EquitiesMarket noteFriday 9 October 2026, 00:35
AI shopping agents are making big tech the gatekeepers of commerce, ING says
AI agents that shop for us will make the biggest platforms stronger, ING says. Amazon has blocked Meta's Muse agent, Shopify has let it in, and Amazon's ad business shows why.
By The Notebook Desk
AI shopping agents, which choose and buy products for their users, will make the biggest technology companies stronger, ING said in a note on Thursday. “AI agents are rarely neutral actors,” wrote Katinka Jongkind, a senior economist at the Dutch bank. They are “inherently linked to the interests of platforms, marketplaces and technology companies”, the note says.
Agents promise convenience and time saved, ING says, but they are also likely to “strengthen the dominance of large tech firms and marketplaces”. Those firms are “becoming increasingly influential in shaping product choices and controlling consumer access”. In other words, whoever runs the agent decides what the shopper sees.
Who leads in AI shopping agents
Chinese platforms are furthest ahead, according to ING. Alibaba and JD.com already have agents built into their platforms that can complete a purchase. In America, Amazon, Google, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic are investing heavily. European companies are “structurally lagging behind”, the bank says, held back by stricter rules and less joined-up platforms.
Fully automatic buying is not here yet. ING expects agents to take over routine and repeat purchases first, such as nappies, shampoo and toothpaste, and electronics and personal care. For fashion and furniture, where taste matters, people will keep the final say, and agents will mostly help them compare.
Amazon closes its door to Meta’s Muse
The fight over who controls the agents has already started. Meta launched Muse, a personal agent that can browse the web and check out for its user, on 8 September. On 20 September Amazon cut it off from buying on Amazon.com, PPC Land reported, after Meta declined to leave Amazon out of the product. Shoppers who try now see a message: “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed.”
Amazon says Meta never told it that Muse would shop in its store, that the agent does not identify itself, and that it appears to capture and store customers’ passwords. Meta says Muse “has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods”.
Shopify, which runs online shops for other businesses, did the opposite. The next day its chief executive, Tobias Lütke, said Shopify was “partnering deeply with Muse to enable agentic checkout with Shop Pay on all Shopify stores”, PYMNTS reported.
The courts have not settled it
Amazon tried the law first. In November 2025 it sued Perplexity, whose Comet browser had an agent that shopped on Amazon through customers’ own accounts. A federal judge in California granted Amazon a preliminary injunction in March. On 4 August the Ninth Circuit appeals court threw it out. “The CFAA contemplates access by a person,” the court said of the federal anti-hacking law, and the agent is “a tool, not a person, for statutory purposes”, according to Ballard Spahr, a law firm.
The ruling left Amazon room to enforce its own terms of service, and the case has gone back to the lower court. Those terms, its Conditions of Use, are now its weapon against Muse too.
Why Amazon cares: advertising
Amazon is not against shopping agents. It has its own, Alexa for Shopping, which can buy automatically through a feature called Auto-Buy. What it guards is the page where the shopper decides. Amazon earned $19.8bn from advertising in the second quarter, 26% more than a year earlier, its results show. In 2025 it earned $68.6bn, by our sum of the four quarters.
Much of that money comes from brands that pay to appear in front of people browsing Amazon’s pages. An outside agent that searches and buys on the shopper’s behalf can skip those pages entirely. An agent run by Amazon keeps them. That is ING’s point in practice: the platform that owns the agent owns the customer.
What to watch next
The Perplexity case continues in the district court. Amazon says it is talking to Meta directly about Muse. The next test will come when Amazon reports its third-quarter results, where any slowdown in advertising growth will be read as an early sign that agents are starting to bite.
Disclosure
This is analysis and opinion, not investment advice.