Amazon Blocked Meta's Muse From Its Store, Then Told Investors AI Shopping Agents Just Aren't Very Good Yet

Andy Jassy has a calming message for anyone worried about AI bots overrunning Amazon: they aren't very good. Less than six weeks after his company shut Meta's Muse agent out of its store, the Amazon CEO told investors on Thursday's third quarter call that the threat is not worth losing sleep over.

"Few customers are doing much shopping this way yet, as the experience is still not great, nor more convenient than coming to a retailer directly to research or one-click order there," he said. He never mentioned Muse by name. He didn't need to.

The agent Amazon would rather you use

Amazon locked Muse out on 20 September, warning that access by an unauthorized AI agent violates its Conditions of Use and accusing it of browsing unidentified and appearing to store customer logins. Meta has said Muse cannot see passwords or payment methods.

Jassy's verdict on outside agents came paired with a pitch for the one Amazon owns. "Though we anticipate working with horizontal agents, we believe Alexa for Shopping is going to be the primary shopping agent customers use to shop Amazon," he said. His argument is that Amazon's assistant already knows your purchase history, shipping address and payment details.

The company brought numbers. More than 400 million customers used Alexa for Shopping in the past 12 months, interactions rose 570% from a year earlier, and US users spend 50% more per order. Amazon has also added more than 100 capabilities, from gift registries to pausing recurring deliveries.

The ad problem

The awkward part of the story is money. Muse skips the step where a human visits Amazon's site or app and sees the ads that drive so much of its profit. And ad revenue grew 11% in the quarter, below forecasts.

Jassy said outside agents were not the cause, and he expects ad growth in the high teens during the holiday quarter. Wall Street still has the question on its mind. "Muse traction will likely drive questions on Amazon's agentic strategy," Bank of America analyst Justin Post wrote.

That traction, on Meta's telling, is considerable. Mark Zuckerberg said in October that more than 10 million people in the US and Canada had set up Muse since its early September release, and that it had unseated ChatGPT as the top free app on the App Store. Shopping is its most common use. More than a quarter of users shop with it, the average purchase tops $200, and Meta had to ask Stripe to raise its limits.

Shopify, Walmart and Best Buy have signed on as partners. Amazon has not. "Obviously, not everyone wants to be an early adopter. That's fine," Zuckerberg said. "We'll work with folks on the terms that makes sense for them."

DoorDash brings a much smaller number

Jassy got some unexpected backup the same day. DoorDash CEO Tony Xu told his own investors that "AI agents are generating several hundred orders across the time that they've been up and running." He called it a "very low use case" for a company that handled just under 1 billion orders in the quarter.

That comparison comes with an asterisk. DoorDash's connector for outside agents launched less than a month ago, is open only to a small number of early beta partners, and mostly handles corporate lunch orders. The count also leaves out DoorDash's own Ask DoorDash tool.

Xu, at least, sounded torn. "You never want to fight gravity," he said. "But at the same time, you don't want to be delusional."

So Amazon and DoorDash say outside agents barely register, while Meta's numbers say people are already shopping with them. Amazon's answer, for now, remains a block at the door.

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