Walmart will let AI agents shop on its website for you starting next month. According to The Verge AI, the retail giant is building approval controls, spending limits and a separate purchase history so you can hand off your shopping without handing over your whole account. It’s one of the clearest signs yet that big retailers are deciding how they’ll deal with agentic commerce, and Walmart has picked a very different path from Amazon.
Amazon has blocked Perplexity’s shopping agent and Meta’s Muse AI assistant. Walmart is taking the opposite approach and inviting agents in, as long as they follow its rules.
What Walmart Is Launching: 5 Key Pieces
- Agent Profiles give your AI its own lane: Agents connect to new “Agent Profiles” inside your Walmart account. You can review what your agent bought separately from your own purchases, and you can switch the agent off whenever you want. That separation matters. If something goes wrong, you’ll know right away whether you made the purchase or your bot did.
- Approval is the default, budgets are optional: Out of the box, Walmart requires you to approve every purchase an agent makes. If you trust your agent more, you can let it shop on its own within a set budget, such as up to $100. That’s a sensible middle ground. Most people won’t want an agent buying freely on day one, but approving every carton of milk gets old fast.
- An Agent Gateway built on MCP: Walmart built an “Agent Gateway,” currently in beta, that connects AI agents through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). MCP is an open standard that lets AI agents plug into different web services in a structured way. Walmart says this helps agents avoid the hiccups they run into when they try to click through a website like a human would. Browser-based agents still break on pop-ups, layout changes and checkout flows, so a direct connection is far more reliable.
- Privacy by design, at least on paper: The gateway also stops agents from seeing your shopping history and personal information. Walmart offers a concrete example: “if a customer tends to buy sourdough bread or a particular brand of milk, Walmart will help the agent find those usual items for the customer without sharing the customer’s broader shopping history with the agent.” Put simply, Walmart keeps your data and only gives the agent the answer it needs.
- Rules of the road for agents: Walmart has published terms that agents must follow. According to the company, “agents must not take actions beyond what the shopper intends,” and they can’t change a customer’s payment method. Agents can only access the information they need to finish their task. Walmart says it will block agents that break these terms.
Availability
- When: Next month for agent shopping on Walmart.com. The Agent Gateway is already in beta.
- Where: Walmart and Sam’s Club.
- Pricing: The article doesn’t mention any fees for shoppers.
- Which agents: Walmart hasn’t named specific agents. Any agent that connects through the gateway and follows the terms appears to qualify.
Why This Matters
What stands out here is the strategy. Amazon treats outside agents as a threat to its customer relationship and its ad business. If a bot does the browsing, nobody sees the sponsored listings. Walmart is betting it’s better to set the rules than to fight the trend. By running agents through its own gateway, Walmart keeps control of the data and the experience while still showing up wherever people’s agents go shopping.
This also makes MCP look even more like the default plumbing for agentic commerce. When a retailer of Walmart’s size adopts an open standard, it puts real pressure on others to follow.
Open Questions
There are still some caveats. The gateway is in beta, so expect rough edges. Walmart hasn’t said how it will detect agents that break its terms, or what happens to a purchase made by a misbehaving agent. It’s also unclear whether Walmart will favor its own products when it helps an agent find your “usual items.”
If Walmart’s rollout goes smoothly next month, Amazon may find blocking agents a lot harder to justify. The Verge AI has more details on the launch.