I don’t see how Amazon or anyone else can prevent AI agents from acting on someone’s behalf. Can they prevent me from using the keyboard or mouse I like? What about the browser I like? What about screen readers? Isn’t trying to ban use of an AI tool a potential violation of disability law? What if I need help from one of these tools to perform actions on my behalf? Or for that matter, isn’t this an antitrust issue - with companies trying to control everything with unreasonable demands?

Note that the broken patent system is a part of the abuse enablement. Companies like Amazon rack up huge portfolios of mostly frivolous patents for this purpose. They may claim they only use them defensively. But the reality is if you cross them in any way, they can then “defensively” make your life miserable by abusing the law through the broken patent system. For example if a company like Amazon copies your innovative product, you can’t practically go after them, because they hold all sorts of leverage through the patent system.

Related to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45814461

The reason Amazon doesn’t want AI involved is because then AI could skip Amazon altogether in the future and checkout directly on seller’s websites.

It’s actually the idea behind the decentralized marketplace I’m building. It uses MCP-UI to bring the whole storefront and checkout into the chat.

I’m keeping a close eye on e-commerce and AI and the recent deal Paypal made with OpenAI and Amazon getting aggressive, it’s clear they want to make AI powered commerce a walled garden.

No word on if their agent actually does the right thing or if it's causing higher than normal return rates

Agentic browsers raise a lot of questions that were hanging there even before LLMs.

Can I ask my partner to buy a product on Amazon? Can I ask my personal assistant to buy a product on Amazon? Can I hire a contractor to buy products on Amazon? Can I communicate with a contractor via API to direct them what products to buy? What if there is no human on the other end and its an LLM?

Same issue with LinkedIn. I know execs who have assistants running their socials. Is this legal?