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 weblog put up responding to Amazon's letter, Perplexity claims Amazon is "bullying" the corporate and that its calls for pose "a risk to all web customers."
In Amazon's eyes, Comet's agent violates its phrases of service, degrades the Amazon buying expertise and introduces privateness vulnerabilities, Bloomberg writes. Amazon's "Situations of Use" for Amazon.com particularly prohibit "any downloading, copying, or different use of account data for the good thing about any third get together" and "any use of information mining, robots, or related knowledge gathering and extraction instruments." Relying in your definition, the agentic capabilities Perplexity presents via Comet might violate each clauses. The browser securely shops log-in credentials for web sites domestically, and makes use of them to make purchases for purchasers on Amazon with a easy command.
Perplexity and Amazon agreed to pause agentic buying on Amazon in November 2024, in response to the report, however when Comet was launched, Perplexity allowed it once more. By representing the Comet agent as a Chrome browser person relatively than a bot, the corporate allegedly tried to get across the settlement, till Amazon came upon and despatched its cease-and-desist letter.
Amazon posted the assertion under on its weblog, brazenly acknowledging the problems it has with Perplexity:
We predict it’s pretty simple that third-party purposes that supply to make purchases on behalf of consumers from different companies ought to function brazenly 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 companies and the airways they guide tickets with for purchasers. Agentic third-party purposes reminiscent of Perplexity’s Comet have the identical obligations, and we’ve repeatedly requested that Perplexity take away Amazon from the Comet expertise, notably in gentle of the considerably degraded buying and customer support expertise it gives.
Complicating Amazon’s claims, Perplexity is likely to be a future buying rival. Amazon demoed its personal AI buying agent referred to as “Purchase for Me” in April 2025. However Perplexity additionally disagrees with the basics of Amazon's argument. "Consumer brokers are precisely that: brokers of the person," Perplexity says. "They're distinct from crawlers, scrapers, or bots." Perplexity believes the Comet agent shouldn't run afoul of Amazon's phrases and situations then as a result of it acts on the customers' behalf, with the customers' permission.
This isn't 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 standard Chrome browser person on macOS. Reddit additionally sued Perplexity and three different firms earlier this month for accessing Reddit posts with out paying for a license.
This text initially appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/amazon-and-perplexity-are-fighting-over-the-future-of-ai-shopping-215445479.html?src=rss