Walmart to let shoppers set spending limits for their AI agents

Walmart will introduce Agent Profiles next month, letting customers give each AI shopping agent a separate profile with its own spending limit and purchase approvals, with approval as the default; examples include $50, $100 or $200. A profile is created automatically when a customer first uses an agent on Walmart’s Agent Gateway, which is built on Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, an open standard for connecting AI agents to outside tools and data, and is entering beta for businesses and developers. Walmart CEO John Furner announced the plan at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. The move contrasts with Amazon, which blocked Meta’s Muse agent less than two weeks after launch, citing customer security and user experience.