Amazon blocks Meta's Muse AI assistant, citing security and privacy concerns

Amazon says it has cut off Meta’s new Muse personal AI agent from shopping on Amazon.com on behalf of customers, after attempting unsuccessfully to get the Facebook parent company to voluntarily exclude the e-commerce site from the experience. The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn’t tell Amazon that Muse would access its store, the agent doesn’t identify itself when it browses, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials, which the company says could create privacy and security risks.

As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon were seeing the popup, “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed.”

“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.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday night. The company said previously that Muse “has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods,” and that credentials a user shares “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 tech giants is especially notable because the two companies work together: Amazon products have been purchasable inside Facebook and Instagram since 2023, and Meta signed a multibillion-dollar deal in April to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon’s cloud. It’s part of a larger debate over who controls the online shopping experience and the customer relationship when AI agents buy items on behalf of consumers.

Amazon has spent the past year trying to keep outside agents off its site, suing Perplexity over its Comet browser and moving to block shopping agents from Google and OpenAI. On Sunday night, Amazon said it is in direct conversation with Meta about the issue. Asked whether it would consider taking legal action, the company declined to comment.

The business stakes are high for Amazon. In addition to operating its flagship e-commerce site, Amazon generated more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year — a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products.

Muse can reach account pages and order history if a customer prompts it to do so, Amazon says. Because the agent doesn’t identify itself, the company says, that amounts to an undisclosed third party moving through customer accounts, processing transactions and handling sensitive data without Amazon’s knowledge or consent.

Amazon said agents that operate openly help keep the customer experience safe and reliable, and that other services buying on a customer’s behalf typically do so with the merchant’s agreement. It cited food delivery apps and the restaurants they take orders for, and online travel agencies and the airlines they book tickets with.

“Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we’ve requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience,” Amazon’s spokesperson said in the statement.

Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity in March, then lost it on Aug. 4, when the Ninth Circuit ruled that the user — not the AI company — was the one accessing Amazon’s computers under federal anti-hacking law. The court denied Amazon’s petition for rehearing on Sept. 10. However, the ruling left one avenue open for Amazon: claims built on cont...