Consumer AI agents are rapidly inserting themselves between shoppers and the brands they buy from, forcing retailers to decide how much access to grant software that can compare products, evaluate policies, and complete purchases without a customer ever visiting a company's website. The shift is changing who controls the customer relationship and leaving brands with less visibility into why shoppers choose one product over another.
Meta's new Muse agent has become the most visible example. According to Sensor Tower data reported by CBS News, Muse passed 2.5 million downloads in its first two weeks and briefly overtook ChatGPT at the top of Apple's App Store. The agent bears a striking resemblance to its open-source predecessor, OpenClaw, and its fast growth is pushing brands to make quick decisions about access rather than defaulting into them.
Retailers' early signals are mixed. On Sept. 20, 2026, Amazon began showing a pop-up to people using Muse to shop its store, warning that continued access by an «unauthorized AI agent» violates the company's Conditions of Use. Two days later, PayPal announced that its customers could shop and check out through Muse at PayPal merchants worldwide. Shopify had enabled Shop Pay checkout for Muse across all of its stores the day before. Within days, three major players made two very different calls.
Amazon's objections are specific. The company told GeekWire that Meta never notified it that Muse would access the store, that the agent does not identify itself while browsing, and that it appears to capture and store customer credentials. Amazon can afford that position: it generated more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year from people browsing its pages and runs its own shopping agent, Buy for Me, which identifies itself and lets brands opt out. Most brands have neither an ad business of that scale nor an agent of their own to protect.
The more common scenario resembles Target's. A CNN reporter testing Muse could browse Target's site with the agent but had to enter personal details by hand because the retailer blocked autonomous clicks at checkout. In many companies, that kind of decision starts as a bot-management rule set by the security team, and marketing learns about it only when conversion numbers drop.
Muse has plenty of company. OpenAI launched Dots in late September, an always-on assistant inside ChatGPT that runs workflows in the background across connected apps; it requires a paid ChatGPT Pro or Business Premium plan and is not available in the EEA, the U.K., or Switzerland. Google has Gemini 4 Argon in limited preview through its Fairwind Program with no consumer release date. Apple's agentic Siri works across on-device apps and personal data, and Anthropic offers desktop control through Claude's Cowork app on its Pro and Max plans.
Meta and OpenAI both run each user's agent in a dedicated cloud environment, so browsing, comparison, and checkout happen on infrastructure the brand never touches. Each company sets its own rules for how an agent identifies itself and when it asks for the user's permission, meaning a brand's access policy must account for all of them.
The legal ground has also shifted toward the companies behind the first wave of consumer agents. In August, the Ninth Circuit ruled in Amazon's case against Perplexity that the «user» is the one accessing a site under federal anti-hacking law, and the AI company acts on that user's behalf. The ruling limits Amazon's ability to use that law to block agents acting for customers, though terms of service remain another way for retailers to restrict access, as Amazon's warning to Muse users shows.
A potential middle path is emerging. Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, developed with Cloudflare, lets merchants verify signed agents and separate them from malicious bots. Mastercard requires agents to register and be verified before they transact on its network, and every Mastercard issuer in Europe is now enabled for that framework. For marketing teams, the practical question is no longer whether consumer agents will mediate shopping, but how much of the customer relationship a brand can retain once they do.