Retailers spent the past week answering the same question in opposite ways: when an AI agent shows up to shop on a customer's behalf, do you let it in? TheRealReal, Tapestry, Kohl's, Chewy, Neiman Marcus, Delta, and Adidas each tightened the door this week, while Walmart built a wider one — on its own terms.
Who's Closing the Door
A Verge investigation published Tuesday found that online retailers are increasingly restricting or blocking third-party AI shopping agents, led by concerns about inventory abuse and account security rather than the hacks and scams that have dominated public debate so far. TheRealReal told reporters it is strengthening its bot defenses after discovering that agents built on Meta's Muse assistant could exploit its 20-minute "hold" feature — placing items on hold for hours at a stretch, tying up inventory that human shoppers couldn't buy. Tapestry (Coach, Kate Spade) and Kohl's don't let agents complete purchases at all, according to the Wall Street Journal; Chewy and Neiman Marcus block some agents outright; Delta doesn't yet allow agents to buy tickets; and Adidas shoppers have reported being unable to use Muse to check out autonomously. Amazon blocked Muse almost as soon as Meta launched it, while pushing its own Alexa for Shopping assistant instead — and banks are reportedly moving the same way, restricting third-party agents from logging into customer accounts over unauthorized-purchase risk.
Walmart's Counter-Bet
Walmart is betting the opposite way. The retailer is rolling out Agent Profiles, which let a shopper create a dedicated profile for their AI agent, set a spending limit or require approval on every purchase, and delete the profile at any time. It's pairing that with Agent Gateway, a beta built on the open Model Context Protocol that lets outside agents shop on a customer's behalf without ever seeing their payment details or purchase history — agents get prices and can transact, but never touch a card number. By default, Walmart still asks for approval even on purchases within a set limit, and any agent that breaks the published terms gets blocked.
It's pointing the technology at a problem that creates meaningful value for the customer.
— Tracy Poulliot, Walmart U.S. digital executive, on Agent Gateway
The contrast with Amazon is pointed enough that it's become the story's own shorthand — one retailer building the rails agents need, the other building the wall to keep them out. Meta says the stakes are real: CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada have set up a personal Muse agent, mostly for shopping, which is a lot of agents for retailers to decide whether to trust.
What This Means for CPG Brands
This isn't an abstract platform fight — it's a distribution question with a brand attached. A product that's perfectly discoverable to an agent on Google or ChatGPT still can't be bought through it if the retailer carrying that product won't let the agent check out there. Brands that sell primarily through retailers now on the restrictive list — Tapestry's categories, Kohl's assortment, Neiman Marcus's specialty mix — may find their agent-driven traffic stalls at the browse stage no matter how well-structured their product data is. Brands with real estate inside Walmart's Agent Gateway, by contrast, get a transacting channel with guardrails the retailer controls, not the brand. And the money is already moving regardless of where any single retailer lands: Mastercard rolled out Agent Pay this week for machine-initiated payments, and three CPG-focused startups — Azoma, Opply, and Profound — raised a combined $198.7 million to help brands get found and transact inside exactly this kind of infrastructure.
The Bottom Line
Six months ago, the open question in agentic commerce was whether shoppers would trust an AI agent enough to let it buy for them. This week's news suggests the more immediate question is whether retailers trust agents enough to let them transact at all — and the early answer is a hard split, not a consensus. For CPG brands, that means the real constraint on agent-driven sales for the next several quarters may not be your product data or your AI visibility. It may simply be which retailers' doors are open.
Sources: Gizmodo, "Online Shopping Platforms Turn Against Third-Party AI Agents," Oct. 27, 2026; Retail Dive, "Walmart welcomes external AI agents — with some guardrails," Oct. 22, 2026; Fortune, "AI Agents Are Shopping Like Never Before," Oct. 26, 2026; FoodNavigator, "AI startups raise $198.7M for marketing, commerce and CPG operations," Oct. 26, 2026.