Silicon Valley is promising an AI agent revolution, but retailers and service providers keep blocking them.
Silicon Valley is promising an AI agent revolution, but retailers and service providers keep blocking them.
eBay appears to have blocked AI agents, including Meta’s Muse, from browsing on the platform — the latest speed bump in the AI agent race.
A reader tells The Verge that for several weeks he’s had his Muse agent browse and curate a daily digest of watches for sale on platforms like eBay, including a link to listings, price, shipping details, and relevant notes about condition or style. This weekend, though, Muse was unable to pull any links or details from eBay, with Muse saying it was blocked from the site. The Verge was able to re-create the experience using other search requests, and in some cases we found that Muse instead directed users to outside sites that mirrored eBay listings.
Shopping is frequently invoked as one area where AI agents can augment or improve the human-driven experience. Technology companies tout the use of agents to book travel, find deals, and even purchase goods and services on behalf of humans. But AI agents are regularly getting blocked from accessing retailers’ sites , calling into question how useful they can really be.
eBay previously updated its user agreement to ban the use of tools like “buy-for-me agents” and “LLM-driven bots” that place orders without human review. Until recently, though, agents like Muse were able to browse the site and pull listings for users.
AI is becoming embedded throughout the platform for the discovery, personalization, and selling process, eBay spokesperson Sybille St. Arromand told The Verge in an email. St. Arromand declined to directly answer whether eBay recently imposed new limits on AI agents.
“As it pertains to third-parties, we take a selective approach to how they access and interact with our marketplace. We have restricted agent access in certain cases, including unauthorized scraping and training on our data,” St. Arromand said. “We have ongoing discussions with potential partners and are evaluating ways third-party agents could help new customers discover eBay’s unmatched inventory, and our focus is on preserving the trusted end-to-end experience that buyers and sellers expect from eBay.”
Retailers and service providers who’ve enthusiastically added AI features to their platforms have shown varying levels of comfort with third-party agents accessing their sites. On one end of the spectrum is Amazon, which is blocking external agents entirely from browsing or shopping. Some retailers like Target have restrictions in place that allow agents to successfully browse in some instances but get blocked in others. Shopify, meanwhile, has opened its catalog of a billion listings so that shoppers can set up their agents to purchase items on their behalf .
Throwing agents into the e-commerce mix has the potential to upend how people shop online, partly because retail sites are largely assuming they’re selling to humans, with human limitations, and not swarms of bots. For example, The Verge discovered in October that someone could use Muse to effectively hold product listings hostage on The RealReal, a secondhand designer consignment site, by having an agent continually add the product to the user’s cart. The RealReal updated its bot system after The Verge ’s reporting.
But as retailers tweak their sites in real time to handle bots, it remains unclear how widespread agentic commerce is. In fact, there are signs that most people are not using AI this way. Uber said it fulfilled only four rides via third-party agents in Q3 and only around 500 Uber Eats orders during the week of Halloween. DoorDash similarly said it fulfilled only “several hundred” orders placed via third-party agents. It reported 993 million total orders last quarter.
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