Meta is pushing artificial intelligence deeper into the shopping journey with Muse, its new personal AI agent that can search retail sites, surface products, and carry out purchases on a consumer’s behalf. Muse, which Meta launched in the U.S. in September, can perform much of the shopping process autonomously, but Meta stops short of fully autonomous purchasing, requiring the user to approve purchases before they are made.
At the same time, Meta is building a network of official “connectors” with Walmart, Gap, Sephora, Wayfair, Best Buy, Expedia, Instacart, and others, creating direct integrations between Muse and participating services. Not everyone is on board; Amazon, for one, began blocking Muse in September, telling users that access by the agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use.
Two Models for Agentic Commerce
Muse reflects two emerging models for agentic commerce. In one, retailers affirmatively integrate with an AI agent, as Walmart, Gap, Sephora, and others are doing through Meta’s connectors. In the other, an agent interacts with a retailer’s site at the direction of a consumer without the retailer’s cooperation, and potentially over its objection.
Amazon v. Perplexity is starting to define the legal boundaries of the second model. As TFL has been reporting, Amazon sued Perplexity under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) and its California state law analogue, which prohibit certain forms of unauthorized computer access. According to Amazon, Perplexity ran afoul of those laws through an AI Assistant built into its Comet browser that accessed Amazon.com and shopped at users’ direction after Amazon had alerted Perplexity that its AI tools were not permitted on the site.
A federal district court in California initially sided with Amazon on its computer-access claims and preliminarily barred Perplexity from using AI agents to access Amazon’s protected computer systems. But in August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated the injunction, finding that Amazon was unlikely to succeed on its claims. On the record before it, the court concluded that the user, not Perplexity, was accessing Amazon’s computers, with Perplexity’s Assistant functioning as a tool through which the user carried out actions on Amazon.com.
The Ninth Circuit’s ruling is narrow. The court expressly limited its holding to the federal and California computer-access statutes and to the technology and record before it. It also distinguished Amazon’s claims under those statutes from its ability to regulate access contractually. In a footnote, the court said the ruling “does not impair Amazon’s ability to regulate access to Amazon.com via private terms of service for its users.”
The footnote leaves contract as a separate avenue for regulating access. Retailers may look to terms governing how customers access and use their sites, although whether and how those terms can be enforced in the agentic context present separate questions.
THE BOTTOM LINE: Muse brings the divide into focus. Retailers can affirmatively open their services to AI agents, as Meta’s partners are doing. But when a retailer objects to an agent’s access, the question becomes what legal tools it can use to keep the agent out. Amazon v. Perplexity shows one potential limit to computer-access claims: On the facts before the Ninth Circuit, those claims faltered because the court deemed the consumer, rather than the AI company, to be accessing the retailer’s systems. Terms of service offer another potential avenue, but whether and how those terms can be enforced in the agentic context remains unsettled.
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