US shopping giant Walmart on Wednesday unveiled tools allowing artificial intelligence agents such as Meta’s Muse to shop on behalf of its customers, taking the opposite approach to rival Amazon, which bars outside AI agents from its platform.

AI agents are programs that can carry out multi-step tasks on a user’s behalf -- such as searching for products, comparing prices and completing a purchase -- rather than only answering questions as chatbots do.

Tech companies including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Meta are investing heavily in agents, which much of the industry sees as the next phase of the AI boom that followed the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.

Anthropic on Wednesday released a preview of Claude Duet, an agent that works in the background across users' connected apps and can make online purchases with their approval.

Its archrival OpenAI launched its own always-on agents, called Dots, last month.

Muse, which Meta launched in September and has made available only in the United States and Canada, has been downloaded more than 10 million times, according to an analysis of third-party data by Sensor Tower.

Walmart said it would launch "Agent Profiles" within the next month, letting customers register each AI assistant they use as a separate profile within their Walmart account so that purchases made by the agent appear apart from their own.

Customers will be able to require approval for every purchase or let an agent buy on its own up to a spending limit they set, such as $50, $100 or $200, and delete a profile at any time.

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