Walmart opens its store to AI shopping agents, with spending caps

How the controls work: Each AI agent a customer uses will get its own profile inside the customer's Walmart account, so its orders show up separately from the customer's own. By default the customer must approve every agent purchase. Customers can instead let an agent buy on its own up to a limit they choose, such as $50, $100 or $200, Walmart said, and can delete an agent's profile at any time. Walmart compared it to adding an authorized user to a credit card. Agent Profiles launch "in the next month," the company said.

The gateway: Today agents shop Walmart.com the way a person would, clicking through pages in a browser, which Walmart called slow and error-prone. The new gateway lets agents connect directly using the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for linking AI tools to services. Walmart said it will help an agent find a shopper's usual items, like a favorite brand of milk, without handing the agent the customer's broader purchase history. The gateway starts as a beta for companies and developers. Reuters said assistants such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Meta's Muse can connect.

The rules: Under Walmart's terms, agents never receive customers' card numbers and can't add or change payment methods. They may access only the information a task needs, must not go beyond what the shopper intends, and will be blocked from Walmart's site if they break the rules. Walmart said its normal returns apply, "including if an agent doesn't act as intended," and that it may ask for extra approval even on purchases within an agent's limit.

Who announced it: Walmart CEO John Furner announced the system, Axios reported. Mizuho analyst David Bellinger wrote that the tools add confidence to what is still an "experimental" way to shop, adding that buy-in from top management "seems to be making this into a real thing," according to Reuters.

Walmart vs. Amazon: The two biggest U.S. retailers are now on opposite sides. Amazon began blocking Muse from its store in September, saying it hadn't authorized the agent to access customer accounts, scrape data or process transactions, and citing security and the shopping experience, according to Axios and GeekWire. GlobalData Retail analyst Neil Saunders told Axios that Amazon is protecting "its closed ecosystem" and likely fears agents could undercut its advertising business. Both companies also run their own in-house assistants: Amazon's Alexa for Shopping and Walmart's Sparky.

The pricing question: Walmart said agents will see the same prices people see on Walmart.com: "We price products, not people." That line answers critics such as Lindsay Owens, head of the left-leaning Groundwork Collaborative, who has accused Walmart of using technology to vary prices based on shoppers' behavior. Walmart called those claims misleading and inaccurate, Axios reported. Neither side has published data that settles the dispute.

What's still unknown: Exactly when Agent Profiles reach every customer; which agent makers will sign on to the gateway and accept Walmart's terms; whether Amazon will change course; and who pays in disputes beyond normal returns, for example if an agent is tricked into a purchase by a scam listing. Walmart hasn't said how it will detect agents that don't identify themselves.

The features described here come from Walmart's own announcement. Agent Profiles have not launched yet (Walmart says they arrive within the next month), and the Agent Gateway is starting as a beta for companies and developers, so US Brief has not been able to test either. The 16% figure comes from Coveo's 2026 Commerce Relevance Report as cited by Axios.