Walmart is inviting AI agents into its store — the opposite approach from rival Amazon. On October 21, 2026, Walmart president and CEO John Furner unveiled the plan at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. It has three parts: Agent Profiles, an Agent Gateway, and a new set of rules agents must follow. Any Walmart account holder can use it — no Walmart+ membership needed — with the first features launching within the next month.

Today, an agent shopping at Walmart signs in as you, mixing its orders with yours. Agent Profiles change that: each agent you authorize gets its own profile inside your account, so you can see its purchases separately and delete the profile at any time. You decide how purchases get approved — sign off on every order, or let the agent spend up to a limit you set ($50, $100, $200), in an arrangement Walmart compares to adding an authorized user to a credit card. The Agent Gateway, meanwhile, gives bots a direct route into the catalog and checkout built on MCP (Model Context Protocol), Anthropic's open standard — launching in beta for businesses and developers. Walmart says agents see the same prices as people ("We price products, not people"), and sets hard guardrails: payment-card data never reaches agents, they can't add or modify payment methods, and they may access only data pertinent to the task.

The split with Amazon couldn't be starker. Last month Amazon blocked Meta's Muse agent from its site, showing users a notice that unauthorized AI agents violate its conditions of use — and back in November 2025 it sued Perplexity over its Comet browser agent making covert purchases on its marketplace. Amazon pushes its own AI shopping tools (Alexa for Shopping, Buy for Me) instead. Meanwhile Meta's Muse — which Meta launched in September and has released only in the US and Canada — has been downloaded more than 10 million times, per a Sensor Tower analysis. Agentic commerce is becoming a battlefront: retailers must now decide whether AI agents are customers to welcome or bots to block, and Walmart just planted its flag.

Sources