Photo: Union Eleven, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Amazon blocked Meta's Muse shopping agent from its store, and Shopify embraced the same agent right after. Tobi Lütke, co-founder and CEO of Shopify, told Alex Heath on the Sources Podcast that he only learned of Shopify's decision after posting about it.
Much of the commentary on AI shopping agents treats them as a threat to retailers' ad businesses and customer relationships. Tobi treats them as one more way for buyers to reach Shopify's merchants, and he rejects the idea that AI's gains come at someone else's expense.
"We aren't probably even at the first basis points of value that's been converted into economic value from the potentiality around us." — Tobi Lütke
Tobi co-founded the software company that independent merchants use to run their online stores, and he built it on the opposite model to Amazon's marketplace. He also runs a personal AI agent on servers in his own home.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 84 minutes of audio, 8 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 arguments that matter.
Sources Podcast · Oct 28, 2026 · 1h 24m · 76m saved
With Tobi Lütke, Co-Founder and CEO of Shopify
Key Takeaways
Shopify supports AI checkout from any assistant, including Meta's Muse, Perplexity's Comet and Grok, after Amazon blocked Muse
A three-sided marketplace has to favor buyers over sellers, which Tobi says is why Shopify never built one
An AI agent paid to pick products is a "breach of trust," in Tobi's view, so advertising is the hard way to fund one
Charging users, metering usage or taking a cut of sales all work
Tobi's estimate of AI catastrophe risk is zero, because AI is fast floating-point math
Pessimism dominates AI coverage because it sounds smarter than optimism, not because the effects are negative
Shopify is seeing more new stores than ever, with younger founders leading
Tobi credits AI as free business advice, and MrBeast's videos as a lesson in reinvestment
1. Amazon Blocked Muse
Amazon cut Meta's Muse agent off from shopping on its site. Shopify did the opposite, and Tobi said he learned of it only after he had posted about the news.
Tobi found out Shopify was embracing Muse after posting about Amazon's block
"I found out after posting that we are embracing Muse. So that was kind of a fun experience." — Tobi Lütke
Tobi does not cast the split as one company being right and the other wrong. He traces it to a choice the two companies made 20 years ago. Amazon digitized the department store, built on deep inventory and an ad business it now has to protect. Shopify sells software and services to merchants instead.
Shopify was built so that its interests line up with its merchants' at every level, Tobi said
"We fairly intentionally built the business in such a way that up and down the stack we are on the same side of the table as our customers." — Tobi Lütke
