By Remco Livain in AI — 29 Sep 2026

Amazon should let Muse in. Blocking AI shoppers is the bigger risk.

Amazon is the best-prepared store an AI shopping agent could ask for, and it's blocking them. Why that's a mistake, what Shopify did instead, and what it means if you sell online.

A week after Amazon shut Meta's Muse agent out of its store, people are still talking about it. One post on Threads stuck with me. @amyleecodes wrote that Amazon blocking Muse is going to hurt them more than they realize, because Muse had ordered more things from non-Amazon stores in a few weeks than they'd ordered in a decade.

Last week I argued that the block isn't really about security, it's about the business model. This week I want to go one step further. Even judged purely as a business decision, I think blocking is the wrong call. I recorded a short rant about it:

Amazon is the best-prepared store an AI shopper could ask for

Here's what I don't understand. If you designed a store for an AI agent from scratch, it would look a lot like Amazon. Verified sellers. Millions of product reviews, which language models love because they help an agent decide whether a product is what it claims to be. Delivery promises down to the day. A returns process everyone already trusts.

An agent like Muse is going to look for the best price. But it also weighs trust and quality signals, shipping costs and time to delivery. On most of those, Amazon starts with a head start nobody else has.

The toilet paper test

Take the most boring purchase there is. Your agent knows from your purchase history which toilet paper you like. It knows you'll run out by the end of the week. So it goes and buys that exact product at the best value, from anywhere on the internet, as long as the store is trusted and its catalogue is easy to read.

The agent doesn't care where it comes from. It cares that it arrives on time, at a fair price, from a seller it can trust. That's a race Amazon should win almost every time. By blocking, Amazon doesn't stop the race. It just doesn't show up.

Blocking doesn't stop the shift. It moves it

The same weekend Amazon's block went live, Shopify went the other way. Tobi Lütke announced that Shopify is partnering with Muse to enable agentic checkout with Shop Pay across Shopify stores. Every merchant on that platform just became easier for an agent to buy from than Amazon.

You can already see what that means for real customers. Under that post, another user described asking Muse to find new pyjamas for a son with specific sensory needs: soft materials, no tags, a snug fit. Muse put together a good list, but Target and Amazon couldn't be searched. Their conclusion: a great opportunity for Walmart and other online retailers. Customers don't go away when you block the tool they chose. They buy somewhere else.

Alexa showed the limit of a closed catalogue

Amazon has tried to get here on its own terms. For years the promise was that you could say "Alexa, buy something for me" and it would just happen. It never fully worked, and I think the reason is context. Alexa only ever knew the world inside Amazon's catalogue. A general assistant that knows your life, your history and every store on the internet is a different proposition.

Amazon had the hardware in the living room and the logistics behind it. Meta has something Amazon never managed: a customer base in almost every home in the world, already talking to it every day.

Be the preferred partner, not the cheapest option

I understand the counterargument. Amazon's advertising business is worth tens of billions a year, and Forbes put a $68 billion price tag on why Amazon wants to keep agents out. An agent that doesn't browse doesn't see sponsored listings. Amazon's official reasons are about security: the agent doesn't identify itself and appears to handle customer credentials. Those are fair problems to solve. They're not reasons to stay out of the game.

The bigger opportunity is to become the partner these agents pick first, regardless of price. Not because Amazon is always the cheapest, but because the delivery is right, the package shows up when you actually need it, and customer service works when it doesn't. That's a moat you can't build by blocking.

"The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won't or can't embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you're probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind." Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander

Bezos wrote that in a shareholder letter. It reads like advice to his own company today.

What this means if you sell online

Maybe Amazon saw in the first few days that agents were hurting the business more than expected, and wants the big players at one table before this rolls out further. Fine. But blocking isn't joining the conversation. It just makes your position worse while others move.

For everyone else, the lesson is simple. Discovery of new products is going to happen more and more inside assistants, and your store needs to be readable, trustworthy and easy to check out from when an agent comes by. I've seen enough channel shifts in twenty years of running marketing to know that the ones who show up early set the terms. There are real trust questions around handing an agent your accounts, and I covered those in my take on the Zuckerberg interview. But the direction of travel isn't in doubt.

Product discovery might not happen on Amazon anymore. Maybe it never fully did. So, Jeff and friends: figure it out. You have a job to do.

Sources & further reading

External
GeekWire: Amazon blocks Meta's Muse AI assistant in new standoff over agentic shopping
Forbes: Amazon's $68 billion reason to block Meta's Muse
PYMNTS: Shopify brings Shop Pay checkout solution to Meta's Muse AI agent
@amyleecodes on Threads
Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020)