Amazon and Perplexity are combating over the way forward for AI buying

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 buying 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 data for the advantage of any third social gathering” and “any use of information mining, robots, or comparable information gathering and extraction instruments.” Relying in your definition, the agentic capabilities Perplexity affords by way of 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 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 consumer somewhat 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 statement beneath on its weblog, overtly acknowledging the problems it has with Perplexity:

We expect it’s pretty simple that third-party purposes that provide to make purchases on behalf of shoppers from different companies ought to function overtly and respect service supplier choices whether or not or to not take part. This helps guarantee a constructive 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 purchasers. Agentic third-party purposes comparable to Perplexity’s Comet have the identical obligations, and we’ve repeatedly requested that Perplexity take away Amazon from the Comet expertise, significantly in gentle of the considerably degraded buying and customer support expertise it offers.

Complicating Amazon’s claims, Perplexity is perhaps a future buying rival. Amazon demoed its personal AI buying agent referred to as “Buy for Me” in April 2025. However Perplexity additionally disagrees with the basics of Amazon’s argument. “Consumer brokers are precisely that: brokers of the consumer,” Perplexity says. “They’re distinct from crawlers, scrapers, or bots.” Perplexity believes the Comet agent should not run afoul of Amazon’s phrases and situations 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 standard Chrome browser consumer on macOS. Reddit also sued Perplexity and three different corporations earlier this month for accessing Reddit posts with out paying for a license.