A popup instead of a lawsuit
Amazon has cut Meta’s new Muse agent off from shopping on Amazon.com, after trying and failing to get Meta to exclude the site from the product voluntarily. From Sunday night, users who pointed Muse at Amazon saw a message telling them that continued access by an unauthorised AI agent violates Amazon’s conditions of use, to which its customers have agreed.
The wording is deliberate. Amazon is not accusing anyone of hacking. It is invoking a contract.
Three objections
Amazon’s complaint, as reported by GeekWire, has three parts: Meta never told Amazon that Muse would access its store; the agent does not identify itself when it browses; and it appears to capture and store customer credentials. Amazon says Muse can reach account pages and order history if a customer asks it to, which it characterises as an undisclosed third party moving through customer accounts and processing transactions without the retailer’s knowledge.
“We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate,” an Amazon spokesperson said, adding that the company had asked Meta to remove Amazon from the experience.
Meta did not respond to GeekWire’s request for comment on Sunday night. It has said previously that Muse has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods, and that credentials a user shares go into secure storage so the agent can use them without seeing them.
Why the message cites terms of service
Amazon spent the past year trying to keep outside agents off its site, suing Perplexity over its Comet browser and moving to block shopping agents from Google and OpenAI. That campaign has been going badly in court. Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity in March and lost it on 4 August, when the Ninth Circuit ruled that under federal anti-hacking law it is the user, not the AI company, who accesses Amazon’s computers. The court denied Amazon’s petition for rehearing on 10 September.
What the ruling left open was contract. Hence a popup that quotes conditions of use rather than the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Partners on one side, rivals on the other
The two companies are commercial partners. Amazon products have been purchasable inside Facebook and Instagram since 2023, and Meta signed a multibillion-dollar deal in April to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon’s Graviton chips. Amazon said on Sunday night that it is in direct conversation with Meta, and declined to say whether it would go to court.
The stakes are not only about who completes the sale. Amazon generated more than $68bn in advertising revenue last year, a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products. An agent that reads the catalogue and buys on a customer’s behalf skips all of it.
What to watch
Meta launched Muse on 8 September as a personal agent that runs multi-step tasks on a secure virtual machine with its own browser, checking with the user before sensitive actions and routing anything it sends to the internet past a separate monitoring agent called Sentinel. A week later it was the number one free app in Apple’s US App Store, ahead of ChatGPT. Amazon’s own Buy for Me agent shops external sites but identifies itself and lets brands opt out — the standard Amazon now wants applied to everyone else.
