Amazon and Perplexity are preventing over the way forward for AI purchasing

Amazon has despatched a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity that calls for that the AI startup prevents its Comet browser from making purchases on Amazon, Bloomberg reports. In a blog post responding to Amazon’s letter, Perplexity claims Amazon is “bullying” the corporate and that its calls for pose “a menace to all web customers.”

In Amazon’s eyes, Comet’s agent violates its phrases of service, degrades the Amazon purchasing expertise and introduces privateness vulnerabilities, Bloomberg writes. Amazon’s “Conditions of Use” for Amazon.com particularly prohibit “any downloading, copying, or different use of account info for the good thing about any third social gathering” and “any use of knowledge mining, robots, or comparable information gathering and extraction instruments.” Relying in your definition, the agentic capabilities Perplexity provides by Comet may violate each clauses. The browser securely shops log-in credentials for web sites domestically, and makes use of them to make purchases for patrons on Amazon with a easy command.

Perplexity and Amazon agreed to pause agentic purchasing on Amazon in November 2024, in accordance with the report, however when Comet was launched, Perplexity allowed it once more. By representing the Comet agent as a Chrome browser person reasonably than a bot, the corporate allegedly tried to get across the settlement, till Amazon discovered and despatched its cease-and-desist letter.

Amazon posted the statement under on its weblog, overtly acknowledging the problems it has with Perplexity:

We predict it’s pretty easy that third-party purposes that supply to make purchases on behalf of shoppers from different companies ought to function overtly and respect service supplier selections whether or not or to not take part. This helps guarantee a optimistic buyer expertise and it’s how others function, together with meals supply apps and the eating places they take orders for, supply service apps and the shops they store from, and on-line journey businesses and the airways they e-book tickets with for patrons. Agentic third-party purposes akin to Perplexity’s Comet have the identical obligations, and we’ve repeatedly requested that Perplexity take away Amazon from the Comet expertise, significantly in mild of the considerably degraded purchasing and customer support expertise it gives.

Complicating Amazon’s claims, Perplexity is perhaps a future purchasing rival. Amazon demoed its personal AI purchasing agent known as “Buy for Me” in April 2025. However Perplexity additionally disagrees with the basics of Amazon’s argument. “Person brokers are precisely that: brokers of the person,” Perplexity says. “They’re distinct from crawlers, scrapers, or bots.” Perplexity believes the Comet agent should not run afoul of Amazon’s phrases and circumstances then as a result of it acts on the customers’ behalf, with the customers’ permission.

This is not the primary time Perplexity has been accused of misrepresenting its AI instruments to entry content material. In August, Cloudflare claimed that the corporate’s bots had been accessing blocked web sites by pretending to be a traditional Chrome browser person on macOS. Reddit also sued Perplexity and three different firms earlier this month for accessing Reddit posts with out paying for a license.