Walmart opened its stores to outside AI shopping assistants on Oct. 21, announcing an Agent Gateway that lets approved agents such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Meta’s Muse search inventory and place orders at Walmart and Sam’s Club. Customers will be able to cap what each agent spends, with the controls arriving the following month.
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President and chief executive John Furner announced the program at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. The timing was pointed: it came weeks after Amazon began turning such agents away, giving the two largest U.S. retailers opposite policies on software that shops for people.
How the Agent Gateway connects assistants to Walmart
According to TechCrunch’s report from the launch, the gateway is a server built on the Model Context Protocol, the standard Anthropic created for linking AI agents to outside tools and data. Through it, an approved agent can search Walmart’s online inventory and buy on a customer’s behalf. Walmart says the design lets shoppers reorder usual brands without handing their personal information or purchase history directly to the agent.
Reuters, in a version carried by KSL, named OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Muse as the assistants that can plug into the gateway. The tools are open to any Walmart account holder, and a Walmart+ membership is not required.
Agent Profiles and the spending limits
The spending controls come through a separate feature called Agent Profiles, which TechCrunch says rolls out next month, meaning November. Each agent a customer authorizes gets its own profile inside the Walmart account, so what the agent buys is recorded apart from the customer’s own orders. A profile is created the first time a customer uses a given agent through the gateway, and the customer links it to the account and then sets the rules.
Those rules come in two forms. A customer can require approval for every transaction, or allow purchases without a prompt up to a spending limit the customer sets. Walmart compares the arrangement to adding an authorized user to a credit card, where that person’s activity is identifiable and can be capped. Profiles can be deleted at any time, and Reuters adds that shoppers can monitor agent purchases and revoke access whenever they choose.
Because the profiles are not live yet, the gateway and the limits are on different clocks. The connection to ChatGPT, Gemini and Muse was announced on Oct. 21, while the per-agent limits and approvals are scheduled for the month after. Until then, the safeguards Walmart describes rest on its terms for agents rather than on a dollar cap set by each shopper.
Terms for agents and the Amazon contrast
Walmart says agents cannot take actions beyond what the shopper intends, cannot see customers’ payment information, and can reach only the information needed for a task. Its returns process applies even when an agent does not act as intended, which speaks to the fear of ending up with items nobody wanted. Agents that break the terms will be blocked from the site.
The welcome contrasts with Amazon. On Sept. 20, Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse from its shopping site, returning an error that said continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates its Conditions of Use. TechCrunch’s Russell Brandom suggested Amazon may not want to take on agentic commerce yet, since it would have to fix bad orders and deal with angry customers and vendors.
A later TechCrunch survey of websites that lock agents out found a mixed field. A Walmart spokesperson told TechCrunch that failed Muse purchases on its site were not intentional, and the problem appeared tied to a human-verification button that agents can fail to complete. Delta said it has no partnership that lets third-party agents book flights, and Yelp allows non-human traffic only when the operator pays for data access.
Walmart was already a retail partner for Meta’s agent, according to TechCrunch’s rundown of Muse features, which lists it with Best Buy, Gap, Sephora and Wayfair. Mizuho analyst David Bellinger said in a note, as quoted by Reuters, that the tools build confidence in the experimental process of agentic buying and that momentum and buy-in from top management make it look like a real thing.
What remains unproven is how many customers will hand a chatbot a shopping list at all. Walmart has taken the position that a store gains more by supervising the agents that arrive than by turning them away, and November’s Agent Profiles will show whether shoppers trust the limits enough to use them. The open questions are practical ones: whether approval prompts become tedious enough that people raise their limits, whether returns for agent mistakes stay as smooth as Walmart promises, and whether more assistants beyond the three named so far are admitted through the gateway. Each of those will be visible in Walmart’s account settings long before it shows up in any earnings report.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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