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ZDNET Highlights
- Amazon has threatened legal action against AI startup Perplexity.
- Perplexity described the move as “a threat to all Internet users”.
- This fight could impact the future of AI-powered shopping.
The battle over the future of AI-powered shopping has begun.
Amazon sent Perplexity a cease and desist letter on Friday demanded that the AI start-up immediately stop its agent Comet browser from making purchases on behalf of users in Amazon stores.
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Addressed to Perplexity CEO Arvind Srinivas, the letter claims that the company has ignored multiple warnings about its Comet browser violating Amazon’s terms of use by not identifying itself as an AI agent, and that the company’s “ongoing illegal intrusions into the Amazon store have already caused substantial harm, including disrupting Amazon’s customer relationships and causing Amazon to Perplexity involves forcing significant resources to be devoted to tracking, investigating, and addressing misconduct.”
The letter said that if Perplexity did not agree to its terms by 5 pm on Monday, Amazon would take legal action against the company.
The anxiety came back the next day blog post The title was “Bullying is not a novelty.” The company portrayed itself as Silicon Valley’s young David, taking on Amazon, a giant tech Goliath that had lost its founding startup ethics and, by seeking to forcibly block Perplexity’s AI shopping assistant, was prioritizing ad revenue and other nefarious forms of user exploitation over what it was originally created to provide: a frictionless online shopping experience.
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“This is Amazon’s first legal attack against an AI company, and it poses a threat to all Internet users,” Perplexity wrote.
The old guard meets the new
Perplexity is framing its legal battle with Amazon as a contest between the old guard of AI-powered shopping and an emerging paradigm where agents act as extensions of human users, making purchases on their behalf and thereby freeing them from the time-consuming work of shopping for the best deals, comparing product offerings, etc.
“For decades, machine learning and algorithms have been weapons in the hands of big corporations, deployed to serve ads and manipulate what you see, experience, and buy,” Perplexity wrote. “The transformative promise of LLMs is that they put the power back into the hands of people. Agent AI marks a meaningful shift: users can finally regain control over their online experiences.”
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In other words: sit back and relax, Amazon shoppers – Comet can complete the online shopping process without being influenced by spam ads and predatory offers.
Of course, Amazon sees things differently, arguing in its letter that Comet’s use “degrades the Amazon shopping experience” by bypassing important and familiar points of engagement.
“When Comet AI makes a purchase from an Amazon store, Comet AI cannot select the best price, delivery method, or recommendations, and Amazon customers may miss important product information,” Amazon’s legal counsel wrote in their letter. “For example, Comet AI does not provide Amazon customers with the option to add products to existing deliveries, which could result in improved delivery times and reduced shipment volume.”
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The letter also claims that the use of Comet also puts Amazon user privacy at risk (which Perplexity has denied in its response).
Whose AI assistant won?
Amazon even has a delicate line to toe. AI boomerism has become an ideological flashpoint throughout Silicon Valley – one of the great taboos of modern tech (at least if you’re trying to attract investors’ dollars) is seeming to be an AI Luddite.
Therefore, Amazon made a point in its letter to clarify that although it strongly opposed Perplexity’s use of Comet to make purchases on behalf of human users, it was firmly committed to the widespread adoption of AI.
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“As a general matter, Amazon shares the industry’s enthusiasm about AI innovations and sees significant potential for agentic AI to improve customer experiences across many areas,” the company’s legal counsel wrote. “But to successfully deliver for customers, AI agents offering to make purchases on behalf of customers must operate in a transparent manner when performing purported actions on behalf of the customer.”
Therein lies Amazon’s main motivation: It’s currently pushing its own AI shopping assistant, Rufus, which it launched in July. As Perplexity tells Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in his blog told investors in an earnings call last week The company “expects to partner with third-party agents over time.” The implication is that AI shopping assistants destroy the optimal user shopping experience – unless they are created by Amazon itself.
It’s not the only e-commerce site actively trying to capitalize on agent-driven shopping experiences. In the company’s own earnings call earlier this week, Shopify — which creates online shopping experiences for businesses — pointed out that shopping through its platform and rooted in AI-powered search increased eleven times since January.
The future of AI and human agency
The unfolding dispute between Amazon and Perplexity offers an early glimpse of what could become a long-term conflict across the e-commerce world as it witnesses the rise of agent shopping assistants.
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In one corner, Perplexity and similar AI-native startups will argue that they’re empowering users through automation, while saluting the somewhat vague founding ethos of the Internet as a tool for democratizing access to everything, including that deal on the vacuum cleaner you’ve been eyeing on Amazon. On the other hand, larger, more established tech companies like Amazon might argue that the advertising-based model on which the Internet has been built over the past 20+ years, although imperfect, is certainly better than a free-for-all where armies of unknown agents curtail the choices of individual users.
Ultimately, what it boils down to is this: human agency. Will it be expanded or eroded by AI? Only time – and possibly more than a few legal battles – will tell.
