France: 3 firms own 84% of AI agents. Own your channel.

The regulator that has spent years fining Big Tech in Europe just spent 3,700 pages on a quieter threat: the AI agent that shops on your customer's behalf. On July 17, France's Autorité de la concurrence published Opinion 26-A-05, and the number in the headline is the one to sit with — more than 84% of the AI agent market is OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

What actually happened

Per the Autorité's own summary, the opinion is the product of an inquiry opened January 8, 2026, and runs past 3,700 pages with annexes. The regulator didn't just read filings — it built its own shopping agents, asked them roughly 550 purchase-related questions, and logged exactly which websites those agents visited and cited.

The findings that matter for anyone selling online:

• Three firms, 84% of the market. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic dominate; Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Mistral, Perplexity, and xAI split the rest.
• Disintermediation is the named risk. Agents become the gatekeeper, and e-commerce sites become "dispensable." The Autorité estimates 20–25% of consumer traffic could route through AI agents by 2030, up from under 5% today.
• You lose the data. When an agent transacts, the merchant can lose access to the behavioral data that used to come with every visit — the raw material for merchandising and retention.
• Self-preferencing is on the table. Vertically integrated players can bundle, tie, and preference their own inventory, and high inference costs favor whoever already owns the model.

The regulator stopped short of proposing new rules, arguing existing law — competition law, the EU AI Act, the DMA — can already be used. It made six recommendations centered on interoperability, data portability, and open standardization.

Why AI agent concentration matters for your business

Strip the regulatory framing and this is a distribution warning. If one in five shoppers arrives through an agent by 2030, then an agent — not your homepage, not your ads — decides whether your product is in the consideration set. You don't get to A/B-test your way out of not being cited.

Two moves follow, and neither requires waiting for a French regulator.

Make your product data stand on its own. Structured, typed, machine-readable attributes are what an agent reads before it recommends. We've made this case repeatedly — your product data is the checkout now — and this opinion is a 3,700-page confirmation.

Keep a direct channel the agent can't sit in front of. Email, SMS, an owned account relationship. When Amazon moved to block third-party shopping agents, it proved the point from the other side: the platforms will fight over who owns the rail. You want to not be fully dependent on any of them.

Sources: Autorité de la concurrence, ppc.land.