Amazon

Amazon controls 40% of US e-commerce, and it sits outside both protocols built to mediate agentic buying. Max Thilén's February 2026 guide places «Amazon» apart from «Agentic Commerce Protocol», the OpenAI and Stripe standard carrying a 4% transaction fee, and apart from «Universal Commerce Protocol», the Google-led coalition that gathered Shopify, Walmart, Target, Visa and Mastercard. Amazon's route is proprietary: «Rufus AI» (300 million users, +60% conversion), Alexa+ for voice commerce, and «Buy for Me (système propriétaire)», which lets shoppers order from competitors inside the Amazon app. Amazon also blocked OpenAI's crawlers, withdrawing 600 million products. Thilén reads the resulting market as a triptych: Amazon proprietary, Google UCP, OpenAI ACP.

The refusal is selective. One layer down, in developer tooling, Amazon appears among the Core Maintainers who published the «Agent Plugins» 1.0.0 specification alongside Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI and Vercel, with Google joining in August 2026. Amazon closes the commerce stack and co-governs the packaging format.

Two Amazon voices recur for reasons unconnected to either. «Werner Vogels», CTO, argued in November 2025 for placing "AI in the human loop", citing companion robots including Amazon Astro and citing the WHO's designation of loneliness as a public health crisis. «Fran Soto», a software engineer there, named "AI slop" and defined developer taste as the judgment of knowing what a good solution looks like before writing a line of code. Soto's own admission: nobody knows how to hire for it.