Walmart plans to introduce walmart ai shopping agents to its website next month, allowing customers to delegate purchases while retaining approval controls, according to reporting by The Verge. The proposed service would give an AI agent authority to find and buy items, a more consequential job than merely suggesting products in a chat window.
Walmart says each agent will be attached to an Agent Profile within the customer’s account. Purchases will require the customer’s approval by default. A customer can instead authorize the agent to spend within a set limit, with Walmart giving $100 as an example, review the agent’s orders separately from their own purchases, or disable the agent.
How will Walmart AI shopping agents be controlled?
Walmart’s stated rules say an agent must stay within the shopper’s instructions, cannot alter the payment method, and may access only information needed to complete its assigned task. The retailer says it will block agents that fail to comply.
Those restrictions are meant to define the difference between a shopping assistant that can search for an item and one that can complete a transaction. The controls described by Walmart put the customer in charge of whether an order needs confirmation every time or can proceed below a budget threshold. They do not establish how reliably agents will follow ambiguous requests in practice.
The retailer has also built an Agent Gateway, currently in beta, that connects agents through the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for linking AI systems to online services. Walmart says the gateway should spare agents from browser-navigation failures and stop them from accessing a customer’s shopping history and personal information.
Walmart says it can use its own records to help an agent identify a shopper’s usual products, such as a preferred bread or milk, without passing the shopper’s broader purchase history to the agent. That is a company description of the system’s data boundaries, not an independently verified privacy result.
Will AI agents also shop at Sam’s Club?
Yes. The Verge reported that Walmart intends to make the agent-shopping capability available at Sam’s Club as well.
The plan is separate from Walmart’s earlier arrangement with OpenAI. In an October 2025 announcement, Walmart said customers and Sam’s Club members would soon be able to shop through ChatGPT using Instant Checkout. That announcement did not say the broader Agent Gateway was operating at the time.
Walmart’s approach differs from Amazon’s reported response to third-party agents. The Verge reported that Amazon blocked Perplexity’s shopping agent and Meta’s Muse assistant; Yahoo Finance also reported that Amazon prohibited companies from deploying automated shopping tools on its site. Whether shoppers will hand checkout duties to AI agents remains uncertain, but Walmart is preparing the permissions, spending limits and account records required if they do.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.
