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Meta’s AI agent “Muse,” launched on the 8th of last month, has surpassed 5 million downloads in just three weeks, shaking up the consumer AI market. The e-commerce industry’s response, however, has split sharply. Shopify has fully opened its stores to Muse and integrated Shop Pay checkout, while Amazon has blocked Muse’s access to its platform. Amazon cited its terms of service requiring AI agents to identify themselves, but industry analysts see the move as a defensive play to protect its $76 billion annual advertising revenue. A federal appeals court ruled that while excluding AI agents under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is difficult, controlling access through terms of service remains permissible—confirming that companies hold the power to decide. With AI agents poised to disrupt the revenue models of search, comparison, and intermediary platforms, this conflict is expected to serve as a bellwether for the future of the platform economy.
Key Elements
Meta launched its personal AI agent “Muse” on the 8th of last month, and within three weeks it has surpassed 5 million downloads, rattling the consumer AI landscape. Yet the e-commerce industry’s reception of Muse could not be more divided. Shopify has embraced it wholeheartedly, while Amazon has blocked Muse from accessing its platform.
Muse is an “always-on” agent that goes beyond simple Q&A—it opens browsers on the user’s behalf, fills out forms, compares prices, and even completes purchases. It continues working even when the app is closed, requesting user approval only at critical decision points such as payments or email dispatch. At launch, Stripe’s AI agent wallet “Link” was the first supported payment method, with Shopify’s streamlined checkout “Shop Pay” joining shortly after.
Shopify’s Forward-Looking Embrace
Shopify opened its stores to Muse immediately after launch. According to Meta, Muse had access to Shopify’s entire product catalog from day one. Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke wrote on X on the 21st of last month: “We are working closely with Muse to enable AI agent checkout
Two days later, on the 23rd, Shop Pay was officially announced as a supported wallet within Muse. That same day, at Meta’s “Connect 2026” event, the company revealed plans to add Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Ulta, and Wayfair as Muse-supported retailers.
Shopify’s choice stems largely from its business structure. Shopify is not a large retailer but a platform providing e-commerce infrastructure to countless small and mid-sized brands. If Muse discovers products on Shopify stores and drives purchases through to completion, merchant revenue rises and Shop Pay’s payment share grows. The bet is that AI agents can become a new customer acquisition channel.
Amazon’s Blockade and the Rationale Behind It
Amazon took the opposite path. It blocked Muse from searching for and purchasing products on its site, and asked Meta to restrict Muse’s use of Amazon. Amazon’s position: “Third-party apps that make purchases on behalf of customers must disclose their presence and respect the right of service providers to decide whether to participate.”
At the heart of the conflict is the issue of AI identity disclosure. According to safety documents released by Meta, Muse’s web browsing is presented as the activity of the user themselves. Amazon’s terms of service, by contrast, require AI agents to identify themselves in all web requests. Amazon also reserves the right to restrict access at its own discretion under its terms.
Industry observers argue Amazon’s blockade is about more than security. Amazon generated approximately $76 billion in advertising revenue over the past 12 months. The ad model depends on consumers searching and scrolling directly on Amazon’s app or website; if Muse handles search and comparison on their behalf, the foundation of that ad revenue could erode. This is why analysts see the move as an attempt to prevent AI agents from becoming the new gateway to shopping.
The extent of Amazon’s legal grounds to block AI agents has already been tested in court. On August 4, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in a case involving Perplexity’s AI browser “Comet,” drew a distinction between violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and access restrictions based on terms of service.
Comet includes an AI agent called “Assistant” that performs shopping and other tasks at the user’s direction. Amazon argued that Perplexity had gained unauthorized access to its computers, but the court found this claim unlikely to succeed. However, the court added that Amazon’s authority to regulate access to Amazon.com through its terms of service was not undermined by the ruling. In other words, the path to excluding AI agents via the CFAA has narrowed, but the room to control access through terms of service remains intact.
What’s striking is that Meta itself restricts competing AI assistants on its own platforms. The terms of service for the WhatsApp Business Platform, with exceptions for certain countries, limit general-purpose AI assistant companies from offering services through the platform. Whether AI constitutes a primary function of a service is determined at Meta’s sole discretion.
Meta, having been rebuffed by Amazon over Muse, is itself controlling the entry of competing AI assistants into its own messaging network. It’s a telling illustration of how tangled the boundary-setting among companies has become in the age of AI agents.
Muse’s early performance has exceeded expectations. According to market research firm Sensor Tower, Muse surpassed 5 million downloads in the U.S. within 22 days of launch, topping the free app charts on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. ChatGPT took 56 days to reach 5 million downloads after its mobile app launch—Muse got there roughly twice as fast. Meta’s stock rose more than 20% within two weeks of launch, adding over $200 billion in market capitalization. JPMorgan assessed that Muse “has the potential to become the most widely used consumer AI application since ChatGPT.”
Muse’s competitive edge comes from being designed as an everyday personal assistant rather than a complex productivity tool. While earlier AI agents spread first in work domains like coding and document creation, Muse targets life-oriented tasks: trip preparation, price comparison, hotel booking, subscription cancellation. Its position atop Meta’s ecosystem—Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, used daily by 3.6 billion people—is another advantage.
As AI agents proliferate, the first casualties will be platforms that profit from search, comparison, and intermediation. Travel booking sites are a prime example. If the gateway consumers pass through when searching for hotels and flights is replaced by an AI agent, platforms find themselves needing to be chosen by the AI. The advertising landscape could shift too: getting into an AI’s recommendation algorithm may become more important than ads that catch the human eye.
That said, Amazon’s physical infrastructure is not easily replicated. A logistics network delivering millions of products within hours, purchase data from hundreds of millions of users, and tens of millions of Prime memberships are competitive advantages that AI agents cannot easily replace. Some observers note that if Muse expands the overall size of online commerce, it would be positive for Shopify and Meta, but the threat to Amazon may be relatively limited.
The divergent responses of Shopify and Amazon ultimately converge on a single question: who decides whether AI agents are allowed between customers and businesses? For now, that choice rests with the companies. No matter how capable Muse becomes, its options are limited if companies refuse to open their doors. The tug-of-war over control in the age of AI agents has only just begun.
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