Walmart Agent Gateway lets AI agents shop over MCP

Walmart is opening its store to outside AI agents. On October 21, 2026, CEO John Furner announced Agent Gateway, a server that lets approved agents search Walmart and Sam's Club inventory and buy for shoppers. It takes the opposite approach to Amazon, which blocks such agents from shopping on its site.

Furner made the announcement at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, Adgully reports. Walmart's own announcement describes three parts: Agent Gateway, Agent Profiles and a set of terms that every agent must follow.

What Agent Gateway does

Agent Gateway is built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP). MCP is an open standard, first created by Anthropic, that lets an AI agent call outside tools in a predictable way. Instead of an agent clicking through Walmart.com like a person, it asks the gateway for products, stock and checkout directly.

According to Adgully, approved agents include ChatGPT, Gemini and Meta's Muse. They can check real-time stock and complete purchases across Walmart and Sam's Club. Walmart says the gateway starts as a beta for companies and developers.

Walmart said in a statement, quoted by Seeking Alpha, that the tools "will let customers shop with Walmart and Sam's Club through the apps and agents they choose."

How Agent Profiles keep shoppers in control

The second part sits in the shopper's own account. Starting within the next month, each AI agent gets its own Agent Profile. Its purchases appear separately from the shopper's own orders.

Shoppers choose how much freedom each agent has:

Setting	What it does
Approval for every purchase	The agent proposes, the shopper confirms each order
Spending limit	The agent buys on its own up to a cap, such as $50, $100 or $200 in Walmart's examples
Turn off	The shopper removes the agent's permissions at any time

Profiles cost nothing, Adgully reports, and no Walmart+ membership is required.

The rules agents must follow

Walmart's new terms set limits on what an agent can do. An agent must not act beyond what the shopper asked for. It cannot see payment card details, and it cannot add or change payment methods. Adgully adds that agents may only use the information needed for the task. Agents that break the terms are blocked.

Two consumer protections carry over unchanged. Walmart's standard return policy applies to orders an agent places. Agents also see the same prices as people. "We price products, not people, so the prices that an AI agent sees are the same prices that a human would see on Walmart.com," Walmart wrote, as quoted by Cryptopolitan.

Why Walmart and Amazon split

Amazon has gone the other way. Adgully reports that Amazon cut off Meta's Muse agent on September 20. Amazon said Meta had not disclosed that Muse would use its store, and that the agent does not identify itself while browsing. Meta says Muse cannot see users' passwords or payment details.

Walmart is betting that agents will bring it sales. Cryptopolitan reports that Walmart U.S. CEO David Guggina said the company's own Sparky assistant grew 60% from one quarter to the next. In premarket trading after the news, Walmart shares rose 1.1% and Amazon's fell 1.7%, per Seeking Alpha.

Banks have been more cautious than Walmart. Schwab and JPMorgan block AI agents from moving client money. Schwab plans read-only MCP access instead.

What this means for developers

Walmart has turned a scraping problem into an API. For teams building shopping agents, that changes how the work should be done.

• Apply for the beta instead of scraping. The gateway is a beta for companies and developers. An agent that reads Walmart.com like a browser is the kind Amazon blocked, so a sanctioned MCP connection is the safer route.
• Make your agent identify itself. Amazon's complaint about Muse was that it did not say what it was. Build clear agent identity into every request, at Walmart and elsewhere.
• Design for approvals and caps. Agent Profiles mean a purchase may wait for a human, or stop at a limit. Your agent needs to handle "waiting for approval" and "over budget" as normal states, not errors.
• Never touch card data. Walmart's terms bar agents from payment details entirely. Keep payment out of your agent's memory, logs and prompts.
• Retailers should watch the split. If Walmart's agent orders grow, other stores will face the same choice Amazon and Walmart made. An MCP gateway with per-agent controls is now a working model to copy.