SEATTLE, Sept. 25 -- For millions of Amazon sellers who have spent the last two years running parts of their operations through outside AI tools anyway, Tuesday's announcement at Amazon Accelerate felt less like a revolution than a formalization. Amazon is officially opening Seller Central to third-party AI agents, starting with Claude, in a move that reveals as much about what the company intends to protect as what it has decided to share.

The new "Selling Partner plugin" lets sellers manage inventory, adjust prices, update listings, pull analytics, and handle customer messages through Anthropic's Claude without opening Seller Central at all. Connecting takes roughly 60 seconds, with no code required. Amazon says seller data stays entir...