IT Home News on October 22: Walmart announced on Wednesday, local time, the official launch of its own agent gateway for processing transactions, along with several new features for consumers using AI agents, as it positions itself in agentic e-commerce. This came shortly after Walmart's biggest competitor, Amazon, began blocking AI agents from placing purchase orders on behalf of online shopping users.
IT之家 noticed that Walmart's open attitude toward AI technology sets it apart from other online merchants. Besides Amazon, many travel and booking websites, facing the growing trend of consumers using AI agents, have chosen to directly block agent access to their sites. Walmart, however, had previously announced a partnership with Meta's Muse, a leading agent in this field, and has also integrated popular AI applications such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
Walmart President and CEO John Furner said Wednesday at the Masters of Scale summit in San Francisco that Walmart is now stepping up its investments in related technologies to prepare for an era in which AI agents become widespread. This technology will support agentic shopping for both Walmart and its discount warehouse chain Sam's Club.
At the core is Walmart's newly launched Agent Gateway, the company's brand-new MCP server, designed to let vetted agents connect to the Walmart platform via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The protocol was originally developed by Anthropic and enables AI agents to hook into external data sources, tools and various workflows. In this scenario, AI agents can retrieve Walmart's online inventory and place orders on a user's behalf.
In addition, the retailer said that through the Agent Gateway, consumers shopping for familiar brands or products do not need to hand their personal information and purchase history directly to AI agents.
Walmart has also developed new technology to distinguish orders placed by agents from orders initiated directly by users themselves, allowing shoppers to control what actions agents are authorized to take.
The Agent Profiles feature, launching next month, lets users create a separate authorization profile within their account for each AI agent they use, and view orders generated by each agent individually. Users can also set their own order approval rules: they can require manual confirmation for every transaction, or set a spending threshold under which orders are automatically authorized.
Walmart explained that this permission control mechanism is similar to adding an authorized user to a credit card: the related transactions can be identified, and a spending limit can be set.
The company noted that the first time a user shops with a given agent through Walmart's Agent Gateway, the system will generate a corresponding Agent Profile. The process is to first authorize, binding the Agent Profile to the Walmart account, then set permissions or spending limits, and users can delete an Agent Profile at any time. A Walmart account is all that is needed to use the agent features; no Walmart+ membership is required.
Beyond these technologies, Walmart has specifically issued terms of use for AI agents, defining the rules agents must follow when operating and their authority to transact on the platform. Notably, Walmart said that even if an agent makes a mistake while executing an action, the platform's return policy still applies. This consumer-friendly term is expected to ease concerns among early adopters of agentic e-commerce, so they need not worry about receiving items they never wanted because of an agent's error.
Walmart also stipulates that agents must not take actions beyond the user's intent, cannot access users' payment information, and may only obtain the information necessary to complete the current task. Agents that fail to comply with the terms will be barred from accessing the Walmart website.