Meta never informed Amazon that its Muse agent would access the online marketplace, the report said. In addition, the agent does not identify itself as it browses, and it seems to capture and store customer credentials, which Amazon said could create privacy and security risks.
“We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement provided to PYMNTS Monday (Sept. 21).
The company said this helps keep customer experiences reliable, safe and secure, and is how businesses such as food delivery apps and online travel agencies operate with restaurants and airlines.
“Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we’ve requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience,” Amazon said.
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Meta did not reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.
When introducing Muse Sept. 8. Meta said Muse “has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods,” and credentials shared by users “go into secure storage, so Muse can use them without seeing them, including passwords a person types into the browser themselves.”
The standoff between the two tech titans is noteworthy because of their existing partnerships, the GeekWire report said. Amazon’s products have been purchasable from Meta’s Facebook and Instagram since 2023, while Meta inked a multibillion-dollar deal in April to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon’s cloud.
For the last year, Amazon has been trying to cleanse its sight of outside agents, filing a lawsuit against Perplexity over its Comet browser and pushing to block shopping agents from Google and OpenAI, according to the report.
Amazon said it is in conversation with Meta on the issue but declined to say whether it would consider legal action in this case, per the report.
Meanwhile, consumers in the United States are using AI as a shopping tool. The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Will the 2026 Shopping Season Go Agentic?” found that roughly 132 million people have made a retail purchase with AI assistance, while 22% now begin online retail research in an AI tool.
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