Walmart, Chase, Bank of America Split on AI Agents Hitting Their Sites

Walmart will give AI agents a dedicated profile inside each customer's account, launching within a month of 21 October, while JPMorgan Chase is blocking outside agents outright. In October, three of the largest consumer businesses in the US revealed three different answers to the same question: what to do when a customer sends an AI agent to your website to buy groceries, book flights, or check a bank balance.

What did Chase, Bank of America and Walmart each decide?

Three distinct postures emerged in October.

• Blocked. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said on the Q3 2026 earnings call: "We are not gonna allow just any agent to come, outside agent to come inside the company." The Verge reported that Charles Schwab blocks agents from accounts too, and that Delta prevents them from booking tickets.
• The customer's login, at the customer's risk. Bank of America told customers never to share their login with an AI agent offering to act for them. If they do, "you're responsible for activity resulting from that access," the bank said, as TechCrunch reported. 1Password for Agents addresses this middle ground: an agent requests a login, the person approves, and "1Password then fills it directly into the sign-in form instead of sending it to the agent." The release does not say whether the website can detect that an agent signed in.
• A separate profile. Walmart's Agent Profiles give each agent "a dedicated profile within the customer's account," with approval required for every purchase or a spending limit the customer sets — "for example, $50, $100 or $200." Walmart says agents see the same prices a person sees, and agents that break its rules get blocked.

Walmart explained why it built Agent Profiles: "Today, when a customer uses an AI agent, it signs in using a customer's account. This means that all purchases – whether made by the customer or the agent – appear together, without any differentiation."

Why does the agent need its own identity?

An agent does things the customer would not do, on the customer's behalf. It might browse more pages than the customer would — maybe all of them. That is the most basic difference, but it could extend to literally anything.

The article's analogy: send a dog to shop for you at a local market with a set amount of money. The arrangement only works if the sellers know who sent the dog. Walmart's spending limit is the set amount of money; the profile is the sellers knowing who sent it. A block stops the customer from using an agent at all. A shared login hides the agent behind the customer.

How many agents are actually arriving?

DoorDash says outside AI agents have placed "maybe several hundred orders in total," in CEO Tony Xu's words on the Q3 call, as TechCrunch reported. In the same quarter, DoorDash handled 993 million orders — more than 10 million a day. The gap between those numbers means businesses still have time to choose a policy deliberately.

What standards are emerging for agent identification?

The rules for how an agent identifies itself to a business remain a draft. Sierra, the AI customer-service company, and Meta are writing the Personal Agent Protocol; more than 40 companies are helping shape it. As of 1 November, its website named no business using it with customers.

On October 30, the draft added a recommendation that agents sign their requests with Web Bot Auth, a proposed method for an agent to prove which company operates it. According to the bot-protection company DataDome, as PPC Land reported, Meta's Muse agent has been signing some requests that way since around 12 October — without any announcement.

What should businesses do before agents scale?

The source recommends three steps:

• Check what your bot-protection software does to an AI agent today — block it, let it through, or fail to distinguish it from a person.
• Decide which of the three postures you would choose, and write it down, before your platform or security vendor decides for you.
• Ask whoever runs your website to watch for agents that sign their requests, since those signatures identify the company operating the agent.

The underlying principle is simple: if you cannot tell the agent from the customer, you cannot treat it differently. Watch the Personal Agent Protocol draft and early adopter announcements over the coming quarters to see whether a shared identification standard consolidates these divergent approaches.