Amazon AI agent-driven shopping trial sparks backlash
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Occurred: January 2026
Page published: January 2026
The launch of Amazon’s "Buy for Me" AI shopping agent triggered a significant backlash from small businesses who accuse the retail giant of "hijacking" their catalogues, scraping data without consent, and creating a liability-filled shopping experience.
What happened
What happened
Amazon expanded trials of Buy for Me, an agentic AI tool integrated into its Rufus assistant and the Shop Direct programme, allowing customers to find products on external websites (like those hosted on Shopify, WooCommerce, or Squarespace) and complete the purchase entirely within the Amazon app.
The backlash intensified when hundreds of independent merchants discovered their entire product catalogues had been scraped and listed on Amazon without their knowledge or permission.
Merchants reported that the AI generated incorrect product descriptions, used unauthorised images, and sold items that were out of stock. One seller reported a 28 percnt chargeback rate on AI-driven orders; others faced "dropshipping" logistics they never agreed to, anonymised customer emails that made returns impossible, and the public exposure of confidential wholesale pricing.
Brands were accused of violating "no-Amazon" clauses in their wholesale contracts, and many faced reputational damage when Amazon’s AI misaligned their branding or return policies.
Why it happened
Why it happened
The incident highlights a profound double standard in corporate transparency and accountability. Amazon recently sued AI startup Perplexity for scraping Amazon’s own site, yet it deployed similar scraping technology against small businesses under the guise of an "experiment."
Amazon designed the trial as an automatic enrollment (opt-out) programme. The onus was placed on small business owners (who did not know the programme existed) to email a specific address to be removed.
The AI agents operate as "black boxes." Merchants were not notified when their data was scraped, nor did they have the tools to verify how the AI was modifying their product information before it was presented to millions of shoppers.
Critics argue that Amazon’s desire to capture "customer intent" outside its own ecosystem led it to prioritise speed and scale over the established norms of merchant autonomy and data ownership.
What it means
What it means
For directly impacted merchants, this event signals a loss of control over their own brand identity and inventory. They are being forced into a "platform-as-intermediary" model where they bear the operational risk (shipping, returns, and complaints) while Amazon controls the customer relationship.
For society, this is a "warning sign" for the ethics of agentic commerce. The incident suggests that current digital laws are insufficient to protect data from "purchasing agents" that act as proxies for users. As AI agents become the primary interface for shopping, brand loyalty may be replaced by algorithmic efficiency, potentially favoring platforms with the largest data-scraping capabilities over original creators. It remains unclear who is liable when an AI agent makes a "bad" purchase: the developer of the AI, the platform hosting it, or the merchant whose data was misinterpreted.
System 🤖
System 🤖
Buy For Me
Documents 📃
Documents 📃
Developer: Amazon
Country: USA
Sector: Retail
Purpose: Automate product sales
Technology: Agentic AI
Issue: Accountability; Accuracy/reliability; Autonomy; Competition/monopolisation; Transparency
News, commentary, analysis 🗞️
News, commentary, analysis 🗞️
AIAAIC Repository ID: AIAAIC2187
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