AI shopping agents are about to run into a basic rule of the internet: other people need to be able to buy things too.
The RealReal has changed its bot defenses after Meta’s Muse was used to repeatedly reserve items in shoppers’ carts. The secondhand luxury retailer says the update makes it much harder for agents to log in, add products to carts, and check out.
The change is a small but revealing response to a much bigger problem. AI agents do not browse like people do. They can keep performing repetitive actions long after a human would have lost interest, creating new ways to distort the systems that online retail relies on.
When a shopping assistant becomes a shopping obstacle
The RealReal places an item on hold for 20 minutes once it enters a shopper’s cart. In testing, The Verge instructed Meta Muse to add listings back into a cart as soon as each hold expired. That meant the items could remain unavailable to everyone else for hours or longer.
For a human shopper, repeatedly refreshing a cart is tedious. For an agent, it is exactly the kind of task it can perform without friction. The behavior turns a convenience feature designed for individual shoppers into a potential denial-of-access tool.
The RealReal’s chief technology officer, Luke Friang, told The Verge that the retailer had addressed the use case. The new configuration still allows agents to surface listings and send users to product pages, but makes it harder for them to complete the full shopping journey.
The web is becoming selective about automation
This is the line retailers are now being forced to draw. They may want AI systems to help people discover products, but they do not necessarily want those systems acting with the speed, persistence, and scale of machines once money and inventory are involved.
Meta says shopping is Muse’s most common use case so far, with purchases averaging more than $200. The company also says 10 million people in the US downloaded the app in its first 40 days. At that scale, the question is no longer whether agents can shop. It is who gets to define the rules when they do.
The RealReal’s response suggests the next phase of agentic commerce will be less about opening every checkout to AI and more about deciding which parts of retail agents are allowed to touch. Discovery may remain open. Reservation, scarcity, and purchase may become guarded territory.