This can actually be great for competition: Ideally, agents have more resources to thoroughly research smaller alternatives to trusted incumbents (although this does somewhat assume the existence of a trusted reviewing platform somewhere).

If Amazon outright refuses to compete on terms and in a playing field that they don't get to fully control, all the better!

> The company also has a financial reason to control the shopping trip: advertising. Amazon generated more than $68 billion in advertising revenue last year, helped by shoppers visiting its properties and viewing the products and sponsored placements displayed there. If outside AI agents take over product discovery, comparison, and purchasing, fewer shoppers may see Amazon's advertising or interact with its recommendation systems.

Who’s to say advertising wouldn’t be just as effective on AIs as it is on humans?

My concern with Muse, and all these AI shopping tools, is that we'll end up in a world where inventory drops to 0, orders are placed by the business based on the number of bots in the queue, and as inventory is made available, it is immediately snatched up by shopping bots... similar to what we've seen in collector markets (ex. sneaker drops) or concert ticket sales.

I don't want to live in a world where an AI agent is required to buy basic goods, just to compete with everyone else using them, and so businesses can optimize their supply chain to the point of product simply passing through the warehouse, without ever keeping inventory around.

This may look like an anticompetitive move from Amazon, and I'm not fan of Amazon, but I want shopping bots to fail. I think we are going in the wrong direction. We've seen how horrible shopping bots are, and I don't think the solution is to democratize them so more people have them. That simply makes the problem worse.

Maybe they couldn't trick the agent into signing up to Amazon Prime.

This is why we need antitrust laws