Walmart will now let an AI agent do your shopping and check out for you, under a set of house rules it wrote itself. The retailer announced its Agent Gateway and Agent Profiles on Wednesday, a package designed to make agentic shopping safe enough for customers, not just early adopters. According to TechCrunch, the move comes just as Walmart’s biggest rival, Amazon, began blocking AI agents from making purchases on behalf of shoppers.
The technology covers both Walmart and Sam’s Club, unveiled by CEO John Furner at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. Walmart already offered shopping integrations with Meta’s Muse, ChatGPT, and Gemini, plus its own assistant, Sparky. The new tools turn those integrations into a governed system.
One Retailer Opens the Door as Another Closes It
The split in retail could hardly be sharper. Amazon has moved to shut third-party shopping agents out of its store, and several travel and booking sites have locked agents out of their websites entirely. Walmart is betting the opposite way: that shoppers will eventually buy through agents the way they now buy through apps, and that the retailer that makes it trustworthy first will win the checkout.
That bet has a clear logic: if an agent picks the product, it controls the recommendation, and whoever owns the checkout owns the upsell.
The Leash: Agent Profiles and Spending Limits
The most practical piece is Agent Profiles, rolling out next month. Each AI agent you use gets a dedicated profile inside your Walmart account, so the agent’s purchases show up separately from your own orders. You can require approval for every transaction, or set a spending limit and let the agent work inside it. You can delete a profile at any time.
Walmart compares the setup to adding someone as an authorized user on a credit card: their spending is identified, capped, and revocable. Agent support is available to anyone with a Walmart account, and Reuters reports that no Walmart+ membership is required.
The Privacy Trick: Your Agent Shops Blind
The Agent Gateway itself is the technical core. It is an MCP server, built on the model context protocol Anthropic created, that gives approved agents a direct, structured way to search Walmart’s inventory and complete purchases, rather than scraping the site through a web browser. It is now in beta for companies and developers.
The gateway’s privacy design is the part other retailers have not matched. It lets an agent shop for your usual brands and items without handing the agent your personal information or purchase history. Agents are barred from accessing payment card data outright, may only access the information needed for the task you allowed, and must not act beyond what you intended. Agents that break the terms get blocked from the site.
There is also a safety net for when the agent gets it wrong. Walmart says its normal returns process applies, including when an agent does not act as intended, so a misbehaving agent cannot leave you stuck with products you never wanted.
Why this matters
The real story here is not that Walmart said yes to AI agents while Amazon said no. It is that Walmart is trying to solve the trust problem that made Amazon say no in the first place. Agentic shopping stalls the moment one viral story appears about an agent overspending, leaking purchase history, or buying the wrong thing with no recourse. Walmart’s answer is a control layer: identified profiles, hard spending caps, blind shopping, and an off switch for bad agents.
If that control layer holds up, Walmart becomes the default checkout for the agent era, and its rulebook becomes the template rivals copy. If shoppers will not trust a chatbot with their grocery budget, the gateway stays a beta curiosity. Watch whether shoppers actually hand an agent a spending limit, and whether rivals follow the rulebook or stick with the ban.
Meanwhile in Apps & Tools: shopping assistants are spreading fast, from TikTok’s AI shopping assistant that buys direct to agentic voice work and plugins in GPT-6 — and Walmart’s move is the first time a giant retailer has written formal rules for how those assistants may spend your money.
