Here’s what’s on our plate today:

• 🧪 Amazon’s AI agents scrape retailers and hijack the customer relationship.

• 🧠 Bite-Sized Brains: Google’s bad AI meds, Grok ban, and prompt theft.

• 💬 Prompt of the day: design your ideal AI shopping agent.

• 🗳️ Who should own the shopping agent?

Let’s dive in. No floaties needed…

The Laboratory

Why Amazon’s shopping agents have retailers alarmed

Long before the world learned about the idea of machines thinking as independent entities, Alan Turing had designed a test to check whether machines could think.

Originally called the “imitation game,” the test today is seen as the benchmark for assessing the capabilities of modern artificial intelligence models. And though some large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have been claimed to pass certain versions of the test under specific conditions, most AI researchers agree that no machine has yet passed a rigorous, unrestricted Turing Test flawlessly.

However, the lack of clarity on whether AI models can pass the Turing test has not stopped enterprises from trying to build and make commercially available tools that are touted as independent agents capable of performing complex tasks.

From the Turing test to agentic commerce

One such entrepreneurial product was Amazon’s Shop Direct. The feature on the e-commerce platform was designed to scrape product data from independent retailers' websites and list those items on Amazon's marketplace, without the retailers’ consent.

These tools were distributed under two programs, Shop Direct and Buy for Me, both of which were announced in February 2025 and have since grown from 65,000 products at launch to over 500,000 by November 2025.

However, now the products have landed Amazon in a controversy, one where the company is being accused of data-scraping in a way that threatens how e-commerce and the internet function.

Amazon’s promise

Amazon’s AI shopping tools promised convenience for retailers and shoppers. The current controversy suggests, however, that they have delivered something else: a reckoning over who controls online sales.

The programs in question, Shop Direct and Buy for Me, were designed to help customers find products not sold directly on Amazon.

Shop Direct surfaces items from external brand websites within Amazon's search results. Buy for Me takes it further: an AI agent that can complete purchases on third-party websites on the customer's behalf, using encrypted payment and shipping details.

For Amazon, this is the next logical step in becoming the universal front door to e-commerce. For small retailers who never agreed to participate, it feels like something else entirely.

The backlash no one warned about

The backlash did not arrive with an announcement or a policy update. It surfaced quietly, in late December 2025, when small retailers began noticing orders that did not quite make sense.

Hitchcock Paper, a stationery shop in Virginia, was among the first to realize something was off. The company started receiving purchase emails from a ‘buyforme.amazon’ address for a stress ball, a product it does not even sell.

What initially seemed like a glitch soon turned into something larger. Angie Chua, the founder of Bobo Design Studio, gave the issue a public face after sharing her experience on Instagram. Her video, which has since crossed half a million views, struck a nerve with other small business owners. Chua sells stationery through her own Shopify store and has made a deliberate choice to stay off Amazon. Yet she, too, began receiving orders placed by Amazon’s Buy for Me agent, despite never opting into the program.

Once Chua’s post gained traction, other retailers started looking more closely. Amanda Stewart, who runs the children’s clothing brand Mochi Kids, discovered that nearly 4,000 of her products had been listed on Amazon. Since November, she had unknowingly fulfilled around 16 Buy for Me orders before realizing where they were coming from.

As more merchants compared notes, a clear pattern emerged. According to a survey Chua later conducted among affected sellers, businesses using platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and Squarespace had all been pulled into the program without prior consent. In every case, retailers said they had to proactively reach out to Amazon to have their products removed.

How Buy for Me actually works

A closer look at how the system works helps explain why so many retailers are uneasy. Amazon says it pulls product details and pricing directly from a brand’s website and refreshes that information regularly. But in its own documentation, the company also notes that it may change how those details are presented inside the Amazon Shopping app.

That combination has led to predictable problems. Products that are no longer available continue to show up. Items that have been discontinued still get listed. Prices can differ from what appears on the retailer’s own site. And while these listings are marked as coming from other brands, they often look similar to standard Amazon product pages, which can leave shoppers with the impression that the brand is selling on Amazon directly.

The knock-on effects show up quickly in customer service. Orders placed through Buy for Me arrive via anonymized Amazon-linked email addresses, which means shipping updates and tracking emails do not always reach customers properly. Retailers say this leads to confused buyers asking for order updates even when packages are already on their way.

When automation breaks trust

For some businesses, the risks go beyond operational headaches. A wholesale supplier told Modern Retail she was concerned about tax compliance if individual shoppers placed tax-exempt orders through her wholesale storefront. She also worried that competitors could gain visibility into sensitive wholesale pricing that was never meant for public view.

Amazon’s defence, and an awkward lawsuit

Amazon insists that its programs are designed to help, not harm. A company spokesperson told CNBC that Shop Direct and Buy for Me are meant to help customers discover new products while giving businesses access to new audiences and additional sales. Amazon also points out that it does not take a commission on Buy for Me purchases and says merchants can opt out by contacting the company directly.

That explanation, however, sits uneasily alongside Amazon’s recent legal posture. Just two months before merchants began pushing back publicly, Amazon filed a lawsuit in a U.S. federal court against AI startup Perplexity. The company accused Perplexity’s Comet browser of deploying AI agents that masked their identity while scraping Amazon’s website and placing purchases without permission.

In its public comments on the case, Amazon argued that third-party tools should operate transparently and respect a service provider’s choice about whether to participate. That principle now sits at the centre of the controversy.

Many affected merchants say Amazon is effectively doing what it claims to oppose, only at a much larger scale. While Amazon has blocked dozens of external AI agents from accessing its own platform, it has simultaneously been pulling data from independent retailers’ websites without explicit consent.

Perplexity’s response to the lawsuit was direct, describing it as an attempt to intimidate a potential competitor. For critics, the irony is hard to miss. Amazon is now facing similar accusations from small businesses that say its AI shopping tools crossed the same lines they were never asked to cross.

At the same time, Shopify quietly updated the robots.txt files across its millions of merchant storefronts. The new language is explicit: "Automated scraping, 'buy-for-me' agents, or any end-to-end flow that completes payment without a final review step is not permitted."

Platforms draw their lines

However, these could be the beginnings of a wider change.

The dispute over Buy for Me is about more than a single feature. It is an early test case for what happens when AI agents become the default interface for shopping.

Consumers are already using AI tools to replace traditional search and discovery. Amazon’s own shopping assistant, Rufus, now reaches hundreds of millions of users and is projected to drive billions of dollars in additional sales. Analysts see enormous upside in agent-led commerce, and Amazon is investing accordingly.

The strategic logic is clear. In a world where AI agents handle discovery, comparison, and checkout, whoever controls the agent controls the customer relationship. Amazon’s move to position itself as that intermediary, even for purchases it does not fulfill, reflects that ambition.

For independent retailers, the questions are more existential. If AI agents can treat the open web as a catalogue to be quietly absorbed into dominant platforms, consent risks becoming an afterthought rather than a requirement.

What is playing out now is not just a backlash against a single product. It is a fight over whether the future of online commerce is opt-in by design or opt-out by default.

AI models may still struggle to pass the Turing Test, but the tools built on top of them are already reshaping how people interact with systems that matter. In shopping, these agents are no longer just recommending products or answering questions. They are quietly deciding where purchases happen, how brands are presented, and who controls the relationship between buyer and seller.

Bite-Sized Brains

• Google pulls risky AI answers: Google pauses medical AI Overviews after users flag dangerously wrong health advice.

• Indonesia bans Grok over deepfakes: Indonesia blocks Grok nationwide for generating non-consensual sexualized deepfake images of women and girls.

• AI prompts, or quiet plagiarism? Artists warn that lazy reuse of AI prompts is turning human styles into low-effort plagiarism.

Prompt Of The Day

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