Walmart opens up to AI shopping agents while Amazon blocks agent purchases, TechCrunch reports

What's new

Walmart announced an "Agent Gateway" on October 21, 2026. It is a so-called MCP server (model context protocol), a standardized entry point that approved AI agents can use to connect to Walmart's systems, search inventory and complete purchases. According to TechCrunch, ChatGPT, Gemini and other widely used AI apps are also supported, and Walmart has previously announced a partnership with Meta's Muse. Support also covers Sam's Club.

Walmart CEO John Furner spoke on Wednesday at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco about preparing for a world where AI agents go mainstream.

What's smart

The idea is that you can ask your AI assistant to find and buy items for you, without having to navigate the website yourself. Walmart has built in several safeguards. Agents do not get access to the customer's payment information, and only to the data a given task requires. Agents that violate the terms are blocked.

According to Walmart, "Agent Profiles" will roll out next month. With them, customers will be able to give each agent its own profile, view the agent's purchases separately, set spending limits or require approval of every purchase. The feature is, in other words, not yet in place.

Cheaper or better?

The price of using Agent Gateway has not been disclosed, and the sources do not make clear whether the service is available in Denmark or the EU. On the other hand, no Walmart+ membership is required, and Walmart's standard return policy also applies to purchases made by an agent.

Compared with its competitors, Walmart is choosing an open approach. According to TechCrunch, Amazon has begun blocking AI agents from completing purchases, reportedly starting in September 2026. Only TechCrunch reports on Amazon's stance. According to the outlet, other travel and booking sites have shut agents out entirely.

Meanwhile, in early September 2026, Anthropic released a template for building shopping and retailer agents on Claude. The sources disagree on the date (September 2 or 3). It can be used via the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry and Google Cloud Vertex AI. The template is not part of Walmart's announcement, but it shows that the tools for building shopping agents are becoming more accessible. Anthropic says basket size rose by about 30-35% at one partner, and that customers were about 60% more likely to complete a purchase. Product lead Angela Jiang says customers were "about 60 per cent more likely to complete a purchase." These are Anthropic's own figures, and it is unclear which partner and how many customers they are based on.

What it is good for

For ordinary consumers, Walmart's solution is especially interesting if you want to let an AI assistant handle tedious shopping: finding items, checking stock and adding them to the cart, with spending limits and approvals once Agent Profiles arrives.

For retailers and businesses, Anthropic's template points to two kinds of agents. The shopping agent can search product catalogs, assemble multi-item baskets, give personalized recommendations and show product comparisons. It can answer questions about orders, returns, exchanges and refunds, and has safeguards against manipulative upselling. The retailer agent can analyze sales, monitor inventory, flag potential stock problems, suggest prices and promotions, and draft marketing campaigns that require human approval before they run.

Anthropic names Accenture, Mastercard and Visa as partners, while Shopify, Priceline and Wix, among others, are developing agents with Claude. There is also a commerce-agents repository with a Claude Code plugin for customization.