After Amazon Blocks Muse, Meta Teams Up with Shopify to Set New Rules for AI Agents

Ebrun Original] October 9 news - Recently, eight companies including Meta, Sierra, Shopify, Stripe, and Walmart jointly announced that they will develop an open standard called the Personal Agent Protocol (PAP) to help businesses identify AI agents that visit websites and perform actions on behalf of consumers, and manage their access permissions. According to an announcement by Sierra on October 6, PAP builds on existing OAuth authorization technology, supporting AI agents to interact with merchants through corporate websites, APIs, or the companies' own AI agents, and plans to introduce payment-related features that enable agents to complete purchases without directly providing consumers' credit card information to merchants. In other words, under this protocol, when a consumer authorizes an AI agent to search for and purchase products, the merchant can confirm whether the AI genuinely has the consumer's authorization, allow it to complete tasks such as querying product information, using necessary user data, and processing payments within the authorized scope, while restricting access to unrelated personal data or unauthorized actions. For merchants, this means that in the future, they may be able to handle consumers brought by AI agents through a set of universal rules, reducing the cost of adapting to different AI products one by one, while retaining control over user data, transaction authorization, and service processes. According to reports, the v0.1 specification of PAP is expected to be released at the end of October. Currently, Amazon has not yet joined the protocol. Previously, Amazon had already imposed access restrictions on Muse. Even earlier, Amazon blocked Perplexity's AI shopping agent and filed a lawsuit against Perplexity in November 2025, accusing it of continuously accessing Amazon's website without permission and bypassing platform restrictions by hiding its agent identity. Regarding the practice of restricting third-party AI agent access, Amazon has previously stated publicly that third-party applications shopping on behalf of consumers should disclose their identity and respect the platform's decision on whether to allow access. However, Amazon has not completely refused to cooperate with external AI platforms. In September this year, Amazon Ads announced a partnership with OpenAI, allowing some U.S. advertisers to test conversational ads in ChatGPT, extending ad placements to AI conversation scenarios. But in transaction stages such as product browsing and order placement, Amazon still maintains strict restrictions on third-party AI agent access. Meanwhile, AI agents have also begun to change the shopping paths of some consumers. According to a previous report by Business Insider, Leif Abraham, co-CEO of the investment platform Public, stated that after using Muse, some products he would have originally purchased on Amazon have shifted to direct purchases from brand-owned standalone stores supported by Shopify. In response, industry insiders added that Meta's collaboration with Shopify, Stripe, and other companies to promote a unified AI agent interaction standard could, to some extent, bring a new wave of traffic opportunities for merchants. When consumers search for products through AI agents, the AI can directly direct consumers to qualified brand standalone stores based on their specific needs and purchase intentions. This means that merchants have the opportunity to gain potential customers with clearer needs and may also reduce their reliance on traffic entrances from traditional e-commerce platforms. So, when consumers can directly find brand standalone stores through AI agents and complete purchases, will comprehensive e-commerce platforms like Amazon face new traffic competition, and how will Amazon adjust its openness strategy towards third-party AI agents in the future? This remains to be further observed. Ebrun continues to track and report on this intelligence. For more information related to this article, please scan the QR code to follow the author on WeChat.

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