After Amazon Slammed The Door, Meta Rallies Partners To Welcome AI Shoppers

A group of tech and retail heavyweights is drafting the rules of the road for artificial intelligence bots that shop on people’s behalf.

Meta joined Walmart, Stripe and several other tech and commerce companies to build the Personal Agent Protocol, a shared set of rules for how AI agents work with businesses, CNBC reported Tuesday. The protocol would help companies verify bots are acting for real customers, a concern Amazon cited when it blocked Meta’s Muse agent from its platform in September.

Leading the charge is Bret Taylor, co-founder of AI startup Sierra and chairman of OpenAI, who said he anticipates both OpenAI and Anthropic will sign onto the protocol, according to CNBC.

“Companies will know when it’s a personal agent versus an actual person. For a lot of companies there’s a risk: you don’t want just a random bot that isn’t acting on behalf of a person to have access to this service,” Taylor told CNBC. “It is kind of chaos until such a standard exists.”

Shoppers would choose how much account access their agents get, and businesses would decide what those agents can do, Sierra’s announcement of the protocol stated. The group plans to publish its first draft of the standard later this month.

When asked for comment, Meta referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to an Oct. 6 company blog post, which acknowledged that some businesses have blocked personal agents but argued that “turning away a personal agent means turning away the customer behind it.”

Muse, Meta’s personal AI agent, ranked No. 1 on Apple’s U.S. app store on Sept. 18, according to 9to5Mac. The app is as of Wednesday ranked first among free apps, ahead of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Sierra, Walmart and Amazon each did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

President Donald Trump signed a “morally binding” agreement Sept. 29 with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other top tech executives to regulate their own AI models.

Meanwhile, Washington has largely left AI companies to police themselves.

Trump named Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton to run the administration’s Super Intelligence Force (SIF) in a Sunday Truth Social post, alongside Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Andrew Ferguson, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael and Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor.

Within 120 days, the group must tell the president how AI could help or harm the country and determine the degree to which the federal government should get involved, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org