Summary
On September 3, 2026, Anthropic published commerce-agents, an Apache-2.0 reference blueprint pairing a shopping agent and a merchant agent with runnable retail, travel, telecom, and entertainment verticals. It deploys unchanged across the Messages API, the Claude Agent SDK, and Claude Managed Agents, and Anthropic reports shopping agents lifted cart sizes up to 35% and purchase completion by 60%.
What changed
Anthropic released anthropics/commerce-agents (Apache 2.0): a shopping agent that searches catalogs, handles multi-item requests, compares options, and builds carts, plus a merchant agent for performance insights, inventory, and campaign planning. One definition runs on the Messages API, Claude Agent SDK, or Claude Managed Agents (beta), targets 90-99% prompt-cache hit rates, and runs against Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry, or Google Vertex AI.
Why it matters
A vendor-blessed, permissively licensed reference for commerce agents lowers the cost of building shopping and merchant experiences on Claude and stakes Anthropic's claim in agentic commerce, where Stripe, OpenAI, and Google are racing to define agent checkout.
Evidence excerpt
Anthropic published anthropics/commerce-agents, a reference blueprint containing a shopping agent and merchant agent with four runnable verticals: retail, travel, telecom, and entertainment. A single agent with skills outperformed both one-prompt and multi-subagent approaches on quality while reducing latency.