Anthropic has released ready-made code letting online stores build their own AI agents on Claude, ahead of the holiday season. The blueprint carries no payment layer — that stays with the store and partners such as Visa and Mastercard.
Anthropic, the company behind Claude, published a blueprint last week — a ready-made code package online stores can build on — for what it calls commerce agents. A commerce agent is an AI program that takes part in the purchase itself on behalf of the customer or the store, rather than sitting alongside it as a recommendation service. The launch targets online retail, travel, telecom and ticketing, and arrives ahead of the holiday shopping season. Visa, Mastercard and the consultancy Accenture are helping bring the blueprint to market.
The package contains two types of agent. The shopping agent meets the customer in the online store, searches the catalogue for what the customer is after, compares products, remembers preferences, builds the cart and answers questions along the way.
The merchant agent works the other side, handling inventory, pricing and marketing. Anthropic describes the release as the framework and guardrails an engineering team needs to get a commerce agent running within days.
What Anthropic left out matters as much as what it shipped. The blueprint contains no payment protocol, no checkout, no product catalogue and no advertising layer. Those parts remain in the store's own systems and with its payment partners, and no transaction routes through Anthropic.
The ecommerce platform Shopify, the software many retailers build their online stores on, shows how the handover works. It has published code demonstrating how the agents connect directly to a live storefront: the agent finds the products and fills the cart through the store's own systems, then passes the customer on to the existing checkout, where the payment is completed. Claude sits on top of the infrastructure the store already has, as a reasoning layer — not as a new checkout competing with the store for the customer relationship or the payment flow.
That is precisely the space Visa and Mastercard occupy. The card networks keep the part of the purchase that requires trust, while the AI company takes discovery and reasoning.
Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa, argues that AI will reshape commerce from the ground up, but that trust has to sit underneath every single transaction.
He says it is the merchants themselves asking for this: they want more control over how AI engages their customers. Kath Gramling, who leads Accenture's global consumer goods, retail and travel practice, describes commerce agents as a critical capability for companies seeking to deliver the personalised customer experiences people now expect.
Shopify and the travel company Priceline are already running customer-facing agents on Claude, and Priceline rebuilt the latest version of its assistant, Penny, on Anthropic's models.
Online stores already using agents on Claude have seen carts up to 35 per cent larger, and customers 60 per cent more likely to complete a purchase. Those are Anthropic's own figures, not independently verified benchmarks.
The launch lands while most retailers are still experimenting. Forty-three per cent of them are piloting autonomous AI tools for commerce, and 81 per cent say they trust AI to operate on its own as long as guardrails are in place, according to a survey from PYMNTS Intelligence and Worldpay. Forty-five per cent of consumers say they are comfortable letting an AI agent complete a purchase for them, rising to 54 per cent among the youngest.
That comfort disappears quickly once money actually changes hands. Ninety-five per cent report at least one concern about buying through AI agents, and only five per cent have none. Half of American consumers say they would trust such commerce more if they knew fraud protections were in place.
The gap between retailer appetite and customer wariness is exactly what Anthropic has left untouched. The company hands online stores a layer for discovery and reasoning, and leaves the transaction itself with the systems and partners — Visa and Mastercard among them — that already carry the trust a payment requires.
Sources: Finextra, PYMNTS, Quartz
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