What happens when the company behind one of the world’s most talked-about AI chatbots decides to help retailers build their own shopping assistants? Furthermore, two of the biggest names in payments help it spread agentic commerce awareness.
Anthropic, the AI company that makes the Claude chatbot, released a set of commerce tools on September 2, 2026, that businesses can use to build AI “agents” for online shopping. The toolkit, which Anthropic calls a blueprint, gives retail, travel, telecom and ticketing companies ready-made building blocks so their engineers can get a shopping assistant running within days rather than months. The launch pushes Anthropic further into e-commerce, an area where it now competes with rivals such as OpenAI and Google, and it also arrives just ahead of the holiday shopping season, when retailers are under pressure to convert online browsing into sales.
For AI agent commerce, Anthropic built two kinds of agents. The first is a shopper-facing agent that sits inside a retailer’s own app or website. Customers can describe what they want in plain language, compare products, get personalized suggestions and build a cart during the conversation, and ask about deliveries, returns or refunds. It does not process payment itself; that step stays with the retailer’s existing checkout or a separate payments provider.
The second is a merchant-facing agent meant for retailer staff rather than shoppers. It can analyze sales, monitor inventory, recommend pricing and promotions, and draft marketing campaigns using the company’s own data, though human approval is required before any proposed change goes live. Anthropic has also built in controls meant to keep prices and product listings accurate and to stop the agent from pushing unwanted upsells.
Anthropic said the results from early users have been notable. Angela Jiang, the company’s head of product for the Claude platform, told Reuters the company has seen “cart size up about 30–35% for one partner,” with shoppers roughly 60% more likely to complete a purchase.
The blueprint’s reach comes from its partners. Anthropic is working with Accenture, Mastercard and Visa to support adoption among their clients and merchant networks, while Shopify is building a reference storefront based on the framework and Priceline already uses Claude to power its AI travel assistant, Penny. Travel technology company Amadeus also said that it is collaborating with Anthropic to make its travel content, connectivity, documentation and authentication available inside AI-enabled development environments.
Developers can deploy the code through Anthropic’s own API or through Amazon, Microsoft and Google’s cloud platforms, and the underlying code is published openly on GitHub.
