Amazon.com Inc. has blocked Meta Platforms Inc.’s Muse artificial intelligence agent from accessing its e-commerce marketplace.
The cloud and online retail giant notified users of the move late Sunday.
Meta made Muse available in the U.S. earlier this month days, which put it ahead of both ChatGPT and Claude. By last Friday, Muse surpassed OpenAI Group PBC’s chatbot as the most popular free app on the App Store. Meta offers the free version of the agent alongside two paid editions that have higher rate limits
Muse’s momentum didn’t go unnoticed by investors. Shares of Meta closed more than 11% higher today. Intel Corp., Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Arm Holdings plc also posted double-digit gains. The three companies are major providers of central processing units, which AI agents use heavily to run their tools. The stock rally suggests that Wall Street doesn’t expect Amazon’s ban to dent the popularity of Muse.
Amazon told GeekWire in a statement that “we think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate.”
According to Amazon, one of the motivations behind the move is that Muse doesn’t identify itself as an agent when making purchases. The company’s terms of service require agents to identify themselves by embedding a text snippet in HTTP requests.
Amazon took particular issue with the fact that Muse can access customer data. According to the company, the agent can view a user’s Amazon account pages and purchase history if the user prompts it to do so. GeekWire reported that the company believes such activity “amounts to an undisclosed third party moving through customer accounts.”
It’s possible that Meta will seek to address those concerns in a bid to lift the ban. The company has stated that it’s actively working to expand Muse’s data protection guardrails.
The agent launched with a security mechanism called the Muse Secure VM. The technology deploys each Muse instance in a virtual machine that isolates it from the rest of Meta’s infrastructure. A second, cybersecurity-optimized agent called Sentinel reviews sensitive actions such as online purchases. It prevents Muse from directly accessing credit card numbers and account credentials.
Currently, Meta can theoretically access data in consumers’ Muse instances. The company is developing an enhanced version of the Muse Secure VM that will make such access impossible. The Muse Confidential VM, as the new technology is called, is set to roll out later this year. Meta is currently testing it with a limited number of users.
Muse is not the first agent that Amazon has blocked. Last year, the company sued Perplexity AI Inc. over its Comet browser, which includes an AI agent that can shop on users’ behalf. An appeals court dismissed the case in August. However, it didn’t bar Amazon from blocking agents that breach its terms of service.
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