Amazon Blocked Meta’s Muse, And Robots.txt Had Nothing To Say

On the evening of Sept. 20, 2026, customers who despatched Meta’s procuring agent Muse to amazon.com acquired a web page that mentioned: “Continued entry by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Situations of Use, to which our prospects have agreed.” Todd Bishop reported it for GeekWire that evening, with Amazon confirming the block.

A web site proprietor who has noticed an automatic customer and needs it gone has a number of controls, and Amazon reached for phrases of service, the settlement with whoever is logged in.

The second management, robots.txt, had nothing to work with. A rule in that file names a user agent string, the label a bit of software program sends when it asks a web site for a web page, after which states what that software program could fetch. Meta’s crawler documentation offers none for Muse. Additionally, robots.txt can’t enforce the rule.

The Pc Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the 1986 anti-hacking statute, had acquired a lot weaker for Amazon on Aug. 4, 2026. That was the day the Ninth Circuit, a U.S. federal appeals court docket, threw out a court docket order Amazon had received in opposition to Perplexity and dominated that the consumer, not the agent’s vendor, is the one accessing the web site.

Amazon’s Situations Of Use Is An Settlement With The Human Shopper, Not With Meta

Situations of Use is the settlement a client accepts once they open an Amazon account, and Meta has nothing to do with it. Amazon gave GeekWire three causes: Meta by no means informed Amazon that Muse would entry its retailer, the agent “doesn’t establish itself when it browses”, and it “seems to seize and retailer buyer credentials,” which Amazon says may create privateness and safety dangers. An Amazon spokesperson informed GeekWire that third-party purposes making purchases on a buyer’s behalf “ought to function brazenly and respect service supplier choices about whether or not or to not take part.”

All three causes are complaints about Meta, and the doc Amazon is imposing binds the consumer. Amazon has individually requested Meta to take away Amazon from the Muse expertise.

Muse Has No Person Agent String, So Amazon’s Robots.txt Can’t Refuse It

Meta’s crawler documentation lists 5 brokers and Muse is just not amongst them, so Amazon has no title to place within the rule.

Amazon’s robots.txt, fetched from amazon.com/robots.txt on 22 September 2026, declares 101 person agent blocks, 100 of which carry Disallow: /, the road that refuses an agent the complete web site. ClaudeBot is listed twice, so these hundred blocks title 99 distinct brokers. GPTBot, CCBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Prolonged, GoogleAgent-Mariner and GoogleAgent-Procuring are refused every little thing.

Meta seems 3 times in Amazon’s robots.txt. meta-externalagent crawls for mannequin coaching and indexing, meta-externalfetcher fetches particular person hyperlinks at a person’s request, and meta-webindexer improves Meta AI search outcomes. All three get Disallow: /, that means Amazon tells them to not learn any pages.

Two of Meta’s 5 documented crawlers are absent from the named blocks, so that they fall underneath the final Person-agent: * guidelines like any crawler Amazon has not named, and people guidelines instruct crawlers to remain out of the cart, sign-in, and account paths whereas leaving product pages open. FacebookExternalHit is how a shared Amazon hyperlink will get its preview inside Meta’s apps, and Meta-ExternalAds helps Meta’s promoting enterprise.

Meta Mentioned That Muse Would Seem As Your Personal Exercise

Meta’s wording, printed on Sept. 8, 2026 within the engineering account of the design that went out the day Muse launched, is that when Muse browses the web it “will seem as your exercise.” Meta places that in a piece on knowledge coverage, disclosing that how an individual makes use of Muse can affect the advertisements they see. The agent drives “an actual up-to-date Chromium primarily based browser,” so the web site on the opposite finish records an ordinary customer session. I went through the post at the time. Muse is U.S. solely and free with paid tiers, and neither Meta’s launch submit nor GeekWire offers a quantity for the way many individuals store by it. I count on Meta to both proudly share a quantity quickly, or not share one in any respect.

Twelve days later, on September 20, Amazon says the agent “doesn’t establish itself when it browses.” Amazon was capable of inform Muse periods aside from peculiar customers, after which served them a special web page. Neither Amazon nor GeekWire says how Amazon did this.

Amazon Printed No Proof For Its Credential Declare

Amazon says Muse “seems to seize and retailer buyer credentials.” Meta had printed on launch day the place Muse shops them. The credentials are held by a background service referred to as authd, contained in the digital machine Meta offers every Muse person, a pc that runs as software program on {hardware} elsewhere. Meta’s wording is “saved in your VM, not in centralized Meta infrastructure.” The agent itself works solely from surrogate tokens, stand-ins for the actual credential. Meta’s wording is {that a} element referred to as Sentinel “will substitute any surrogate tokens with the actual credential, obtained from authd, on the community boundary.” On Meta’s description the mannequin by no means sees the credentials, and I’ve discovered no unbiased examine of that within the protection of the block as of September 22.

So Amazon raised as a priority one thing Meta had printed, and the half Amazon added, that this might create privateness and safety dangers, got here with no captured request, no named endpoint and no disclosure timeline.

After all Amazon has a procuring agent of its personal and an promoting enterprise constructed on folks taking a look at its pages. Alexa for Procuring launched in Could 2026, as GeekWire notes. Amazon made greater than 68 billion {dollars} in advert income in 2025, by GeekWire’s determine, from a enterprise that “relies on folks shopping its pages and seeing sponsored merchandise.” And GeekWire information Amazon’s level that its different agent, Purchase for Me, identifies itself and lets manufacturers decide out, which is the habits Amazon is asking of Meta.

Meta had not answered by the point GeekWire printed, and I’ve discovered no response within the protection since, as of September 22. Nothing a client can run from exterior Meta’s VM settles the credential declare. Two issues would settle it: Meta opening the VM to an unbiased audit, or Amazon producing no matter their “seems to” rests on.

Amazon Already Misplaced This Argument In opposition to Perplexity, And The Court docket Left Muse’s Case Open

Amazon had already tried the courts in opposition to Perplexity, and misplaced. It sued over Comet, a browser that logs into a client’s Amazon account and buys on their behalf, and in March 2026 it won a court order protecting Perplexity’s agent out of the password-protected elements of the shop whereas the case ran. The Ninth Circuit put that order on maintain, heard the enchantment on June 11, and threw the order out on August 4.

Comet runs on the consumer’s personal laptop, so Perplexity’s machines by no means discuss to Amazon’s. That’s the place the court docket began. It dominated that the consumer is the one visiting Amazon, not the corporate that wrote the software program, and quoted a short from the Digital Frontier Basis and 4 different exterior teams: “Perplexity’s servers by no means straight entry Amazon’s servers.” The case is written up in full here.

Amazon requested for the case to be reheard by a bigger group of judges, which legal professionals name going en banc. On this circuit, that’s 11: the Chief Decide and 10 drawn by lot, reasonably than each decide on the bench. On September 10, the court refused, and never one decide requested for a vote on it.

So on this circuit the anti-hacking regulation is usually gone as a software in opposition to an agent, an individual despatched, and what the court docket left Amazon was its personal phrases of service. Twelve days after Muse launched and ten days after that refusal, Amazon put a Situations of Use discover in entrance of its personal customers.

There may be one query the Ninth Circuit didn’t reply, and it wrote the reservation into the opinion: “We don’t deal with whether or not, on a special file or new info, Perplexity could train management over the Assistant in such a manner as to realize entry to Amazon’s servers.” That’s the case the place the software program firm, not the consumer, is the one working the agent.

Muse doesn’t run on the consumer’s machine. Meta’s personal description is that “you and your Muse share your own dedicated computer in the cloud,” an “remoted Linux field” reachable from WhatsApp, the Muse apps and muse.ai. Meta names no internet hosting supplier. GeekWire notes that Meta signed a multibillion-dollar deal in April 2026 to run agentic AI workloads on Graviton, the server processors Amazon designs for its personal cloud, and neither firm has mentioned whether or not Muse is amongst these workloads. If Muse is amongst them, Amazon is obstructing an agent that runs on {hardware} Amazon rents out.

Situations Of Use Was The Solely Purpose Amazon May Put On The Web page With out A Identify Or A Lawsuit

Amazon’s Situations of Use reached Muse as a result of the consumer working Muse had already accepted these phrases, and neither robots.txt nor the Pc Fraud and Abuse Act had that maintain. Phrases of service bind your buyer, so imposing them means telling the one that was attempting to purchase one thing that the best way they selected to buy is just not allowed. That’s the sentence on Amazon’s block web page. It’s extra sincere than yelling CFAA, anyway.

Anybody can write that sentence in their very own phrases. What Amazon has not defined is the way it noticed Muse within the first place, and till it does, that is one thing Amazon did reasonably than one thing any web site can do.

Extra Assets:

This submit was initially printed on No Hacks.

Featured Picture: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock