Meta's Muse shopping agent hit 10.9 million downloads as Amazon blocked it and Walmart opened checkout

Meta's▲+2.74% — Meta, up 2.74 percent today Muse agent posted its first commercial numbers on Wednesday, and they say people will hand a purchase to software. Sensor Tower, the app-download tracker, counts 10.9 million downloads since the September 8 launch↗, 10.2 million of them American; shopping is the most common use, with average baskets above $200 ¹². In the past 30 days, US downloads of OpenAI'sPVT$1.18T — OpenAI, private, latest valuation $1.18T ChatGPT fell 25% ¹².

The fight these numbers open is over who keeps the shopper when the agent does the buying, and Meta has begun spending past its own cash flow to own the funnel ³.

Muse can shop only where retailers let it in

Muse buys by browsing a retailer's site, showing the shopper an approval card, and paying through payment partners such as Link by Stripe, which issues a one-time-use card number; Mark Zuckerberg said at Meta's Connect event that Meta takes a small fee on each transaction↗ ⁴. "Whoever owns the agent owns the relationship with the shopper, and every retailer knows it," Luca Cian, a University of Virginia business professor who studies AI shopping, told CNBC ⁴.

Amazon built a wall, Walmart opened a door

Amazon▼−0.57% — Amazon, down 0.57 percent today blocked Muse less than two weeks after launch, after months of stripping item names from its confirmation emails to blunt agents↗ ⁵⁶. Walmart▼−0.06% — Walmart, down 0.06 percent today went the other way on October 21, the day Meta reported, opening an Agent Gateway that lets a shopper cap what an agent may spend, require approval, or cut it off ⁶. GlobalData retail analyst Neil Saunders reads Amazon's wall as defense of its roughly $68 billion advertising business, which needs people browsing its pages ⁵⁶.

Ad profit no longer covers the AI buildout

Advertising is nearly all of Meta's revenue and, as D.A. Davidson's Gil Luria puts it, the source of more than all its profit, with AI investments and Reality Labs, Meta's headset and hardware unit, still losing money ³⁷. An agent that shops for you never sees the ads, the same cannibalization analysts already price onto Google, which together with Meta takes more than half of global ad revenue ⁸.

Zuckerberg's answer is a toll on everything the agent buys: he expects Muse to earn more per user than the several hundred dollars a US user of the existing apps brings↗, once compute efficiency improves tenfold ¹. The bill came first. Capital spending outran the cash the business generated this quarter, free cash flow landed at minus $2.1 billion↗, and the new non-voting Class C shares exist to keep funding the buildout ³.

Only 16% of shoppers will let an AI buy for them

Only 16% of shoppers are comfortable letting an AI find and buy products for them, Coveo's 2026 Commerce Relevance Report finds, and Meta suspended Muse's chat-sharing feature on Tuesday after researchers exposed about 6,800 conversation links ²⁶. Walmart's caps and approval steps target exactly that gap, and "perceived control changes behavior," as Cian puts it: every purchase that clears those checks lands inside Walmart's own checkout ⁴⁶.

Meta is financing the replacement of its own ad surface with a fee on buying, and the first demand numbers say shoppers will make the trade ¹³. Google▼−2.09% — Google, down 2.09 percent today, Bank of America's▲+0.08% — Bank of America, up 0.08 percent today pick as the better-positioned second entrant↗, reports next week; watch for any slowdown in search click growth tied to AI use, and for a consumer agent of its own to answer Muse ⁸.