Late last year, some independent online merchants started noticing something strange. Despite never working with Amazon — and in some cases pointedly avoiding it — they were getting orders that seemed to originate from Amazon. Typically, getting your product listed on Amazon is a complicated process, involving either a wholesale relationship or becoming a seller on the platform, and these brands, according to various reports, had done nothing of the sort.

Amazon, it turned out, had been scraping their listings to include in its AI-powered shopping feature, Rufus. In addition to seeing products from Amazon, customers using Rufus were being shown items from outside stores, sometimes with a button labeled “Buy for me✨,” which would trigger an Amazon-powered bot to browse the outside merchant’s website, check the item’s price and availability, place the order, and handle the payment process.

The order numbers were small, so the issue was more unsettling than urgent; for the time being, the consequences of Amazon’s presumptuousness were a few extra sales and a minor sense of violation (Amazon allows outside merchants to opt out). But the feature provides a glimpse of how some in tech are thinking about AI-powered shopping: Not just........

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