Amazon Blocks Muse and Turns Agents Into Licensees

Amazon cut Meta’s Muse agent off its store on September 20, 12 days after launch, with a popup that cites the shopper’s own Conditions of Use.

The message reads, “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed.” Amazon says Meta never asked, Muse does not name itself in traffic, and login details sit in a cloud machine Amazon does not control.

The Popup Names the Customer’s Own Contract

Amazon asked Meta to take Amazon.com out of Muse before it showed the warning. Meta did not. The popup that appeared Sunday night does not accuse anyone of breaking into a server. It points at the contract every Amazon account holder already clicked.

That is the move the appeals court left standing. Amazon can still set house rules for its site. It cannot, on the record now in front of the Ninth Circuit, treat a shopper-aimed agent as a hacker under federal computer-fraud law.

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.

Amazon spokesperson, company statement

Amazon compared Muse to a food-delivery app that never asked the restaurant, or a travel site that never asked the airline. “Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we’ve requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience,” the spokesperson said.

Amazon also said it was talking directly with Meta that Sunday night and declined to say whether it would sue. The same Monday, it filed an amended 41-page complaint against Perplexity over the Comet browser, a separate fight that now sits on contract claims as well as computer-access statutes.

Muse Shops From a Cloud Browser Amazon Did Not Approve

Meta Muse Secure VM with its own browser is the product it launched in the United States on September 8. Muse is free for most tasks, with paid plans for heavier use, and it runs on iOS, Android, muse.ai, and WhatsApp.

If a service has a public API, Muse connects with logins the user hands over. If there is no API, Meta says the agent “can use the service through a browser the way you would.” Amazon has no public shopping API of that kind, so Muse’s path onto the store is the browser.

Meta says Muse has no visibility into passwords or payment methods. Shared credentials go into encrypted storage so the agent can use them without seeing them, including passwords typed into that browser. A second monitor Meta calls Sentinel has to approve anything Muse sends to the internet, and Muse is supposed to check with the user before it sends an email or places an order.

Amazon’s reply is that the architecture still puts an unnamed third party inside a password-protected account. Muse can open account pages and order history if the user asks. Because the traffic does not announce itself as an agent, Amazon treats that as an undisclosed party moving through private data, capturing logins, and placing orders without Amazon’s consent.

A week after launch, Muse was the No. 1 free app in Apple’s U.S. App Store, ahead of ChatGPT. Early use already included loading grocery carts and hunting discount codes. Those jobs do not need Amazon. They do need a store that will let a machine finish the buy.

WHAT MUSE CAN STILL TOUCH

• Stripe Link: Muse can check out with a one-time card so the agent never holds the real number, and Meta says Stripe’s purchase warranties cover those orders.
• Shop Pay: On September 21, Shopify turned on agent checkout for Muse across Shopify stores.
• Other daily apps: Email, calendar, dining, and travel still sit on the original launch list, plus WhatsApp as a chat front door.

Amazon is the store Muse cannot finish. That is a hole in a shopping agent, because Amazon is where a large share of U.S. online orders still start.

Every Request Now Needs an Agent Name

Amazon wrote the machine rules into its Conditions of Use on August 14, six days after the Ninth Circuit took the hacking shortcut away. The Agent Terms apply if you use, allow, or cause any software that takes autonomous or semi-autonomous action on Amazon’s services.

The first duty is identification. No agent may touch Amazon unless it names itself at all times and follows the technical rules. If Amazon has asked an agent to stay out, it must stay out. Amazon may also limit, including by technical measures, whether and how any agent gets in.

The same identification rule appears in Amazon’s seller and associates contracts. Tools that already talk to Amazon through registered APIs are, in practice, already named. A cloud browser that looks like Chrome is the pattern Amazon has been trying to kill since it sued Perplexity.

AMAZON’S AGENT RULES

Amazon says Muse fails the first test. It also says Meta never disclosed that Muse would enter the store. Those two points, plus the stored logins, are the whole public case for the popup.

Elon Musk wrote on September 21 that Amazon “won’t be able to tell whether the buyer is a human or an AI acting on their behalf if access is via the user’s IP address & cookies.” The Agent Terms try to close that gap by forcing a header. An agent that rides the shopper’s own phone, IP, and cookies, and never adds Agent/Muse, is the thing those rules are written to catch, or to miss.

The Court Closed the Hacking Claim in August

Amazon sued Perplexity in November 2025 over Comet, an AI browser whose optional Assistant can shop Amazon at a user’s direction. Amazon told Perplexity’s chief before launch that those products would not be allowed on the store. After launch, Amazon said Comet was not sending a user-agent string that would let Amazon see, and block, the Assistant.

A federal judge in San Francisco granted Amazon an early court order in March 2026. The Ninth Circuit vacated that order on August 4 in Amazon.com Services, LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc., No. 26-1444.

Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. wrote that Perplexity did not access Amazon’s computers for Computer Fraud and Abuse Act purposes. On the facts before the panel, the user accessed Amazon’s computers, with the Assistant as a tool. The California computer-access statute failed for the same reason. The panel also held that the remaining injunction factors favored Perplexity, not Amazon.

Amazon asked the full Ninth Circuit to rehear the case. On September 10 the court said not one judge requested a vote. Ten days later, Muse users hit the Conditions of Use popup.

FROM COMET TO THE MUSE WARNING

1. November 2025: Amazon sues Perplexity, claiming Comet’s Assistant entered password-protected Amazon accounts without authorization.
2. March 2026: The district court grants Amazon an early order blocking that use.
3. August 4, 2026: The Ninth Circuit vacates the order and says the shopper, not Perplexity, did the accessing.
4. August 14, 2026: Amazon’s Conditions of Use add Agent Terms that require a named header and let Amazon cut agents off.
5. September 8, 2026: Meta launches Muse, including a browser that can shop when no API exists.
6. September 10, 2026: The Ninth Circuit denies rehearing.
7. September 20, 2026: Amazon shows Muse users the unauthorized-agent popup.
8. September 21, 2026: Amazon files the 41-page amended Perplexity complaint, and Shopify turns on Shop Pay for Muse.

The new Perplexity filing is aimed at Comet on iOS. Amazon alleges that version copies a shopper’s Amazon session cookie onto Perplexity’s own cloud servers, which then request pages from Amazon, so no user device touches Amazon’s machines. In April and May briefs, Perplexity had told the appeals court that “no Perplexity computer ever has direct access to an Amazon computer.” Amazon now says its engineers watched that traffic from March 18 through at least May 11.

Muse’s cloud VM is the same kind of gap. If the agent’s browser runs on Meta’s computers, the “user as the accessor” holding from August is thinner, and the customer contract is the cleaner lever either way.

Sponsored Listings Vanish When an Agent Skips the Page

Amazon’s advertising services took in more than $68 billion in 2025. That line lives on people browsing product pages, seeing sponsored slots, and taking the recommendation Amazon is paid to show. An agent that picks an item and checks out can skip the page, the slot, and the recommendation.

THE MONEY ON THE PRODUCT PAGE

• Ad sales, 2025: More than $68 billion, a business built on sponsored listings and personalized modules on Amazon pages.
• Launch to block: 12 days from Muse’s September 8 debut to the September 20 popup.
• Other agents already cut: Amazon has also moved to block shopping agents from Google and OpenAI, after a year of fighting Perplexity.

Amazon still sells its own goods inside Facebook and Instagram, a setup that has run since 2023, and Meta signed a multibillion-dollar deal in April to run agentic AI work on Amazon’s Graviton chips. Those ties did not buy Muse a pass at checkout. The store and the ad page are a different product from the chips in the data center.

Amazon is not leaving the agent slot empty. It launched Alexa for Shopping in May, an agent that researches products and makes recommendations. Its other tool, Buy for Me on outside brand sites, finds items that are not in Amazon’s catalog and buys them from the brand, while Amazon says the feature identifies itself and lets brands opt out.

Buy for Me does some of the browsing Amazon is stopping in Muse. The difference Amazon draws is the name in the traffic and the merchant’s right to refuse. Muse, Amazon says, has neither.

People who had already used Muse for groceries argued that easier buying should mean more spending, not a locked door. Amazon is making a different bet: that an unnamed agent costs it the page, the ad, the recommendation, and control of the return when the order is wrong. Permission, in that view, is not a courtesy. It is the inventory.

Shopify Licensed Muse the Next Morning

On September 21, the morning after Amazon’s popup, Shopify chief executive Tobi Lütke posted that Shopify was partnering with Muse so the agent could check out with Shop Pay on all Shopify stores.

We are excited to announce we are partnering deeply with Muse to enable agentic checkout with Shop Pay on all Shopify stores, offering people an easy and delightful way to shop and check out with Muse.

Tobi Lütke, chief executive, Shopify, on X

Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang wrote that Meta wants “Musers” to reach a wide range of stores and “find the absolute perfect products.” In Shopify’s model the merchant stays the seller of record. Muse becomes the face the shopper talks to. Catalog, Shop Pay, and order processing stay on Shopify’s rails.

That is the other fork. Amazon is telling agents to identify, then wait for a yes that may never come. Shopify is selling the yes as a feature and putting Muse in the merchant’s channel list. One store is metering machine shoppers. The other is recruiting them.

Amazon has spent a year trying to keep outside agents off its catalog. Shopify spent a Monday plugging the most-downloaded new agent into checkout. The split is not about who has a smarter model. It is about who still needs the human to see a sponsored module before the card is charged.

Permission to Buy Is Becoming the Product

The scarce asset in this fight is not another benchmark score. It is a store’s written permission for a machine to finish a purchase, plus a name in the header so the store can meter, block, or bill that machine. Amazon’s popup is that permission, denied. Shopify’s Shop Pay note is that permission, sold.

Amazon can still lose the cookie war Musk described, if Muse or some later agent rides a phone so cleanly that the traffic looks like the owner. The Agent Terms, the popup, and the Perplexity amendment are how Amazon is trying to make that ride expensive anyway, by putting the customer’s own account on the hook and by arguing that a cloud browser is not the customer at all.

As of September 20, Amazon said it was still in direct conversation with Meta. Muse can still plan, mail, and buy on rails that asked it in. It cannot, for now, take an Amazon cart to the pay button unless Meta puts Agent/Muse in the header and Amazon says yes.