The Everything Agent Comes for the Everything Store

How OpenAI is trying to do to Amazon what Amazon did to retail

Photo by Mike Petrucci on Unsplash

Last month, OpenAI flipped the switch on shopping in ChatGPT. U.S. users can now research products and buy directly inside the chat interface—ask about wireless headphones, get recommendations, complete the purchase without leaving the conversation. Etsy went live first, with “over a million” Shopify merchants coming soon. Two weeks later, Walmart joined. But the world’s largest e-commerce store, Amazon, was conspicuously absent from the announcements.

Around the same time, Amazon quietly updated its robots.txt file—essentially a “not invited” list that tells automated bots which parts of the site they can’t access. The update blocked AI agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and others from crawling Amazon’s catalog or enabling automated shopping flows. No AI shopping assistants. No “buy-for-me” flows.

It reveals what’s at stake: whoever owns the shopping interface controls the customer relationship. Amazon spent 25 years building that interface. OpenAI wants to sit on top of it.

How Amazon Became a Platform

Amazon didn’t always control the interface. In 1999, when Amazon launched its Marketplace, third-party sellers accounted for just 3% of units sold. Amazon was still primarily a retailer—it bought inventory, stored it, and sold it to you.

Source: Reddit

But watch what happened next. By 2008, third-party sellers hit 30%. By 2018, they’d crossed 58%. Last year, they peaked at 62% of all units sold on Amazon. The everything store had quietly become something else: a platform that other stores paid to access.

Those fees add up. In 2024, Amazon collected roughly $156 billion from third-party seller services—fulfillment fees, advertising, storage, checkout processing. That’s more revenue than most Fortune 500 companies generate in total. Amazon charges sellers to reach Amazon’s customers, using Amazon’s interface, following Amazon’s rules.

This is what winning looks like in platform economics. You stop competing on inventory and start competing on access. The sellers become interchangeable—if one drops out, another fills the gap. What matters is owning the moment when a customer decides what to buy.

Physical retailers learned this the hard way. They’d spent decades building brands, training staff, optimizing store layouts. Amazon reduced all of that to “inventory available for shipping.”

Now OpenAI wants to do the same thing to Amazon.

The Real Threat: Being Platformed From Above

Here’s what changes when ChatGPT owns the interface:

Today, shopping decisions happen on Amazon. You search for wireless headphones, browse results, read reviews, compare prices. Every step of that decision process—the searching, evaluating, comparing—happens inside Amazon’s interface. That’s what makes the revenue possible: the $56 billion in advertising revenue, the $156 billion in third-party seller fees. Amazon is valuable because it’s where the decisions get made.

ChatGPT wants to move that entire process into chat. You ask about wireless headphones. The AI researches options, evaluates features, compares prices, considers your past preferences. The decision happens in the conversation. Then ChatGPT places an order—maybe with Amazon, maybe Walmart, maybe a Shopify merchant. Amazon just executes the purchase.

The consequence is existential. Third-party sellers pay billions to access customers where shopping decisions happen. If those decisions happen in ChatGPT, why pay Amazon? Advertisers spent $56 billion to influence purchase decisions. If the decision process moves to ChatGPT, that advertising inventory disappears. Amazon becomes just fulfillment infrastructure—the warehouse in someone else’s store.

This isn’t unique to e-commerce. Interface ownership can be everything. It’s why Google pays billions annually to be the default search engine in Firefox and on PC manufacturers’ devices. It’s why Amazon’s shipment emails deliberately omit purchase details—they don’t want Gmail inserting itself into that customer relationship. Companies that control the interface control the economics.

Amazon recognizes this threat. They’ve played this game before. Now someone wants to do it to them.

When Platforms Refuse to Be Commoditized

This fight has precedents. In August 2017, Disney announced it would pull all its content from Netflix and launch its own streaming service. At the time, Netflix was the dominant streaming interface—the place people went to watch shows and movies. Disney was just content, increasingly interchangeable with other studios in Netflix’s catalog.

Disney looked at that relationship and decided: no. They weren’t going to be “just content” inside Netflix’s interface. They’d rather control their own platform, even if it meant starting from scratch.

Source: Genuine Impact

The logic was straightforward. If Netflix owned the interface, Netflix controlled the relationship with viewers. Netflix decided what got recommended, what showed up in search results, which thumbnails got tested. Disney’s decades of brand building, its carefully constructed franchises, its library worth—Netflix’s algorithm reduced it all to “content that keeps subscribers engaged.”

So Disney pulled out. Built Disney+. Now they control their own interface, their own customer data, their own recommendation engine. They took the bet that owning the platform was worth more than being content in someone else’s.

Amazon is making the same calculation. They’ve spent 25 years building not just a store, but the store—the interface where millions of purchase decisions happen daily. OpenAI wants to wrap that interface inside ChatGPT. Amazon is saying: no.

Amazon’s Counter-Move: Building the Shopping AI

But blocking AI agents isn’t enough. Amazon needs to answer the underlying question: if conversational AI is the future of shopping, whose AI will customers use?

Enter Rufus, Amazon’s generative AI shopping assistant. Ask it “What do I need for cold-weather camping?” and it recommends products with explanations, drawing from Amazon’s catalog, customer reviews, and decades of shopping data. It’s doing what ChatGPT wants to do—except it keeps you inside Amazon the entire time.

The strategy mirrors Disney’s. Don’t just block the platform above you—build an alternative customers actually want to use. Amazon is betting that its proprietary data advantage (millions of products, billions of reviews, decades of purchase history) plus the convenience of staying in the Prime ecosystem will beat ChatGPT’s superior AI capabilities.

Whether that bet pays off depends on a question Amazon knows well: is the interface enough, or does the underlying capability matter more?

The Interface Wars Begin

The battle lines look familiar. When streaming fragmented into Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, and a dozen other services, each company made the same calculation: better to control our own platform than become “just content” inside someone else’s interface. We’re watching that same pattern play out in commerce.

But commerce has an asymmetry that content doesn’t. Disney owns Marvel. Amazon doesn’t own the headphones. The same third-party sellers who account for 62% of Amazon’s units could, in theory, list directly with ChatGPT. Or with ten different AI shopping assistants. The inventory isn’t exclusive.

That’s why Walmart and Shopify moved so quickly to integrate with ChatGPT. They’ve already lost the interface war to Amazon—that battle ended years ago. ChatGPT represents a reset. A new interface where Amazon’s decades of customer relationship building, search ranking optimization, and recommendation algorithm tuning might not matter. Where the game starts over.

Amazon still has formidable advantages. The logistics infrastructure took decades and tens of billions to build. Prime membership creates genuine switching costs. The customer service infrastructure handles millions of transactions daily. These aren’t trivial moats.

The question is whether they’re enough.

If shopping decisions move into ChatGPT, does Amazon’s fulfillment network make them the preferred endpoint, or just another warehouse? If AI handles the recommendation and comparison, does Prime’s convenience outweigh ChatGPT’s personalization capability? If sellers can reach customers through ChatGPT without paying Amazon’s fees, do they maintain dual listings or gradually shift?

Last week’s article covered the payment infrastructure—the cryptographic proof and audit trails that let AI agents transact on your behalf. That’s the plumbing question: can agents buy? The infrastructure is being built.

This is the power question: who owns the interface when agents shop?

The technology is being developed. The economics are in flux. And the company that spent 25 years teaching everyone that interface ownership is everything is about to find out if they make it to the next round.