eBay appears to have shut the door on third-party AI agents
TL;DR
eBay appears to have blocked AI agents, including Meta's Muse, from browsing on the platform - the latest speed bump in the AI agent race. A reader tells The Verge that for several weeks he's had his Muse agent browse and curate a daily digest of watches for sale on platforms like eBay, including a link to listings, price, shipping details, and relevant notes about condition or style. This weekend, though, Muse was unable to pull any links or details from eBay, with Muse saying it was blocked from the site.
Nauti's Take
Teams building shopping or research agents should treat eBay access as an unstable dependency. First test whether the workflow can fall back cleanly to permitted APIs, owned data sources, or a human handoff when a site blocks the agent, and validate links, prices, and shipping details separately.
The public reason for the block remains unconfirmed.
Sources