Users of Meta’s AI assistant, Muse, started getting a strange error message when they tried to buy goods on Amazon Sunday night. According to GeekWire, an American technology news website, the error message read: “Continued access by an unauthorised AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed.” In other words, Muse is not welcome as a shopper — and anyone trying to buy something on Amazon through the AI agent will have to find it somewhere else. It’s easy to see the block as a tête-à-tête between tech giants.
Tech analysts are of the view that as long as Amazon has its own cohort of foundation models, along with one of the most popular inference platforms on the internet, it is not under any legal obligation to open the doors to Muse. But there are also substantive reasons Amazon might not want to be in the agentic commerce business just yet. If Muse makes a bad order, Amazon is going to be the one to clean it up — dealing with both the angry customer and the angry vendor. Muse has one of the lower hallucination rates, as AI models go, but it’s still pretty far from zero.
Even if Amazon sees an opportunity in agent-driven commerce, they may want to wait a few more release cycles before rolling anything out, experts posit. OpenAI Constitutes Math Advisory Group
Source: GeekWire
