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Comment by rr808 | Hacker News Reader

It makes total sense for Amazon to block agents. It sucks having to manually check multiple sites for prices and delivery of something you want so is easier just to use Amazon which is usually very good. If people start using agents Amazon is less likely to get the sale and are more vulnerable to competition. Better to kill this trend off asap.

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Sounds like Amazon is trying to use its monopoly position to give it an competitive advantage over smaller stores.

Monopoly is a word that has a real meaning, and not a blanket term for companies you personally don't like and not even a blanket term for big companies.

Amazon has nothing even approaching a monopoly. You can go right now to a store built from bricks and purchase goods.

> Monopoly is a word that has a real meaning

Correct

> Amazon has nothing even approaching a monopoly

Sortof? It probably doesn’t have a monopoly in any segment that matters, but it does have many illegal monopolies (as defined by US FCR and the Sherman Act).

Evidence: Amazon has been found guilty of being an illegal monopoly multiple times already.

I don't think it does make sense. I think Amazon is way overestimating brand loyalty, and underestimating how much of their success comes from being a one-stop shop for everything.

I'm using Claude for everything from finances to dinner planning to project planning. If Amazon doesn't let Claude search and buy, I'm not abandoning Claude, I'm abandoning Amazon.

As long as my actions are as simple as possible, I don't care whether Claude is searching 5000 online retailers or only 4999, minus Amazon. I'm certainly not going to say "ok, this project requires buying 13 things for about $500, but I don't see amazon in the list, so let me go manually search for each one on Amazon and see if they might have a better price or something."

This is Walmart / Apple Pay all over again. Yes, near-monopolies, lots of power. But they got there by making things easy for consumers. Making things difficult to force consumer behavior never ends well.

Most people don't have the disposable income to ever let an agent casually make a purchase for them.

I never let agents make purchases unsupervised. But that wasn't the point; the point is that the convenience of getting a complete list including multiple-vendors when pricing makes sense is way better than going to amazon and searching one by one, therefore Amazon will lose this power play.

The same would be true for someone shopping for one $10 item.

I always check Google before Amazon, because it's impossible to find anything on Amazon. Amazon is a bit like the bargain bin of a DYI shop. If it's immediately visible it's okay, of not, don't bother searching.

Half the time I can't even find the category page. And if I do find it, the filters will just be useless anyway.

In general, preventing consumers from having fully featured AIs (especially local ones) will be worth about 10 trillion dollars to companies. That's my prediction.

Amazon is one example. If my basement AI drives my browser and never clicks an ad, Amazon loses big.

Or, the ad industry in general -- imagine the basement AI filtering out all ads at the analog level so nobody in my house ever sees an ad, and no software update can change that.

Or other optimizations. Right now companies enjoy a power imbalance because they have people who ruthlessly optimize 24/7 to save a buck. I can't do the same, because I have to work, and also prefer to spend my personal time with family -- a foolish thing to do in a capitalist society, at least from a capital perspective. Imagine I have an AI wheeling and dealing on my behalf 24/7 too. Especially in an age of online shopping and product deliveries, my AI will absolutely order from your competitor to save a penny, my AI will absolutely spend 400 hours disputing a medical bill I don't think is right, barely an inconvenience to me.

The ads (in general) will be redirected to where you will see it, regardless of whether or not Amazon allows bots. You don't think you're getting off that easily, do you?

> You don't think you're getting off that easily, do you?

Agreed. But that's where Amazon needs some thrashing from users, competitors and regulators to start with.

Once AI is good enough the AI will control what I see, plus, I will just spend a lot less time looking at screens altogether.

It's also trivial for Amazon competitors to pop up in this potential AI future. Maybe you only sell door knobs, but all you need to do is set up a mostly text-based API designed for AI consumption and you're in business. If you offer the door knob for 10 cents less, why wouldn't the AI agents buy from you?

Right now making an Amazon competitor will fail mainly because humans are lazy and can't be bother to check other sites. AI might change that.

One of the optimistic aspects of what's happening is that it doesn't seem like the leading model capabilities are outpacing the more open ones by that much- that just as a general principal there are pretty ok models relatively close behind the best ones.

This could mean the long term viability of my open claw bot to shop for me- that openai / google etc won't control AI, and I'll still just be able to use a model via API to do what's actually in my own self-interest.

Amazon is not usually very good anymore, quality has suffered massively.

I still prefer the Amazon shopping experience to anything else, unless I already know the product is available locally. The primary quality problem I've run into is the quality of the products themselves.

Should not stores make shopping with AI easier instead, as the number of ”customers” that are agents will increase and they will shop where they can?

Amazon is supposed to be the cheapest/best delivery store due to it's huge scale.

It's how they killed the competition.

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