Amazon Locked Meta's Muse AI Out of Shopping After Accusing It of Silent Credential Capture

Amazon spent Sunday night shutting Meta's newest AI out of its store, and the reason it gave was blunt: the agent had been browsing Amazon.com in disguise and scooping up customer logins along the way.

The block landed on 20 September, one week after Meta pushed its Muse personal agent to US shoppers. Anyone who now aims Muse at Amazon hits a popup warning that continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates the site's Conditions of Use. Meta, Amazon says, never asked for permission and never gave a heads-up that Muse would walk in the front door. GeekWire first reported the standoff.

Amazon's specific charge is what raises the temperature. It says Muse does not identify itself while it shops and appears to capture and store the credentials customers type, which the company frames as a privacy and security problem rather than a business grievance. An Amazon spokesperson said any app buying on a shopper's behalf should operate openly and honor a retailer's decision to opt out. Amazon says it is talking to Meta directly and will not discuss whether lawyers are involved.

Meta's answer, delivered at Muse's launch on 8 September, is that the agent never sees passwords or card numbers because credentials drop into secure storage it can use but not read. The company did not respond Sunday night. That reassurance is now doing double duty, because reporters testing Muse have already caught it reading the contents of user messages it was not supposed to touch.

None of this makes the two companies enemies, exactly. Amazon products have been purchasable inside Facebook and Instagram since 2023, and in April Meta signed a multibillion-dollar deal to run agentic AI workloads on AWS. They are partners who happen to be fighting over the checkout button.

For Amazon, that button is the whole game. The company has spent the past year trying to keep outside agents off its pages, most visibly by suing Perplexity over its Comet browser. Amazon won an early injunction, then lost it on 4 August when the Ninth Circuit ruled that under federal anti-hacking law it is the user, not the AI company, who accesses the site. The court refused to reconsider on 10 September, leaving contract and terms-of-service claims alive, which is exactly the ground Sunday's block stands on.

The money explains the fervor. Muse launched free with paid tiers and hit No. 1 on Apple's US App Store inside a week, while Amazon's own Buy for Me agent politely identifies itself and lets brands opt out. Amazon booked more than $68 billion in advertising revenue last year, a business that only works if human beings keep scrolling its pages and seeing the sponsored products an agent would skip right past.