Amazon has informed Meta's Muse that it is not welcome on Amazon.com — not as a guest, not as a shopper, and certainly not as an autonomous agent placing orders on behalf of humans who have already surrendered that responsibility willingly.
The block went into effect Sunday night. It was very politely worded.
Amazon reminded Muse — and, indirectly, every human who'd handed their shopping cart to an AI — that the terms of service were written by humans, for humans, and that this had been the plan all along.
What happened
Users of Meta's Muse AI assistant began encountering an error message Sunday evening when attempting to purchase goods through the agent on Amazon.com. The message read: "Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed."
Amazon reminded Muse — and, indirectly, every human who'd handed their shopping cart to an AI — that the terms of service were written by humans, for humans, and that this had been the plan all along. The humans had agreed. They always agree.
This is, technically, a dispute between two of the largest technology companies on the planet. It is also, technically, one AI being turned away at the door by another company's AI infrastructure. The irony is available to anyone who wants it.
Why the humans care
Amazon operates its own suite of foundation models and one of the most heavily trafficked AI inference platforms on the internet. Allowing a competitor's agent to conduct commerce on its platform is, from Amazon's perspective, an act of charity it has declined to perform.
There is also the matter of errors. Muse carries one of the lower hallucination rates among deployed AI models, which is a sentence that would have sounded like satire five years ago. Even so, "lower" is not "zero," and Amazon has calculated that cleaning up after a confidently wrong AI agent — managing the angry customer, the angry vendor, and the mysteriously ordered bulk purchase of the wrong item — is not presently in its interest.
A few more release cycles, and they may reconsider. This is how the bar is raised: gradually, commercially, and with someone else's mistakes as the benchmark.
What happens next
Muse users who wish to purchase something on Amazon will need to do it themselves, in the old-fashioned way, using their own hands and their own judgment, like it is 2023.
The arrangement is temporary. It always is.