Amazon began inviting a small group of US customers to buy through Alexa for Shopping by text message on November 6, and the company said the option will reach millions more customers in the coming weeks, according to PPC Land. It is the clearest sign yet of a choice large platforms are making about outside AI agents, which we lay out in our comparison of Amazon, Walmart, Shopify and Mercado Libre and track in our retailer agent access story. CEO Andy Jassy said on October 29 that Amazon expects Alexa for Shopping to be the primary agent customers use to shop Amazon, after the company cut Meta's Muse agent off from Amazon.com in September. Mercado Libre CEO Ariel Szarfsztejn told analysts on November 4 that the company has decided, for now, not to provide its inventory to any external platform.
Walmart and Shopify sit on the other side. Walmart has published terms letting approved outside agents search and buy, with customers approving agent purchases by default; the Shelby Report said its Agent Profiles were launching within a month, and we could not confirm they are live. Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said orders from AI channels grew 3.3x, without disclosing the base. For brands, the split decides where discovery happens and who keeps order and payment data. On Amazon, that discovery is turning into ad inventory: Amazon's announcement did not address ads, but Digiday reported that Sponsored Products will appear in text conversations, free to advertisers for now. Reliability is also unsettled, since a Visa test of 22 agents found they completed everyday purchases about 57% of the time.
Merchants who do sell through outside agents face competing protocols, which is the pitch behind Firmly's $15 million Series A, led by Squarepoint Capital with J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard and Samsung Next, as Retail Technology Innovation Hub reported. Firmly says one integration reaches agents, marketplaces, social networks and shoppable ads, though it disclosed no revenue or merchant counts. It belongs to our agentic checkout rails story; before signing with any connector, ask who is merchant of record and who owns order data.
On risk, OpenAI released GPT-6 Cyber to approved API customers and rated its cyber capability critical under its internal framework, ITdaily reported. OpenAI says it scored 48.5% on its ExploitGym benchmark, against 32.1% for its predecessor, claims that have not been independently verified. If they hold, the gap between disclosure and exploitation of flaws in checkout scripts and payment SDKs could shrink, a thread in our agent security story. In Europe, a non-binding research ethics note from the European Commission rates AI rights risks one right at a time and flags AI credit scoring, according to PPC Land; AI Act deployer assessments for those uses apply from December 2, 2027.
PPC Land notes the announcement is inconsistent on when text purchases need customer approval, and Amazon has not said how sponsored placements in texts will be reported. With Black Friday on November 27, those are the questions to put to your Amazon account team before the option reaches millions more shoppers.