While Amazon blocks the purchasing agents, Walmart takes them to the red carpet: an MCP server, agent profiles with validation or spending limits, and their own conditions of use.
Walmart presented a set of tools for AI agent-driven commerce at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco on October 21. At the heart of the system, the Agent Gateway is an MCP server (the protocol originally designed by Anthropic to link agents to tools and data): an approved agent can browse the online catalog of Walmart and Sam's Club and place an order on behalf of its user, without the customer's purchase history or personal data being transmitted directly to them. The choice contrasts with that of Amazon, which recently began to prevent agents from buying on its site.
Starting next month, "Agent Profiles" will allow users to register each agent used in their Walmart account, view their purchases separately and choose between validating each transaction and authorizing within a set budget. The retailer compares the principle to adding an authorized user to a credit card. A profile is created when an agent places the first order and can be deleted at any time; no Walmart+ subscription is required.
Walmart also publishes terms specific to agents, which specify what they are allowed to do on the site. In particular, they provide that the return policy applies even when an agent has not behaved as expected, and prohibit agents from going beyond what the customer wanted. The group had already partnered with Meta's agent Muse and integrations with ChatGPT and Gemini.
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