Amazon Blocks Meta’s Muse AI Agent From Shopping, 12 Days After Its Launch

Amazon has blocked Meta’s new Muse personal AI agent from shopping on Amazon.com, 12 days after Meta launched it. It is the latest move in a monthslong campaign Amazon has run to keep outside AI shopping agents off its site, and this time it is leaning on a different legal argument than the one that already failed once this year.

As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon started seeing a popup message: “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed,” according to GeekWire, which first reported the block. Amazon said it had tried, without success, to get Meta to voluntarily exclude Amazon from Muse’s shopping capabilities before cutting the agent off.

What Amazon says the problem is

Amazon’s complaint centers on three things: Meta never told Amazon that Muse would access its store, the agent doesn’t identify itself as it browses, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials, which Amazon says could create privacy and security risks.

“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 in a statement reported by GeekWire. Amazon compared the arrangement to food delivery apps working with restaurants, or online travel agencies booking through airlines, relationships it says typically require the merchant’s agreement. “Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we’ve requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience,” the spokesperson added.

Meta has previously said Muse “has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods,” and that any credentials a user shares “go into secure storage, so Muse can use them without seeing them, including passwords a person types into the browser themselves.” Meta did not immediately respond to GeekWire’s request for comment on the block itself.

The browsing behavior Amazon is objecting to appears to be a documented part of how Muse works. According to TechCrunch’s reporting on Muse’s launch, the agent runs inside its own “dedicated, secure computer with its own browser,” which Meta calls Muse Secure VM. When a service Muse needs offers a public API, it connects through that; when no API is available, Meta says Muse falls back to accessing the service through its own browser instead, the same way a human would, just without announcing itself as an automated agent. The Verge said it used Muse to successfully buy tank tops on Amazon during testing before the block took effect.

A legal argument shaped by an earlier loss

This isn’t Amazon’s first attempt to keep a third-party AI agent off its site, and the last one didn’t go well. Amazon won a preliminary injunction in March against Perplexity, blocking its Comet browser’s AI agent from shopping on Amazon under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. On August 4, the Ninth Circuit vacated that injunction, ruling that it was the user, not Perplexity, who was legally “accessing” Amazon’s computers when Comet shopped on their behalf, so Amazon was unlikely to win the underlying CFAA claim. The court denied Amazon’s request for a rehearing on September 10, just ten days before Amazon moved against Muse.

Per GeekWire’s reporting, the Ninth Circuit’s ruling left one door open for Amazon: claims built on contracts and terms of service, rather than federal computer-hacking law. That is exactly the route Amazon is taking with Muse. Instead of filing suit, it is pointing to its Conditions of Use and showing users a popup rather than going back to court, at least for now. Asked whether it would consider legal action against Meta, Amazon declined to comment, saying only that it is in direct conversation with the company. Readers who want the underlying case can read the Ninth Circuit’s opinion in Amazon.com Services, LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc. directly.

Frenemies with a lot at stake

The standoff is unusual because Amazon and Meta are also business partners. Amazon products have been purchasable directly inside Facebook and Instagram since 2023, and Meta signed a multibillion-dollar deal in April to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon Web Services, according to GeekWire. Amazon’s own business stakes are also considerable: the company generated more than $68 billion in advertising revenue last year, a business that depends on shoppers browsing its pages directly rather than having an AI agent complete checkout on a page they never see.

GeekWire also reports that Muse is not the only agent Amazon has pushed back against this year: the company has spent the past year trying to keep outside shopping agents off its site generally, including moves against agents built by Google and OpenAI in addition to the Perplexity lawsuit.

What Muse actually does

Meta introduced Muse on September 8, describing it as a personal AI agent that can send emails, book travel, fill out forms, turn a recipe into a grocery list, and make purchases on a user’s behalf using Link by Stripe for checkout. It runs on Meta’s own Muse Spark model, which sxz.io covered earlier this month when Meta began offering steep API discounts in exchange for usage data. Muse is available on the web, iOS, Android, and inside WhatsApp, free to start, with paid Power ($20 a month) and Maximum ($100 a month) tiers for heavier use, per TechCrunch’s reporting.

The dispute is the latest example of a broader problem this site has covered repeatedly this year: platforms and AI agent makers disagree about who gets to authorize an agent to act on a user’s behalf, and on what terms. sxz.io recently covered Google’s own struggle with the same question when it opened Google Home to third-party AI agents, a case where the authorization problem ran in the opposite direction: Google inviting agents in, rather than Amazon trying to keep one out.

What happens next

For now, Amazon says it is talking directly with Meta rather than suing, and Meta has not publicly responded to the block. Whether that conversation produces a negotiated integration, similar to the food-delivery and travel-booking partnerships Amazon cited, or pushes Amazon back toward litigation this time built on contract law rather than the CFAA claim that failed against Perplexity, is the question both companies now have to answer.