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Shopify opens its catalog up to more AI agents

Shopify opens its catalog up to more AI agents

Shopify previously announced a partnership with Meta’s Muse for AI-powered shopping and checkout.

Shopify previously announced a partnership with Meta’s Muse for AI-powered shopping and checkout.

is features writer with five years of experience covering the companies that shape technology and the people who use their tools.

More AI agents will soon be able to browse and purchase from Shopify listings, marking an expansion of the company’s agentic commerce ambitions.

Shopify announced Tuesday it will let shoppers configure their AI agents to purchase products on their behalf, giving more agents access to over a billion listings in Shopify’s catalog. (The catalog consists of both items on and off Shopify storefronts.) In September, Shopify announced it was partnering with Meta to allow its Muse agent to browse and purchase items on a human’s behalf; now, shoppers can use any agent without a partnership integration.

To set up the feature, customers connect an agent with their account on Shop, a Shopify-owned platform that consolidates orders, tracks packages, and recommends products. Like the Muse partnership, customers use the one-click Shop Pay feature to check out within the conversation with the agent. Orders placed through the agent are funneled back to the Shop app. Shopify is marketing the feature as a “personal shopper” that humans can give rules to, like setting budget guardrails or only displaying products with fast shipping. Buyers must approve each purchase.

E-commerce has become one of the battlegrounds in the era of AI — it’s no coincidence that many demos of agentic tools end with a transaction, whether it’s buying clothing, booking a flight, or ordering takeout on a human’s behalf. The tech industry, including big commerce players like Google and Amazon, are investing in AI-driven shopping tools where the end goal is an “agent” purchasing things for a human user. It’s also the basis of an ongoing fight between Amazon and AI companies like Perplexity — and more recently, Meta’s Muse — over whether agents should be able to shop on a customer’s behalf.

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The Genie 4 world model offers more realism and can create audio to accompany its interactive worlds.

The Genie 4 world model offers more realism and can create audio to accompany its interactive worlds.

is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.

Google announced today its Genie 4 world model for generating interactive experiences using AI. The company says the model has four main updates: It allows for more realistic worlds, lets users update an experience in real time with a natural language prompt, can generate audio, and uses Gemini 3.8 Flash under the hood to help with its simulations. It also can create experiences that are about two minutes long, up from one minute for the previous Genie 3 model.

Google is pitching Genie 4 as a tool that could be helpful for things like pre-visualization for filmmakers, prototyping game ideas, and making training scenarios for robots. But the company warns that, as simulations run longer, details and object permanence can shift over time.

I haven’t been able to try Genie 4 for myself — it’s launching first as a “research preview” to “trusted testers” — so I can’t tell you how it compares to the Genie 3-powered Project Genie, which I used to generate bad Nintendo knockoffs. But here are some examples from Google demonstrating what’s possible with the new model.

Genie 4 will be “coming soon” to Google AI Ultra subscribers, Google says, and the company has opened a waitlist where you can apply to be able to try it in Project Genie.

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