Meta, Walmart and Stripe Build Open Commerce Standard as Amazon Blocks Muse AI Agent
Updated
Updated · TechCrunch · Oct 6
Meta, Walmart and Stripe Build Open Commerce Standard as Amazon Blocks Muse AI Agent
3 articles · Updated · TechCrunch · Oct 6
Summary
Meta, Walmart, Stripe and other partners are developing an open standard for agent-to-agent commerce after personal AI assistants repeatedly failed to complete purchases, bookings and other tasks on consumer websites.
Amazon recently blocked Meta's Muse from browsing and buying on its retail site, while Walmart said Muse failures on its platform were unintentional and tied to human-verification checks interrupting the agent.
Delta said it has no third-party agent integration for flight shopping or booking, and United pointed to terms barring unauthorized automated use, underscoring how security rules are colliding with consumer AI adoption.
Complaints have also cited Yelp, eBay, Zillow, Pizza Hut, Adidas and Google, with some users saying blocking has increased; Yelp requires paid data access for non-human traffic, while eBay said it targets unauthorized agents rather than all shopping bots.
Cloudflare's bot controls and a September 15 crawler-default change have fueled suspicion that infrastructure providers are also disrupting agent traffic, highlighting why the new protocol aims to distinguish user-authorized bots from malicious ones.