On 21 October Walmart introduced the Agent Gateway, its own MCP server, which lets approved AI agents search the catalogue and buy on behalf of their users. Walmart president and CEO John Furner announced it at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. The gateway covers both Walmart and warehouse chain Sam’s Club.
An MCP server, not a private road
The Model Context Protocol comes from Anthropic and connects agents to data sources, tools and workflows. Walmart is not building a bespoke agent interface; it speaks that protocol. For developers that means anyone already building MCP clients has nothing new to learn here.
Walmart also promises something that sounds awkward for agent operators and good for shoppers: the gateway should be able to find your usual brands and items without handing the agent your personal information or purchase history.
Agent Profiles: a separate account for every agent
Agent Profiles arrive next month. Every agent a customer uses gets its own profile inside the Walmart account. Its purchases show up separately from yours, and you decide how approval works: either each transaction individually, or automatically up to a spending limit you set. Walmart compares it to adding an authorised user to your credit card.
A profile is created the first time you shop through the gateway, linked by authorisation, and deletable at any point. No Walmart+ membership required.
On top of that come separate terms for agents. They say Walmart’s returns process applies even when an agent does not act as intended. Agents may not go beyond what the shopper intended, may not see payment information, and may only touch the data a given task needs. Agents that break the terms get blocked.
Two answers to the same question, and this is the more interesting one
Four days ago the story here was websites locking AI agents out — Yelp, Delta, JPMorgan Chase, Charles Schwab, with Amazon blocking agent purchases too. Walmart is doing the opposite, and doing it shortly after Amazon shut the door. A partnership with Meta’s Muse and integrations with ChatGPT and Gemini were already in place.
The reason blocking is so common is liability: who pays when an agent buys the wrong thing? Walmart answers that question before anyone asks it, and answers it with the ordinary returns policy. That is the actual news here, not the MCP server but the promise sitting next to it.