Apple and LG, The House For Everyone Else, Agent Standards and Amazon
Apple and LG, The House For Everyone Else, Agent Standards and Amazon
Thompson begins with a reported Apple–LG smart-home partnership. He thinks tightly coordinated hardware and support could give ordinary households the integrated experience they would not build for themselves, while he would rather customize his own software with an agent. The products and an October 13 announcement were still reports about the future on October 7, not a shipped Apple system.
He then welcomes the Personal Agent Protocol proposed by Sierra, Meta and several businesses as a way for personal agents to work through a company’s site, APIs or agent with recognizable permissions. He contrasts participating retailers with Amazon’s resistance to outside shopping agents, and favors an investor’s proposal that Amazon charge for a premium agent-friendly shopping tier instead of trying to preserve every visit to its own interface. Thompson and the investor describe successful personal hotel bookings, not measured merchant-wide outcomes; the investor discloses a stake in Instinct.
The primary announcement says its first specification and reference implementation are still forthcoming; detailed action permissions and payments are possible later extensions. Shopify’s existing controls illustrate a harder question: merchant catalog access and eligible direct checkout are on by default, new agent channels can be auto-enrolled, and a merchant’s withdrawal can take days. Recognizing a consumer’s permission does not by itself establish the business’s opt-in, a query-volume limit, or that returns and support remain workable. No controlled comparison of agents using the proposed standard appears here.