KDCube
← AI Industry News

Agents Get Wallets and Passports: Walmart Checkout, Claude Duet, AI Passport

Walmart opened an Agent Gateway MCP server with per-agent profiles and spending caps so approved AI agents can shop and check out, while Anthropic previewed Claude Duet, a proactive Opus 5.5 agent that asks before it pays, sends, or deletes. ServiceNow's AI Passport and IBM watsonx Orchestrate push age...

Highlights

  • Walmart launched the Agent Gateway, an MCP server that lets approved AI agents search inventory and check out for customers at Walmart and Sam's Club — paired with Agent Profiles that give each agent its own account, per-purchase approval by default, and spending caps like $50/$100/$200 (Walmart)
  • Anthropic opened a research-preview waitlist for Claude Duet, a proactive Opus 5.5 agent that briefs you each morning, runs between messages, and must show-and-wait before sending, paying, signing, or deleting (Testing Catalog)
  • ServiceNow's AI Passport issues each agent a cryptographically signed runtime credential — identity, allowed actions, reachable systems, and accountable owner — verified by the AI Control Tower before every action (ServiceNow)
  • Amazon is still blocking third-party shopping agents even as Walmart rolls out the welcome mat, setting up a split in how retailers treat agentic buyers (Shopifreaks)

Key Signals

  1. Walmart gives shopping agents a sanctioned front door — Oct 21, 2026
    Instead of forcing agents to scrape the site like humans, Walmart's Agent Gateway exposes a Model Context Protocol endpoint so authorized agents can find a customer's usual items and place orders without handing over full history. It opens as an invitation-only beta at walmart.com/agents, with Agent Profiles and spending controls arriving next month — a concrete template for how a major retailer scopes, caps, and audits agent purchases (Walmart).
  2. Anthropic ships a background agent that asks before it acts — Oct 21, 2026
    Claude Duet runs on Opus 5.5 as a single ongoing thread, surfaces work needing attention, and executes assigned tasks between messages — but is hard-gated to propose-and-confirm on any send, payment, signature, or deletion. It ships as standalone iOS/Android/web apps for US Pro and Max users, shares plan usage limits, and taps 6,000+ Claude Marketplace connectors (Gmail, Slack, Stripe, Shopify, HubSpot) (Testing Catalog).
  3. Agent identity hardens into a runtime credential — mid-October 2026
    ServiceNow's AI Passport moves governance from policy docs and after-the-fact audits to execution-time enforcement: a signed credential, grounded in the CMDB and GRC policies, that the Control Tower checks on every action and that triggers graduated responses — up to termination — when an agent drifts from scope. It's built on open specs so other governance and identity products can issue and verify the same credentials (ServiceNow).

Why It Matters / What To Watch

  1. Agents that spend money need scoped identity, not shared service accounts.
    • Watch how Agent Profiles' per-purchase approval and spending caps behave under real agent traffic — Walmart reserves the right to require extra approvals even inside a cap, a signal that fraud/abuse handling is still being tuned (Walmart).
    • The governance side is catching up fast: ServiceNow's AI Passport and IBM watsonx Orchestrate's Agent Identity both give each agent a verifiable identity distinct from its builder and user, tied to enterprise IdPs like Entra and IBM Verify (ServiceNow, IBM).
  2. "Proactive" and "autonomous commerce" raise the bar on human-in-the-loop design.
    • Duet's show-and-wait gate on money-moving actions is the pattern to copy — if you're building proactive agents, make the approval surface a first-class control, not an afterthought (Testing Catalog).
    • Expect a retailer split to widen: Walmart courting agents via MCP while Amazon blocks them means builders must design for inconsistent, per-platform agent access rather than a universal checkout (Shopifreaks).
  3. Multi-cloud agent sprawl is becoming an inventory problem.
    • IBM watsonx Orchestrate now discovers and imports agents from Amazon AgentCore, Microsoft Foundry, and Google Gemini Enterprise into one control plane with shared policy — a preview of the "single pane for every agent across clouds" operators will increasingly demand (IBM).

Quick Links