Walmart announced on 21 October 2026, three mechanisms for AI agents that shop on behalf of their customers on Walmart.com and Sam’s Club: Agent Profiles, a technical gateway called Walmart Agent Gateway, and usage terms specific to those agents. The company wants to know which agents enter its sites, with what permissions, and be able to cut off those that fall outside the framework.
According to the company’s press release, an agent that purchases on Walmart logs in with the customer’s credentials, and its orders are mixed with those of the person, with no distinction. An AI agent here refers to software capable of performing tasks on behalf of the user, in this case placing an order.
One profile per agent, a cap set by the customer
The Agent Profiles, which Walmart says will be available “next month”, will give each authorized agent a separate profile within the customer’s account. Its purchases will appear separately. The customer will choose between two regimes: approve each order, or allow the agent to shop under a cap that the customer sets themselves. Walmart cites amounts of 50, 100 or 200 dollars.
The company likens the mechanism to adding an additional authorized user on a credit card. The profile is created automatically the first time an agent goes through the gateway. The customer then links it to their account by logging into Walmart, and can delete it whenever they wish. Regarding pricing, the release makes an explicit commitment: “we set the price of products, not the price of people”. An agent will see the same prices as a human on Walmart.com, with offers and fees displayed before purchase, the company says.
The MCP gateway, an entry point governed by the merchant
Agents can currently browse the site like humans, following a click‑based flow, a mode Walmart deems “slow and error‑prone”. The Walmart Agent Gateway, which routes agents through Sparky, Walmart’s assistant, will give them access via MCP, the Model Context Protocol. This protocol, released as open source by Anthropic in November 2024, is used to connect AI assistants to data systems.
Through the gateway, Walmart will help the agent retrieve the customer’s usual purchases, for example in the release sourdough bread or the preferred milk brand, without providing the full purchase history. According to Walmart, the distributor will only deliver what the task requires. As of October 22, the gateway’s landing page describes it as an early‑beta program, limited‑access, invitation‑only and subject to suspension at any time. It promises verified identities, controlled permissions, rate limits and category‑based restrictions. No agent publisher is named as a partner.
The new terms of use also require default purchase approval, and Walmart reserves the right to demand additional validations, even within the granted cap. An agent must not act beyond the buyer’s intent and never receives credit‑card data. Agents that do not comply with these conditions will be blocked on the site, Walmart warns.
Amazon has taken the legal route
In a statement posted on its website, Amazon says that third‑party applications that shop on behalf of customers must “operate openly” and respect a merchant’s decision to participate or not. The company says it has repeatedly asked Perplexity to remove Amazon from its Comet agentic browser experience.
On November 4, 2025, Amazon sued Perplexity in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. According to the case docket, Judge Maxine M. Chesney granted a preliminary injunction to Amazon on March 9, 2026. Perplexity appealed the next day, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated that injunction on August 4, 2026, sending the case back to the district court. A request by Perplexity to dismiss Amazon’s amended complaint is set for hearing on November 20, 2026.
Both companies champion the same requirement: an agent that purchases must be identified. Amazon pursues it through the courts, while Walmart implements it via infrastructure and contracts, offering agents faster access than the browser in exchange for identification. The release mentions no legislation or regulatory authority. On November 20, 2026, California courts will once again consider the dispute between Amazon and Perplexity.
