Agentic commerce defaults - Amazon blocks Meta Muse, Google auto-enrolls Shopify checkout; platforms set the defaults

Two default settings changed in the same week, on opposite sides of the agentic commerce fight, and together they tell you where the power actually sits.

Meta's Muse agent, launched earlier this month, shops and pays on a customer's behalf. Amazon asked Meta to keep Muse away from its store, Meta declined, and Amazon cut it off. Customers now see a warning that access by an unauthorised AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use. Amazon's statement was polished: third-party agents should "operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate". The problem is that Amazon's own Buy for Me agent purchases from other retailers' sites by default, and those retailers have to notice and then email Amazon to opt out. Openness, it turns out, is a standard Amazon applies to agents entering its store, not to its own agent entering everyone else's.

Days later, Google told Shopify merchants their products were "now eligible for native checkout" inside AI Mode and Gemini, and that eligible products are automatically included. Nothing to set up, nothing signed. If a merchant would rather the sale happened on its own site, where the customer relationship and the data live, the merchant can go and turn it off by hand. Earlier this year that same checkout was an application-only program.

I wrote here in August that the frontier model race was giving way to a fight over distribution, and this week is what that fight looks like up close. Nobody is asking which model is smartest any more. They are asking which surface the agent has to cross to reach the customer, and who sets the defaults on that surface. Amazon and Google have both answered: the platform does, through terms of service and opt-out settings, decided in advance and changed unilaterally. Every business that sells online is now inside somebody else's default, whether it chose to be or not.

Worth a look at your own storefront this week. Do you know which AI channels your products are being sold through right now, and was that your decision or a setting you never touched?

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