eBay has restricted access for AI agents, including Meta's Muse agent
eBay has stopped allowing Meta's Muse agent to browse listings on its marketplace. eBay speaks of selective access to AI agents to protect against unauthorized scraping, but has not confirmed the specific new restriction. Amazon blocks agents entirely, while Shopify, by contrast, supports them.
The Verge has found that eBay has blocked access for Meta's AI agent Muse, which for several weeks had served a user by browsing eBay watch listings and compiling a daily summary of them. The agent was newly unable to retrieve links and details from eBay and instead redirected the user to external servers that mirror eBay listings.
eBay spokesperson Sybille St. Arromand told The Verge that the company applies selective access to third parties and in some cases has restricted access for agents, for example due to unauthorized scraping and model training on eBay's data. She did not directly confirm or deny that this was a newly introduced restriction specifically targeting the Muse agent. According to an earlier update to eBay's user agreement, the company bans tools such as "buy-for-me agents" and bots driven by language models that place orders without human review. Meta declined to comment on the case.
According to the article, e-commerce platforms' approach to AI agents varies: Amazon blocks external agents entirely, Target in some cases allows agents to browse and in others blocks them, while Shopify, by contrast, has opened up its catalog of a billion listings to agents meant to make purchases on users' behalf. In October, The Verge also described a case in which the Muse agent on The RealReal could effectively "lock" a listing by repeatedly adding it to the cart; The RealReal subsequently modified its bot-detection system as a result.
The article further cites figures from Uber and DoorDash on actual usage of agentic shopping: in the third quarter, Uber facilitated just four rides and around 500 Uber Eats orders through third-party agents during Halloween week, while DoorDash reports only "a few hundred" orders out of a total of 993 million orders in the last quarter.
Why it matters
The case shows that AI agents' access to shopping platforms is in practice unstable and depends on a unilateral decision by the site operator rather than on a technical agreement. Companies building products on agentic shopping must therefore reckon with the possibility that functionality can change at any time without notice, and the figures from Uber and DoorDash further demonstrate that actual use of agents for placing orders remains negligible for now.
Two audiences, two different impacts
What this means
For individuals
Users who have the Muse agent or similar tools browse eBay listings for them may now find that the agent doesn't work or redirects them to untrusted mirror servers instead of directly to eBay.
For a business
Companies planning agentic shopping or the integration of AI agents into e-commerce processes must account for the inconsistent and changeable policies of individual marketplaces (eBay and Amazon restrict it, while Shopify, by contrast, is opening up its catalog), which increases the risk that relying on third-party agent access to a specific platform may stop working at any time.
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Event sources
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