Amazon opens Seller Central to outside AI agents, starting…

At Accelerate 2026, Amazon launched a Selling Partner plugin that puts Seller Assistant's inventory, pricing, and listing controls inside third-party AI agents — beginning with Anthropic's Claude in U.S. beta and Amazon's own Quick assistant.

Amazon used its Accelerate 2026 seller conference this week to open Seller Central to outside AI agents, launching a Selling Partner plugin that pipes its Seller Assistant tools into Anthropic’s Claude in U.S. beta and into Amazon’s own Quick assistant. The plugin connects in roughly 60 seconds with no coding and pulls in listings, inventory levels, sales analytics, and performance metrics.

The framing from Mary Beth Westmoreland, Amazon’s vice president of Worldwide Selling Partner Experience, made the strategic intent unmistakable. “Our vision was that they would never have to log into Seller Central. We would just bring it to them where they work,” she said, adding that the architecture is “modular enough for us to continue to publish plugins.” Eric Burns, field CTO at Anthropic, described the integration as dropping Seller Assistant’s data-driven insights into sellers’ existing Claude accounts alongside their accounting and supplier connections.

The numbers explain the urgency. Independent sellers move more than 60% of units sold on Amazon worldwide, and third-party seller-services fees pulled in $46.8 billion in Q2, more than AWS. Amazon’s advertising business added another $19.8 billion in the same quarter, growing 26% year over year. Amazon says roughly 90% of its selling partners are already running some form of outside AI against their operations. Seller Assistant itself has rolled out in native language to more than 90% of partners globally, reaches hundreds of thousands of active users, and sees its recommendations accepted more than 90% of the time.

That’s the context for the giveaway: a free 12-month Amazon Quick Plus subscription for primary account holders and two co-workers, available through December 31, 2026.

Reuters describes the new abstraction as “workflows”, plain-language automations that monitor conditions and prepare or execute responses, say, flagging when a top 10 product slips below a 4-star rating. Unite.AI reports every workflow logs a full audit trail, and sellers choose whether the agent only surfaces recommendations or actually acts.

The leadership signal is aligned. Amit Agarwal, the 27-year Amazon veteran who launched the India marketplace, took over selling partner services in February from Dharmesh Mehta, now technical advisor to CEO Andy Jassy. All of it lands with the FTC antitrust case set for trial in Seattle in March 2027, as Amazon institutionalizes itself as the operating system third-party agents plug into rather than compete with.

Amazon opens Seller Central to outside AI agents, starting with Claude

Sources