Amazon sends legal threats to Perplexity over agentic browsing

Amazon has told Perplexity to remove its agent browser from its online store, the companies publicly confirmed on Tuesday. After alerting Perplexity multiple times that Comet, its AI-powered shopping assistant, was violating Amazon’s terms of service By not identifying itself as an agent, the e-commerce giant sent the AI ​​search engine a sternly worded defamation letter, Perplexity. wrote in a blog post titled “Bullying is not innovation.”

“This week, Perplexity received an aggressive legal threat from Amazon, demanding that we ban Comet users from using their AI assistants on Amazon. This is Amazon’s first legal salvo against an AI company and it is a threat to all internet users,” Perplexity complained in the blog post.

Perplexity’s argument is that since the agent is acting on behalf of a human user, the agent automatically has “the same rights” as the human user. The implication is that it does not need to identify itself as an agent.

from Amazon respectivelyOnse points out that other third-party agents working on behalf of human users do identify themselves. “It’s how others operate, including food delivery apps and the restaurants they take orders for, food delivery apps and the stores they shop at, and online travel agencies and the airlines they use to book tickets for customers,” Amazon explains.

If Amazon is to be believed, Perplexity could simply identify its agent and start shopping. The risk, of course, is that Amazon, which has its own shopping bot called Rufus, could also block Comet – or another third-party agent – ​​from its site.

Amazon suggests the same thing in its statement, which also says, “We think it’s pretty straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers of other companies should operate openly and respect service providers’ decisions as to whether or not to participate.”

Perplexity claims that Amazon would block the shopping bot because Amazon wants to sell advertisements and product placements. Unlike human shoppers, a bot needing to buy a new laundry basket probably wouldn’t buy a more expensive one, or be tempted into buying the latest Brandon Sanderson novel and a new set of earphones (on sale!).

If this all sounds a little familiar, that’s because it is. A few months ago, Cloudflare published research accusing Perplexity of website scraping while specifically defying requests from websites that blocked AI bots. Interestingly enough, many people came to Perplexity’s defense at the time, as this was not a clear case of bad behavior from the web crawler. Cloudflare documented how the AI ​​accessed a specific public website when the user asked about that specific website. Perplexity fans argued that this is exactly what every human-operated web browser does.

On the other hand, Perplexity used some questionable methods to gain access to a website when a website opted out of bots, such as hiding its identity.

As TechCrunch reported at the time, the Cloudflare incident foreshadowed the challenges that would come if the agent world became a reality as Silicon Valley predicted. If consumers and businesses outsource their shopping, travel bookings, and restaurant reservations to bots, is it in the best interest of websites to block bots entirely? How will they allow and cooperate with them?

Confusion may be justified because Amazon is setting a precedent. As the 800-pound gorilla of e-commerce it clearly says that the way this should work is for an agent to identify themselves and let the website decide.