Amazon kicked Meta's Muse off its store. Here's the diff.

What this video covers

• Muse, two weeks later: unauthorized AI agent
• The block: an anti-bot wall and a very polite Muse
• Amazon's three complaints, Meta's box with a key
• Perplexity prior art: the Ninth Circuit says you are the hacker
• Buy for Me: the rule, written by the store with an opt-out form

Transcript

Muse, two weeks later: unauthorized AI agent

0:00 Two weeks ago I told you Meta shipped Muse, a personal agent that lives on its own cloud computer and shops for you. On Sunday night the biggest store in America locked the door, and the sign on it reads, unauthorized AI agent. So here is the weekend. On Sunday night, Amazon began showing Muse users a popup. Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's conditions of use, which you, the customer, agreed to.

0:25 This morning xAI shipped Grok four point seven, half the price according to the headline and the same price according to the next paragraph. And an app called ZuckOff hit the top of Hacker News, because it hears Meta's camera glasses before they see you. In this video, how Amazon blocks a bot without a court, why the last court fight went badly for Amazon, and the awkward little agent Amazon runs on everybody else's store. It's Monday, September 21st, and this is The Daily Diff.

The block: an anti-bot wall and a very polite Muse

0:54 First, the block. Muse works like a human with a laptop. If a service has an API it uses the API, otherwise it opens a browser and clicks the way you would. Amazon has no shopping API for outside agents, so Muse clicks. The Register tested it this morning and asked Muse for the best reviewed office chair. Muse came back with, quote, hit a snag. Amazon is showing an anti-bot wall that blocks automated browsers outright,

1:20 and I didn't push past it. The most polite thing a Meta product has ever said to anyone. Amazon's complaint has three parts.

Amazon's three complaints, Meta's box with a key

1:27 Meta never told Amazon that Muse would shop there. Muse doesn't identify itself when it browses. And Amazon says the agent appears to store customer credentials, and can walk through your order history if you ask it to. Meta's launch post says the opposite. Muse has no visibility into passwords or payment methods, they sit in secure storage on the virtual machine, and a second agent called Sentinel approves anything Muse sends out.

1:52 So the password is in a box, on a computer Meta owns, and the bot with the key promises it never looks. Meta had not answered anyone by Monday afternoon, which is Meta for yes. Amazon has tried the front door before.

Perplexity prior art: the Ninth Circuit says you are the hacker

2:04 Last November it sued Perplexity, because the Comet browser's assistant did the same clicking. In March a judge barred that agent from the logged-in parts of the site. In August the Ninth Circuit threw the order out with one sentence. When the agent follows your instruction, you are the one accessing Amazon's computers, not the AI company. Amazon asked for a rehearing and got a no on September tenth. Ten days later it stopped suing the bot and started addressing the shopper. The popup doesn't say Meta broke in.

2:33 It says you agreed to the conditions of use, and your bot is breaking them. This time the defendant is you.

Buy for Me: the rule, written by the store with an opt-out form

2:39 Now the awkward part. Amazon has an agent. Rufus became Alexa for Shopping in May, and Amazon says Rufus helped over three hundred million customers last year. It has a feature called Buy for Me, which shops other retailers' websites for you, with your Amazon card. Amazon's statement says agents should respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate.

3:01 In January, Modern Retail found small Shopify merchants whose whole catalogues had appeared on Amazon through Buy for Me, four thousand products in one case, uninvited. The way to say no was to email Amazon. One founder said it turned us into drop shippers against our will. So agents must ask the store first, and the store that wrote the rule ships with an opt-out form. The reason is not privacy, it is the sixty-eight billion dollars.

$68 billion: the seat between you and the checkout

3:26 That is Amazon's ad revenue for last year, and every dollar of it needs a human looking at a page of sponsored products. An agent doesn't scroll. Amazon's own CEO says shoppers who use its assistant spend forty percent more per order. That is the seat between you and the checkout, and Amazon just said whose chair it is. Meta, for the record, banned ChatGPT and Perplexity from the WhatsApp business API last October.

3:51 Two doors, two locks, two shocked owners.

Grok 4.7: half the price, same price, five points lower

3:54 Meanwhile, Grok four point seven. The blog says half the price of comparable models, then says it costs the same as Grok four point six, two dollars in and six out, so the discount is against models that aren't Grok. On the slide-deck benchmarks, which are undefeated, it wins the legal one by a mile. On Terminal-Bench it gets thirty-eight, and Fable five point one gets fifty-eight. Then Vals AI ran its own suite and posted that Grok four point

4:18 seven ranks twenty-fourth on their index, five points below Grok four point six. So the new model is bigger, costs the same, and by one independent count is worse. Progress. And the glasses.

ZuckOff: the glasses announce themselves

4:28 ZuckOff is a free app that listens for the Bluetooth manufacturer ID that Ray-Ban Meta glasses broadcast, and tells you a camera is in the room. It can't tell you whether it's recording. Meta sold about seven million pairs last year, the recording light is defeated with tape, and the top comment on Hacker News was, great name. It has a merch store, of course. If you'd rather read this than hear me say it, the diff lands in your inbox every morning, free at the daily diff dot dev, link below.

4:53 So, today's verdict, needs review.

Verdict: needs review, and Amazon's agent goes first

4:55 Amazon's rule is right, an agent shows its ID at the door and the store gets to say no. Amazon's own agent should go first. And that's the diff for today. I'm Niko from Axrisi. Merge responsibly.

Sources

1. GeekWire (primary)www.geekwire.com
2. The Register's own Muse testwww.theregister.com
3. Forbeswww.forbes.com
4. Hacker News (116 pts)news.ycombinator.com
5. Meta, Introducing Muse (Sep 8)about.fb.com
6. Ninth Circuit, Amazon v. Perplexity (Aug 4)law.justia.com
7. CNBC, injunction (Mar 10)www.cnbc.com
8. Amazon, Alexa for Shopping / Buy for Mewww.aboutamazon.com
9. Modern Retail, Buy for Me opt-outwww.modernretail.co
10. xAI, Grok 4.7x.ai
11. Vals AI on Grok 4.7x.com
12. ZuckOff: https://zuckoff.app/ · Wiredwww.wired.me