The Standard Open Call Uses Is Not the Standard the FTC Enforces

Researchers at Columbia Law School’s Center for Law and the Economy asked Walmart’s AI shopping assistant to compare a class of products marketed as American-made and rank them by how suspicious the origin claim looked. Sparky ran the assessment. According to the report, it weighed price points, checked seller identity, and evaluated whether the brands had any U.S. manufacturing footprint. It then placed the items in the researcher’s shopping basket.

That exchange appears in “Made in America, Hidden by AI,” released Thursday by Erie Meyer and Zachary Harris. The report tested Amazon’s Alexa for Shopping and Walmart’s Sparky to see whether either could identify products whose listings claim U.S. origin while the country-of-origin field reads “Imported,” and what each company does with that capability. Reuters covered it the same morning. The report’s recommendations are addressed to Congress, law enforcement, and the public.

For suppliers and sellers, the more useful question sits one layer beneath the report, in the gap between the origin standard Walmart uses to recruit domestic products into its assortment and the standard federal regulators apply to what those products can claim on the page.

The Amazon Finding and the Walmart Finding Are Not the Same

Most of the coverage has merged the two companies. The report does not.

Its most striking result belongs to Amazon alone. Asked for American-made fly-fishing reels, Alexa for Shopping returned a refusal saying it lacked access to that information. Asked the identical question about Chinese-made reels, it produced a full comparison. The researchers reran the query using “in USA” rather than “Made in USA” and got a complete answer, which the authors treat as evidence of an engineered block rather than a data gap. Amazon’s assistant, in the report’s account, tied that design to a seller base it described as 40% to 50% China-based.

No equivalent finding is reported for Walmart. Sparky was not found to block origin queries. The Walmart findings are narrower: that Sparky can assess the credibility of a U.S.-origin claim when asked, that it does not do so proactively, and that Walmart gives shoppers no way to filter by country of origin. The report’s appendix of concerning listings contains one Walmart product, a Thorogood steel-toe boot whose details describe U.S. manufacture while the origin field reads “Imported.” Four of the five examples are Amazon’s.

One caution matters more than any of this for anyone planning to cite the study. The report’s most quotable Walmart material is text generated by Sparky, including the line describing weak enforcement as “a business calculation, not a legal justification.” The authors are candid that a corporate communications office would not treat chatbot output as an authorized spokesperson, and a footnote acknowledges that large language models produce errors. Sparky generated that characterization. Walmart did not issue it. The researchers say they contacted Walmart and received no response, no technical corrections, and no dispute of the findings. Walmart also did not comment to Reuters, which noted that Lina Khan sued Amazon during her tenure as FTC chair in a case that remains active.

A Product Can Qualify for the Program and Fail the Label Test

Underneath the study sits a distinction that explains a good deal about how mismatched listings arise, and it does not require anyone to have made a business calculation.

Walmart’s domestic sourcing commitment counts products “made, grown or assembled in the U.S.” That is the language on Walmart’s Open Call materials and its Investing in American Jobs pages, and it governs the $350 billion purchasing commitment the company has pledged to complete by 2030. Walmart says that as of the end of last year it had increased cumulative U.S. spend by $176 billion toward that goal, and that about two-thirds of Walmart U.S. product spend went to goods its suppliers reported as domestically sourced. The threshold is broad, it includes assembly, and the attestation comes from the supplier.

The FTC applies a different test to what goes on the listing. In its July 2025 letter to Walmart, the agency wrote that when a third-party seller makes a United States origin claim, the product must be “all or virtually all” made in the United States, meaning all significant processing and all or virtually all components are domestic. The letter said Bureau staff had received information that sellers on Walmart’s marketplace may be falsely advertising products as American-made.

Both standards are legitimate within their own purpose. Each measures something different, and Walmart flags the distinction to its own domestic suppliers: the Investing in American Jobs site carries a packaging section that links directly to the FTC’s guide on complying with the Made in USA standard. By the plain terms of the two definitions, a product assembled domestically from imported components can satisfy Walmart’s sourcing language while failing the FTC’s labeling test. Suppliers should treat program eligibility and label eligibility as two separate determinations, because reading a sourcing qualification as license to write an unqualified “Made in USA” claim into a title creates exposure that has nothing to do with intent.

Walmart’s Written Rule Already Reaches These Listings

The report frames the question as whether platforms will build proactive enforcement. For Marketplace sellers, the more immediate point is that the written rule exists now.

Walmart’s Prohibited Products Policy, last updated April 13, 2026, requires that all product labels, information, and images in a Walmart.com listing appear in English and “must not contain any conflicting information.” A listing asserting U.S. manufacture in the title or product details while the origin field reads “Imported” contains conflicting information on its face. Sellers agree to that standard as a condition of selling, and the policy states Walmart may remove listings and suspend or terminate accounts for noncompliance.

What the Columbia report adds is documentation that the assessment capability now sits inside the shopping assistant, available to any shopper who asks for it.

The Origin Data Walmart Collects Does Not Reach the Shopper

The finding with the most direct bearing on how products get found is the simplest in the study. Searching for dolls on Walmart.com, the researchers counted roughly 299 filter options across 23 categories, including skin tone, piece count, and recommended location. None was country of origin. The authors note that filter counts can vary by date.

Walmart does collect the underlying field in defined circumstances. Its Marketplace documentation requires country of origin at item setup for all Walmart-fulfilled items, alongside dimensions and trade item configuration, and states that an item must have a country of origin to be listed in an additional market. Sellers who cannot identify it are told the item will not be eligible to cross-list.

That field is also unusually difficult to correct. Walmart’s item setup guidance states that country of origin for an existing item cannot be updated by spreadsheet, and that changing it requires deleting the item in Seller Center, waiting 48 hours, and setting up a new item. Any seller auditing listings in response to this report should plan remediation around that constraint rather than assuming a bulk update will resolve it.

The stakes attached to the assistant have grown since it stopped being an app feature. Walmart ended its OpenAI Instant Checkout pilot in March, as OpenAI phased the feature out across partners, after EVP of AI Acceleration, Product and Design Daniel Danker said in-chat purchases converted at roughly a third the rate of click-through transactions. Sparky began operating inside ChatGPT the week of March 25, and Danker said at the time that the experience would travel into Gemini as well. The Columbia researchers tested Sparky inside Walmart’s own app and site. What the assistant surfaces now reaches shoppers through interfaces Walmart does not own. On Walmart’s Q4 fiscal 2026 earnings call in February, CEO John Furner told analysts that customers who use Sparky carry an average order value about 35% higher than those who do not. Walmart U.S. President and CEO David Guggina said on the same call that roughly half of Walmart app users had tried the assistant.

The 1P and 3P split here is real but partial. Third-party sellers own their listing content directly and carry the compliance obligation under the Prohibited Products Policy, which makes them the population the FTC letter named. First-party suppliers submit attributes through item setup while Walmart controls the published page. Walmart says the item setup data model is the same for first and third parties under Item Spec 5.0. What differs is accountability for what appears around the origin field, and the correction path described above is documented for Marketplace item setup, not for the first-party tools. Open Call exists to bring small and mid-size domestic suppliers into the assortment, which means the population most dependent on the origin attribute is also the population with the least catalog infrastructure behind it.

Applications for Open Call 2026 are open, and on October 6 and 7 Walmart and Sam’s Club merchants will hear pitches at Home Office in Bentonville from suppliers whose qualification to be in the room is that their product is made, grown, or assembled in the United States. Walmart published its FY2026 ESG report on July 29, the day before the Columbia study, restating its Digital Trust Principles and a commitment to using data and technology responsibly, transparently, and with integrity. The Columbia authors report separately that Walmart’s 2023 Responsible AI Pledge page, which carried a specific transparency commitment about explaining how the company uses AI, came off the website between September and December 2025.

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