Amazon, Delta, JPMorgan block outside AI agents from customer accounts

Summary

• Amazon, Yelp, Delta, JPMorgan and Charles Schwab say they are blocking third-party AI agents.
• Amazon began blocking Meta's Muse agent in September, saying Meta refused a request to withdraw it.
• Access is narrowing to paid licensing or formal partnerships, shrinking what personal AI agents can actually do.

The latest

Five major US companies have confirmed they are blocking outside AI agents from their sites or customer accounts, according to The Verge. Amazon, Yelp, Delta Air Lines, JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab each described restrictions ranging from outright blocks to paid-license-only access. Schwab said it stops external agents attempting to move customer money dozens of times every week.

Details

• Amazon's block: Amazon said it began blocking Meta's Muse agent on 20 September, roughly 12 days after launch, according to The Verge. Amazon said it asked Meta to withdraw the agent and Meta refused, that Meta did not disclose Muse would enter its retail site, and that the agent did not identify itself as AI while browsing. TechCrunch, citing Bloomberg, put the date at 21 September.
• Yelp's paywall: Yelp told TechCrunch it permits only agents enrolled in its paid data-licensing program, and does not allow non-human traffic unless the agent pays for access. The policy converts agent access from a technical question into a commercial one.
• Delta's position: Delta told The Verge it has no agreements with third-party agents. Hina Chavda, Delta's managing director of global communications, told TechCrunch the measures are taken with security and customer experience in mind, and that no partnership allows an external agent to book its flights.
• The money question: JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab both said agents cannot reach customer accounts. Schwab CEO Rick Wurster told The Verge: "We don't want anybody giving their password to Muse." He added that if something goes wrong with a tool neither the firm nor the customer controls, responsibility becomes unclear.
• Schwab's numbers: In a 16 October Bloomberg Television interview, relayed by The Next Web, Wurster said a weekly report shows Schwab stopping external agents trying to move client funds dozens of times a week. He said Schwab will open read-only access via Model Context Protocol servers, letting outside tools check balances and search without moving money.
• Schwab's own agent: Wurster said the firm wants customers using its in-house assistant, Charley, announced on 30 September. The read-only MCP route and the proprietary assistant together define the only sanctioned path Schwab is offering third-party developers.
• Mixed signals: United Airlines pointed TechCrunch to terms barring any robot, spider or automated tool for monitoring or copying the site, and did not say whether it blocks Muse. eBay said it does not bar all shopping agents from completing purchases but restricts unauthorized agents, scraping and model training. Zillow said anti-scraping measures may sometimes catch consumer-side agents.
• Walmart's case: A Walmart spokesperson told TechCrunch that blocking incidents were not intentional. Walmart has been a Meta partner on Muse since the Meta Connect announcement on 23 September, making it the clearest example of a partner site still producing failures.
• Meta's defense: Meta argued that blocking a personal agent means blocking the customer behind it, and said Muse cannot see passwords or payment methods. It cited integrations with Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora and Wayfair, and a Shopify default enabling Meta payments for eligible merchants.
• The standards push: Meta is working with Walmart, Stripe, Sierra, Genesys, Rocket, NICE and Decagon on an open standard defining how agents communicate with corporate e-commerce systems, TechCrunch reported. Cloudflare changed default crawl settings on 15 September 2026 to let site owners block AI training while permitting other bots, and said it has no specific data on personal-agent blocking.

Background

Meta launched Muse in September 2026 as a personal agent able to browse and transact on consumer sites. Users of Muse, xAI's Grok, Dots, Instinct and OpenClaw have all run into recent failures on third-party sites, according to The Verge and TechCrunch.

Between the lines

The blocks cluster where agents touch money and bookings: retail checkout, flight reservations, brokerage accounts. Yelp's licensing program and Meta's standards consortium point the same direction — access becomes a negotiated commercial arrangement, not an open web default. Chris Canal, CEO of AI safety evaluation firm Equistamp, told The Verge that if companies move to block agents, the useful things agents can do will shrink.

What's next

Watch whether Schwab ships read-only MCP access, whether the Meta-Walmart-Stripe open standard produces a published specification, and whether United clarifies its stance on Muse.

Source: The Verge, TechCrunch, Bloomberg Television, The Next Web