eBay appears to have blocked third-party AI agents, including Meta's Muse, from browsing its marketplace, The Verge reported. A reader told the outlet his Muse agent had compiled a daily digest of watch listings from eBay for several weeks, but this weekend it could not pull links or details and said it was blocked. The Verge said it re-created the block, and in some cases Muse sent users to outside sites that mirrored eBay listings.
eBay had already updated its user agreement to ban buy-for-me agents and LLM-driven bots that place orders without human review, but agents could still browse until recently, according to The Verge. eBay spokesperson Sybille St. Arromand declined to say directly whether new limits were imposed. She said eBay takes "a selective approach" to third parties, has "restricted agent access in certain cases, including unauthorized scraping and training on our data," and is evaluating ways third-party agents could help new customers discover its inventory. Meta declined to comment.
The Verge noted that Amazon blocks external agents entirely, Target blocks them in some cases, and Shopify has opened a catalog of a billion listings to shopper agents. It also cited low usage: Uber said it fulfilled only 4 rides via third-party agents in Q3, and DoorDash said it fulfilled several hundred agent orders against 993 million total orders last quarter.
