Walmart announced on October 21 that it is building Agent Profiles, a Walmart Agent Gateway and new terms of use for AI shopping agents. It disclosed no transactions, developer counts or fees. The announcement says customers get "clear permissions, controls and protections" when they let software shop for them. Walmart adds that agent shopping "won't be for everyone, and it doesn't have to be."

How Agent Profiles will work

Agent Profiles are due "in the next month," according to Walmart. Each authorized agent gets its own profile inside a customer's account, similar to an authorized cardholder on a credit card. The customer sets a spending limit, with Walmart citing $50, $100 or $200 as examples, or requires approval on every purchase. Permissions can be switched off or a profile deleted at any time. Any Walmart account works, and a Walmart+ membership is not required. Walmart says agents see the same prices as human shoppers: "We price products, not people."

Agents never receive payment-card information and cannot add or change payment methods, per Walmart's announcement. The company says agents must stay within what the shopper intends, and agents that don't comply "will be blocked from Walmart's site."

What the Agent Gateway does

The Walmart Agent Gateway is a separate technical path for software built on MCP (Model Context Protocol, an open standard from Anthropic that lets AI agents connect to outside tools and data). Walmart says its regular website, built for people clicking through pages, can leave an automated agent stuck, and that the Gateway is faster and more dependable for that traffic. It starts as a beta for companies and developers at walmart.com/agents. Walmart's example is reordering a household's usual bread or milk brand without exposing the customer's personal information or wider purchase history.

Named integrations are Meta's Muse, ChatGPT, Gemini and Walmart's own assistant, Sparky. The program covers Walmart and Sam's Club.

Credentials behind each purchase

A blog post from UCP Checker walks through the cryptographic requirements in Walmart's terms. A Gateway agent must register and receive an Agent Credential, which the terms define as "the verifiable cryptographic credential associated with a registered Agent." Each transaction runs on a Scoped Access Token, "a short-lived cryptographic credential bound to a specific merchant, cart, amount, and session," used up at checkout. The token is paired with an Agent Mandate, "a cryptographically signed record" of the customer's instructions that carries both parties' identities, the consent given and a timestamp.

Outside the Gateway, every checkout requires a Human Consent Gate. The terms say: "No Agent instruction or Deployer configuration can waive a Human Consent Gate." A Deployer is the company running the agent. On request, an agent must disclose that it is an agent, along with the Deployer's legal name, address, domain, product name and version, and an abuse contact.

The terms bar agents from masking their origin, defeating human-versus-software checks or copying "the timing or rhythm of human actions." Walmart can throttle, suspend or permanently block an agent at its discretion, and an addendum gives Walmart a right to audit both the agent and its Deployer.

Limits on data use

Per the terms UCP Checker reviewed, agents may use Walmart's product, price and availability data only to complete the customer's requested shopping. The terms prohibit bulk scraping, long retention, model training, content generation, ad targeting, synthetic data, and analytics or data-licensing products.

Liability and returns

UCP Checker cites Walmart's Terms of Use, Sec. 16.L, as treating an authorized agent's purchases within its granted permissions as the customer's own, which leaves the customer responsible for payment, returns and disputes. Sec. 9 lets Walmart hold the Deployer directly responsible for scraping, purchases beyond the customer's consent, inaccurate information or ignoring a consent gate. Sec. 10 preserves the customer's statutory rights to returns, refunds and disputes.

TechCrunch's Sarah Perez reports that Walmart's returns process applies even if an agent misbehaves, and calls that customer-friendly. Under Walmart's own terms the purchase belongs to the customer, and Walmart says it will take the item back anyway. That arrangement has not been tested at volume.

Walmart and Amazon

CEO John Furner announced the program at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, according to TechCrunch. Amazon, Walmart's largest competitor, blocks AI agents from making purchases for shoppers, and TechCrunch reports that some travel and booking sites have also closed their doors to agents. Axios ran the contrast as its headline the same day: Walmart welcomes AI agents while Amazon blocks Muse.

Forbes put Muse's user base at 10 million in a headline published October 26. The full article was not accessible, so the figure is attributed to the headline alone.

Seufert's critique

Analyst Eric Seufert, in the October 26 installment of his "Agentic commerce is a mirage" series, writes that Walmart's limits on third-party agents place Walmart's own agent, Sparky, "in the most prominent and privileged position within the agentic commerce workflow." He makes the same point in an X post. Third-party agents connect to Sparky instead of the full storefront, and Sparky manages the interaction. Seufert calls the outside agents "conduits for demand."

The series argues that "platform incentives and platform power matter, even in the context of a new consumer engagement paradigm," and that third-party agentic commerce cannot take root without satisfying the largest retail platforms' economic interests. Seufert links the Sparky routing to Walmart's advertising business and cites Walmart Connect's leader saying commerce media can "connect brands with these new moments of discovery." Agents under Walmart's terms must submit cryptographic hashes, signed mandates and consent records in Walmart's format, which become part of an immutable transaction record.

An agent cannot unilaterally add a transaction fee inside Walmart's checkout, Seufert writes. Any commission would have to be negotiated. He allows that Muse, as a Walmart partner, could earn one, and says Walmart controls checkout and would decide when a fee is owed. This reading is Seufert's inference from the terms and the architecture, and Walmart has not confirmed it.

Shop Pay in agent chats

Shopify VP of Product Mani Fazeli said on October 28 that Shop Pay now works with any merchant, inside the chat of personal agents including Muse and Instinct, in an X post. The announcement is separate from Walmart's program.

What the sources leave open

Agent Profiles had not launched at the time of writing. Walmart said they would arrive "in the next month" after October 21. The Gateway is an invite-only beta, and Walmart has published no count of developers or completed transactions and no fee structure for agents. No real dispute has yet tested the split between a purchase that is the customer's and a return that is Walmart's.

Sources