The agent access war has started！
Meta's Muse recently hit #1 on the App Store. But soon Amazon blocked it. Jefferies then found a third of the US shopping and travel sites it tested block it too.
ByteDance is running into the same thing in China. It gave every app 30 days to opt out of its Doubao phone agent. 155 did, including WeChat, Taobao, Alipay, and even DeepSeek and Kimi.
What is this war really about? Data security, privacy, or money? An agent shopping for you doesn't click sponsored listings, while Amazon made ~$68B from ads last year. Tencent and Alibaba, which make up 57% of ByteDance's list, are each pushing their own AI agents.
Shopify let Muse in and Meta is already signing connector deals with Walmart and Best Buy. If access ends up going to whoever pays, do we eventually need some kind of agent neutrality rule? What do you think?