Walmart on October 21 announced tools and rules that let customers shop at Walmart and Sam’s Club through the AI assistants they choose: Agent Profiles inside customer accounts, a dedicated connection for agents called the Walmart Agent Gateway, and published terms that AI agents must follow. In its announcement, Walmart said Agent Profiles will launch within the next month.

Walmart CEO John Furner discussed the plans at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, TechCrunch reported.

How Agent Profiles work

Each AI agent a customer uses gets its own profile within the customer’s Walmart account, so that agent’s purchases appear separately from the customer’s own. Walmart described three steps. The shopper starts in the agent’s app, and Walmart creates an Agent Profile the first time that agent shops through the gateway. The shopper then connects by signing into a Walmart account and sets controls.

Customers can require approval for every purchase or allow purchases within a spending limit; Walmart gave $50, $100 and $200 as examples. They can see purchases made by every agent and delete a profile at any time. TechCrunch reported that no Walmart+ membership is required.

The gateway

The Walmart Agent Gateway is built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Walmart said agents shop differently from people and that its website “is built for people to browse, click and sign in themselves,” so the gateway is meant to give agents a faster, more reliable way to shop. TechCrunch described it as an MCP server that lets approved agents search Walmart’s online inventory and make purchases for shoppers.

According to Walmart, the gateway can help an agent find a customer’s usual items without sharing the customer’s broader shopping history. The company also said “the prices that an AI agent sees are the same prices that a human would see on Walmart.com, with applicable offers and fees shown before purchase.” The gateway begins as a beta for companies and developers.

The terms for agents

Walmart published seven terms for AI agents shopping on customers’ behalf:

  • Customers stay in control, and Walmart’s returns process applies, including when an agent does not act as intended.
  • Customers approve agent purchases by default, and “Walmart may require additional approvals even for purchases within an agent’s spending limits.”
  • Agents must not act beyond the shopper’s intent.
  • Agents never receive payment card information and cannot add or change payment methods.
  • Agents may access only the information a task requires and the customer allows.
  • The agent’s own privacy policy governs what it receives, while Walmart handles information that agents provide under its Privacy Notice.
  • Agents that break the terms will be blocked from Walmart’s site.

Walmart said it already serves customers through Sparky and through “conversational commerce integrations with Muse, ChatGPT, Gemini and others.” Walmart is also one of five retailers and platforms that co-developed Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard for agentic commerce, according to a January post from Google.

Why it matters

The announcement sets out in writing how Walmart will treat third-party AI agents: as identifiable buyers with their own profiles, spending caps and rules, rather than as anonymous traffic on a site designed for people. It also answers a practical question for agent shopping, namely who absorbs the cost when an agent buys the wrong thing. Walmart’s answer is that its normal returns process applies.

The approach differs from that of Walmart’s top competitor. TechCrunch reported that Amazon “began blocking AI agents from making purchases on behalf of online shoppers” shortly before Walmart’s announcement. In a September report, TechCrunch said users of Meta’s AI assistant, Muse, began receiving an error when trying to buy on Amazon that read: “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed.” TechCrunch also reported that various travel and booking sites have locked AI agents out of their websites entirely.

What to watch

Agent Profiles are due within a month of the announcement, which would put the launch in November. Walmart has not said which agents will connect through the gateway first or when the beta will open more widely. Its release points companies and developers to a page at walmart.com/agents.

The caveats

The descriptions of the controls, prices and data sharing come from Walmart’s own announcement, which carries no byline and no named spokesperson. Walmart did not publish technical documentation for the gateway in the release, list the capabilities it exposes to agents or say how it will detect agents that break its terms. The characterization of Amazon’s position comes from TechCrunch’s reporting; the articles cited include no statement from Amazon beyond the error message users received.