Walmart is inviting AI agents to shop for you

Starting next month, Walmart will let customers send AI agents to shop its site, with purchase approvals, spending limits and a separate review trail. Agents connect through a new Agent Gateway, in beta, built on the Model Context Protocol, and each gets its own Agent Profile inside the customer's account.

Amazon has gone the other way, blocking Perplexity's shopping agent and Meta's Muse. When the two biggest retailers in the US take opposite positions on agents, every brand, shopper and AI company has to pick a side.

We think Walmart's approach is the more useful one for shoppers, and it's built with more care than a simple open door. By default every agent purchase needs approval. Customers can instead set a budget, such as up to $100, review agent purchases separately, and switch the agent off at any time. That's a sensible ladder of trust: start supervised, loosen it if the agent earns it.

The terms for agents are also worth noting. Walmart says agents must not take actions beyond what the shopper intends, cannot change a payment method, and may only access what they need for the task. Violators get blocked. And the gateway is designed so an agent can find your usual sourdough or milk brand without seeing your broader shopping history. That's a real privacy improvement over agents scraping a logged-in browser session.

There's strategy here too. Routing agents through Walmart's own gateway means Walmart controls what the agent sees, how products are presented, and which agents are allowed in. That's understandable for security, but it also means the retailer, not the shopper's agent, shapes the shelf. If agents are supposed to comparison-shop on our behalf, a store-controlled interface is a quiet way to tilt the result.

Where this leads if it scales: retailers compete on how agent-friendly they are, and the open-versus-closed split hardens. Amazon's walls protect its ads and data business; Walmart's gateway courts agent traffic Amazon turns away. I'm watching whether shoppers notice the difference, and whether Walmart's rules actually stop a misbehaving agent before it spends someone's money.

The Model Context Protocol is an open standard that lets AI agents plug into services on the web; Walmart says using it lets agents shop without the hiccups of navigating a browser. The same agent shopping will be available at Sam's Club.