Meta and Anthropic Launch AI Agents for Commerce

Meta Platforms Incorporated and Anthropic launched new AI agent tools this week to advance agentic commerce, a sector that currently represents less than 1% of total e-commerce. Meta introduced Muse, a personal AI agent designed to autonomously execute multistep tasks such as shopping and travel booking. Simultaneously, Anthropic released Commerce Agents, an open-source framework allowing companies to develop their own shopping and operational agents.

Payment networks are adapting to the shift toward autonomous transactions. Visa and Mastercard developed standards including the Trusted Agent Protocol and Agent Pay to support tokenized transactions. Adyen also launched Adyen Agentic to help merchants integrate their services with AI platforms. While some observers view agentic commerce as a threat to traditional payment networks, analysts at Bernstein suggest the trend will benefit Visa and Mastercard by increasing digitization and the need for card-based dispute management.

Despite these technical advancements and the popularity of messaging-based agents like Instinct in Silicon Valley, consumer adoption faces hurdles. A Visa survey indicates that only 23% of consumers trust AI agents to handle their payment transactions.