Anthropic publishes two commerce agent blueprints before the holiday season, leaving payment with the retailer
Anthropic has published a blueprint for building commerce agents on Claude, with reference implementations of a shopping agent and a merchant agent for retail, travel, telecom and ticketing platforms. The shopping agent searches catalogues, assembles carts and answers order, return and refund questions, then hands the cart to the retailer's own checkout; payment processing stays with the retailer. A person approves the merchant agent's pricing and campaign drafts before they go live.
Artificial Intelligence··Midday
The blueprint deploys on the Claude API as well as Bedrock, Foundry and Vertex AI
Anthropic has released a blueprint for commerce agents that packages the harnesses, patterns and guardrails an engineering team needs, together with working reference implementations of a shopping agent and a merchant agent for retail, travel, telecom and ticketing platforms. The code can be built with the Messages API, the Agent SDK or Claude Managed Agents in beta, and the blueprint deploys through the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry or Google Cloud Vertex AI. The repository sits at github.com/anthropics/commerce-agents and ships with a Claude Code plugin, self-guided demos for each vertical and an engineering deep-dive. Anthropic names Shopify and Priceline among the enterprise customers already running agents on Claude, and lists Accenture, Mastercard and Visa as partners taking the blueprints to clients and merchant communities.[1], [2]
The shopping agent builds the cart and leaves the payment to the retailer
The shopping agent lives inside the retailer's own app or website and connects to catalogue, cart, checkout, customer preference and order-history systems. It can take a multi-item request and search the catalogue, remember what a customer prefers, show products, comparisons and the cart inside the conversation, and answer order, return, exchange and refund questions in the same thread instead of sending the shopper to a support page. It then hands a finished cart to the retailer's own checkout, and payment processing stays with the retailer or an agentic payments provider. Its guardrails are designed to tie prices and products to actual catalogue data and to avoid manipulative upselling.[1], [2]
The merchant agent's suggestions pass a human approval before they go live
The merchant agent works for the people running the store: it answers questions about what is selling and what is not, tracks inventory and flags an item about to sell out before a promotion starts, recommends pricing and promotions from the store's own sales history, and drafts marketing campaigns. When it proposes a change, a person approves it before anything goes live. Anthropic says retailers running shopping agents on Claude have seen carts up to 35 percent larger and shoppers 60 percent more likely to complete a purchase; those are the company's own figures and no independent test accompanied them. Adobe Analytics reported last month that AI-driven visits to retail sites converted at a 60 percent higher rate than other traffic.[1], [2]
