Renting out the moat

Weeks after Amazon wove its in-house shopping assistant directly into its own search bar, it started renting the thing to competitors. The new AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant hands any retailer the architecture, starter code and engineering support to put an Amazon-tested conversational agent on its own catalog in about sixty days. Kate Spade is the first to go live.

OpenAI deprecated its rival Instant Checkout in March after fewer than thirty of Shopify's millions of merchants went live.

This is the move that built AWS in the first place: take the infrastructure that gave Amazon's own store an edge, and sell it as a service to everyone else. The pitch is a number — Amazon says shoppers who chat with the assistant buy at 3.5 times the rate of those typing keywords into a search box, on the strength of nearly $12 billion in what it calls incremental sales last year. Treat the figure as a sales claim: it is Amazon's own, measured on Amazon's own site, with no disclosed baseline and no outside audit.

The strategic knot is the story. Amazon simultaneously deepened the moat around its own storefront and began selling the moat-digging equipment to rivals — who, in adopting it, deepen their dependence on Amazon's cloud. There is a quieter irony too: the 'Amazon AI' that Kate Spade now runs is powered by Anthropic's Claude, not Amazon's own model. The same quarter, OpenAI quietly retired its competing checkout product after almost no merchants signed on — a reminder that in agentic commerce, selling proven plumbing may beat shipping a new protocol.