor is human, and if that check gets interrupted, it fails and the agent is kicked out.

Defenses built to stop spam bots were never designed to tell a scraper from a customer’s assistant.

The protocol is the fix for that second group. Sessions run on OAuth, the same handoff behind “Sign in with Google” buttons, according to a post by Sierra’s Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor. An agent can start as a guest to check stock or a returns policy. Once the customer signs in, the customer decides whether it gets read-only or write access.

The session follows the customer across channels, so a question asked before signing in and an order changed afterward count as one visit. The business picks the door: its website, its APIs, which are the direct connections it offers to outside software, or an agent of its own.

TNW also names Genesys, Instinct and Rocket as partners. TechCrunch’s list adds the customer-service software makers NiCE and Decagon.

Payments aren’t in the first version. They’re listed as a future extension, along with push notifications and finer-grained permissions. Stripe and Shopify have also joined a rival standard run by Visa, the Trusted Agent Protocol, which TNW reported in June let agents buy from about 175 million merchants through ChatGPT.

In Europe, TNW notes, strong customer authentication rules were written for a person approving a payment to a named payee for a set amount. They carry no carve-out for software approving one on that person’s behalf. No European retailer, bank or payment company has been named as joining.

A shared sign-in gives a store like Walmart, which already wanted agents in, a way to recognize a customer’s agent and wave it through instead of tripping its own bot check.

Amazon runs its own assistant, Alexa for Shopping, and sells ads on its own search pages. An outside agent shopping Amazon’s catalog skips both.

Until Amazon has a reason to sign, the protocol mostly serves stores that were going to let agents in anyway.

Yelp already has an agent policy anyone can read. It told TechCrunch that agents get in once they’ve paid for its data licensing program.

Sources

• TechCrunch: The next hurdle for AI agents: getting websites to let them in
• The Next Web: Sierra announces Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard for personal AI agents