Walmart is opening its store to AI shopping agents — on its own terms. The retailer on Wednesday announced an Agent Gateway that lets approved AI agents search its inventory and buy on a customer’s behalf, alongside new Agent Profiles that give each agent its own identity, spending limits and approval rules inside a shopper’s account, according to TechCrunch.
The announcement is a deliberate contrast with Walmart’s largest rival. Amazon has begun blocking AI agents from making purchases for online shoppers, TechCrunch reported, and various travel and booking sites have locked agents out of their websites completely. Walmart is making the opposite bet: that agents which come through a front door it controls are customers worth having.
Walmart president and CEO John Furner described the expansion as preparation for a world where AI agents become mainstream, speaking at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday. The technology will support agentic shopping at both Walmart and its warehouse chain, Sam’s Club.
A front door, built on MCP
The Agent Gateway is Walmart’s own MCP server. The Model Context Protocol, originally created by Anthropic, lets AI agents connect to external data sources, tools and workflows; in Walmart’s case, it lets an approved agent search across the retailer’s online inventory and complete a purchase for its user, without scraping a website built for humans.
Reuters reported that assistants such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Muse can connect directly with Walmart and Sam’s Club systems through the gateway to search products and complete purchases. Walmart had already announced a partnership with Muse and offers integrations with AI apps including ChatGPT and Gemini, TechCrunch noted. One such partner agent is Meta’s Muse, which just passed 10 million users.
The gateway is also designed to limit what an agent learns. Walmart says it can help customers shop for their usual brands or items without the shopper having to share personal information or purchase history directly with the agent.
Agent Profiles: an authorized user, for software
Agent Profiles, rolling out next month, handle the trust side. The first time a given agent shops through the gateway, the customer authorizes it and links a dedicated profile to their Walmart account. Purchases made by that agent then appear separately from the customer’s own orders.
Controls sit with the shopper. A customer can require approval for each transaction, or authorize the agent to spend within a limit they set. Walmart compares the arrangement to adding someone as an authorized user on a credit card, where their transactions are identified and their spending can be capped. A profile can be deleted at any time, Reuters reported, and agent support is available to anyone with a Walmart account — a Walmart+ membership is not required.
“Shopping with an agent won’t be for everyone, and it doesn’t have to be,” Walmart said in its announcement. “But for customers who choose to use one, our goal is to make our experience the most trusted by building clear controls and protections into the experience from the start.”
Terms for agents, and a returns promise
Walmart is also publishing terms that specify how agents must operate on its site and what rights they have to transact. Agents cannot take actions beyond what the shopper intends, cannot access the customer’s payment information, and can only access the information they need for the given task. Agents that do not comply will be blocked from the site.
One term is aimed squarely at hesitant shoppers: Walmart says its returns process applies, including when an agent does not act as intended. A customer who receives the wrong product because an agent misbehaved is not stuck with it.
Analysts see the controls as the point. The tools instilled confidence in the “experimental” shopping process of agentic purchases, Mizuho analyst David Bellinger said in a note cited by Reuters, adding that “the momentum and buy-in from top management teams seems to be making this into a real thing.”
What is not settled
Analysis: Walmart has answered the questions it can control — identity, limits, liability for bad purchases — but the open questions sit outside its site. How shoppers will actually divide buying between themselves and their agents, and whether rival retailers keep their doors shut or copy the gateway model, will decide whether Agent Profiles become a standard pattern for agentic commerce or a Walmart-only experiment. For now, the largest US retailer has decided the agents are coming in either way, and it would rather hand them a badge than fight them at the door.
