Let the agents in

On October 21, Walmart gave the clearest answer yet from a big retailer to a question every company with a website now has to face: when a customer sends an AI agent to do the shopping, do you let it in?

Walmart said yes. It opened an Agent Gateway that agents connect to over MCP, the open standard AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT use to plug into tools. It announced Agent Profiles, arriving within about a month, so a customer can link an agent to their Walmart account, give it a spending limit and see everything it bought. And it published terms for agents: act only on what the shopper asked for, never handle payment details, or get blocked.

A month earlier, Amazon went the other way and started blocking Meta’s Muse from shopping its site.

Two of the biggest retailers in the world made opposite bets on the same question. We think one of those bets ages a lot better than the other. gmoney, the night after the announcement:

“This is Walmart taking over the space that Amazon left open, exactly what I was talking about… They’re the only team that has the scale and operations to take on Amazon in any way, shape, or form, especially in terms of price and speed of delivery.”

gmoney, October 22

The thesis

Companies that let agents use their sites, make it easy for agents to buy, and plug into the AI tools people already work in are bullish in our eyes. Companies that wall agents out are making a short term trade that gets harder to defend every month.

Three reasons.

Agents are becoming the front door. More people now start with an assistant, not a search box or an app. When someone tells Muse or ChatGPT to reorder toothpaste, the agent decides where the order goes, and it goes to a store it can actually use. Meta says more than 10 million people in the US and Canada have set up Muse since it launched on September 8.

Agents shop on price, speed and stock, not on the storefront. A person scrolling Amazon sees sponsored results first. An agent told to find the best value doesn’t care about the banner. That moves power away from shelf space you can sell and toward the things that are hard to fake: price, inventory and delivery.

Usage flows to whatever agents reach for first. When an agent builds a website it reaches for Cloudflare and GitHub. When it buys something it reaches for the checkout that works. Being the default is a distribution moat, and those defaults are being set right now.

What changed this year

• January 11. Google announces the Universal Commerce Protocol with Shopify, Walmart, Target and Etsy: one common way for agents to find products and check out in Google’s AI Mode and Gemini.
• March. Walmart says purchases made inside ChatGPT converted at a third the rate of sending shoppers to walmart.com, and moves to its own Sparky assistant inside ChatGPT. OpenAI starts phasing out its Instant Checkout in favor of checkout run by merchants.
• August 4. A federal appeals court lifts the order that had kept Perplexity’s shopping agent off Amazon, finding it was Perplexity’s users, not Perplexity, who accessed the site.
• September 8. Meta launches Muse, which checks out through Stripe’s Link wallet. Shopify adds Meta as a channel in its Agentic Storefronts the same day.
• September 20. Amazon starts blocking Muse, saying agentic apps should “operate openly and respect service provider decisions.”
• September 21 to 23. Shop Pay checkout comes to Muse, PayPal follows, and Instacart and Expedia are plugged in by Meta Connect.
• October 21. Walmart launches the Agent Gateway and its terms for agents, and announces Agent Profiles. That evening Meta reports its quarter and Mark Zuckerberg says Meta will work on making money from Muse “somewhat sooner on this than our normal playbook,” because of “the amount of commerce that we already see taking place.”

What we’ve said on the show

We’ve been on this since the week Amazon blocked Muse.

“When I’m buying toothpaste or socks or deodorant, I don’t care if I buy it from Amazon or Walmart. I want it as fast as possible, as cheap as possible.”

gmoney, September 22. Play it at 1:12:30

That day gmoney bought Walmart calls a year out “on the bet that Walmart doesn’t stay asleep at the wheel here.” His read: by walling off Muse, Amazon handed the one retailer that can match it on price and speed an opening, and a way to earn some of the AI multiple. He sold the calls in early October, with Walmart near $105 and the trade not following through, and said on October 15 that he “sold the bottom.” Then Walmart shipped the very thing the trade was betting on. By its price onchain, Walmart has gone from about $110 on the day of that call to about $121, up roughly 10%. The thesis was right; the timing on the options wasn’t. We keep the receipts either way.

Hunter framed the split on October 15:

“Whoever leans into it and just says, you know, F it, we’re going to let it happen. It’s the future.”

Hunter, October 15. Play it at 32:56

He pointed to a founder who told Jason Calacanis he didn’t need a salesperson on the founding team: “I’m not going to be selling to people. I’m going to be selling to agents.” When the buyer is an agent, as Hunter put it, “It doesn’t matter what the UI looks like.” Play it at 36:31

gmoney added why that hurts a marketplace built on ads. On amazon.com, “the first results that you’re shown aren’t always the best value. Whereas like, I can tell my Grok bot to get the best value.” Play it at 38:27

On October 20 gmoney said Cloudflare is “going to probably be a big winner in the agentic world,” since it already shields sites from bot traffic and, as he put it, has “all the data,” and the show is long Cloudflare. Play it at 34:11 Hunter explained why every site we run is built the other way around from Amazon: “everything leans into, hey, this site is welcome for agents, come scrape it, come use it.” Play it at 35:52

And the day after Meta’s report, with the stock falling on worries about how Muse makes money, the read on the show was that shopping is the answer: “I don’t think, at the end of the day, it’s impossible to figure out the advertising and shopping angle for Muse.” Play it at 7:28

Who’s letting agents in

Walmart (WMT)

The Agent Gateway is in beta for companies and developers, and Agent Profiles arrive within about a month. A customer either approves every order or lets an agent buy on its own up to a limit, such as $50, $100 or $200. Agents never see card numbers and can’t add payment methods. They see the same prices people do (“We price products, not people,” in Walmart’s words), and agents that break the rules get blocked. Walmart already works inside Muse, ChatGPT and Gemini.

Our read: the most important move in agentic retail this year. Walmart doesn’t need to own the agent. It needs every agent to find Walmart easy, and it just built the door. The risk is one Walmart flagged itself in March: buying inside an assistant converted badly. The Gateway is a bet that a store built for agents works better than a store agents have to scrape.

Shopify (SHOP)

Shopify’s Agentic Storefronts put merchants’ catalogs into AI shopping channels by default, and Meta became one on September 8. Shop Pay checkout now works in Muse, and Shopify helped Google build the Universal Commerce Protocol.

Our read: Shopify gets paid whichever agent wins. Every independent brand on Shopify became agent ready without writing a line of code. gmoney’s caveat from September 22 still stands: that’s mostly smaller merchants, not the toothpaste and socks run that Amazon and Walmart fight over.

Meta (META)

Meta built the agent itself. Muse checks out through Stripe, Shop Pay and PayPal, books travel through Expedia and orders groceries through Instacart. The bill is real: capital spending was $34.9 billion last quarter and free cash flow was negative $2.1 billion. Meta’s stock fell about 8% the day after its report.

Our read: Meta owns the agent, the memory and the social graph. The market wants to know how Muse pays for itself, and we think commerce is the answer. Every retailer that opens up, like Walmart, makes Muse more useful. Every Amazon that closes the door makes it less so.

Cloudflare (NET)

Cloudflare sits in front of millions of websites, and its tools decide which bots get through. Since last year it has been piloting a way for sites to charge AI crawlers for access. In February it launched Markdown for Agents, which hands an agent a clean text version of a page, cutting the reading cost by up to 80%.

Our read: Cloudflare is the toll road and the map. Whether a company lets agents in or keeps them out, it usually does it through Cloudflare. We’re long.

The rails: Google, Stripe, PayPal and Mastercard

Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol gives agents one way to shop many stores. Stripe’s Link was the first wallet inside Muse, and PayPal brought its merchants, with Mastercard’s Agent Pay carrying those payments. Whoever wins the agent, these companies want to be how it pays. We watch them as the picks and shovels of this trade.

Who’s walling agents off: Amazon (AMZN)

Amazon blocks Muse. It sued Perplexity last November, won an order in March that kept Perplexity’s agent off Amazon, and lost it on appeal in August. Amazon says shopping agents should respect a store’s decisions, the way food delivery apps and travel sites need permission. Andy Jassy said in April that agentic shopping still had problems, like bots getting prices wrong. Amazon is also building its own shopping tools.

Our read: rational in the short term. Amazon earns a lot from sponsored placement, and an agent hunting for the best value skips it. Amazon also has logistics nobody else can match, so this isn’t a call to short it. But the first appeals court to rule on it sided with a shopper’s right to send an agent, and if more buying moves to agents, keeping them out gets more expensive every quarter.

What would change our mind

• Agents research more than they buy. Walmart’s numbers from March and OpenAI’s retreat from Instant Checkout show buying inside an assistant is still clunky. If agent checkout stays a rounding error, letting agents in is good manners, not a business.
• Margins. Agents that shop purely on price are great for shoppers and hard on everyone’s margins, including the companies that let them in.
• Platform risk. Opening up means leaning on Meta, OpenAI and Google, who may want a cut of every order.
• Trust. Agents that buy the wrong thing, or get used for fraud, could make shoppers pull back. Walmart’s terms keep its returns policy in force even when an agent gets it wrong, which tells you it expects mistakes.
• The bill. If Meta can’t make Muse pay for itself, the agent era arrives slower and costs more than anyone wants.

What we’re watching

• How many customers turn on Walmart’s Agent Profiles, and whether Walmart starts reporting sales from agents.
• Muse’s first real revenue. Meta says it will come sooner than its usual playbook.
• Whether Amazon opens a door: a partner program, an API, or a deal with Meta.
• Cloudflare’s next quarterly report.
• More retailers shipping agent gateways and MCP servers of their own.

We built ours too

We think this matters enough that we rebuilt fullportshow.com around it. Any AI can plug into the show through one address, every page has a version written for agents to read, and every episode, call and dashboard has an Ask AI button. Connect Full Port to your AI.