Nilay Patel
Editor-in-chief of The Verge, which he co-founded in 2011, covering consumer technology, platforms and the policy around them.
“The idea that your agent is just you going off and doing things on the internet was very tempting for five minutes at the beginning of all this. And it is absolutely not going to be true. There are going to be opaque backroom deals that control how the web works because all that money is too lucrative for this just to be wide open.”
The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026
Patel on AI shopping agents. Some retailers block them and others welcome them to win share, and he predicts the blocking is mostly a way to force deals, as publishers did with AI crawlers.
Transcript
…whatever AI system, OpenAI, whatever. And then the AI companies are sad. And then you're like, we'll do a deal. And like every publisher, I'm not even sure if our deal survived the transition to VMC. Yeah, I'm confident our parent company has a deal with someone. It no longer is relevant to us.
Presumably. But like Amazon is, Amazon is out here blocking not for deals. Amazon is saying, we want no part of this game.
But I think that they're going to end up with deals. We want no part of this game until the rest of the market has settled down and all of you realize you still need Amazon and then you will come crawling up to us, right? Like, I think that's true. On the flip side, Walmart is basically saying, let your agents come shop with us. We will take over for Amazon, right? Because Walmart also has a giant third-party marketplace and fulfillment centers and all that stuff. And so if you, if they can take points of share away from Amazon for agent commerce, then that's going to be great for Walmart. Yeah. But like all of this is just deals. Like the idea that your agent is just you going off and doing things on the internet was very tempting for five minutes at the beginning of all this. And it is absolutely not going to be true. There are going to be opaque backroom deals that control how the web works because all that money is too lucrative for this just to be wide open.
Right. And I think like the shopping cart example is a good one, right? Because there's a way of looking at this that says, okay, I should be able to buy something from Amazon. And the fact that Amazon's website is so bad, I don't want to use it is actually Amazon's problem and not mine. So…
I think lots of people camp on their carts on various platforms.
Sure, but not it, it takes work, right? And like the friction ends up being really important there. It's like, a good example of this is Ticketmaster scammers, right? Like as this stuff has gotten more automatic, it's become a much bigger problem because it's one thing to sit here with a bunch of…
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