eBay appears to have blocked outside AI agents like Meta's Muse from browsing its listings, so shopping helpers may hit walls at some stores.
A reader of The Verge had an AI assistant check watch listings for him every day. This weekend it stopped working on eBay. Meta's Muse told him it was blocked from the site. eBay has not confirmed a new rule, but the signs point to the company shutting out outside AI agents.
For several weeks, the reader had Muse build a daily digest of watches for sale on sites like eBay. Each digest had links, prices, shipping details and notes on condition or style. Over the weekend, Muse could no longer pull links or details from eBay. The Verge repeated the test with other searches. In some cases, Muse sent users to outside sites that mirrored eBay listings instead.
eBay had already updated its user agreement to ban "buy-for-me agents" and "LLM-driven bots" that place orders without a human reviewing them. Until recently, though, agents like Muse could still browse and pull listings.
eBay spokesperson Sybille St. Arromand declined to say directly whether new limits were recently added. She said eBay takes a selective approach to outside access. The company has restricted agent access in certain cases, including unauthorized scraping and training on its data. Scraping means automatically copying content from a website. eBay also said it is talking with potential partners about how outside agents could help new customers find its inventory. Meta declined to comment.
Stores are still learning how to handle bots. In October, The Verge found that Muse could hold items hostage on The RealReal, a secondhand designer site, by repeatedly adding one product to a cart. The RealReal updated its bot system after the reporting.
It is unclear how common shopping by AI agent really is. Uber said third-party agents completed only four rides in the third quarter. It also said they placed only around 500 Uber Eats orders in the week of Halloween. DoorDash said agents placed "several hundred" orders, against 993 million total orders last quarter.
If you use an AI assistant to hunt for deals, expect it to run into closed doors at some stores. Results may come from copies of listings on other sites. Before you buy, open the listing on the store itself and check the price, shipping and condition.
If an AI assistant finds you a deal, open the store's own listing and confirm the price, shipping and condition before you buy.
A leaked EU draft would make AI shopping helpers ask for fresh approval when they are paid to push a deal. Shoppers and sellers could see more prompts.
Read more: EU draft law would make AI shopping helpers ask before some purchasesAnthropic says it signed about $10 billion more in cloud commitments with Microsoft and Google, which shows how costly AI is to run.
Read more: Anthropic adds about $10 billion in cloud deals with Microsoft and GoogleSalesforce says its AI sales agents give reps back about six hours a week, but the numbers come from a survey of only 24 of its own customers.
Read more: Salesforce survey: AI sales helpers save reps about six hours a week
