People who sent Meta’s new Muse assistant to shop on Amazon over the weekend hit a wall. From Sunday evening, instead of a checkout page, they got a popup: “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed” [2]. Amazon blocks apps that shop on its site without its permission, and the world’s biggest online store has now turned that policy on one of its own business partners [1].
A Weekend Pop-Up Halts Meta Muse
Meta launched Muse on September 8. The software was designed to handle everyday errands on behalf of consumers, even purchasing a stroller during its live promotional demonstration [1]. Within a single week, the application surged to the number one free software ranking in Apple’s US App Store, outpacing ChatGPT [2, 3]. It books, buys and fills in forms, and for a shopping agent, losing Amazon means losing the one store most people would ask it to use [2].
Todd Bishop first reported the block for GeekWire on Sunday night. Amazon later told Bloomberg that blocking began on Sunday evening, after Meta declined a request to take Amazon out of Muse [2]. The popup cites the company’s Conditions of Use, not any law, and that choice turns out to matter [1].
Meta did not respond to requests for comment from Bloomberg, Business Insider, CNET or GeekWire [1]. Amazon told GeekWire it was in direct conversation with Meta and declined to say whether it would sue [2].
Security Objections Behind Storefront Blocks
Amazon spokesperson Lara Hendrickson set out the company’s position in an emailed statement to Bloomberg. “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,” she said. She compared it to food delivery apps and the restaurants they take orders from, and to online travel agencies and airlines. “Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we’ve requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience” [2].
The specific complaints are narrower than that statement suggests. Amazon told GeekWire that Meta never said Muse would access the store. Georgia Hennessy reported for Business Insider that Amazon also accuses Muse of scraping account data, and says agents bypass the personalization on its pages, showing people products that ignore their own shopping history [2].
The most serious charge is about passwords: Amazon says the assistant appears to capture and store customer credentials [2]. Meta had pushed back against such concerns in advance through its product documentation, emphasizing that Muse operates with no visibility into customer passwords or stored payment instruments [1, 2]. Anything a user shares goes into secure storage, Meta said, so the agent can use it without seeing it [2]. Meta answered the credentials point in advance, but it has said nothing about the block itself. Earlier reporting on Meta Muse launching with shopping tools and privacy questions covered those privacy questions when the assistant launched.
Technical Reasons Amazon Blocks Apps Like Muse
The rule Muse broke is a technical one. On May 30, 2025, Amazon added an Agent Terms section to its Conditions of Use, requiring AI agents to identify themselves in the user-agent string (the line of text a browser sends to say what it is) as “Agent/[agent name]” [2]. Amazon blocks apps that skip that step, and it says Muse does not identify itself while browsing [3].
The fight comes as the industry builds the plumbing for agent shopping. CNET’s Katelyn Chedraoui notes that Visa and Mastercard have both introduced infrastructure to let AI agents pay for things. But as long as Amazon blocks apps like Muse, that plumbing has a hole in it. “If Meta’s AI agent isn’t allowed to make Amazon purchases, that is a huge blow to the AI’s usefulness,” she said [1].
Amazon is not against shopping agents as such; it has its own. In April 2025 it launched Buy for Me in beta for some US shoppers, letting the Amazon app buy items from other brands’ websites without the customer leaving the app. “This new feature uses agentic AI to help customers seamlessly purchase from other brands within the familiar Amazon Shopping app,” Oliver Messenger, Amazon’s shopping director, wrote [1]. Buy for Me identifies itself to those stores and lets brands opt out, which is exactly what Amazon now demands of Meta [2]. This month Amazon also struck a deal to let its advertisers into ChatGPT [2].
Perplexity Lawsuit Reveals Parallel Scraping Battle
Muse was only one of Amazon’s fronts on Monday. The same day, as Jason Del Rey of the retail newsletter The Aisle flagged on X, Amazon filed a 41-page amended complaint against Perplexity, pleading computer fraud, California’s computer data access statute and tortious interference with contract [2].
The amended filing centers on Comet for iOS, launched March 18, 2026, nine days after a district court injunction. On iOS, Amazon alleges, Comet copies the user’s Amazon session cookie to Perplexity’s own cloud servers, which then run a virtual browser and request pages from Amazon directly. “No user device touches Amazon’s servers,” the complaint states. That matters because in briefs filed on April 1 and May 6, 2026, Perplexity told the appeals court that “no Perplexity computer ever has direct access to an Amazon computer.” Amazon says its engineers watched exactly that traffic every day between March 18 and at least May 11 [2].
When Amazon’s lawyers asked for a correction, Perplexity repeated the statements, then wrote five days later that “as a measure of good-faith, Perplexity has temporarily disabled the assistant feature on Amazon.com in Comet for iOS.” Amazon claims damages well beyond $260,000: eight members of its traffic engineering team have spent at least 1,280 hours on the agent since July 2025, and by June 15, 2026, Comet had run at least 185,712 sessions on Amazon.com. The filing also notes that Comet identifies itself as Google Chrome, echoing Cloudflare’s August 2025 finding that Perplexity ran an undeclared crawler posing as Chrome [2].
The new claims are aimed at a court loss. Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity in March, then lost it on August 4, when the Ninth Circuit held that under federal anti-hacking law it is the user, not the AI company, who accesses Amazon’s computers; the court refused a rehearing on September 10 [2]. If no user device sits in the middle, as Amazon now alleges, that reasoning is harder to apply. The Muse popup, citing a contract rather than a hacking law, points the same way.
Advertising Revenue Shapes the Commercial Conflict
Money sits under the security arguments. Amazon generated more than $68bn in advertising revenue last year, GeekWire noted, and that business depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored listings [2]. An agent that buys without browsing sees no ads.
The two companies are not strangers, either. Amazon listings have been directly purchasable within Facebook and Instagram apps since 2023, and Meta signed a multibillion-dollar deal in April to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon’s cloud [2]. Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy told Bloomberg in April that agentic shopping “left much to be desired” and that the bots often got pricing wrong, adding: “We’re having conversations with all those folks to try and make that better” [2]. Amazon has also updated its robots.txt file, in November 2025, to keep ChatGPT’s agents off its site [1].
Agents are not a side issue for Amazon anymore: on its own Prime Day in June, AI shopping beat search [2]. The question now is who owns the customer when an agent does the shopping, and until Meta and Amazon settle it, Amazon blocks apps that will not play by its rules [1].
- ONLINE NEWS McAuliffe, Z. (2026, September 21). No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service: Amazon Blocks Meta’s Muse AI From Shopping. CNET. [Article Link]
- ONLINE NEWS Constantin, A. M. (2026, September 21). Amazon blocks Muse and takes Perplexity back to court. The Next Web. [Article Link]
- ONLINE NEWS Schreiner, M. (2026, September 21). Amazon blocks Meta’s AI agent Muse from online shopping. The Decoder. [Article Link]
