> The right way to do this is to create an API or MCP or whatever catering to bots, and implement corresponding terms in your legal agreements (i.e. after approving a bot to interact with us, you're responsible for purchases it makes), along with some limits to prevent runaway shopping when Muse decides to binge.

From Amazon's perspective, that would be very much the wrong way.

Amazon's concerns here aren't technical. It's entirely about being disintermediated.

But how can they serve product suggestions this way?

I’m actually making this:

https://marketplace.openship.org

It’s an interoperable marketplace that uses MCP-UI to connect to seller websites directly. It brings the storefront and cart directly into the chat.

Nice. That would allow people to create alternative interfaces for humans (like me) who absolutely HATE Amazon's web interface.

Sounds like Amazon is trying to use its monopoly position to give it an competitive advantage over smaller stores.

I don't think it does make sense. I think Amazon is way overestimating brand loyalty, and underestimating how much of their success comes from being a one-stop shop for everything.

I'm using Claude for everything from finances to dinner planning to project planning. If Amazon doesn't let Claude search and buy, I'm not abandoning Claude, I'm abandoning Amazon.

As long as my actions are as simple as possible, I don't care whether Claude is searching 5000 online retailers or only 4999, minus Amazon. I'm certainly not going to say "ok, this project requires buying 13 things for about $500, but I don't see amazon in the list, so let me go manually search for each one on Amazon and see if they might have a better price or something."

This is Walmart / Apple Pay all over again. Yes, near-monopolies, lots of power. But they got there by making things easy for consumers. Making things difficult to force consumer behavior never ends well.

I always check Google before Amazon, because it's impossible to find anything on Amazon. Amazon is a bit like the bargain bin of a DYI shop. If it's immediately visible it's okay, of not, don't bother searching.

Half the time I can't even find the category page. And if I do find it, the filters will just be useless anyway.

In general, preventing consumers from having fully featured AIs (especially local ones) will be worth about 10 trillion dollars to companies. That's my prediction.

Amazon is one example. If my basement AI drives my browser and never clicks an ad, Amazon loses big.

Or, the ad industry in general -- imagine the basement AI filtering out all ads at the analog level so nobody in my house ever sees an ad, and no software update can change that.

Or other optimizations. Right now companies enjoy a power imbalance because they have people who ruthlessly optimize 24/7 to save a buck. I can't do the same, because I have to work, and also prefer to spend my personal time with family -- a foolish thing to do in a capitalist society, at least from a capital perspective. Imagine I have an AI wheeling and dealing on my behalf 24/7 too. Especially in an age of online shopping and product deliveries, my AI will absolutely order from your competitor to save a penny, my AI will absolutely spend 400 hours disputing a medical bill I don't think is right, barely an inconvenience to me.

Amazon is not usually very good anymore, quality has suffered massively.

Should not stores make shopping with AI easier instead, as the number of ”customers” that are agents will increase and they will shop where they can?

Amazon is supposed to be the cheapest/best delivery store due to it's huge scale.

It's how they killed the competition.

That's irrelevant from Amazon's perspective. If an agent is popular enough and has some fingerprint they can identify, they have a strong incentive to block it.

Agents that scrape and digest web data are entirely anathema to brand-reliant and advertising-reliant vendors and marketplaces. Even human assistants could be trusted to develop brand attachment and respond to advertising meant to shape their preferences. And while LLM agents are still manipulable, that's a frontier that nobody really knows how to navigate effectively yet, at least not to the degree of optimization modern vendors and marketplaces (especially Amazon) have acheived.

It's quaint to imagine what AI agents might do for consumers in the naive internet that preceded their emergence (if you ignore their vulnerabilities and flaws), but that's not what they'll be able to achieve as that same internet responds to them -- at least not at Meta scale. It's not very different than how social media companies once offered, and then aggressively withdrew and policed, API's to their graphs and feeds. Those open API's simply aren't compatible with the business objectives that keep these companies running, no matter what cool and profoundly user-friendly things could be built on them.

The same kind of incompatibility applies to AI agents when it comes to e-commerce. It won't be a permitted thing until, and except for where, vendors/marketplaces can assert control over the agents themselves and manipulate them to ends comparable to what they can achieve with human consumer sentiment already.

What's crazy is that the ToS is basically, "allow us, Amazon, to give you algorithmically higher prices- and if you try to circumvent that, you can't buy from us anymore".

I think the arguments for these kinds of near-monopoly companies being true market-driven capitalism seem more and more false.

The idea that Amazon will tell you that you don't even own the right to your own shopping experience tells you everything you need to know. Apple owns your device and Amazon owns the right to show you whatever price/product they want, regarless of your search intent.

And let's not forget that the browser is already considered to be a user agent.

I guess it’s more that Amazon’s server queries for an answer and intentionally obfuscating a bad one comes across as lying.

What do you mean? Declaring the agent is transparency. You should be congratulating Meta for their rare good deed.

Do Amazon Fresh purchases count towards the $25? I've noticed that only specific prime only thinks count towards it most of the time.

Amazon is basically a frontend for AliExpress, with some US products thrown in to keep people clicking.

In the past few days:

- Dusted off a 3d printer that wasn't being used enough, largely because of the tax of setting up profiles for materials and each print. That was fun once, I'm too busy now. Was able to get claude to use MCP and configure the slicer just right for the job and filaments.

- Needed to get IPTV/etc set up for football season. If you've done this you know what a pain it is, how EPG's don't always work right, finding the 50 channels you care about out of 80k channels is a nightmare, etc. Pointed claude at my utility server, it got Dispatcharr configured, wrote scripts to parse channel guides from sources not covered in the EPG, scheduled to update daily, deployed.

- I'm considering getting back to 3D printed clay, which is fun but challenging. Based on a thread here on HN, had claude go investigate using FPGAs (which it would program) for a realtime flow modulation system that would remove the variability from slight changes in viscosity within a batch of clay. Not sure I'll pull the trigger but I have a much deeper understanding of the solution.

- Realized I was paying like $30/mo to RocketMoney and Copilot (finance, not MS), for rare usage and basically just occasional "find subscriptions I forgot about" usage. Got claude connected to plaid via MCP, found more than those other two ever did, got it to set up cron to send me email weekly with current subscriptions and any price changes.

That's literally in the past 4-5 days. I find great value there, YMMV of course.

I find it useful, so here are some concrete examples from last few days.

As a baseline which many skeptics will have a hard time accepting for their own usage - I think there is a correlation between utility and trust (even which is not truly earned). If you don't let it capture memories and learn about you, and you don't connect it to external tools like email, it's less useful. But I think of it usually like a ChatGPT w/ extra tools and knowledge.

I just moved, and last night I asked my agent how to test how safe the soil in my (urban) garden was, and it found some warnings from my city government, and suggested a particular test service that is available in my area. Since it knows exactly where I live, it was able to find recent warnings of contamination in my neighborhood, and suggest specific chemicals to test for.

Additionally, I give it (read only) access to my email, and it'll ~2x a day notify me of some important email. I'm working with a contractor, and getting emails from them bumped, or getting emails about AWS usage alerts pulled out of inbox and notify me directly is super helpful for filtering the noise of my crazy email volume of 99% spam.

Also, as others have said, it's easy to take a picture of a flier, and say "add to my calendar".

At home? Not really, no.

At work? I've got ADHD, so the idea of making a to-do list is fine but keeping it up to date was a challenge. I've created a set of agentic skills that comes through the last 36 hours of emails, meetings, chats, and gathers up all the work I volunteered to do (or was told to do), triages them across urgency/impact, and sorts them into Do/Defer/Schedule/Delegate piles.

Last, I created an app to give a UI to this data to see and act on it all, including a way to flag a to-do that was found and enter why I thought the status or categorization was wrong. On the next run, a review skill reads those comments, makes changes to the other skills accordingly, and sends me an email with details of the changes, and the commit I can use to roll back the change if I'd like.

I've been running it since April and while there were a lot of updates at first, I haven't had to flag anything for review in months, and I get to feel a whole lot better about managing my to-do pile.

I'm looking at open-sourcing it, but since I created it with work resources on work time, I need to jump through a few hoops first.

For myself, it's been super helpful in at least two ways:

1) Staying on top of my kid's school obligations, homework, etc. School Learning Management Systems are a hot mess, and I use agents to consolidate and collate, to keep track of the homework that has been done, what needs to be done, and even pre-grade homework to give feedback (most of the work is done on digital platforms too). It's been immensely time saving for these kinds of things. 2) Multiple instances of watching things passively: hotel room prices, availability of tickets, finding the best place to sell things online. In general things that require a lot of browsing, collating, and watching. These are the kinds of things that specialized software products could do as well, but with an agent they are just a prompt away, and you get exactly what you want. (More or less.)

- find piece to buy to repair an appliance

- travel research for places where I need an apartment with requirements one cannot just filter for

- gardening tips based on photos of my plants

- financial planning (similar tips to what I would get for more money, without paying per hour until I know much more)

- take photo of all physical spam and have me removed from the list

and many more…

If the access to this product went away I will survive, but it will be annoying and waste my time.

I'm not using a platform but I set up a telegram bot that is backed by AI (DeepSeek flash tokens are almost too cheap to meter) that handles my strength training workouts. It reminds me of the days workout, takes my feedback on each exercise difficulty and adjusts it for the next round, handles injury rehab prescriptions, and so on.

I'm now considering putting a coding harness inside it so I can actually ask it to improve itself on the fly, since I realized that having to switch to my laptop just to give a short feedback is a bit silly, why not right through the bot?

It's working well so far and helps with my tendency to forget my workout program for days at a time since it pings me daily.

I agree with you. I also wouldn't trust it calling on my behalf or doing the majority of what people say it can do. Putting aside it making mistakes and not even being beneficial, I definitely wouldn't want meta of all companies to have the relevant information to do those things.

Just in the last three hours, Muse helped me make progress on my go-to-market plan, drafted me a script for my demo video, and went and listed 50 high value creators in my target market that i can go interact with and ask for product feedback. It could even DM them for me if I wanted to. It's the first time a product like this has actually shocked me... it closes the gap between decision and action. I'm hooked.

I still have to do the work, but everything's all teed up for me.

I use Claude Code often for entirely non-code things: the harness concept is super helpful for going through documents etc.

I think these Claw-type harnesses are basically this for somewhat less technical folks. If eg Muse has been able to make this work smoothly from your phone for completely non-techy people, then that seems like an incredible product.

I use coding agents to fill out dunkin donuts surveys for me

i just have the claude scheduled job kinda tool running, but at the grocery store i can spot something and think of a meal, then ask claude if any nearby grocery stores have other key elements to the meal on sale.

its pretty handy.

i was trying to get a nice setup for finding what shows are happening around me, but theres just too much stuff, and im not having a good hook time for when i check

I just used it today to find and reserve a parking spot in SF.

Previously, I used Claude to gather AWS invoices for reimbursement purposes.

Instinct contacted Oracle support for me and got movement on a ticket that had been stuck.

It's nice as like an interactive note keeper. I tell it thoughts/ideas I have and it stores them in markdown.

I'm having Muse record a local radio show (no online archives), transcribe it, and send me the transcription after the show. Hasn't ran yet, but if it actually works it'll help me keep up with local news.

This is all stuff I could do myself or do with other apps/code, but I wouldn't have time or would rather not

> use cases that have actually improved your life in some measurable way?

"actually" and "measurable" are, to pardon the Claudism, load bearing. If something made my life better in some imperceptible way that makes me happy, why the need to force metric on it? Not having to call Comcast to fake threaten to cancel service made me THREE happier and SEVEN less angsty. That pretty picture made me FOUR smilier. It makes me wonder if we can't just have nice things.

I made appointment with my doctor and haircut all using chatgpt. Also bought some stuff on a local website.

I hate having to work through random UI. I just wanna get stuff done.

It's worse than that, they will block all agents and specifically make exceptions for maybe 2 search engines per country. Thereby strengthening existing players and weakening all incumbants.

Cloudflare for instance does allow indexing by Google and Bing I think by default, but does challenge other bots. Double check me I am speaking from memory.

> Right now there isn't a robust, standard way to distinguish between them

There is, it’s called an API

> That's a main advantage of running your own local claw setup using your residential connection -- difficult/impossible to block.

https://aws.amazon.com/waf/features/bot-control/

How are AI's capable of defeating every captcha when I, a human, get sometimes entirely blocked by captchas all the time.

I get captchas when trying to do google searches if I'm not logged in. Or a lot of the time its "please wait a moment. Don't refresh the page" (the google results will then never load until you refresh the page). A few weeks ago I couldn't get past a cloudflare checkbox on a modern iPhone, and I'm not on a VPN or anything either. Yesterday I tried to visit an old reddit thread I had bookmarked and got "You've been blocked by network security," without a chance to even attempt a captcha.

What are bots doing to get past all of these?

Agreed, that really sucks.

We should blame Google for this, and not Amazon. Google added this data from your email to your advertisement profile and used it to increase their own revenue.

I’ve been purchasing more and more stuff from Walmart (good interaction with ChatGPT) and other stores.

It’s clear why Amazon is doing this from a business perspective, but this is a stop gap for them. They will need figure out a better plan for people using their agents.

Yeah I experimented with shopping and found it was really tedious jumping through the 2FA and other bot check hoops every third click. Agree it's a huge convenience if it would work though.

It’s funny watching all these large tech firms with so much resource commit the sin of innovation: starting with the tech and not the customer + economics of it all.

I get it. It’s tempting and alluring. But no - reimagining something takes a lot more work than sticky taping an agent on. Impatiently waiting for all this agent stuff to fek off.

Yeah subscriptions are another big one. So many profits today are generated by bleeding off customers that just can't deal with the hoops they need to jump through to get unsubscribed. Tasking that to an agent would destroy the whole model.

Of course they will be influencable. It is already possible to poison LLM output. It will happen with agents too.

Its a very good point. There are lots of orgs in company's whose whole job is to push shit from all possible points in the website - its probably called "real estate" internally.

These orgs have a lot to lose. But the company? Not so much, they will make it up and more - agents are great to use.

And yes ads are hard to place because agents let you bypass all this and give you a nice filtered view of exactly what you need.

Where do you think the world will head? Maybe Amazon will sell their inventory for agents at a hefty API price?

How do you know they are standing up for users? From where I'm sitting it looks like they just are trying to protect Alexa Shopping's revenue and/or monopoly.

This is not them standing up for the small guy, this is them seeing their actual profit center in retail (advertisement and paid promotion) evaporating if human beings never view their listings.

Returns cost money and if an agent generates more returns and hitting the margins or seller retention then that's something that's likely going to get increased scrutiny.

The generally quoted return rate is 5% to 15% (and it varies by category). If Muse identified purchases are generating returns of 10% to 30%, then amazon is probably going to crack down on it. (Amazon Sellers pay from 30% to 50% for customer returns from their own pockets. https://medium.com/@myrealprofit/how-much-do-refunds-really-... )

That's already a thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_shopper

Amazon doesn't provide financial breakdowns between Ads & E-commerce fulfillment and inventory costs, so take the Wall Street article with a grain of salt.

> Display ads are meaningless to agents. And agentic commerce is a huge threat to Amazon’s profitability.

Would agents be susceptible to advertising? If humans have issues differentiating ads from real results, and are swayed by TV ads and stuff (they are), then why wouldn't an AI agent.

I kind of assume they would, given how ChatGPT brings up garbage websites sometimes for my questions.

In theory, legislation could help. If there were a pro-consumer movement in government.

Something like declaring agents as representatives of consumers and blocking them violates ADA or just shouldn’t be allowed unless they are abusive.

Lacking that, it seems it’ll be an arms race between offense and defense. At some point, computer control probably wins (running my browser, on my computer, is pretty difficult to detect with reasonable f1 score)

Anything is possible I suppose... I don't see a path that leads to Amazon actually further controlling the shopping experience inside a browser (where a local agent might have control that they can't reliably detect), short of forcing users into some kind of hardware-based attestation solution or something, but even that is not foolproof.

> On one hand Amazon has a lot to lose by giving up control

The everyday person is told to get over it and accept that AI is here so adapt or die. Companies start reducing headcounts to be replaced with AI. So now, a company is having to accept that people are using AI in ways they don't like so they should adapt or die as well too, right? I have no tears to shed if Amazon loses control. Also, it'll be one billionaire battling another billionaire at that point, and I'm kind of okay with that chaos. My world is no longer in my control so fuck 'em is my stance

This is already solved by the existence of hundreds of other stores that actually do some level of filtering and curation of products. I don't know why we want to play some cat and mouse game of getting an LLM to find the best toilet paper on Amazon versus just finding a reliable source of toilet paper to begin with.

Theh will probably consolidate more. Less choices even if they are worse is also easier for llms to do. Just look at how they pick technologies to use. Almost always the same for a given model.

Amazon is just trying to get you to use their agent, so they're not anti-agent, just anti-someone-else's