Walmart opens its checkout to AI agents while Amazon locks them out

Walmart launched an Agent Gateway on Wednesday to let approved AI agents search its inventory and buy on behalf of shoppers — a direct counter-move to Amazon, which recently began blocking AI agents from making purchases for its customers.

The announcement positions Walmart as the most aggressive major retailer in what the industry calls agentic commerce: shopping handled by software agents rather than a human clicking through a website. CEO John Furner unveiled the technology at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, saying the company is building for a world where AI agents become mainstream.

The stakes are straightforward. Retailers and travel sites are split on whether agents represent a sales channel or a threat to their control over the customer relationship. Amazon and various booking sites have chosen lockdown. Walmart has chosen the opposite, and it's now shipping the infrastructure to back that bet.

What is the Agent Gateway?

The centerpiece is Walmart's Agent Gateway, a new MCP server — a piece of infrastructure built on the model context protocol, the standard originally created by Anthropic that lets AI agents connect to external data sources, tools and workflows.

In practice, the protocol lets an approved agent do two things on Walmart's site: search across the retailer's online inventory and complete purchases for the agent's user. Walmart says the gateway works for both Walmart and its discount warehouse, Sam's Club.

There's a privacy angle built in. According to the company, the Agent Gateway lets customers shop for their usual brands and items without sharing their personal information or purchase history directly with the agent.

That design matters because it addresses the obvious consumer worry: handing an AI assistant your shopping data in exchange for convenience. Walmart is betting the gateway keeps the retailer as the data holder, with the agent acting as a controlled go-between.

The takeaway: Walmart has built the plumbing for agent-driven shopping on its own terms, not the agent makers'.

How will customers control what agents can do?

Control is the heart of the announcement. Alongside the gateway, Walmart has developed new technology to distinguish an agent's purchases from those initiated directly by the customer, and to give shoppers granular authority over what their agents can and cannot do.

Next month, the company rolls out Agent Profiles. The mechanics work like this:

• The first time you use a given agent to shop through the Agent Gateway, Walmart creates a dedicated profile for that agent.
• You authorize and link the Agent Profile to your Walmart account, then set your controls or spending limits.
• Agent purchases then show up separately from your own transactions.
• You can require approval for each transaction, or authorize anything within a spending cap you set.
• You can delete an Agent Profile at any time.

Walmart frames the model in familiar terms: it's similar to adding someone as an authorized user on your credit card, where their transactions are identified and you can cap their spending.

Access is broad. Anyone with a Walmart account can use agent support — a Walmart+ membership is not required.

That pricing decision signals Walmart wants mass adoption of the feature, not a perk bundled into its subscription tier.

What rules will agents have to follow?

Alongside the technology, Walmart is introducing special terms for AI agents that specify how they must operate and what rights they have to transact on its site.

The terms impose hard limits:

• Agents can't take actions beyond what the shopper intends.
• Agents can't access customers' payment information.
• Agents can only access the information they need for the given task.
• Agents that don't comply will be blocked from accessing Walmart's site.

One condition stands out for consumers: Walmart says its returns process applies even when an agent doesn't act as intended. In plain terms, if your AI assistant buys the wrong thing, you can send it back under the normal policy.

That's a customer-friendly condition, and potentially a decisive one. It removes the biggest fear of being an early tester of agentic commerce — ending up stuck with products you never wanted because a misbehaving agent ordered them.

The takeaway: Walmart is treating agent purchases as ordinary purchases, returns and all, rather than a special experimental category.

Why are retailers split on AI agents?

The context for Wednesday's launch is a widening rift. Consumer adoption of AI agents is growing, and the industry's response has fractured into two camps.

Amazon, Walmart's top competitor, began blocking agents from making purchases on behalf of online shoppers shortly before this announcement. Various travel and booking sites have responded the same way, locking agents out of their websites completely.

Walmart moved the other direction early. It had already announced a partnership with a leading agent in the space — Meta's Muse — and offers integrations with popular AI apps including ChatGPT, Gemini and others. Wednesday's Agent Gateway builds on that foundation.

The commercial logic differs by business. Retailers like Walmart win when transactions happen, wherever they originate. Travel and booking platforms, by contrast, live on controlling discovery and pricing, and an agent intermediating that relationship threatens their margins.

Walmart's bet is that agents become a mainstream sales channel and that the retailer which welcomes them early captures that demand. Amazon's bet, at least for now, is that the risks of agent-driven purchasing — fraud, errors, loss of customer control — outweigh the upside.

What happens next?

The immediate milestone is next month's rollout of Agent Profiles, which will show whether shoppers actually want per-agent spending caps and approval workflows, or whether that control layer adds friction that kills adoption.

The bigger test is competitive. If Walmart's agent-friendly posture drives measurable sales from ChatGPT, Gemini and Muse users, the pressure on Amazon and the travel sites to reverse their blockades will grow. If agent purchases stay a rounding error, Walmart will have built infrastructure ahead of demand — an expensive but recoverable position for a retailer of its scale.