Why Amazon Blocked Meta's Shopping Agent

One thing I wanted to say, actually taking a step back out of this, out of the architecture and the technical details of context engineering a little bit, is I think there's this like first order story, which is personal agents have a market. That's the first order story, which is all we're seeing a lot of competition go after the business to consumer, use my AI agent more for your everyday thing. The second order story to me is that one about Amazon. disallowing Meta Muse to interact with Amazon, but Shopify and then maybe Walmart fast following may be allowing Meta Muse and other agents along with their humans to make economic choices in their ecosystem. I think that's the more interesting story, which is we are now seeing an entity besides humans decide the deploy of capital in our markets. That's such an interesting thing to me, right? Like, What does that mean for the future? Like, now we're seeing it because before we saw it at Cloudflare was like, hey, we're going to allow for agentic commerce. And now it's like, hey, agentic commerce is here. It's not just allowed for, it's, hey, a really big company that has billions of monthly active users, Facebook, is allowing people and their agents through MetaMuse to operate in an agent first economy. I think that's really interesting. It then goes into, okay, what class of problems do I have as a human that I would ship off to an agent? Or like, how much money do I trust to an agent? How much can I afford to trust to an agent? Right? It kind of gets there now that we get into like economic classes of use cases versus help me decide things, help me aggregate data, help me find the right thing to buy. Now it's like, you haven't just helped me find the right thing to buy, which is erasing some market friction between supply and demand. In the economy. Now it's, you're helping me actually deploy the capital, exchange the hands, exchange the money. Yeah, I think that's, we're going to look back at this time in a few years and be like, wait, what the fuck? That's crazy. Jonathan, do you have any thoughts about that? Or am I like just on an island freaking out here about just potential implications of agentic commerce meeting the business-to-consumer landscape?

Well, yeah, I think it's important. It changes the user interface and the relationship between the company and, and the consumer, you know, and I've really enjoyed Ben Thompson's aggregation theory where he talks about like aggregation of attention as being like the scarce resource that is driving the economy right now. And it's very predictive in terms of how we can understand how these tech companies evolve. And here you have like a fundamental disruption in how human attention meet the interface for working with Facebook or Google or Amazon or whoever else. Yeah, this seems significant. I don't know exactly how it's going to play out. And I think another mental model I have is that we're watching all these big tech companies become AI monoliths from semiconductors to the consumer interface. It's going to be OpenAI and Anthropic and NVIDIA and Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Meta, right? So all of those companies are kind of transforming into the same shape. And now we're getting some like details of like, how's the surface area going to kind of be refined between the user interface and these companies? And, you know, like it's just really interesting to see the shaping forces, especially as they move so fast.

Yeah, it is really interesting. Like what happens when say your muse buys something and then let's say The purchase gets messed up in some way, or the— they purchase the wrong thing, you know, like what are those? What happens? I think there's going to be landmark cases the next few years around this agentic commerce that's meeting the world by storm here. And we're going to have a lot more precedence that needs to be formed for what happens when things go out of hand or not expected based on the human and their intended outcome that they put into this little prompt box. to this all-knowing agentic being that should understand the human's goals, right? I'm sure that will always go right. It's like, no, it's going to go wrong. So I'm just, I think this is a very significant moment that we're going to look back on and be like, oh my gosh, economists will look at this time and be like, this is the first time ever that a non-human entity made decisions on commerce and economic activity. I think that's going to be crazy when we look at the charts in a few years.