A significant legal and philosophical battle over the future of online commerce has erupted between tech behemoth Amazon and the AI startup Perplexity. At the heart of the conflict is Perplexity’s new AI-powered Comet browser, which uses an agent to execute purchases on Amazon’s marketplace, prompting Amazon to issue a cease-and-desist letter demanding the practice be stopped.
Perplexity responded aggressively in a public blog post, accusing Amazon of “bullying” the company and characterizing Amazon’s demands as “a threat to all internet users.” This dispute quickly escalated beyond a simple corporate disagreement, becoming a high-stakes fight over the permissibility of AI agents in consumer transactions.
Amazon’s core argument centers on its Conditions of Use for Amazon.com, claiming that the Comet agent violates terms that prohibit “any downloading, copying, or other use of account information for the benefit of any third party” and the use of “data mining, robots, or similar data gathering and extraction tools.” Comet’s agentic capability—which securely stores a user’s login credentials locally to make purchases on command—potentially violates both clauses, depending on how one defines the agent’s actions.
The current escalation follows a temporary agreement between the two companies. According to reports, Amazon and Perplexity had previously agreed in November 2024 to pause agentic shopping on the Amazon platform. However, when the Comet browser was formally released, Perplexity reportedly enabled the feature once again. Amazon’s cease-and-desist letter was sent after the company discovered that Perplexity was allegedly attempting to bypass the terms by representing the Comet agent as a standard Chrome browser user instead of an automated bot.
Amazon publicly acknowledged the dispute, arguing that third-party applications making purchases on behalf of customers should “operate openly and respect service provider decisions whether or not to participate.” They drew analogies to established systems like food delivery apps and online travel agencies, stating that Comet should have the same obligations, particularly given its “significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience” on Amazon.
However, the dynamics of the conflict are complicated by Amazon’s own ambitions. The cloud giant demoed its own AI shopping agent, called “Buy for Me,” in April 2025, suggesting that Perplexity might be perceived not just as a violator of terms, but as a future competitor in the lucrative AI shopping space.
Perplexity fundamentally rejects Amazon’s premise, arguing that “User agents are exactly that: agents of the user.” By acting with the user’s permission and on the user’s behalf, Perplexity contends that the Comet agent should be considered distinct from malicious crawlers, scrapers, or bots, and therefore should not be bound by Amazon’s current terms and conditions.
This dispute is not the first time Perplexity has faced accusations regarding its access methods. In August, Cloudflare claimed that Perplexity’s bots were accessing blocked websites by masquerading as a normal Chrome browser user on macOS. Furthermore, the company, alongside three others, was recently sued by Reddit for allegedly accessing Reddit posts without acquiring the necessary licensing. This pattern suggests an ongoing challenge for Perplexity in defining the ethical and legal boundaries of its powerful AI tools on the public internet.