Amazon blocks Meta's Muse AI shopping agent

2026-09-22 00:08 Hacker News Top www.theregister.com 网页快照

正文为英文，可一键机器翻译（仅首次需要等待）

阅读原文 ↗ www.theregister.com

Amazon shows Meta's Muse AI shopping agent the door

Retailer cites credentials and transparency concerns while guarding its lucrative customer journey

Treasury chief says AI bosses, not their bots, will carry the can for criminal acts now

AWS says wartime damage means some Middle East cloud resources are gone for good 5 days ago

Amazon-branded plane in fatal accident at Miami Airport 14 days ago

Zuck's Muse to Spark joy with open weights release 'soon' 18 days ago

A lot of datacenter networks are run by absolute clowns. Not Amazon's 23 days ago

Amazon has blocked Meta's new Muse AI agent from shopping on its website, apparently deciding that having someone else's bot wandering through customer accounts and placing orders is a step too far.

The ecommerce giant cut off Muse after unsuccessfully asking Meta to prevent the personal AI agent from accessing its store, GeekWire reported . Users who try anyway are told that access by an "unauthorized AI agent" violates Amazon's Conditions of Use.

The Register asked Muse to find the "best-reviewed ergonomic office chair," add it to our cart, and proceed to the final checkout screen.

Muse reported: "Hit a snag: Amazon is showing an anti-bot wall that blocks automated browsers outright – the browser couldn't even get to the search page, so no chair was found or added. I didn't push past it, since the notice says continuing would violate Amazon's terms."

Meta launched Muse in the US earlier this month as an agent capable of doing more than answering questions. It can act on a user's behalf by shopping, making payments, reading emails, and managing calendars. When a service does not provide a public API, Meta says Muse can operate it through a browser much as a human would.

The retailer told GeekWire that Meta had neither informed it that Muse would access the store nor obtained authorization. It also claimed that the agent fails to identify itself while browsing and appears to capture and store customer credentials. Amazon said Muse could also access account information, including a customer's order history, when instructed to do so.

Meta says the Muse model cannot see users' passwords or payment methods. Credentials are instead held in secure storage and made available for authentication without being exposed to the model. The Register asked Meta for further comment.

Account security is not the only issue at stake. Amazon has spent much of the past year trying to keep rival AI agents away from its storefront. It took Perplexity to court over the Comet browser and has also moved to block shopping agents from Google and OpenAI.

Amazon, of course, has shopping agents of its own. Alexa for Shopping researches products and makes recommendations, while Buy for Me purchases goods from other retailers' websites on a customer's behalf. Amazon says the latter identifies itself to those retailers and allows them to opt out.

The company also has a financial reason to control the shopping trip: advertising. Amazon generated more than $68 billion in advertising revenue last year, helped by shoppers visiting its properties and viewing the products and sponsored placements displayed there. If outside AI agents take over product discovery, comparison, and purchasing, fewer shoppers may see Amazon's advertising or interact with its recommendation systems.

Amazon is all-in on agentic shopping – provided it is Amazon's agent holding the credit card. ® An Amazon spokesperson told The Reg : “We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate. "This helps ensure a safe, secure, and reliable customer experience, and it is how others operate including food delivery apps and the restaurants they take orders for, delivery services apps and the stores they shop from, and online travel agencies and the airlines they book tickets with for customers. Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we’ve requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience.”

Treasury chief says AI bosses, not their bots, will carry the can for criminal acts

'Humans are responsible, not the AI,' argues Scott Bessent as he calls out OpenAI agents' hack of Hugging Face

Google smacks forehead, realizes $899+ thin-and-lights were what it was missing

'A new category,' insists the Chocolate Factory, not a premium Chromebook - yet some of the family resemblance remains

HPE makes its “unified storage” claim real as B10000 R6 hits GA

PARTNER CONTENT: Pairs block and adjacent file workloads with independent scaling of performance and capacity

London neocloud Nscale takes its $1B loss to Wall Street

Rent-a-GPU firm reportedly seeks a valuation of up to $35B in New York IPO

Your cloud survived everything except the real world

War damage, air traffic chaos, and a storage shortage expose the cost of treating resilience as someone else's problem

AI can't outprompt a shortage of power, water, and land

Forrester predicts operators will face tariffs, grid commitments, and tougher community scrutiny

AI

Treasury chief says AI bosses, not their bots, will carry the can for criminal acts 'Humans are responsible, not the AI,' argues Scott Bessent as he calls out OpenAI agents' hack of Hugging Face

Google smacks forehead, realizes $899+ thin-and-lights were what it was missing 'A new category,' insists the Chocolate Factory, not a premium Chromebook - yet some of the family resemblance remains

AI can't outprompt a shortage of power, water, and land Forrester predicts operators will face tariffs, grid commitments, and tougher community scrutiny

Salesforce wants to charge for AI outcomes, but first it needs to figure out how Seats, Flex Credits, and all-you-can-eat contracts make for an 'anxiety-filled architecture'

Microsoft agentically ports Copilot runtime to Rust for $120K The Rust compiler remains unperturbed by the antics of the LLM

Infosec

Security Russians are posing as Signal support to launch phishing attacks PLUS: US takes down Iranian propaganda sites; Marketing company asks 'Why Do We Have Your Information?' And more!

Security Microsoft patches failed to fix on-prem SharePoint, which is now under zero-day attack PLUS: China upgrades smartphone surveillance tools; Ring eases anti-snooping stance; and more

Black Hat and DEF CON DEF CON Franklin project enlists hackers to harden critical infrastructure Voting village reports have been so successful, says Jeff Moss, that the whole of DEF CON will now be included

Security EQT buys majority share in Swiss cybersecurity biz Acronis Went at equivalent of $3.5B+ valuation for entire firm, though portion sold not specified

Malware Month Ten years since the first corp ransomware, Mikko Hyppönen sees no end in sight On the plus side, infosec's a good bet for a long, stable career

FOSS

KDE turns 30 and someone's brought an AI-native desktop proposal Akademy talk imagines Plasma assembling itself around a personal model of each user

Shopify extends lifeline to Tailwind as vibe coding erodes web dev platform's bottom line Acquisition gives open source CSS framework 'a stable long-term home'

Switzerland tests a FOSS escape route from Microsoft 365 Swiss Army sticks a knife in American cloud apps with its own FOSS push

Feel peak Windows was 7? You might like Kumander Linux Debian and Xfce – solid, sensible choices – with a pretty skin

Canonical shuttering some of its legacy chat channels The Ubuntu Pastebin went in June, IRC gets demoted next

Audacity audio-editing app no longer looks like it's from the early 2000s The FOSS tool for audio editing has a fresh coat of paint, and new features to boot