Amazon blocks Perplexity from sending its AI agents to purchase goods – News

Amazon.com Inc. has sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI startup Perplexity, asking that the company refrain from using its Comet browser’s AI agents to make purchases on Amazon’s marketplace, a move Perplexity has called “bullying.”

Amazon argued that agents taking the place of human shoppers would degrade the customer experience. The company explicitly prohibits “any use of data mining, robots, or similar data gathering and extraction tools.” Third-party AI agents must operate transparently and in coordination with participating businesses.

Amazon reportedly asked Perplexity to stop using its AI agents about a year ago. Perplexity agreed, only to start again with the release of Comet browser.

Though Amazon points to “degraded shopping and customer service experience” as the reasons for the cease-and-desist letter, it’s also possible that the tens of billions of dollarsAmazon could lose in advertising is at the heart of the matter. Without human eyes on products, targeted advertising no longer works.

Amazon has its own AI agent to help users purchase goods, its ‘Help Me Decide’ AI shopping assistant, although the major difference is that it requires human eyes on the website. With Perplexity’s agentic shopper, users don’t need to log in themselves or input their credit information to buy something. The human is almost completely removed from the process, although early customer reviews of the Comet assistant as a shopper point to teething issues – customers seemingly don’t always get what they want.

Perplexity has agreed to hold back the bots, but the company hit back at Amazon in a blog post, accusing Amazon of stifling innovation. It claims Amazon is using “legal threats and intimidation to block innovation,” adding that agentic AI is there to reduce labor. “Today, Amazon announced it does not believe in your right to hire labor, to have an assistant or an employee acting on your behalf,” the company said. “This isn’t a reasonable legal position; it’s a bully tactic to scare disruptive companies like Perplexity out of making life better for people.”

Perplexity argued that Amazon should welcome such software, since easier shopping ought to mean more sales. It’s doubtful that pitch will convince the e-commerce giant that what it loses in ad revenue and upselling can be offset by streamlined ghost buying. It almost certainly won’t, hence the letter.

In Perplexity’s view, this is a matter of the future butting heads with the past, a clash that tends to end the same way every time. “Amazon also forgets how it got so big,” the post ended. “Users love it. They want good products, at a low price, delivered fast. Agentic shopping is the natural evolution of this promise, and people already demand it. Perplexity demands the right to offer it.”

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