eBay bans illicit automated purchasing amid fast rise of AI brokers

On Tuesday, eBay up to date its Consumer Settlement to explicitly ban third-party “purchase for me” brokers and AI chatbots from interacting with its platform with out permission, first noticed by Worth Added Useful resource. On its face, a one-line phrases of service replace doesn’t appear to be main information, however what it implies is extra important: The change displays the fast emergence of what some are calling “agentic commerce,” a brand new class of AI instruments designed to browse, examine, and buy merchandise on behalf of customers.

eBay’s up to date phrases, which go into impact on February 20, 2026, particularly prohibit customers from using “buy-for-me brokers, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end movement that makes an attempt to position orders with out human evaluate” to entry eBay’s providers with out the location’s permission. The earlier model of the settlement contained a common prohibition on robots, spiders, scrapers, and automatic information gathering instruments however didn’t point out AI brokers or LLMs by title.

At first look, the phrase “agentic commerce” could sound like aspirational advertising jargon, however the instruments are already right here, and individuals are apparently utilizing them. Whereas becoming loosely beneath one label, these instruments are available many kinds.

OpenAI first added purchasing options to ChatGPT Search in April 2025, permitting customers to browse product suggestions. By September, the corporate launched Instantaneous Checkout, which lets customers buy objects from Etsy and Shopify retailers immediately inside the chat interface. (In November, eBay CEO Jamie Iannone advised the corporate may be part of OpenAI’s Instantaneous Checkout program sooner or later.)