Amazon Threatens Perplexity to Back Off from Its Shopping Site
Calling large corporations’ use of legal threats to stifle innovation “bullying,” Perplexity said it is fighting for its users’ rights.
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[Image creative: Krishna Prasad/MITSMR Middle East]
E-commerce giant Amazon has issued a legal notice to AI startup Perplexity demanding that it prohibit its Comet users from using the AI assistant on the shopping platform. The two confirmed the legal developments on Tuesday.
“This is Amazon’s first legal salvo against an AI company, and it is a threat to all internet users,” Perplexity’s official blog, addressing the concern, read.
Terming large corporations’ use of legal threats and intimidation to block innovation as bullying, the blog read, “Today, 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 argues that since user agents are simply the agents of the user, they are different from crawlers, scrapers, or bots. “A user agent is your AI assistant—it has exactly the same permissions you have, works only at your specific request, and acts solely on your behalf.”
Amazon retaliated with an official statement, “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,” adding that Perplexity’s Comet has the same obligations, and that they’ve repeatedly requested the startup to remove Amazon from the Comet experience.
Perplexity stated that it is fighting for the rights of its users. “Amazon also forgets how it got so big. Users love it. They want good products, at a low price, delivered fast. Agentic shopping is the natural evolution of this promise, and people already demand it. Perplexity demands the right to offer it.”
The AI assistant market is being dominated by the likes of ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, and DeepSeek.
