RealReal, a secondhand luxury fashion retailer, said it is upgrading its anti-bot defense system, effectively making it harder for AI agents to shop on its site.
The change comes days later The edge reported that an artificial intelligence agent could be used to take advantage of The RealReal’s article reservation system. On the retailer’s website, an item is placed on “backorder” and is not available for other customers to purchase for 20 minutes once it is placed in a user’s shopping cart. Using Meta’s muse, The edge was able to instruct the AI agent to continually re-add The RealReal listings into a shopping cart as soon as the 20-minute wait expired, effectively blocking other shoppers from purchasing products for hours or longer.
After publication, CTO Luke Friang said in an email that the company had addressed the Muse use case pointed out by The edgeThe story of. RealReal’s bot defense setup now makes it much more difficult for all agents to log in, add items to cart and checkout, Friang said. Agents will still be able to display listings from The RealReal and direct Muse users to product pages, Friang said, adding that the company will continue to strengthen protections as AI-powered online shopping evolves.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tech companies are selling agents as personalized assistants to billions of people: always-on, compliant entities that will schedule meetings, host parties, and buy things for human users. So far, agents and purchases seem to go hand in hand; Meta said in its third-quarter earnings call this month that it was the most common use case for Muse so far, with purchases exceeding $200 on average. Muse has been a success for Meta and could mark a turning point for AI agents: the company said 10 million people in the United States had downloaded the app in 40 days.
But robots that buy things instead of humans have the potential to upset the balance of the web as we know it. On the one hand, if humans stop visiting websites directly and instead access the web through chatbots, companies are one step away from their customers. Retailers – most notably Amazon – have recognized that reality could disrupt their bottom line, especially advertising revenue, and have blocked agents from shopping on their sites.
An influx of AI agents accessing consumer platforms could also break or complicate even the most unexpected things that shoppers take for granted, like the reservation system of a used clothing website. Of course, there’s a realistic limit to how much time a person is willing to spend adding and re-adding designer clothes to their shopping cart if they’re on the fence. An agent, on the other hand, doesn’t care. Perhaps it’s precisely the kind of heavy lifting that a cutting-edge person might pay an actual personal assistant to do on their behalf. Now, a capability like this is within the reach of millions of consumers, and they are just beginning to learn how to take advantage of it. Retailers are also catching up.
