United Airlines will sell you a ticket. It’s drawing the line at selling one to your personal AI assistant.
On November 11, the airline announced restrictions on unauthorized third-party AI agents, covering access through its own digital platforms and through travel agencies and aggregators. United cites exposed account credentials, unintended purchases, accidental use of MileagePlus miles, and potential conflicts with aviation requirements.
Those are reasonable things to worry about. Nobody wants their assistant spending a year’s worth of miles on the wrong flight.
But the most revealing line came from CEO Scott Kirby, who told The Wall Street Journal: “I don’t want to create another middleman.”
That gets to the business question underneath the security debate: When your AI does the shopping, who gets to keep the relationship with you?
United wants that relationship to stay with United. Amazon has been pushing in the same direction. Walmart is betting it can win business by letting outside agents in.
The choices these companies make could determine whether your future assistant can shop across the internet or spends half its day explaining which websites won’t let it through.
United’s concern about another intermediary makes commercial sense. If a personal agent learns your travel preferences, compares airlines, and handles purchases, it could become the place you start every trip.
The airline would still operate the flight. But the assistant could influence which airline gets the booking in the first place.
Imagine telling an agent: Find a flight that gets me home before dinner, includes a carry-on, and doesn’t require a connection unless the savings are substantial. An assistant that already knows your schedule and preferences could carry those instructions from one airline to another.
That is useful for the traveler. For the airline, it means competing inside someone else’s interface, with fewer opportunities to shape the purchase.
There is an obvious historical echo here. Online travel agencies already demonstrated how valuable it can be to sit between travelers and airlines. Personal agents could become another influential distribution channel, this time armed with a much more detailed understanding of the person buying.
Amazon faces a similar challenge.
The company asked Perplexity to remove Amazon shopping from Comet, arguing that purchasing applications should identify themselves and respect a business’s decision about whether to participate. It also cited problems with the shopping and customer-service experience. Amazon subsequently blocked Meta’s Muse agent.
Its legal campaign against Perplexity has met resistance: the Ninth Circuit vacated a preliminary injunction in August, and a rehearing petition was denied in September. That dispute remains separate from the broader commercial question of how Amazon wants customers to shop.
Amazon’s own Alexa for Shopping and Buy for Me features make its interest in AI shopping clear. Buy for Me can even purchase eligible products from other merchants on a customer’s behalf.
The company sees value in an assistant that searches and buys across stores. It also wants a say in which assistants can do that inside Amazon.
There is plenty at stake. A customer browsing a retailer’s website encounters its recommendations, promotions, sponsored placements, and reasons to buy something extra. An agent arriving with a specific assignment could shorten that journey dramatically.
The retailer might still get the sale. It could lose some influence over everything leading up to it.
Walmart is taking a different approach.
In October, it announced Agent Profiles and a Walmart Agent Gateway, designed to let customers authorize outside assistants with defined permissions. Planned controls include approval for individual purchases, spending limits, separate purchase records, and the ability to revoke access. Agents would not receive customers’ payment-card information.
The announcement put Agent Profiles on a launch schedule for the following month; it did not establish that every feature was already available.
Walmart also reserves the right to block agents that break its rules. Its approach gives outside assistants a controlled path to checkout while preserving oversight.
As we covered when Walmart announced the controls, retailers are already disagreeing over how much freedom to give the software shopping for you.
Walmart’s wager is understandable: if customers increasingly start with their own assistant, being available to that assistant could be more valuable than insisting they start in the Walmart app.
And that is where the consumer argument gets compelling.
The appeal of a personal agent is that it can know you across stores.
It could remember your clothing sizes, household needs, preferred brands, budget, dietary restrictions, and the supposedly excellent headphones you returned because they hurt your ears. You would not have to teach a different assistant the same things every time you entered another company’s ecosystem.
There is a strong case that people will want that continuity. Whether they trust agents enough to delegate routine purchases at scale is still an open question.
For businesses, that same continuity creates a competitive threat. If the useful knowledge about your preferences lives with a portable assistant, the store’s understanding of you becomes a smaller part of the purchase decision.
Control over customer data matters because it supports control over recommendations, repeat purchases, and where people choose to spend.
An outside assistant introduces its own complications, too. A personal agent supplied by a large AI company still has an owner, a privacy policy, and a business model. Moving the customer relationship away from a retailer could simply make another platform more powerful.
Consumers will need to know what the assistant remembers, who can access that information, and whether commercial arrangements influence its recommendations.
United, Amazon, and Walmart are making early decisions about where they fit into that future. Security requirements will shape the boundaries. So will the desire to keep customers close.
The promise of a personal agent is that it can take your preferences wherever you want to shop.
Businesses are now deciding whether they will let that relationship travel.
Related reading
- Walmart and Amazon disagree on who should do your shopping — The permissions and spending controls behind Walmart’s approach to outside agents.
- Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse, exposing AI agents’ permission problem — How Amazon’s restrictions brought the battle over agent access into focus.
