While Amazon blocks AI agents, Walmart rolls out the welcome mat

What changed

Walmart is embracing agentic commerce with the launch of its own Agent Gateway to manage transactions and other new features aimed at customers using AI agents, the retailer announced on Wednesday. The move comes shortly after Walmart’s top competitor, Amazon, began blocking AI agents from making purchases on behalf of online shoppers. Walmart, on the other hand, had already announced a partnership with a leading agent in the space, Meta’s Muse, and offers integrations with popular AI apps like ChatGPT, Gemini, and others.

Why it matters

A concrete addition to Practical AI: Tools, Models & Frameworks: it changes what's available to builders today rather than being general commentary.

How it compares

Related prior coverage to compare against:

• Amex introduces a framework to prevent AI agents from making unauthorized purchases
• Introducing the Stateful Runtime Environment for Agents in Amazon Bedrock
• Building Blocks for Foundation Model Training and Inference on AWS

• Amex introduces a framework to prevent AI agents from making unauthorized purchases similarity 0.21
• Introducing the Stateful Runtime Environment for Agents in Amazon Bedrock similarity 0.18
• Building Blocks for Foundation Model Training and Inference on AWS similarity 0.17