Amazon (AMZN) is demanding Perplexity stop its AI browser, Comet, from making purchases for users on the Amazon marketplace, a practice the ecommerce giant claims is illegal and unethical by not disclosing its activity to users.
In Amazon’s cease and desist letter, Perplexity violated Amazon’s rule prohibiting the “use of data mining, robots, or similar data gathering and extraction tools.” The company asked Perplexity to stop using its AI agents last year until an agreement could be reached regarding the practice.
“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,” Amazon spokesperson Lara Hendrickson said in a statement to Bloomberg, adding that the company has repeatedly asked Perplexity to remove Amazon from the Comet experience due to the “significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience it provides.”
However, this past summer, Perplexity reinstated use of its Comet AI tool, circumventing Amazon’s (AMZN) effort to block it with a new version of the AI agent.
In response to accusations that the company scrapes data and content from online sites in AI news summaries without consent, Perplexity claims it is only providing a service to users to “freely and fairly access public knowledge.”
“Amazon announced it does not believe in your right to hire labor, to have an assistant or an employee acting on your behalf. This isn’t a reasonable legal position, it’s a bully tactic to scare disruptive companies like Perplexity out of making life better for people,” Perplexity said in a blog post.
The company alleges Amazon (AMZN) is not acting on behalf of its customers, but rather to protect its lucrative ad business. Amazon (AMZN) generates a significant amount of revenue by selling ad placement on its platform in response to product search queries. If AI agents like those developed by Perplexity or Alphabet (GOOG) shop for customers, Amazon’s (AMZN) ad placement loses value.
In the company’s most recent earnings call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy acknowledged the proliferation of AI agents and potential for partnerships.
“I think [AI and agentic commerce solutions] are really good for customers, and I think it’s really good for Amazon because at the end of the day, you’re going to buy from the outfit that allows you to have the broadest selection, great value and continues to deliver for you very quickly…[but] right now the customer experience does not provide personalization, there’s no shopping history, the delivery estimates are frequently wrong, the prices are often wrong.”