Two weeks ago I asked who sent you. Amazon answered for Meta’s Muse by closing the door. Walmart answered last week by opening one and handing the agent some paperwork on the way in.
The paperwork is simple enough. Every AI agent you use gets its own profile inside your Walmart account. You approve each purchase, or you set a spending limit and let the agent work within it. The agent never sees your credit card. You can shut it off whenever you like. There is a proper gateway, so the agent doesn't have to scrape the website, and there are terms. The agent has to say it is an agent, stay inside what you asked for, and only look at the information the task needs. Break the terms, and Walmart blocks you.
Buried in those terms is a sentence worth more than the rest of the announcement. Whatever an authorized agent does inside the permissions you gave it counts as your own action. Read it like a lawyer. It is a rule of agency, the sort of thing you’d find in a power of attorney, and a retailer just put it in its terms of use. Everyone has settled on OAuth for proving who an agent is. Nobody wanted to say what an agent is allowed to do on your behalf, and whose act it is when it does. Walmart said it.
I think that line matters more than the spending limit, which is what got the headlines. A fifty-dollar ceiling is a convenience. “Your agent’s act is your act, within bounds you set” is a contract. It also answers Amazon’s complaint from the other direction. Amazon said an undisclosed third party was wandering through customer accounts. Walmart’s reply is that the third party will show its face, carry a profile, and work under terms both sides have agreed to.
Now notice where that profile lives. Inside your Walmart account. Walmart sets the permissions on its systems, the record sits in Walmart’s order history, and the terms are Walmart’s. You can see what your agent did, which is good, but the other party wrote your side of the deal. Shop at twelve stores with the same agent, and you’ll keep twelve profiles under twelve sets of terms you didn’t write and can’t compare. The relationship still runs on the merchant’s ledger.
This is half of what MyTerms describes. The other half is terms you bring with you, as you are the initiating party in a transaction. Walmart has shown that a big retailer can let an agent in under contract. It is, however, their contract which is really taking the current state and ‘agentifying’ it. Reportedly, 37 of the top 51 shopping sites are still blocking agents outright.
What I like about a published rule is that you can point to it. Walmart has established its approach, but it still lacks true agency for customers.