Amazon Sues Perplexity Over Agentic Shopping Tool

Amazon.com has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity that demands the artificial intelligence startup prevents its Comet browser from making purchases on Amazon. In a blog post responding to Amazon's letter, Perplexity claims Amazon is "bullying" the company and that its demands pose "a threat to all internet users."

Amazon alleges the Comet agent violates its terms of service, degrades the Amazon shopping experience, and introduces privacy vulnerabilities. The e-commerce giant specifically prohibits "any downloading, copying, or other use of account information for the benefit of any third party" and "any use of data mining, robots, or similar data gathering and extraction tools." Depending on your definition, the agentic capabilities Perplexity offers through Comet could violate both clauses. The browser securely stores log-in credentials for websites locally, and uses them to make purchases for customers on Amazon with a simple command.

Total Retail's Take: This legal argument has implications for Amazon as well as the larger retail and e-commerce industry. For Amazon, allowing Perplexity's Comet browser to make purchases on its marketplace undermines Amazon’s “first party” experience (e.g., its user interface, its product recommendations, ads), potentially reducing the retailer's ability to monetize ads or promote its own private labels. Furthermore, the emergence of agentic shopping assistants risks them bypassing Amazon's storefront altogether, making it a de facto search engine rather than a merchant.

In addition to Amazon, the rise of AI shopping assistants presents challenges (as well as opportunities) for the retail industry. From shifts in channel discovery to a potential loss in first-party data capture, to adjusting merchandising strategies for more transactional, purpose-driven AI shopping assistants, retailers must begin preparing their businesses for the future of agentic commerce. First movers will have an advantage over laggards that opt for a wait-and-see approach.

Benjamin Fabre, CEO and co-founder of DataDome, a cyberfraud management platform that helps companies manage unwanted bots, offered the following commentary to Total Retail on the Amazon-Perplexity dispute: "The Amazon–Perplexity dispute underscores a fundamental tension in the emerging agentic web: who controls the customer relationship when AI intermediaries act on users’ behalf. For brands, this is a wake-up call. They need to think not just about how they appear in search or on social, but how they’re represented (or excluded) by AI agents making decisions for consumers. The brands that win will be those that embrace transparency, structure their data for machine-readable interactions, and build trust with both users and the AI systems guiding their choices."