JPMorgan, Amazon block Meta Muse as Walmart opens up

The standoff over AI shopping agents is unfolding with little coordination. Billions Network's audit of 51 large U.S. retailers found that 37 block shopping agents largely by accident, through older bot rules written for scrapers, rather than through a deliberate decision. Evin McMullen, co-founder and CEO of Billions Network and AmanTrue, said most of the retailers in the audit have not made a decision about AI agents at all.

The security concerns cited by banks and retailers are not uniform. Visa's Michael Jabbara said the fraud risks from agents are very real and very tangible, pointing to fake agents built by fraudsters and legitimate agents acting in ways the customer never intended. Joseph Chalom, CEO of SharpLink and a former BlackRock executive, expects large incumbents to keep their gates closed to fend off what he described as an innovative threat, noting that an AI agent can move idle cash to a higher-yielding account or rebook a flight at lower cost, eating into margins.

Where the body points to a resolution, it is through infrastructure rather than blocking. Ed Felten, a Princeton professor emeritus who served as chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission, doubts the blocking will last, saying agents will win out because they will be so useful to users, so that sites too effective in blocking agents will lose business. Jabbara drew a parallel to past shifts from online to mobile shopping, which he said did not scale until a foundational security layer enabled trust.