As of Sunday night, September 20, Amazon is blocking Meta's Muse from completing purchases. Users attempting to shop through the agent hit a Conditions of Use popup and go no further.

The stakes are structural. Amazon holds roughly 37 to 40 percent of US e-commerce, so the block carves a large hole in Muse's shopping utility. Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora framed it as the opening of a much broader contest as AI assistants multiply. Elon Musk made the technical point bluntly on X: "Amazon won't be able to tell whether the buyer is a human or an AI acting on their behalf if access is via the user's IP address and cookies." Perplexity already proved the point in practice, evading an Amazon fingerprint aimed at its Comet browser within 24 hours.

The legal ground is shakier than Amazon's popup suggests. The Supreme Court's Van Buren ruling and the Ninth Circuit's reading of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act narrowed the statute to users abusing access they already have -- not platforms wielding it against competitors acting on a user's instructions. What remains to Amazon is its contract with the account holder, not the agent. Whether the block persists as a practical matter may come down to whether Muse identifies itself in its traffic.

For now, Muse shoppers are routed to Shopify-powered merchants via the Meta-Shop Pay integration. The question hanging over Connect: does Meta negotiate, route around, or build the storefront itself?