The first holiday season of the AI shopping agent is arriving, and the biggest stores in America cannot agree on whether to let it in.

Walmart has built a dedicated entrance for software that shops on a customer's behalf. Amazon has posted a guard at the door. Most other large retailers sit somewhere in between, either picking which AI platforms they will work with or, in a surprising number of cases, turning agents away without meaning to. For consumers who have started handing errands to assistants like Meta's Muse, OpenAI's ChatGPT Agent or Grok Bot from SpaceX Super Intelligence (SpaceXSI, the AI company formerly known as xAI), the result is a patchwork: an agent that breezes through one checkout can hit a wall at the next.

Chart sorting major U.S. retailers into Embracing, Partial and Blocking columns based on their stated positions on third-party AI shopping agents, with Walmart, QVC and Etsy embracing, Target, Home Depot, Tapestry and The RealReal partial, and Amazon, eBay and Kohl's blocking

WebProNews reviewed retailer announcements, terms of service and recent reporting to map where the major chains stand. The short version is in the chart below. The longer version says a lot about who expects to own the customer relationship once software starts doing the shopping.

See the full list of 44 retailers and how each treats AI agents below.