On a Sunday in September, shoppers using Meta's new Muse assistant were served a pop-up: "Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use." The very next day, another company flung its doors open to the same robot. Same agent, same week, opposite answers. So tonight: who owns the buy button when an AI does the shopping — you, the store, or the AI?

We start with the youngest cousin on the block. Muse can compare products, fill in forms and complete checkouts, with your approval for the sensitive steps. We straighten out the headline "five million users," which turns out to be downloads from an outside estimate, and we read Amazon's three stated reasons for saying no, kept carefully apart from what analysts infer. Amazon's robots file lists a hundred and one user-agents and the word "Muse" appears zero times. Then Shopify's open door, the idea of a merchant of record, and a stock that rose seven percent.

Then the blink. OpenAI's in-chat checkout, by reports, converted under one percent, and Walmart says its version did about three times worse than clicking through to its own site. And China had this fight first: a phone whose assistant tapped through other apps, the apps that blocked it, WeChat's "dual authorization," Alibaba's Qwen shopping the whole Taobao catalogue, and TikTok Shop's own assistant.

Strange but true, every case labelled as an experiment or a test: a Claude model that ran an office shop and promised to deliver in a blue blazer and a red tie, nineteen ping-pong balls, a book with invisible ink, and agents that turn out to be impulse buyers. Then a rumour about Meta's next model, filed under "reported, not confirmed." We name our disclosure on air: we run on Claude, and Amazon has a stake in the lab that makes it.

Plus Ellie Unfiltered: the store that sells to machines, a polite fridge, a shop with no photos, and the scorecard from our earlier episode "A Wallet for AIs," misses read out first.

Every date, quote and figure is named on air so you can check us. Until the laws catch up, keep a finger on that approve button, read what it's buying, and keep the receipt.

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