eBay appears to have blocked AI agents, including Meta’s Muse

eBay appears to have blocked AI agents, including Meta’s Muse, from browsing its platform. A reader told The Verge that Muse stopped gathering links, prices, shipping details, and watch-listing information; the outlet reproduced the issue in other searches and found that the agent sometimes directed users to outside pages mirroring eBay listings. Meta declined to comment.

eBay had already prohibited tools such as buy-for-me agents and large-language-model-driven bots that place orders without human review. Spokesperson Sybille St. Arromand told The Verge that the company takes a selective approach to third-party access and has restricted agents in some cases, including unauthorized scraping and training on its data, but she did not directly answer whether new limits had been imposed. The case highlights the tension between using agents for shopping and retailers’ control over their websites.