Amazon has announced changes to its Business Solutions Agreement (BSA) that will take effect on March 4, 2026, placing formal requirements on the use of AI agents and automated software systems by sellers and third-party developers accessing the platform. The announcement, posted on Amazon Seller Central forums on February 17, 2026, outlines a set of binding policy updates that reshape the legal and technical relationship between Amazon and the ecosystem of software providers, brands, and marketplace participants operating on its infrastructure.

The timing is notable. Amazon began formalizing its agentic AI posture on multiple fronts in late 2025 - deploying its own autonomous tools for advertisers, introducing Seller Assistant agentic capabilities in September, and suing Perplexity in November over what it described as covert AI agent access to its marketplace. The March 2026 BSA update extends that posture directly into seller contracts, institutionalizing governance requirements for any automated system that touches Amazon's services.

What the updated agreement says

According to the announcement posted on the Amazon Seller Central forums, the updated BSA will introduce a new, standalone Agent Policy governing any "automated software or AI agents" that access Amazon Services. The update defines a new category - "Agent" - and adds it to the agreement's formal definitions alongside "Applicable Government Authority" and "Our Materials."

Three baseline obligations apply to all agents operating under the new policy. First, AI agents must clearly identify themselves as automated systems at all times. Second, they must comply with the new Agent Policy without exception. Third, they must cease access immediately if Amazon requests it. Crucially, the announcement states that Amazon "may restrict their access in certain instances under the BSA and new Agent Policy" - a provision that gives Amazon discretionary authority to revoke access without specifying a threshold or process.

The "AI and machine learning restrictions" component of the update is equally significant. Amazon will add BSA language prohibiting the use of its materials or services for AI development purposes. The language specifically includes "enhanced protection against reverse engineering" - a provision that directly addresses concerns about competitors or third-party developers using Amazon's infrastructure to train or improve competing machine learning systems. This represents a notable tightening of intellectual property protections embedded within a commercial agreement rather than through separate terms of service.

Dispute resolution gets a new section

Beyond AI governance, the updated BSA will add a new Section 20 dedicated to arbitration. According to the forum announcement, the new section "includes our existing binding arbitration language and class action waiver" - meaning the substantive content is not new, but it is being consolidated and formalized into a dedicated section of the agreement. The announcement describes the arbitrator's expanded power as a clarifying update to existing practice rather than a change in rights.

The addition of a formal dispute resolution section gains additional relevance when placed alongside Amazon's concurrent introduction of the Seller Challenge mechanism in October 2025, which gave Account Health Assurance sellers three challenge allocations per six-month period for disputing enforcement decisions. That program operates outside arbitration but signals Amazon's broader effort to structure and formalize the resolution of disagreements with sellers.

Geographic scope: Mexico gets its own agreement

One structural change in the update separates the US and Canada agreement from Mexico. According to the announcement, Amazon will add a standalone Business Solutions Agreement for the Mexico store and remove all references to Mexico from the US/Canada BSA. Minor updates will also clarify Canada-specific language throughout that agreement. The change reflects the continued growth of Amazon's Latin American operations and the need to address jurisdiction-specific regulatory environments through separate contractual frameworks.

Seller reaction: questions about scope and breadth

Response from the seller community was immediate, and largely skeptical. One seller - posting under the handle Seller_Ggt6s7zXEwLbA - raised a pointed concern about the breadth of the "automated software" category: "Please add more detail before we have to see it in the BSA. We use software to obtain pending orders for fulfillment, and to send tracking back to Amazon for those orders where we cannot purchase postage from Amazon." The seller continued: "Policy changes seem to be AI related but 'automated software' could be broad, such as regularly requesting new orders." The post also asked whether software providers had been informed of the changes - noting that third-party software companies, rather than sellers directly, are the parties most directly affected.

Another seller raised a specific compliance question about GETIDA, a widely used FBA reimbursement service: "I'm using GETIDA for FBA reimbursements - will third-party services like this be considered 'Agents' under the new March 2026 BSA/Agent Policy update? Could continued use of reimbursement services create any compliance risk for sellers?" No official response to this question appears in the forum thread as of the time of publication.

A third seller flagged a technical error in the announcement itself: "Hi there, your Agent Policy link routes to the wrong policy page." The policy remains viewable through the Amazon Seller Central Changes page, though the direct link cited in the announcement was incorrect at the time of posting.

The concerns about third-party software scope are not trivial. Amazon's Solution Provider Portal billing requirements, which came into force in November 2025, already required developers to submit payment information by January 31, 2026, with applications lacking valid charge information losing SP-API access by February 16, 2026. The new Agent Policy arrives on top of this existing compliance burden.

The competitive context behind the rules

The BSA update cannot be read in isolation from Amazon's broader posture toward AI agents operating on its platform. In September 2025, research published by PSE Consulting showed that Amazon was the primary exception among major US and UK retailers that blocked AI bots, using fingerprinting and AWS WAF to prevent automated scraping while competitors like Shopify took more permissive approaches. The research found that Amazon explicitly disallows crawlers from Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI in its robots.txt files.

Two months later, in November 2025, Amazon filed a federal lawsuit against Perplexity, alleging that the company deployed AI agents through its Comet browser to covertly access Amazon's marketplace. The complaint stated that "traffic from automated agents, such as that from the Comet AI agent, imposes operational burdens and costs on Amazon's advertising systems." Amazon's advertising business generated $17.7 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2025, growing 22% year-over-year - and the company has been explicit that non-human ad traffic creates filtering costs that directly affect that revenue stream.

Tom C., founder and CEO of Eleviam, shared the BSA announcement on LinkedIn three days before publication of this article, writing that the update signals a move toward "stricter governance. Not less." His post noted that "AI agents accessing Amazon Services must clearly identify themselves as automated systems" and observed that Amazon now holds the right to revoke their access at any point. The observation was echoed by Muhammad Waqas Arif in the comments: "yea, governance and systems are becoming just as important as growth speed."

Implications for the advertising and martech community

For marketing technology providers and advertising professionals, the Agent Policy introduces a new compliance layer for any software that interacts with Amazon's ecosystem. Tools used for sponsored ads management, FBA reimbursement processing, order tracking, inventory management, and price monitoring could potentially fall within the definition of "automated software or AI agents" depending on how Amazon interprets and enforces the new language.

The broader advertising and AI agent infrastructure has been shifting rapidly. Amazon launched its own Ads Agent in November 2025, enabling automated campaign planning and optimization through natural language inputs. The IAB Tech Lab introduced its Agentic RTB Framework version 1.0 in November. Amazon also launched a closed beta MCP Serveron November 13 to enable natural language interactions with advertising APIs. Against that backdrop, the BSA update represents Amazon's attempt to simultaneously promote its own AI agent tools while controlling third-party agent access to its platform.

The asymmetry is notable. Amazon's Rufus AI shopping assistant reached 300 million users and drove $12 billion in incremental sales in 2025, according to the company. Its internal agentic capabilities are being expanded. Meanwhile, external agents are being brought under formal compliance requirements with discretionary access revocation built into the contract.

For compliance teams at software providers serving Amazon sellers, the practical question is definitional: at what level of automation does a piece of software become an "Agent" under the new policy? The announcement does not specify thresholds, and the seller community has already flagged this ambiguity. The requirement that agents "clearly identify themselves as automated systems" raises implementation questions - particularly for software that communicates through API calls rather than user-facing interfaces. Neither Amazon's announcement nor the associated policy documentation cited in the forum had clarified these points as of the time the forum post was published.

The updated privacy notice language - replacing specific developer references with general "Amazon's Privacy Notice" language - and the renaming of "Developer Site" to "Solution Provider Portal" are administrative changes with limited substantive effect on seller obligations. The revision to the "Insurance Limits" definition may carry more practical significance but was not elaborated upon in the announcement.

Sellers who continue using Amazon's selling services after March 4, 2026, will be considered to have accepted the updated terms, according to the announcement. No action is required to formally accept the changes - continued use constitutes acceptance.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Amazon, third-party sellers operating on the Amazon marketplace, software providers and developers building tools that interact with Amazon Services, and AI agent developers whose systems access Amazon's platform.

What: Amazon is updating its Business Solutions Agreement (BSA) to include a formal Agent Policy governing the use of automated software and AI agents. The update requires all AI agents to identify themselves as automated systems, comply with the new policy, and cease access if Amazon requests it. Additional changes include AI and machine learning development restrictions, enhanced reverse engineering protections, a new dispute resolution section formalizing binding arbitration, and a geographic separation of the Mexico store agreement from the US/Canada BSA.

When: The announcement was posted to Amazon Seller Central forums on February 17, 2026. All changes take effect on March 4, 2026. Continued use of Amazon selling services after that date constitutes acceptance of the updated terms.

Where: The policy applies across Amazon's marketplace infrastructure in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, with the Mexico store receiving its own dedicated BSA. The Agent Policy governs any automated software accessing Amazon Services globally.

Why: Amazon is formalizing governance over AI agents and automated systems as the deployment of such tools accelerates across the marketplace ecosystem. The company has been engaged in litigation over unauthorized AI agent access, has built its own competing agentic tools, and faces mounting questions about non-human ad traffic affecting its $17.7 billion quarterly advertising business. The BSA update provides Amazon with contractual authority to restrict agent access and establishes clear compliance obligations for the growing number of third-party tools operating within its platform.

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