It seems that Perplexity and Amazon have a standoff in their hands. The Aravind Srinivas-led AI company has publicly accused e-commerce giant Amazon of employing “bully tactics” to limit innovation. In a public blog post, the company revealed that it received an aggressive legal threat from Amazon, demanding that it stop its users from using AI assistants to shop on Amazon’s platform.
The post, titled “Bullying is Not Innovation,” states the Perplexity team finds the incident a critical battle for user rights in the era of agentic AI, where software acts as a personal employee or assistant. The company argues that Amazon’s move is an attempt to block user freedom and prioritise advertisement revenue over customer convenience and innovation
“This is Amazon’s first legal salvo against an AI company, and it is a threat to all internet users,” stated the post.
Perplexity acknowledges threat from Amazon
The dispute revolves around the Comet Assistant, an AI agent offered by Perplexity that allows users to quickly find, compare, and purchase items on Amazon by using the user’s secure, logged-in credentials. Perplexity says that this feature streamlines the shopping experience, which should be beneficial to Amazon through an increase in the number of transactions.
In a post in X, Aravind Srinivas states, “We would be happy to work together with Amazon to figure out a win-win outcome for both us and them. But attempts to block our Comet Assistant on Amazon and hurt our users — we will have to stand up for them and not get bullied by Amazon.”
The AI brand suggests that Amazon’s opposition is driven by a desire to push sponsored results and ads, which user agents bypass. Perplexity quoted Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s recent comments to investors, where he boasted about the high return on advertising spend, contrasting it with a later statement about potentially partnering with third-party agents in the future.
In a bid to defend agentic AI’s role in shopping, Perplexity defined it as an assistant that has the user’s specific permissions, works solely at their request, and is distinct from automated web scrapers. It outlined three critical principles for AI user agents:
1. Private: The agent must be indistinguishable from the user, with corporations having no right to discriminate based on the chosen AI.
2. Personal: The agent works only for the user, reversing the trend of corporate algorithms being deployed for manipulation.
3. Powerful: The agent’s capabilities should not be limited by pressure on large companies to deliver ad revenue.
For now, the company has pledged not to be intimidated by the threat from Amazon.
