Walmart is opening its store to AI shopping agents on purpose. On October 21, 2026, the retailer announced three pieces: Agent Profiles, the Walmart Agent Gateway, and a set of terms that agents must follow. Together they cover Walmart and Sam's Club. The pitch is simple: if you want an agent to buy groceries for you, Walmart wants that agent to come in through a door it controls, under limits you set.
That puts Walmart on a different track from its biggest rival. TechCrunch reports that the move comes shortly after Amazon began blocking AI agents from making purchases for shoppers, and that some travel and booking sites have locked agents out completely.
The problem Walmart says it is fixing
Walmart describes how agents shop today in two parts. First, an agent signs in with the customer's own account, so every purchase, by the person or by the agent, shows up in one list with no way to tell them apart. Second, agents often shop through a web browser, following steps built for people. Walmart calls this slow and error-prone, and says agents "may get stuck along the way." For the general methods agents use to get into accounts, see our explainer on screen scraping, open banking, OAuth and MCP.
Each of the three new pieces answers one of those problems.
Agent Profiles: a separate identity for each agent
Agent Profiles launch "in the next month," per Walmart. Each AI agent a customer uses gets its own profile inside that customer's Walmart account. The agent's purchases are shown separately from the customer's own orders.
The customer picks how purchases get approved:
- Approve every purchase, or
- Let the agent buy within a spending limit the customer sets. Walmart gives $50, $100 or $200 as examples.
Walmart compares this to adding someone as a cardholder on your credit card: you give them a way to pay, set a spending limit and keep track of how the card is used. A profile can be deleted at any time.
The setup flow, as Walmart lists it, has three steps. The first time you shop with an agent through the Agent Gateway, Walmart creates an Agent Profile for that agent automatically. You then link it by signing in to your Walmart account. Then you set a spending limit. TechCrunch adds that agent support is open to anyone with a Walmart account, with no Walmart+ membership needed.
Walmart also says agents see the same prices a person sees on Walmart.com. Its phrase is "We price products, not people," with offers and fees shown before purchase.
The Agent Gateway: an MCP server instead of a browser
The Walmart Agent Gateway gives agents a direct connection using MCP, the Model Context Protocol. TechCrunch notes the protocol was originally created by Anthropic and lets AI agents connect to outside data sources, tools and workflows. TechCrunch describes it as Walmart's new MCP server for approved agents, letting them search Walmart's online inventory and buy on a user's behalf. Walmart says it will start as a beta for companies and developers.
Reuters reports that the gateway lets assistants such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Meta's Muse connect directly to Walmart and Sam's Club systems to search products and complete purchases. Walmart's own post says it already runs conversational shopping integrations with Muse, ChatGPT, Gemini and others.
One detail matters for privacy. Walmart says the gateway can help an agent find a customer's "usuals" without handing over the customer's personal information or purchase history. Its example: if you tend to buy sourdough bread or one brand of milk, Walmart helps the agent find those items without sharing your broader shopping history with the agent.
The terms: what agents may and may not do
Walmart's terms for AI agents set these rules:
- Customers must approve agent purchases by default, and Walmart may ask for more approvals even inside a spending limit.
- Walmart's returns process applies, including when an agent does not act as intended.
- Agents must not take actions beyond what the shopper intends.
- Agents do not receive payment-card information and cannot add or change payment methods.
- Agents can access only the information needed for the task and allowed by the customer.
- The agent company's own privacy policy covers what you share with its app. Walmart handles what the agent passes to it under Walmart's Privacy Notice.
- Agents that break these terms will be blocked from Walmart's site.
Why it matters for retail
Amazon and some booking sites have answered the agent question by blocking them, per TechCrunch. Walmart's answer is to let them in, with an account-level permission system: one identity per agent, a spending cap, approval on by default, and no card data in the agent's hands. The returns rule also moves some risk off the shopper when an agent buys the wrong thing.
The design also keeps Walmart in the middle. Purchase history stays with Walmart, and the agent gets only what it needs for the task. For other retailers weighing whether to block agents or build for them, it is a worked example of the second path.
At least one analyst took note. Mizuho analyst David Bellinger wrote that "the momentum and buy-in from top management teams seems to be making this into a real thing," according to Reuters. TechCrunch reports that CEO John Furner discussed the tools at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco.
What is still unknown
- Which agent companies are approved for the gateway beta, and how approval works. Walmart does not list them.
- An exact launch date for Agent Profiles beyond "in the next month."
- How Walmart detects an agent that breaks its terms, and how blocking is applied.
- Whether shoppers get any notice or appeal when Walmart requires an extra approval inside a spending limit.
