>Retailers running shopping agents on Claude have seen carts up to 35% larger and shoppers 60% more likely to complete a purchase.

I feel like this is a messed up thing to brag about. From dark patterns now to whatever this is. Like a dark nudge from something that can appear intelligent, acting as a person, with the goal of selling more and more.

I don't want this. I want the diametric opposite of this: I want stores that expose their entire real-time catalog as RAG endpoints and let my agents go bonanza on them. My agents; agents whose loyalties are to me.

I'd enthusiastically pay a large premium for this, if any hungry startup people are looking for ideas.

I'm not interested in using agents controlled by vendors. Our interests are adverse! Even plain text search on modern storefronts is an anti-consumer tarpit that promotes (upranks) defective products and things I wasn't deliberately seeking, and hides what I actually need, to maximize my eyeball time in their store. Imagine how much worse the experience could get, with a predatory AI guiding the process—studying the hapless human's psyche; gaming it.

No; I don't want that at all. I want to view as few commercial offers as possible. I want to invest as little time as possible in these meaningless-to-my-life consumerism chores.

> "Retailers running shopping agents on Claude have seen carts up to 35% larger..."

Yup; the opposite of that, please!

Who is still using Anthropic seriously, their price and limits are ridiculous these days, you can't get anything done unless you're paying top dollar on a metered pricing at ridiculous levels. Subscriptions only get you frustrated, and any agentic pipeline that needs to make a profit, that has actual margins, I seriously doubt is using any of their models.

Claude is finally entering the agentic commerce race, but as a buyer, why would I want to limit myself to stores Claude or even ChatGPT whitelist? LLMs are slowly eating away the moat that marketplaces have since an agent in the terminal can scour the web and find the product you need without the product search dark patterns and sponsored products everywhere.

Automating the checkout is tricky, but with WebMCP, I feel like agents will be able to go and checkout directly on websites soon. I myself am building an open-source agentic commerce chat that uses MCP-UI under the hood and brings the full checkout experience to the chat.

Ok Shopify, you called the demons, now Anthropic makes you obsolete!

You know, maybe merchants now have to "justify to the bank why they are using Shopify instead of Anthropic" just like your software engineers have to "justify not using AI".

A new AI purity spiral is emerging that devours one by one.

Very nice jeans you've got there! Up for some belts-and-suspenders, maybe?

>agentic payments provider

The LAST thing you want to be non-deterministic is a payment system, right? What is the possible use of AI in the payment process? I fill in fields and that gets whisked away to an API somewhere to verify. Why do I possibly need Claude involved?

Anyone else worried about the premise of Anthropic selling specific agentic tools that also use their models underneath? My first thought is apps on the iPhone that got banned after Apple introduced an official option with the same functionality in a new iOS.

I'm not sure I would risk building an agentic app that competes with this on Anthropic models out of fear of that scenario.

This is going to be an extremely interesting space to watch. Will online shops open their perfectly sculpted and sales-optimized webpages to accept requests from chat bots? such that they can just do highly targeted requests for shoppers? Or will they implement custom chat bots that guide and nudge you along your purchasing journey on the page itself? I'm very curious how consumer behavior will evolve from here. is every online search still going to start with a google query? or maybe soon a query on claude and chatgpt? or maybe three separate queries to the chat bots of the respective stores?

Preventing upsells won't fly with most smaller shops who depend on social media advertising and average order value (AOV) to make profits from ads.

that example of getting wooden blocks for a 9 year old child isn't going to go down well.

Thats more of a 2 year old thing...

I'm also a little worried about their example of "two buyer messages contain instructions to refund and reprice the store" - the intent is clearly to show the agent refusing the command, but the fact it has made it into it's context here shows this is a terrible idea

The intelligence is artificial, but the dollars it spends on your behalf are very real.

"Hey, Mythos, get me the best discount. Negative bill is even better"

All I see is slop.

lol much innovation wow

The way they keep spinning off these niche offerings tells you one of 2 things, it's either working pretty well, or it is failing very, very badly.

They know they need to differentiate from other offerings that are catching up, but I don't know anyone who has just left their work up to any of these specialised products. Most try it say "it's interesting" and then move on.

>Who is still using Anthropic seriously

Too many people, hence all the friction and cost.

It's pretty clear that there is massive unmet demand for AI, and compute cannot keep up. So you can pretty reliably dial in the "free compute for inference" situation for any given lab based on their pricing and friction tactics.

Anthropic/Google getting stuffed (Google is an odd case here)

OAI doing alrightish

Grok/Meta basically doing giveaways

Chinese models trying to fill vacancies on 3rd party compute

For most tasks I tried the choice is either expensive Claude that will actually deliver vs Codex or others that are cheaper but won’t.

Having said that Terra is awesome for clearly defined (by Opus/Fable) research task, and Sol is amazing for adversarial review, but I won’t allow them to touch my codebase any more.

If someone has a workflow where they keep tight control over agents, reviews the code by hand and so on, I can imagine them being useful.

Large businesses who choose enterprise solutions over cheaper indie/open-source solutions for similar reasons (dedicated support, sticky products designed for their industry, less regulatory concerns, etc.)

FWIW, Claude is an available model of Enterprise Copilot, and I'm sure Microsoft is paying a pretty penny to keep that as an option. Between Chat and Claude, most of my workplace prefers to use Claude. To your point though, the user isn't paying, and doesn't need to concern themselves with cost. I'd imagine if any of them have an active subscription to either, it's Chat

> Who is still using Anthropic seriously, their price and limits are ridiculous these days,

likely they hooked many fat enterprise customers

Who is using it? when everyday they have issue with capacity, clearly some people are using it and using it heavily.

> Who is still using Anthropic seriously...Subscriptions only get you frustrated

If you're using Claude in a pair-programming/"exoskeleton" sense, you'll probably never get close to maxing your subscription allotment unless you really lean on Fable.

The "you can't get anything done" comment confounds me, frankly.

Many corporates move very slowly and adopt 1 provider and stay put for a couple year.