Amazon Opens Seller Assistant to Anthropic's Claude and AI Agents for Third-Party Sellers

Amazon announced a significant expansion of its Amazon Seller Assistant at the Accelerate conference in Seattle, introducing a plugin that allows third-party sellers to manage their entire ecommerce business through AI agents like Anthropic's Claude and Amazon Quick.1

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The move represents a fundamental shift in how sellers interact with Amazon's platform, transforming AI tools from simple chatbots into operational infrastructure.

Amazon Seller Assistant Plugin Eliminates Seller Central Dependency

The Seller Assistant plugin enables sellers to check inventory, adjust prices, and update listings without opening Seller Central, the portal merchants have traditionally used to manage their Amazon businesses.1

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Mary Beth Westmoreland, Amazon's vice president of Worldwide Selling Partner Experience, explained the vision: "They would never have to log into Seller Central. We would just bring it to them where they work."2

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Connecting Anthropic's Claude takes approximately 60 seconds and requires no coding.1

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The plugin pulls listings, inventory levels, sales analytics, and performance metrics into the outside assistant, which can then act on the account similarly to how Seller Assistant functions inside Seller Central.2

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Sellers choose which types of data the plugin can access and approve each action before execution, with every interaction maintaining an audit trail.2

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AI Agents Transform Seller Operations Beyond Simple Automation

Amazon is expanding Seller Assistant from a conversational tool into something closer to an operating system for merchants.4

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Westmoreland told PYMNTS that the company has moved "from a smaller set of capabilities to onboarding just hundreds of them."4

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The AI tools now reason across inventory management, pricing, advertising, demand, and compliance while remembering how individual merchants operate.4

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New workflows run continuously in the background, even when sellers aren't logged in.2

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A seller can request alerts when a top product drops below a four-star rating or authorize price adjustments when competitive openings appear.2

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This shift targets managerial attention as the scarce resource, moving beyond AI's first wave of task compression.4

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Third-Party Sellers Drive Amazon's Revenue and AI Adoption

Independent sellers account for more than 60% of units sold on Amazon worldwide.1

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The seller fees Amazon charges brought in $46.8 billion in the second quarter, exceeding AWS revenue.1

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Amazon reports that approximately 90% of sellers already use some form of outside AI to run parts of their operations.1

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The Seller Assistant, first launched in 2023, has reached more than 90% of selling partners worldwide with hundreds of thousands of active users.2

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Sellers accept its recommendations more than 90% of the time, demonstrating significant trust in AI-driven automation for ecommerce.2

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Strategic Control and Selective Integration

While opening seller tools to outside platforms, Amazon retains control over which AI agents gain access.1

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The announcement came days after Amazon blocked Meta's Muse, a new AI agent designed to shop on behalf of consumers.1

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Amazon states that outside agents must identify themselves and follow site rules.1

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Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic, and Claude models already power Seller Assistant through Amazon Bedrock.2

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The company promises more integrations beyond Claude and Amazon Quick, with Westmoreland noting they "built this in a way that should be modular enough for us to continue to publish plugins."1

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New Features and Free Subscriptions

Seller Assistant now includes persistent memory of each seller's pricing patterns, inventory cycles, and growth goals, carrying over into Amazon Quick and Anthropic's Claude.2

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A new canvas feature provides a visual workspace generated from live data, allowing sellers to compare pricing strategies or diagnose ad campaigns.1

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Amazon is offering every primary selling account holder worldwide a free 12-month subscription to Amazon Quick Plus, available through December 31, 2026, with two additional co-workers covered at no cost.1

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The plugin launches in beta for sellers in Amazon's U.S. stores, with international expansion to follow.3

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Regulatory Context and Business Implications

The seller fees that fund these AI tools are central to the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust case against Amazon, which accuses the company of overcharging sellers and punishing them for offering lower prices elsewhere.1

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Amazon has denied the allegations. The case is set for trial in March 2027 in federal court in Seattle.1

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Amazon's advertising business, which includes sponsored listings sellers buy, brought in $19.8 billion in the quarter, up 26% year-over-year.1

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By positioning itself as the intelligence and execution layer underneath various AI interfaces, Amazon appears willing to surrender part of the user interface to preserve control over the operational infrastructure that powers agentic commerce.4

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