Amid the wave of artificial intelligence sweeping through the retail industry, Amazon is adopting a strategic "double standard" approach: on one hand, it is actively courting the vast user base of ChatGPT by running targeted ads to acquire customers; on the other hand, it is building high walls to strictly prevent various AI systems from collecting its core product data.

Recently, several industry analysts pointed out that Amazon has officially joined OpenAI's advertising system, becoming one of the most deeply involved retail giants in this field. When users consult ChatGPT about shopping-related needs, the system will push Amazon's paid promotional content based on their intent. These ads directly link to Amazon's store pages, ensuring a complete transaction process from exposure, browsing to ordering, all under Amazon's control.

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This move is seen by the industry as an important turning point in Amazon's AI strategy. For a long time, this e-commerce giant has been highly vigilant toward various "AI shopping assistant" projects, refusing to open its product catalog, real-time pricing, and inventory data to third-party chatbots or intelligent agents. In Amazon's view, allowing AI systems to directly scrape and integrate its internal data would mean losing control over traffic, and even potentially giving competitors an advantage.

To strengthen this data fortress, Amazon has been taking active measures in recent years. It not only updated its underlying code to block various AI crawlers, including OpenAI, but also resorted to legal means to force AI search tools like Perplexity to stop scraping its platform data. Additionally, Amazon has cut off the cooperation of pushing product data to Google Shopping, aiming to lock the traffic pool entirely within its own ecosystem.

Industry experts analyze that Amazon's choice to place ads on ChatGPT, rather than opening up underlying data, essentially aims to transform the conversation model from a "data thief" into an "efficient traffic distribution channel." For OpenAI, this is undoubtedly a strong boost for its advertising business. As more and more advertisers regard AI conversation windows as the core touchpoint to reach consumers, OpenAI seems to have found a more stable and profitable business model compared to "agent-based e-commerce."

For Amazon, this is both a shrewd response to the increasingly fierce competition for traffic, and an inevitable choice to protect its retail data moat in the era of explosion in computing power and models. In the AI-powered future, how to balance "precise traffic generation" and "data protection" has become a must-have course for all leading retail enterprises.