"willing to let AI make purchase decisions"
No way in hell, no chance, over my dead mouse and keyboard.
Anthropic lays groundwork for bots that shop for you
Anthropic has blueprints for building e-commerce bots that shop on behalf of clients. That's not something many consumers want at the moment, but the AI biz this week published a set of templates for Claude-based shopping agents and merchant agents in the hope of encouraging more e-commerce businesses to implement automated …
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Sunday 6th September 2026 06:32 GMT Giles C
Re: "willing to let AI make purchase decisions"
Ai to make “recommendations” maybe but to actually go and order items no way.
I can see the point of giving it a list of part numbers and telling it to find out who has stock. But to actually let it go and order the items by itself no chance.
I want a tyre compressor for my road bike (in case I get a puncture when out riding), there are numerous options on Amazon, eBay etc all of which look almost identical which do you buy. Some of them have 10 5 star reviews whereas a couple have 400 4.5 star so which is better. Can an AI make that call?
Which features am I looking for:
Weight
Size
Battery capacity
Valve type
Does it have a display
What size / type of tyres are you inflating
Get any of those wrong and it is a paperweight which won’t get used.
By the time you have specified what you want then you may as well go and do the research yourself. Or get an AI to give recommendations if you can’t be bothered to put in the effort. It the final choice I would not leave to a machine.
Instead I went to my local bike shop (who I have been using for over 30 years) and asked them, they have a model they sell around 8-10 a week of so bought one of those instead. So instead of potentially taking a gamble I took their recommendation instead. It might cost a few quid more but does that matter.
Oh and of course https://xkcd.com/1807/
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Monday 7th September 2026 10:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "willing to let AI make purchase decisions"
I’m sure they have already sold the technology to Airlines and other morally bankrupt surge pricing scum, so your consumer grade AI Agent/Bot will be even less useful than Google Flights/Kayak is today for finding the best price or predictions.
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Friday 4th September 2026 23:35 GMT jake
Re: to rephrase
To be fair, a certain percentage of those 11% can't go shopping for whatever reason. Of those, some don't have friends or family who can do it for them.
In that case, would I want an AI/robot choosing my apples and meat? Absolutely not ... If I didn't have a day-to-day caretaker, I suspect I'd prefer a human employee of the store to do it for me. Which. please note, they have been doing since before Covid.
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Sunday 6th September 2026 15:23 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: to rephrase
But this isn't about robots in a warehouse picking your order, it's software agents doing online shopping for you…
I can see some situations where it might make sense to discuss some purchases – maybe it's a complex project in area with which you have little experience – with an agent and then let it go ahead but I also see a potential arms race with bots on the supplier working out how to game such agents in the way they already game humans. And, as they have a vested interest in making money from this, I suspect they might try harder… which is why you also got that cute toy with your last order for engine oil…
But I see more advantage in something that would help people manage their budget better, which would actually involve getting them to do more to understand their financial situation. They could start by doing the maths for people keen to spend money on the AI bubble!
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Sunday 6th September 2026 22:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: to rephrase
... maybe it's a complex project in area with which you have little experience ...
Call someone who knows instead of relying on something you cannot/should not trust.
If it is really a complex project you do not know enough about, do the sensible thing: call a professional.
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Monday 7th September 2026 08:41 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: to rephrase
Sure, but I'm also sure we'll soon be using "AI" experts for some of these tasks before long: domain knowledge is often a lot easier to codify than trying to "know" everything. Think of many of the helpful DIY blogs and videos that we've all used.
But following the money suggests that anything that uses an API with support from a vendor might get more prominence.
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Saturday 5th September 2026 07:48 GMT vtcodger
Re: to rephrase
Our local supermarket will send folks around the store to find and bag up your shopping list then cart it out to your car when you show up to pick it up. But it costs more. Significantly more. They'll also, for yet more money, deliver it to your home. I suppose that's helpful if you have more money than time and your shopping list tends toward "six boxes of Mac and cheese, three bags of frozen burritos, six glazed donuts, two quarts of vanilla ice cream, and 3 bottles of whatever red wine is cheapest." Or maybe if you have limited mobility. Or you find grocery shopping a terrifying/annoying experience what with all the elderly folks charging about propelling large, heavy shopping carts mixed with family groups wandering the aisles at a snails pace while doing their meal planning on the fly.*
But I doubt AI shopping assistance will be as good. Or as cheap.
*For is it not written that "The Family Who Shops Together moves at half the pace of the slowest member -- and blocks the whole damn aisle."
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Saturday 5th September 2026 10:41 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Re: those 100,000 tins of baked beans
Just before COVID some online shopper purchased an outer (carton) of toilet rolls, as she thought, but fat fingered a shipping container of the stuff but some people are born lucky and within weeks of COVID breaking the supermarket shelves were stripped of tissues and toilet paper. The residents of her neighbourhood were then extremely happy to "assist" her in her predicament. Actually I think she gave the stuff away (being a well heeled suburb.)
I can imagine ordering 2Kg container of chicken manure for the garden and receiving a truckload dumped in the driveway (pig manure would be close to a WMD and contravene any number of conventions.)
If people unassisted can screw up spectacularly, with AI assistance the scale of potential fuckups in almost inconceivable. To err is human, it takes a computer to completely screw up but the existential level threats of AI gazumps all.
As for the 11%, I have an extensive portfolio of bridges in major cities around the globe — Sydney, San Franciso, New York, London,… that I might be prepared to consider parting with, for the right purchaser.
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Friday 4th September 2026 23:47 GMT Tron
This is going to create a new industry.
Websites that can con AI into handing over financial data by offering cheaper goodies. Because AI is not artificial intelligence.
I don't mind what AI does as long as it can be easily turned off or (better) is off by default. Sensible people can turn it off. Idiots can learn the hard way.
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Saturday 5th September 2026 04:00 GMT BoHu
Comet as you are then, rather perplexed
Geez, what happened to Amazon will face irreparable harm if forced to allow electronic shopping bots (and wrenches) through the electronic aisles of its electronic store ... ditto eBay?!
Is this Anthropic blueprint a design to throw customers under the bus of behavioral surplus surveillance capitalism digital inquisition probes that favor us all being repeatedly fleeced by those same profit-maximizing dynamic pricing algos that were so vexed by the likes of Perplexity's original artifacts, but just much more efficiently than ever before?!
Thanks so much for making AI-assisted racketeering great again, again, Anthropic! ;(
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Saturday 5th September 2026 19:31 GMT retiredFool
Re: Comet as you are then, rather perplexed
So true. I order from amazon infrequently, maybe twice/year. I usually have a group of stuff that goes over the free shipping limit this way. At order checkout, I'm like Santa Claus, checking my list once, twice, thrice, quants... to ensure that amazon didn't slip "prime" in the order. At every step they try to trick you into adding it. Every effin step.
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Sunday 6th September 2026 02:34 GMT doublelayer
Re: Comet as you are then, rather perplexed
I think Amazon doesn't want bots buying things because they know users will not check what the bot is doing, receive the wrong thing, and then return it to Amazon which is currently free / priced in. The only way to fix that is to stop offering free returns or put limits on that. Users won't like that either.
It's also true that Amazon probably didn't have the infrastructure to advertise to LLMs when they made that complaint, so there's some chance that LLMs would not buy the thing they put at the top of the list because they earn more from that one. However, a lot of humans also don't do that and they're happy enough to sell those less profitable items nonetheless. I think the returns thing was probably the more expensive and less fixable problem and I think they probably knew that.
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Saturday 5th September 2026 08:35 GMT nobody who matters
".....already half of those using the Walmart app use "Sparky," the company's AI assistant. Those shoppers spend about 35 percent more than those who don't....."
And there you have the principal reason why letting a bot do your shopping is a bad idea!
Or, is it just richer people using it, and they would spend more than others anyway. Whatever, I would want it to spend less than I would myself, which I think it would find a challenge as I don't buy more than I actually need in the first place.
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Saturday 5th September 2026 12:05 GMT Bebu sa Ware
"is it just richer people using it"
You would like to think so but I remember when online grocery ordering and delivery was first offered† by our majors.
The online prices were higher than in·store — partly because in·store specials weren't available online, partly by the way produce was unit priced v weight and partly by the restricted range — plus delivery charges.
Surprisingly — or perhaps not — it wasn't the relatively affluent that were using the service but rather those struggling and the improvident including the young that were the big users.
I rarely spied a grocery delivery vehicle in the better suburbs but often saw two at a time in the down at heel ones.
This difference generally not due lack of transport as it is the affluent suburbs — older, established — that ironically have the best access to public transport so owning a vehicle is inescapable when you live in the newer affordable but remoter locations.
The supermarkets have now realised that online ordering and delivery can have far fewer overheads, so now the two modes are probably equivalent in cost for the customer.
They would dearly love to move to an Amazon style warehousing‡ set up with extensive automation and limited staff.
I suppose the rich didn't become rich by giving their money away… or by not getting full value for each of their dollars spent.
† More than a decade ago now.
‡ Suppliers have to supply stock in reusable magazines for robots as store staff now spend a lot of time removing cardboard outers when refilling shelves.
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Monday 7th September 2026 13:33 GMT just4this
Re: "is it just richer people using it"
"I rarely spied a grocery delivery vehicle in the better suburbs but often saw two at a time in the down at heel ones."
No delivery vans isn’t necessarily a sign of an affluent area.
There are areas that supermarkets refuse to deliver to as they often get robbed.
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Sunday 6th September 2026 02:38 GMT doublelayer
It could also be that people who often shop at the store use this, while people who shop only occasionally don't know about it or how to use it. So many possible correlations. You'd expect a CEO to have asked why there was a difference, and if it was one that told a nice story about their fancy AI tool making people happier and the shops more profitable, they would have given us the details. Therefore, I'm guessing it's one of the boring ones but they had to say something nice about the AI product or investors would have asked why they weren't doing more AI.
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Saturday 5th September 2026 09:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
So the ad revenue that currently goes to facebook and google etc... would be redirected towards AI companies/divisions to determine which mop it buys or recommends when you ask for a mop. I think I can see part of where they are going with this now.
As for getting it to shop for me, no, IRL I would only let family and close friends shop for me which is a rare occurrence. There's no way I'm letting some AI agent do it and even if I did by the time I've typed exactly what I want I might as well have ordered it myself. Then add to that finding cheapest price (inc P&P) and checking stock it's just a non-starter though I guess it could be useful if you could ask it those questions but again by the time I've typed it out and so on.
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Saturday 5th September 2026 11:10 GMT vtcodger
Appropriate tools
In truth, AI seems to be a pretty good reference librarian. I ask it questions and it gives me usually pretty good answers. They need to be checked of course, but Gemini at least even gives me links to its sources. It's not a bad tool.
But I don't use my computer mouse to hammer nails. Why on Earth would I use a reference librarian to buy groceries, or electronic equipment?
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Saturday 5th September 2026 11:36 GMT T. F. M. Reader
Agents on my mind...
"These agents can assess individual behavior and tailor prices based on a consumer’s shopping and purchasing history."
If I have an account with Walmart, Amazon, or XYZ ECommerce Ltd. then they will have my shopping and purchasing history with or without agents. And as for assessing "individual behavior", if my agent does my shopping it seems to be a recipe for a quick model collapse.
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Saturday 5th September 2026 12:20 GMT 0x80004005
Weren't we all going to be ordering our shopping by talking to Alexa by now?
I can't see how different this is to saying "Alexa, order me some coffee".
Ordering everything by talking to Alexa hasn't gained much market traction. I think about the only thing that really sells on Alexa is the "Advanced Fart Pack" - and if you google that you'll see plenty of remarks like "My 7-year old ordered an Advanced Fart Pack, how do I get a refund?"
An AI Agent run by Anthropic will always be biased towards the advertisers who pay Anthropic, or maybe those who managed to poison its training data to make it think "The best coffee in the world is grown in Basingstoke"
People want to feel they've made some kind of informed choice in what they purchase.
An AI agent which makes an impartial scan of the market, free from bias or influence will never exist, because who'd run a business doing that?!?!?
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Saturday 5th September 2026 16:17 GMT nobody who matters
Re: Weren't we all going to be ordering our shopping by talking to Alexa by now?
"I can't see how different this is to saying "Alexa, order me some coffee"."
The \difference is that you will physically ask Alexa to order something specific.
An 'AI' bot will assess your past purchasing habits and place the orders without you asking it for those specific things. It would be a bit like lending Fergie your credit card and PIN!
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Saturday 5th September 2026 12:34 GMT BinkyTheMagicPaperclip
It's unlikely to be better than recommended purchases
We're well over a decade (actually probably closer to twenty five years) into recommending purchases, and it *still* recommends fridges after you've just bought a fridge..
It was sold as finding exactly what you want, but amazingly people and lives are complex. Oh, you don't just want a motherboard? You want a motherboard with working vt-d, four x16 slots, a BMC, and PS/2 ports? Well, how about this one instead, which meets zero of your requirements (other than being 'a motherboard') but *does* provide us with a nice margin.
You want a new amplifier and for it to work with everything, but unaccountably don't want to spend another three grand replacing everything already owned so that it does work together (maybe), you want it to work with your existing equipment? Butbut that requires lots of cables, four pages of documentation, an open source standards converter, and a second hand item off ebay because the modern equipment has stopped supporting the older standards.
If LLMs have scraped the web and can answer some of the hypothetical questions above that I've gone through in the past, leading to hours of research and losing the will to live, then it might be worth a punt. Not holding my breath though.
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Sunday 6th September 2026 02:52 GMT doublelayer
Re: It's unlikely to be better than recommended purchases
That's a problem where LLMs might be able to solve it, but you would want to use a harness designed for research, not buying crap, and you would still need to check the answers. LLMs can ingest a bunch of pages that talk about amplifiers and connectors and figure out where the information about cable types and compatibility is, and when run through a layer that keeps track of where information came from, it can provide references. That is hard on the sites that receive a lot of traffic from research queries like that, but it can work often enough that it could save you some time. It will also use a lot of tokens, so unless you've already got something that subsidizes it, you might find it more expensive to run than you want given the risk that it gets it wrong and you have to start over.
The problem with LLM purchasing bots is not that they're incapable altogether. There are two smaller problems. One is that, when they mess up, and they inevitably will because they're correct by chance, you'll have a problem of unsuitable purchases you need to deal with. The other is that the people building the software aren't going to try to make something that finds the thing you wanted. They're going to build software which makes them money, and since it's not going to be popular if the users pay the cost, they'll find ways to have advertisers or merchants pay some of it by buying more expensive things than what you would have wanted.
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Saturday 5th September 2026 18:45 GMT Pete 2
Let it loose on Aliexpress
Whenever I search for something there I almost always get the first returns offering what I want but at a very low price. On inspection the seller will have bundled the item I want with a piece of disconnected tat. Then given the title of the desired item with the price of the bait.
If AI can filter out this practice and offer me (but never buy it) what I want, then I'm in.
But as for the weekly supermarket shop, no. Although anyone who joins a loyalty scheme probably already has an AI making them offers.
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Saturday 5th September 2026 20:01 GMT Inventor of the Marmite Laser
Look at it this way: we are already beset by adverts driven by systems if varying "intelligence".
Given the dross, inaccurately chosen suggestions and general utter crap that inevitably turns up, would you even contemplate trusting an AI to make decisions about what to actually spend your money on, rather than simply making misguided advertising suggestions?
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Sunday 6th September 2026 10:27 GMT munnoch
"Sleek"
eBay has become almost completely unusable due to the prevalence of AI generated listings.
Beset with incorrect information like wrong part numbers, made up capabilities (apparently everything supports wifi...) and the descriptions padded out with vacuous non-information -- "sleek design", "dependable manufacturer", "complements your decor". The word "sleek" in particular being a 100% accurate signal that there is no point in reading the description. And which I immediately associate with the Scots word sleekit, which perfectly describes the entire endevour.
Complex use cases like "I'm going camping this weekend and I have no idea what I need(!!)", can only fail spectacularly. Simple use cases like send me 1kg of cornflakes every two weeks don't need planet incinerating fuzzy pattern matchers to solve.
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Monday 7th September 2026 04:29 GMT BasicReality
Grok Bot
They’re just trying to catch up to Grok Bot. I set up a bot the other day, gave it a shopping list of a handful of items, told it to price comparison between three different local stores and it came back with all the information I needed. I told it to put together the shopping cart for me, and it went to one of the sites and put together my cart. All I would have to do is finalize the order.
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Monday 7th September 2026 08:54 GMT TH*
I wouldn't even trust close family or friends to do my online shopping for me - they don't read descriptions properly, get fooled into buying from Amazon Marketplace sellers, they order stuff from foreign websites then get shocked they have to pay tax & duty, they're constantly buying clothing in the wrong size and having to return it, and they get tricked by ads into giving their personal information to spammers and other miscreants. if Anthropic thinks Claude can do better, then they truly have developed superintelligence.
But of course they haven't, because when I've attempted to use Claude to find things I want to buy half the results are hallucinated and the others are inappropriate and/pr incomplete. It spends 20 mins doing "research", generates thousands of words of text, and it misses the obvious answers I can see (even post-enshittification) in the first two pages of ordinary google search results.
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Monday 7th September 2026 14:11 GMT MachDiamond
Let's get this in perspective
Use AI to replace a spouse and children.
That's in addition to me having a load of hobbies and projects going on that always require healthy cash influxes and would have been cheaper and quicker if I wasn't trying to DIY a "cheap" solution.
Yeah, naw. I don't need any help spending money.
