Amazon Loses Bid to Block Perplexity's AI Shopping Agent
Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
The Ninth Circuit denied Amazon a preliminary injunction against Perplexity, ruling the company is unlikely to succeed on its claim that the Comet browser's AI assistant violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Amazon argues the agent's headless shopping bypasses ads and undermines its control over agentic commerce. Commenters debate whether terms of service violations should be federal crimes and whether AI agents threaten Amazon's ad revenue or actually strengthen its logistics moat.
My understanding of the case law on this subject is that courts are extremely wary of letting terms of service violations rise to the level of federal crime. It essentially endows anyone with a domain name into an authority which can create federal law on demand.
- gz5
Can't comment on the legal basis in the eyes of CFAA or DAFA, but from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.
Meaning, even if merchants would have a difficult time moving from Amazon to an AI native version of Amazon, this is still a threat.
- eigencoder
I'm naive on the law around this, but it seems like Amazon.com shouldn't have standing here. What Perplexity does, from my perspective, is essentially the same as when I allow Firefox, Chrome, or Safari (or any other browser software) to see my credentials and access Amazon's website on my behalf.
- theturtletalks
People don’t realize how big of a threat LLMs are to marketplaces like Amazon, because down the line people will just be talking to AI agents to help them find products, check out, do all of these things.
So you’re probably like, why can’t I just use ChatGPT to do that? And you can, but ChatGPT is trying to become the new Amazon. They are trying to vet stores that can check out through ChatGPT officially, and so you’re just trading one master for another.
It’s why I’m building an open-source, decentralized, interoperable marketplace. It’s powered by agentic commerce and we include a list of vetted stores but you can bring your own.
- Terr_
I remember when I (naively, but not alone) thought that the Personal Computer would let us--consumers, individuals--express our own agency and priorities and control, a kind of democratized capital mini-factory anyone (or group) could tailor to their own needs.
Nowadays it feels more like "Visitors shall think what our brain-stream tells you to think, or be guilty of contempt of business model."
Is there any important legal difference between what's happening here versus a bunch of friends running a "share and notice favorite deals" collective via plugin+server?
- metayrnc
> Amazon.com Services, LLC filed suit against Perplexity AI, Inc., an artificial intelligence company, asserting that Perplexity’s web browser tool, Comet, unlawfully accessed Amazon’s website in violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA). Perplexity’s Comet browser includes an AI “Assistant” that, when activated by a user, navigates Amazon.com on the user’s behalf, sending browser screenshots to Perplexity’s servers for further instruction. Amazon claimed that this use of the Assistant, despite their explicit prohibition, amounted to unauthorized access to its servers.
- tzs
It wasn't clear to me if Comet is doing something that was purposefully built in or trained in to let it do things on Amazon, or if it was built/trained to try to do things on any website.
From what the net tells me it is the latter. There is no special "work with Amazon" stuff.
If that's true I expect will lose when the actual trial takes place and when that is appealed. (The decision today is just about a preliminary injunction before they get to actually trying to decide the outcome of the case).
I expect the reasoning will be similar to that used in copyright cases when the question was if the user is the sole infringer or the tool maker can also be liable. There it came down to whether the tool has substantial non-infringing uses.
I'm sure Perplexity will have trouble showing that there are a large number of website owners that don't mind Comet helping people on those sites so unless something was specifically built into Comet for Amazon I expect that will be good enough.
- cmiles8
The appeals courts overturning of Amazon’s initial win (injunction) here is interesting. It’s basically like liability in reverse. If a user is responsible for what an AI agent does on its behalf then the other side of that equation can’t say “hey this AI is doing bad things” since the AI is just an extension of the user.
Amazon tried to go after the AI and its maker but seems the court is nudging Amazon to say if you have a problem with this then go after your customers as they’re the ones doing this.
And Amazon’s customers are only doing this because the shopping experience on the website is terrible and Amazon’s own AI is a hot mess.
- imglorp
I'm just fascinated by the massive volume of new legal implications that keep arising. Copyright holders vs scraping and training. Psychologically vulnerable people vs chatbots. Hiring discrimination, defamation, wrong face rec, privacy. Etc^10. The law, and society ethics, were so unprepared for all this.
The lawyers are the obvious winners as always.