Amazon, Yelp, Delta Join Banks Blocking Third-Party AI Agents

Amazon, Yelp, Delta Air Lines, JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab have all moved to shut third-party AI agents out of the parts of their sites where real tasks get done, The Verge reported on October 17.

The failures piled up on users of Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok, and OpenAI's Dots and Instinct in recent days.

Amazon began blocking Muse on September 20, roughly 12 days after Meta launched the shopping agent, after Meta declined Amazon's request to remove it. Amazon told reporters that Meta had not disclosed Muse would access the retail site and that the agent did not identify itself as AI while browsing. Yelp will admit only agents enrolled in its paid data-licensing program; Delta says it has no deals with third-party agents; JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab say the agents cannot touch customer accounts.

The banks frame it as a credentials problem. "We don't want someone just giving their password to Muse, and letting Muse come in and take action on that client's behalf," Charles Schwab chief executive Rick Wurster said. Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan has signaled his bank will require human authorization for payments until agents prove more reliable.

Meta's position is that the blocks hurt the customer, not just the agent. "Turning away a personal agent means turning away the customer behind it," the company said, and insisted Muse "cannot see passwords or payment methods." It pointed to live integrations with Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora and Wayfair, plus a Shopify default that enables Meta checkout for eligible stores.

Chris Canal, chief executive of AI-safety evaluator EquiStamp, put the squeeze plainly: "If there are companies that are actively working to make that not happen, there are just fewer useful things the agents can do." The agent beat has been busy on our tracker, with 499 agent-related stories in the last 90 days.