Amazon’s trial run of its agentic AI characteristic has led to concern and frustration amongst on-line retailers in america after it enabled purchases with out clear consent and in some circumstances, reportedly hallucinated merchandise on the market.
Taking to Reddit and Instagram, some on-line retailers mentioned that their merchandise had been scraped and listed on the e-commerce big’s market with out their permission, in line with a report by CNBC.
The agentic AI characteristic often known as ‘Purchase for Me’ additionally reportedly led to a couple situations the place the merchandise that had been listed had been by no means offered or had been out of inventory. In February 2025, the tech big introduced an AI characteristic referred to as ‘Store Direct’ that exhibits shoppers numerous gadgets from different manufacturers’ web sites on Amazon.
The ‘Purchase for Me’ characteristic builds on this by letting customers set off an AI agent that autonomously purchases the product from the model’s web site with a single faucet. Each these AI-powered options are presently in testing inside the US. They’re a part of Amazon’s wager on AI brokers, LLM-powered techniques that may take motion on their very own, as the way forward for on-line procuring. In 2024, Amazon rolled out its personal AI procuring chatbot referred to as Rufus, which additionally boasts of some agentic AI capabilities.
Potential pushback from on-line retailers over AI agent-driven procuring highlights two key factors.
First, agentic commerce nonetheless faces vital challenges. Like Amazon, a number of tech corporations comparable to OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity have rolled out new options that allow customers purchase merchandise from retailers with out leaving the chatbot window.
Second, it might deepen tensions between Amazon and third-party sellers. Greater than 60 per cent of gross sales on Amazon are reportedly from impartial retailers. Nevertheless, the tech big has additionally come underneath regulatory scrutiny for favouring its personal merchandise, together with in India, the place the nation’s antitrust regulator in 2024, discovered that the corporate breached competitors legal guidelines by giving desire to pick out sellers and deep discounting of some merchandise.
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In response to the pushback from on-line retailers, Amazon reportedly mentioned that the trial run has acquired optimistic suggestions, including that the 2 options are designed to assist prospects discover merchandise not offered on its website whereas serving to companies attain new prospects and drive incremental gross sales.
“Companies can decide out at any time by emailing branddirect@amazon.com, and we take away them from these applications promptly,” an Amazon spokesperson was quoted as saying by CNBC.
In the meantime, there’s additionally a turf struggle brewing within the agentic AI race. In November 2025, Amazon despatched a stop and desist letter to Perplexity, in search of to dam the search startup’s agentic AI-powered browser, Comet, from accessing its on-line market.
Whereas Amazon accused Perplexity of violating its phrases of service since Comet had didn’t determine itself as an AI agent regardless of a number of warnings, Perplexity countered by saying that Comet doesn’t should determine itself as an AI agent as a result of it routinely has the “identical permissions” as a human person since it’s appearing on their behalf.
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