E-commerce giant Amazon has now issued a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity AI, demanding the fast-growing AI startup stop allowing its Comet browser to make purchases on Amazon’s retail platform. The move sets up one of the first major legal and commercial confrontations between a dominant e-commerce company and an emerging class of AI “agentic browsers” capable of acting autonomously on behalf of users. For those who are curious, by automating purchases and bypassing the company’s search, recommendation, and sponsored product ecosystem, Comet effectively strips Amazon of its ability to influence buying decisions — a key driver of its $47 billion annual ad revenue. If agentic browsers become mainstream, they could funnel users directly to specific products based on external AI reasoning,
According to Bloomberg, Amazon accused Perplexity’s AI agent of violating its terms of service, degrading the user experience, and creating potential privacy risks. In its Conditions of Use, Amazon explicitly prohibits any “use of data mining, robots, or similar data gathering and extraction tools,” language that could encompass AI-driven shopping agents such as Comet. The e-commerce giant said it had previously reached a temporary understanding with Perplexity in November 2024 to pause automated shopping activity. But following the public launch of Comet earlier this year, the feature was reinstated without Amazon’s consent.
“We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions whether or not to participate. This helps ensure a positive customer experience and it is how others operate, including food delivery apps and the restaurants they take orders for, delivery service apps and the stores they shop from, and online travel agencies and the airlines they book tickets with for customers. Agentic third-party applications such as Perplexity’s Comet have the same obligations, and we’ve repeatedly requested that Perplexity remove Amazon from the Comet experience, particularly in light of the significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience it provides,” Amazon said in a public statement confirming the development.
The company argued that Perplexity’s AI “significantly degrades” the Amazon shopping experience, citing inaccurate delivery estimates and incomplete product details. “Agentic third-party applications such as Perplexity’s Comet have the same obligations,” Amazon added, comparing its expectations to the relationships between delivery apps and restaurants or travel agencies and airlines.
Perplexity responded sharply on Tuesday, publishing a blog post titled “Bullying Is Not Innovation.” The San Francisco–based startup accused Amazon of anti-competitive behavior and said the cease-and-desist order represented “a threat to all internet users.” “It’s a bully tactic to scare disruptive companies like Perplexity out of making life better for people,” the company wrote. Chief Executive Aravind Srinivas said in an interview that Perplexity’s AI acts purely as a user’s delegate, not as an external crawler or bot. “User agents are exactly that — agents of the user,” Srinivas said. “They should have the same rights and responsibilities as any human user operating their own browser.”
Perplexity maintains that Comet doesn’t scrape or harvest data but merely executes commands authorized by users, such as placing an order or retrieving product information. “We’re not training on Amazon data or accessing anything that isn’t available to a logged-in user,” Srinivas said.
Speaking of Perplexity, the firm is valued at about $20 billion and has emerged as one of the most prominent challengers in the AI search and agentic computing market, competing with OpenAI’s GPT-powered assistants, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini. The firm is also a major customer of Amazon Web Services (AWS), having committed “hundreds of millions of dollars” to Amazon’s cloud infrastructure. Amazon has frequently promoted Perplexity as one of its showcase AI clients
Amazon itself is building competing AI shopping tools, including “Buy For Me,” an in-app feature unveiled in April that allows users to delegate product selection and purchases to Amazon’s own agent. Another internal assistant, Rufus, recommends items and manages carts using conversational AI. This is not the first time Perplexity has faced allegations over how its AI tools access online content. In August, Cloudflare accused the company of disguising its automated traffic to bypass bot-blocking protocols, while Reddit filed a lawsuit alleging unauthorized scraping of posts for AI training. Amazon’s claims are narrower in scope but echo the same theme — that Perplexity’s software misrepresents its identity while interacting with third-party systems. The cease-and-desist letter reportedly warned that such activity could amount to computer fraud under US law.
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