// THE VERGE — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
AI agents are ready to shop. Some retailers are wary.
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AI agents are getting blocked left and right — but even when they work, it suggests a more annoying future for humans.
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Using an AI agent to shop for you is a strange experience. Tech companies have marketed them as personal assistants — the democratizing of labor that ordinarily would only be available to the rich and powerful. In practice, at least for buying things, it’s more like sending an anxious and apologetic teenager out to the store: They require an inordinate amount of instructions and specifications, run into technical problems regularly, and come back with solutions that are not exactly what you asked for. They did, technically speaking, complete a task, just not the specific one you asked them to, and often not in the way you would have approached it.
Meta, Google, OpenAI, and others have all introduced some version of agentic shopping tools that promise to make buying things even easier than it already is. Demos show AI agents that can seamlessly book flights and hotels, browse billions of products to find the right one, and secure tickets to sporting events on a human’s behalf. But as AI companies — and their users — are finding out, buying things requires that the other party is willing to sell them in the first place.
The most prominent example of a retailer or service provider refusing to let an AI agent in has been Amazon. The retail giant sued Perplexity, with Amazon saying the AI company had ignored its requests to stop its agent from shopping on the site. More recently, Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse agent from shopping on Amazon. E-commerce sites aren’t the only platforms walling off agents: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said the bank wouldn’t allow outside agents to access accounts, saying it was “too risky” for clients and the company, and some users report they’ve been unable to use agents to book trips from providers like Delta and Amtrak. AI agents can also get caught in the web of general bot blocking systems, meaning that even if a site doesn’t have a blanket ban, existing firewalls can make agents inconsistent — and by extension, less useful for the types of tasks tech companies tout as the future.
Even without hard blocks, agents’ access to retailers is spotty. For example, Muse, which I instructed to look for a specific face moisturizer, was caught in Target’s bot check one day but was able to get through the next. It suggested a listing from a grocery chain that doesn’t ship to my address when I searched for the best price on granola bars. When I asked for mattress recommendations under a certain price point, Muse was once again blocked by Target, despite being able to pull from the site just a few minutes prior.