Amazon has blocked Meta's Muse AI agent from shopping on Amazon.com, citing security risks and breaches of its Conditions of Use.
According to the announcement, users trying to shop on Amazon through Muse were shown a message. It stated that continued access by an unauthorised AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, which customers have accepted.
Amazon says Meta did not notify it that Muse would access its store. It also says the agent does not identify itself when browsing and appears to capture and store customer credentials. Amazon has asked Meta to remove the site from the Muse experience and says it is in direct conversation with the company. It declined to comment on possible legal action. Meta has previously stated that Muse has no visibility into users' passwords or payment methods. According to the company, shared credentials are held in secure storage that the agent can use without viewing them.
Security and disclosure concerns
According to Amazon, Muse can reach account pages and order history when a customer prompts it to. Because the agent does not disclose itself, Amazon argues, an undisclosed third party is moving through customer accounts, processing transactions, and handling sensitive data without its knowledge or consent. In addition, Amazon compared this with food delivery apps and online travel agencies. It said these services typically operate with the agreement of the restaurants and airlines they transact with.
Meta launched Muse on 8 September 2026 as an agent that carries out multi-step tasks. It connects to email, calendar, payments, dining, and shopping services. The service is free, with paid subscription tiers, and runs on iOS, Android, muse.ai, and WhatsApp. It operates on a secure virtual machine with its own browser and asks the user to confirm sensitive actions such as purchases. A separate monitoring agent, Sentinel, must approve anything Muse sends to the internet. Where a service has a public API, Muse connects using the credentials the user supplies. Where there is no API, it uses the service through a browser, and this mechanism is at the centre of the dispute. One week after launch, Muse ranked first among free apps in Apple's US App Store.
Legal and commercial context
Over the past year, Amazon has tried to restrict third-party agents. It has sued Perplexity over its Comet browser and moved to block shopping agents from Google and OpenAI. Amazon obtained a preliminary injunction against Perplexity in March 2026 but lost it on 4 August 2026. The Ninth Circuit ruled that under federal anti-hacking law, the user, not the AI company, was the party accessing Amazon's computers. Amazon's petition for rehearing was denied on 10 September 2026. The ruling left contract and terms-of-service claims open, and Amazon's message to Muse users relies on those terms rather than on hacking allegations.
The dispute also touches an existing partnership. Amazon products have been purchasable within Facebook and Instagram since 2023. In April 2026, Meta signed a multibillion-dollar agreement to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon's Graviton chips. Advertising is also at stake: Amazon generated more than USD 68 billion in ad revenue in 2025, a business that depends on users browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products.
Amazon runs its own agentic tools. It launched Alexa for Shopping in May 2026. Its Buy for Me feature purchases from external brands' sites, identifies itself, and lets brands opt out. The case adds to a wider debate over who controls the customer relationship when AI agents buy on behalf of consumers.
This dispute came as Shopify confirmed that Muse would be able to complete purchases through its ecommerce platform. The contrasting responses show that merchants and marketplaces are taking different approaches to autonomous AI agents acting on behalf of consumers.
