Imagine telling your AI assistant to buy the weekly groceries — and it actually does it, pays, and shows you the receipt. That future took a big step this week. On October 21, 2026, Walmart announced it is opening Walmart.com and Sam's Club to approved AI shopping agents, while its biggest rival, Amazon, is doing the opposite and blocking them. This is not a small experiment. It is a fight over who owns the shopping trip of the future: the store, or the AI assistant you talk to every day.
What Walmart actually announced
At the centre of the announcement is the Agent Gateway, a new system built on the Model Context Protocol, an open standard originally created by Anthropic that lets AI agents connect to outside tools and data. Approved agents can search Walmart's online inventory and place orders on a shopper's behalf. Walmart says the gateway is designed so agents can find a shopper's usual brands and items without handing the agent the shopper's personal information or full purchase history. It is, in Walmart's words, its own front door for agents — they come in through the gateway, identify themselves, and follow Walmart's rules. The announcement covers both Walmart and Sam's Club in the US. Walmart has not said when, or if, the system will come to its stores elsewhere.
Agent Profiles: your AI gets its own account
The second piece is Agent Profiles, rolling out over the coming weeks. Each AI agent a shopper uses gets a dedicated profile linked to their Walmart account, so the agent's purchases are shown separately from the shopper's own orders. Shoppers stay in control in two ways. They can require approval for every single purchase, or they can set a spending limit — Walmart compares this to adding an authorised user to a credit card. A profile is created the first time a shopper uses an agent through the gateway, and it can be deleted at any time. No Walmart+ membership is needed. That control matters, because it answers the first question most people ask about agent shopping: what stops the AI from buying the wrong thing, or too much of it? Walmart's answer is that agents must stay within the shopper's stated intent, can only access the data a task needs, and never see payment card details. Normal returns apply to agent orders, and agents that break the rules will be blocked. The control question is one reason agent design is moving this way across the industry. Anthropic's new agent app, explained in our article on What Is Claude Duet? Anthropic's New AI Agent App Explained, also asks before it pays for anything — the same ask-first principle Walmart is building into shopping.
Why Amazon is doing the opposite
Amazon has taken the other path. It has blocked AI agents from Perplexity and Meta's Muse from completing purchases on its store, saying in the Muse case that the agent did not identify itself and was capturing customers' logins. It has also fought Perplexity's Comet browser in court. The business reason is easy to see. Amazon earns large advertising revenue from sponsored listings that shoppers see while browsing, and it promotes its own assistant inside its store. An outside agent that browses, picks a product and buys without ever viewing those pages weakens both the advertising and the data link. Blocking agents protects that model. Walmart has a smaller share of online sales, so meeting shoppers inside ChatGPT, Gemini or Muse offers reach it might not win on its own site. Its own Sparky assistant, launched in June 2025, is already embedded inside ChatGPT, with a Google Gemini integration in development alongside partnerships with OpenAI, Google and Meta. One report on the announcement notes Sparky users generate 40% higher average order values and 57% higher conversion rates on visual searches — company claims, but they show why Walmart believes in this channel.
What this means for the agent economy
This split is bigger than one retailer. Agents that can act — not just answer questions — need shared rules to be trusted, and those rules are still being written. The Agentic AI Foundation Adds Four Open Projects from Anthropic, OpenAI, Hugging Face and Alibaba shows how the industry is trying to standardise how agents work together, while the safety side of giving agents access to real systems is exactly why Apple Is Tightening macOS Full Disk Access Because of AI Agents. Retail is also where agents meet the physical world first. Just as Striding AI's Retail Robots Want to Stock Your Supermarket — Stores Go Robotic in 2027 shows robots moving into stores, Walmart's gateway shows software agents moving into the checkout. The store of the near future may be staffed by robots inside and served by agents outside. For shoppers, the practical test is simple: does an agent save time without creating surprise orders? Walmart's profiles, approvals and spending limits are designed to pass that test. For rival retailers and travel and booking sites that have locked agents out entirely, Walmart's bet is that welcoming agents on its own terms wins more customers than shutting the door.
Conclusion
Walmart is betting that the future shopper sends an agent, and that the store which welcomes that agent — with clear rules, separate profiles and spending limits — becomes the store the agent picks. Amazon is betting that protecting its storefront, its ads and its own assistant matters more. Both cannot be right forever. Would you let an AI agent do your weekly shop, and if so, what limit would you set it? Tell us in the comments.
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