Thread

Amazon blocks Meta’s new Muse AI agent from shopping on amazon.com

153 points · 162 comments · simianwords

rkagerer · 1790016658 · focus · HN ↗
The right way to do this is to create an API or MCP or whatever catering to bots, and implement corresponding terms in your legal agreements (i.e. after approving a bot to interact with us, you're responsible for purchases it makes), along with some limits to prevent runaway shopping when Muse decides to binge.
Less friction = more shopping = more profits.
That used to be a concept companies like Amazon understood well. (As well as companies like Google in the context of web browsing and keeping it user-friendly as opposed to user-hostile).
If the bots mean customers are getting a better deal elsewhere, then you're doing something wrong elsewhere in your business model and need to go address that. Or eventually free market economics will, no matter how big an artificial moat you try to build.
1. steve1977 · 1790016835 · focus · HN ↗
  But how can they serve product suggestions this way?
  1. simonw · 1790016999 · focus · HN ↗
    Right. Agents represent a direct attack on a significant portion Amazon's revenue model.
    anthonypasq · 1790017821 · focus · HN ↗
    maybe agentic commerce will finally realize the micro-payments based internet that crypto people had been wishing would happen for years? Should there be stablecoin based micropayments built into MCP to charge for agentic interactions to replace the micropayment of an ad into someones eyeballs?
    Miraste · 1790021496 · focus · HN ↗
    This is (still) never going to happen. A more realistic outcome is a deal between Meta and Amazon to enable access in exchange for invisibly integrating advertisements into the agents' decisions.I don't know exactly what that will look like, but I'd bet we will see a version of it soon.
    anthonypasq · 1790028566 · focus · HN ↗
    very interesting, and im inclined to agree with you. Depends how centralized the agent economy is I suppose where bespoke deals are worth it.
    flessio · 1790038149 · focus · HN ↗
    It can only be this. And it will fail the same reason Alexa failed.
    Nobody will blindly trust Amazon to buy products when they know Amazon cannot and will not truly suggest the best product for the consumer.
    Alexa was supposed to be the voice gateway to purchasing. But nobody trusts the result Alexa picks because it will not default to the best value to the user - only the best value to Amazon.
    edmundsauto · 1790025545 · focus · HN ↗
    Right, agents work on behalf of the user and only cost compute (not time/attention, which is the ultimate human currency). They act on behalf of me not Amazon.
    It is my personally optimistic perspective on AI that it will mediate all interactions with 3P who are acting in their own interest and not mine. Ie, “my” agent.
    flessio · 1790037918 · focus · HN ↗
    This.
    Recently it was estimated that Amazon makes $30-80 billion(!) per year off not showing you the economically best results by deliberately disallowing sorting on $ per unit [1] to force sellers into ads. Amongst other tactics (ex. filter by country of origin).
    AI agents can sort on $ / unit to easily find you the best deal, rendering Amazon's various forms of paid placement irrelevant.
    Extend this to filtering Chinese slop brands (also not able to be filtered) and the significant portion of revenue starts looking like knocking back margins to the 3-5% range. Basically an existential threat.
    Amazon cannot allow AI agents and maintain current margins.
    [1] - <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/" rel="nofollow">https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/
  2. nsvd2 · 1790017489 · focus · HN ↗
    If Amazon doesn't want to offer agent-first shopping I'm sure someone else will come along and eat their lunch. Adapt or die.
  3. SoKamil · 1790017787 · focus · HN ↗
    API or MCP that does context injection and forbids stripping it in ToS.
  4. novok · 1790017831 · focus · HN ↗
    The AIs are also providing the product suggestions, and it comes from what data they are given from their searches. I think they can put 2 and 2 together on how to make that happen with the right MCP response bodies.
  5. cyanydeez · 1790024135 · focus · HN ↗
    I asked this in another thread: who benefits from all these bot integrations?
    It's not the consumers of the AI, or the consumers of the real businesses? It just seems like everyone things "if they build it" it'll come.
    But it's clear Amazon cares about how it's costomers have to view all the items as both upsells and advertising, and a bot is going to either be _really_ into it or act much like ublockorigin does.
    But either way, no company making money on costumer direct sales sees a real benefit to allowing a bot to easily bypass all the necessary details.
    Whether it's advertisement, liabilities, manufacturer's recommendations; a bot will ignore these things and generate a costumer expectation that suddenly the producer has to live up to.
    Then you'll tell me: YEAH, that's why you need a MCP friendly website.
    And I'll tell you: that's how the mafia works.
2. krunck · 1790018451 · focus · HN ↗
  Nice. That would allow people to create alternative interfaces for humans (like me) who absolutely HATE Amazon's web interface.
  1. Terr_ · 1790018663 · focus · HN ↗
    They will absolutely put something in to prevent you from doing that, too much of their profit relies on the experience you hate.
    ssl-3 · 1790021480 · focus · HN ↗
    That experience actively drives me towards other retailers.
    I want to buy what I want to buy, and I will never buy things that I do not want to buy. If the time ever comes that I am tricked into buying the wrong thing from Amazon, then I'm sending it back on their dime.
    If that means that only 3 things fit, then I only want to see exactly 3 things. If that means that 0 things fit, then 0 is also a valid result. In response to these results, I can then elect to soften my constraints at my own volition.
    But an Amazon search typically results endless pages of vaguely-related products that represent a jumbled mess of things largely do not fit or only-sorta fit the broad concept of what I intend to purchase.
    When I want a 4300 Kelvin D2S HID headlight bulb for my car, then that's all that I want to find when I search for it. I do not want results for LEDs. I do not want selective yellow bulbs. I do not want 5000k or 6500k or 10000k. I do not want an "upgrade" kit, nor D2R bulbs, nor D3S. None of those things are useful to me.
    The list of things that I do not want is infinite, and when Amazon presents a seemingly-infinite list of them then that represents the opposite of usefulness.
    I only want to peruse listings that match. I require no more and no less than this in order to be satisfied. There is no possible amount of additional noise that can ever dissuade me from seeking the thing that I very specifically desire.
    A modern LLM can weed out and separate the bad results from the good ones and give me an easier time of making a purchase decision, but it can only do so when it is not blocked from the start.
    desolate_muffin · 1790023603 · focus · HN ↗
    > that's all that I want to find when I search
    That ship has long since sailed for every search product. Companies have long-since learned that intent-based results are much more profitable (why show an empty result page when you can show something for people to buy or click on?), but it is also often genuinely useful when your search is not perfect or what you want doesn't actually exist. I agree that it is annoying when you really truly do only want something very specific and the ranking prioritizes the wrong things (e.g., sponsored results, more profitable items, etc.) over exact matches, but can you honestly and truly say you've never found any value from intent search algorithms?
    spwa4 · 1790027985 · focus · HN ↗
    You mean if they falsify the search for both sides they make more money, as ironically spelt out in Google's original paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine":
    “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
    “advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.”
    “the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model...”
    <a href="https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/Brin98Anatomy.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/Brin98Anatom...
    Note: they even explain why advertising funded search makes things worse for customers and for advertisers. Worse search finds more ads and thus more dollars, resulting in both worsening search results over time AND less value for ad money over time.
    ssl-3 · 1790031614 · focus · HN ↗
    I very often truly only want something very specific. I'm not apologetic about that at all.
    When I want oolong tea bags and I search for "oolong tea bags," then I definitely don't want to be shown bulk green tea instead.
    If I want to find any kind of tea instead of specifically oolong -- if, perchance, I wish to peruse the broader market of available tea -- then I'm very capable of removing "oolong" and/or "bags" from my search prompt.
    ---
    I can look around and observe that the ship has sailed, but that doesn't mean I'll ever be happy with the outcome or accepting of any notion that the situation is anything other than hostile.
    Can you recognize that it gets between me and my willingness to spend money?
  2. carlosjobim · 1790020275 · focus · HN ↗
    Amazon is only an interface to purchase products made by other companies (except for Kindle devices).
    Your alternative interfaces exist and have always existed: Go to a physical store, order by phone, order through the OEM website, order through an Amazon competitor, etc.
    Miraste · 1790021702 · focus · HN ↗
    "you can already build [Dropbox] yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."
    For all the complaints, it's nice to see HN hasn't changed that much.
    carlosjobim · 1790022389 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, you're right. It's almost impossible to purchase from a physical store or from competitors to Amazon (who many times are much bigger than Amazon in their country).
    On the next episode of Oppressed Hackers: We get a load of a guy who had the nerve to say that it was possible to drink a glass of water.
    Miraste · 1790026061 · focus · HN ↗
    The point wasn't that there are no alternatives, but that calling Amazon "only an interface to purchase products made by other companies" is reductive to the point of being completely wrong.
3. Ronrey · 1790022521 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
4. theturtletalks · 1790024541 · focus · HN ↗
  I’m actually making this:
  <a href="https://marketplace.openship.org" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.openship.org
  It’s an interoperable marketplace that uses MCP-UI to connect to seller websites directly. It brings the storefront and cart directly into the chat.
5. wdr1 · 1790025184 · focus · HN ↗
  > The right way to do this is to create an API or MCP or whatever catering to bots, and implement corresponding terms in your legal agreements (i.e. after approving a bot to interact with us, you're responsible for purchases it makes), along with some limits to prevent runaway shopping when Muse decides to binge.
  From Amazon's perspective, that would be very much the wrong way.
  Amazon's concerns here aren't technical. It's entirely about being disintermediated.
  1. inquirerGeneral · 1790086037 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
6. DylanFerrara · 1790955254 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]

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