On Tuesday, eBay up to date its User Agreement to explicitly ban third-party “purchase for me” brokers and AI chatbots from interacting with its platform with out permission, first noticed by Value Added Resource. On its face, a one-line phrases of service replace doesn’t seem to be main information, however what it implies is extra important: The change displays the speedy emergence of what some are calling “agentic commerce,” a brand new class of AI instruments designed to browse, evaluate, 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 evaluation” to entry eBay’s providers with out the location’s permission. The earlier model of the settlement contained a basic prohibition on robots, spiders, scrapers, and automatic information gathering instruments however didn’t point out AI brokers or LLMs by identify.
At first look, the phrase “agentic commerce” could sound like aspirational advertising and marketing jargon, however the instruments are already right here, and persons are apparently utilizing them. Whereas becoming loosely beneath one label, these instruments are available in many varieties.
OpenAI first added buying options to ChatGPT Search in April 2025, permitting customers to browse product suggestions. By September, the corporate launched Prompt Checkout, which lets customers buy gadgets from Etsy and Shopify retailers immediately inside the chat interface. (In November, eBay CEO Jamie Iannone suggested the corporate would possibly be part of OpenAI’s Prompt Checkout program sooner or later.)
