Home Depot Wants Your AI Agent to Show Some ID First

Residence Depot needs to roll out the welcome mat to your AI agent — as long as it is sporting a reputation tag and appearing in your behalf.

Throughout a sit-down interview with Business Insider, Angie Brown, the corporate’s govt vice chairman and chief info officer, stated the retailer needs to help AI brokers that may search and purchase merchandise on a buyer’s behalf. However Residence Depot must be certain of two issues first.

“We need to know you are not a bot, and we really need to know if it is you,” she stated. “That is one thing that Muse is engaged on proper now, to self-identify.”

Her feedback are the most recent glimpse into how legacy retailers — and their tech workers — are excited about the doable subsequent technology of on-line purchasing.

Just lately, a number of Silicon Valley corporations have launched consumer-focused AI brokers, comparable to Meta’s Muse and Spear Road Know-how’s Instinct AI. They promise brokers able to scanning the web, evaluating merchandise, filling carts, and shopping for gadgets with little to no intervention from the one who despatched them.

Their rollout has been met with various ranges of resistance and buy-in from on-line retailers. Amazon barred Muse from purchasing on its market, saying the bots did not correctly establish themselves. A number of different retailers — together with Walmart, Finest Purchase, Sephora, and Shopify — have announced integrations or openness to AI brokers. In October, Meta introduced that it co-developed a private agent protocol with Sierra AI to standardize AI agent identification.

Brown stated Residence Depot is open to the thought of AI brokers, however the retailer would not need to lose its reference to loyal clients.

Frequent Residence Depot consumers, comparable to contractors and remodelers, are a part of the corporate’s Professional Rewards platform, the place they’re eligible for reductions. The retailer would not “need to lose contact with the client,” she stated.

“That is the following evolution,” Brown added, confirming that Residence Depot is in energetic conversations with Meta about how Muse ought to introduce itself to web sites. “There’s openness on each side, as a result of they need it to develop.”

Residence Depot is already utilizing AI to defend itself

Brown stated Residence Depot is deploying AI amid a current wave of cybersecurity worries.

Final week, corporations all over the world raced to patch essential vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language utilized in an estimated 70% of internet sites. The issues have been found with assist from OpenAI and prompted US cybersecurity officers to induce affected organizations to replace their techniques or, in some circumstances, take them offline.

Brown, whose remit consists of Residence Depot’s cybersecurity, known as the hours after the warning a “little hectic,” however stated the corporate’s primary web site was not affected.

“We had a few working items — corporations we have purchased and issues like that which are a bit of bit smaller — that needed to plug just a few vulnerabilities,” she stated, together with an inner job software system that was taken down “in the midst of the day for about an hour to patch.”

In any other case, she stated, the corporate was largely spared from the sudden tech anxieties.

Residence Depot, Brown confirmed to Enterprise Insider, has entry to Anthropic’s Mythos AI mannequin, although the corporate wasn’t granted early entry by way of Challenge Glasswing, “regardless of our greatest efforts, and calling a whole lot of mates.” These slots have been largely reserved for banks and cybersecurity corporations, not main retailers.

The Anthropic fashions “discovered just a few issues” for Residence Depot to repair in its code — however the brokers additionally discovered just a few “false positives,” Brown stated.

Residence Depot, she stated, has lengthy ranked cybersecurity vulnerabilities, however AI is main the corporate to rethink its desired time to deploy a repair.

“The pace to repair a vulnerability must be pushed right down to hours,” she stated.

Replace, November 2, 2026 — This story has been up to date to replicate that Residence Depot has not participated in Anthropic’s Challenge Glasswing initiative.