Amazon closed the door on two rival AI shopping agents in a single day.
On Monday, Amazon blocked Meta's new AI assistant, Muse, from operating on Amazon.com. Shoppers who had sent Muse to buy things over the weekend started seeing a popup instead of a completed purchase. The same day, Amazon filed an amended complaint against Perplexity, accusing the AI company of misleading a federal appeals court. Both moves target AI agents that try to shop on Amazon's behalf without going through Amazon's own checkout.
This is not a one-off skirmish - it's Amazon defending the choke point that makes its marketplace valuable: the checkout. Every AI agent that buys on a user's behalf without Amazon's involvement chips away at the data, ad revenue, and pricing control Amazon has spent two decades building. Meta and Perplexity are betting that agent-led shopping is the future; Amazon is betting it can just say no.
For an industry that keeps pitching AI agents as the next big thing in e-commerce, the biggest online store in the US just answered with a locked door - twice in one day.