eBay Bans Illicit Automated Shopping Amid Rapid Rise of AI Agents (arstechnica.com)
- Reference: 0180639060
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/01/22/1738221/ebay-bans-illicit-automated-shopping-amid-rapid-rise-of-ai-agents
- Source link: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/ebay-bans-illicit-automated-shopping-amid-rapid-rise-of-ai-agents/
> On its face, a one-line terms of service update doesn't seem like major news, but what it implies is more significant: The change reflects the rapid emergence of what some are calling "agentic commerce," a new category of AI tools designed to browse, compare, and purchase products on behalf of users.
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> eBay's updated terms, which go into effect on February 20, 2026, specifically prohibit users from employing "buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review" to access eBay's services without the site's permission. The previous version of the agreement contained a general prohibition on robots, spiders, scrapers, and automated data gathering tools but did not mention AI agents or LLMs by name.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/ebay-bans-illicit-automated-shopping-amid-rapid-rise-of-ai-agents/
"buy for me" sounds like a bad idea. (Score:2)
I just don't trust a computer to spend my money. Especially one that might hallucinate an offer or not be able to recognize a scam.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, a blank check to buy something in particular likely means you're a mark. Its a CEO's wet dream.
Re: (Score:3)
> eBay really doesn't/shouldn't care if it is a bad decision or not to the purchaser....they just want sales, right?
EBay's buyer protections mean they will have to deal with more seller/buyer service disputes that may arise from people using agentic shopping assistants.
Re: (Score:2)
> EBay's buyer protections mean they will have to deal with more seller/buyer service disputes that may arise from people using agentic shopping assistants.
That's likely the problem. They don't want to deal with returns or other things because your agentic AI bot mistook "RAM box" as actual RAM and payed way too much for a box. It's likely to result in sellers being inundated with refund requests because they wrote their descriptions that fooled AI bots and such.
And any proper solution like "you're responsibl
Re: (Score:2)
they will be liable for 'errors' because of their guarantee policy. they don't want to deal with it, and I don't blame them. but this rule can't stand for long. once the market is full of only automated agents, they will be missing a market opportunity that others are taking advantage of so I see this as a temporary legal reprieve for ebay.
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any decent computer algorithm will be many times better at spotting a scam than the average person.
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Oh, that must be why there are no scam listings anywhere anymore.
Wait a sec... there are scam listings and they're everywhere. Does that mean there aren't any decent algorithms, or...?
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^^^^^ This.
Bingo- letting an 'AI' decide to spend money on your behalf is a disaster waiting to happen.
You'd need to put in a LOT of guardrails to make sure it didn't wipe out your bank account because it thought it saw a good deal on pallets of chopsticks or a 3-ton sea crate of green marbles.
"Holy shit, I compute that that's a super deal on gardening gloves- I better buy 10,000 pairs."
Re: But... (Score:2)
You are smoking French fried dick.
eBay has one of the most usable shopping sites on the net. They have more metadata about items than anyone else who does anything like what they do, so you can do more meaningful searches on their site than anywhere else that offers a breadth of products.
Re: (Score:2)
> You are smoking French fried dick.
I'm stealing that for later use.
Re: But... (Score:2)
Fair since I stole it.
The entire quote is "you must be smoking French fried dick if you think I give a chicken fried fuck"
Found it in a meme that ends something like I would fuck that up so bad... You must be smoking dick if you think I'm going to fuck that chicken
The AI RAM craze is impacting eBay (Score:2)
Once what was seen as worthless ewaste is now hot chips. Job lots of eol computers (Thanks to Microslop) and laptops are being shucked of their ram and ssds and their other other parts to feed data centers. Then there are all the GPUs for the underground AI market too, which barley recovered from Ethereum mining. eBay as a place to get cheap junk as been hollowed out for profit. Then there is the scalping of all collectables and valuables. eBay is being used as a testbed for AI economics experiments and it
Oh No. (Score:3)
Anyway...
Am I supposed to believe that eBay's UAP will have any impact against people using AI and bots?
I believe that this will only serve to alleviate liability for eBay in the rare case that they kick an AI bot and the owner wants to sue.
So the fixed the sniper bots right?? (Score:1)
They've had bots buying stuff since forever. Nothing is going to change.
make it work both ways (Score:2)
the problem is that everything worth having is scalped to hell and back now. "agentic commerce" is the back edge of that blade. in a world where everything is scalped out, how else are we to get anything except by paying even more out the nose that the already exorbitant prices being demanded by retailers.
have you seen the prices of [RAM, GPUs, SSDs] these past months?