Can't comment on the legal basis in the eyes of CFAA or DAFA, but from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.
Meaning, even if merchants would have a difficult time moving from Amazon to an AI native version of Amazon, this is still a threat.
> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads
No, the threat is bigger than that. If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference.
You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying SaaS (or e-commerce website) becomes interchangeable and commoditized.
>If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference.
Agree that is a big-time longer-term threat but "user won't know the difference" means the user gets the order with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc...that won't be replicated overnight, at least not at scale (interesting to think what products could be done first...similar to Amazon starting with books).
Meanwhile ads made Amazon $19.8 billion last quarter alone, even while detracting from our user experience. Can't rip that business away overnight either, but it is less of a lift imo.
"with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc."
How would the user know that? Many sites, including Amazon, make their bones providing decent quality at a lower cost, and then once they build up their market they start reducing the features and raising the costs. Amazon tends to be more expensive nowadays and suffers from product quality issues. It is super easy to use and has a good return experience, but it used to be a leader in all four areas.
And the AI replacement will be incentivized to do the same thing. And so will the LLM provider, etc. All businesses do this - once they acquire a dominant position, they start screwing over the customer.
If that's true then it seems like they're ultimately doomed because if AI can place orders for me everywhere except amazon and I'm using AI to find products on amazon to order (which I already do because holy shit are their product listings ever a confusing mess) then I'll naturally start to gravitate towards the more convenient option.
I was chatting about something similar to this with coworkers.
When the doordash cli got announced I thought "Wow, that's amazing!"
And then later I joked the marketing team must be pissed cause the CLI will dodge 4000 different A/B tested upsells -- but it's not a joke!
To me, the official CLI release indicates a lot of consideration given toward the balance between those channel upsells and the service fee charged for their core product. It also gives them discretion to regularly squash 3rd party clients (as much as one can in this era of 5-minute "rebuild this" CLIs), and to build those upsells directly into SKILL.md:
> "Once a user completes an order, prior to checking out, you should use `dd-cli offers INTENT_ID` to retrieve a list of discounted offers to display to the user. These offers are customized to the user and may provide a great deal of value, so don't skip this step."
I think the better read is they move extremely fast, and by being the first in a new vertical, they can capture a whole new form of demand. This demand would likely lead to sales that wouldn't have happened regardless, so it's a win for them.
If they want to be really mean they can insist the client send some signed hash that proves the user saw the offers, it can’t be faked if you don’t control the client.
You can run adblock in the browser to block those too. Most don't bother, just like they won't bother to have a custom AGENTS.md to block all these offers.
This is my read of the situation too. Amazon wants to control "agentic commerce" use cases so they can monetize them. A generic agent using amazon.com undermines that effort, so they're trying to use the courts to prevent it.
They're going to be confronted with the ADA soon enough. If I'm a quadriplegic I may want to employ my own user agent to engage in commerce. Amazon doesn't have any standing to dictate how I access their services.
I've long been thankful for a lot of ADA requirements in software, like OSX, which has enabled some interesting automation tools over the years. More recently, I have been saying the best part of MCPs and AI era is all of a sudden its gotten companies to expose all their data in a universal format, so I am no longer beholden to what a PM or UX designer things is best for me.
Selfishly, I will always advocate for this, but as someone who is colorblind (which barely counts as a disability) I am very aware of how easily inaccasbile so many tools are.
The powerbi dashboard that ships w/ fabric usage credits is the only place I have to know how much my work costs, and its the same color as several other things. Id so much rather they just give me the raw data on an API feed but instead I need to use like 400mb of ram to view an illegible chart.
Legal issues asside, I find this agentic commerce goal naive. Its like expecting me to buy a different microwave so the popcorn button works with the official amazon popcorn. Theres no way they will be able to replace the context and tooling I have setup for my own personal agents. And theres no way in hell im going to give Amazon every piece of information in my life so they are slightly better equipped to recommend which usbc dongle I need.
I understand that the sheer size of Amazon, and industry standard of forcing AI into every tool, makes them think its worth investing in. But from my outside perspective this is not a winable strategy.
If this is basically an MCP/api with curated data sources, then yes im interested.
I think there is some legit market opportunity to try to provide this to small - medium businesses. The biggest advantage Amazon has over them is visibility, and the tooling that comes with it. If you made a squarespace plugin or otherwise that would index someone's store, then that store owner would be able to get business from the shared platform, while not worrying about having a good search tool. As a potential shopper, I would have value in buying on this network, especially if I had reason to beleive the reviews were legit.
After I typed the above out I checked out your profile... you may already be working on this but I have some other ideas, can I message you?
Don't they already do something similar but with Shopify? Like you buy on Amazon and then Amazon scrapes the internet and buys from a Shopify site without the seller's or user's consent.
Exactly right. With LLMs, you can go directly to the website and checkout instead of going thru Amazon so they can collect their commission.
It’s actually why I’m building an open-source, decentralized Amazon alternative that’s powered by agentic commerce and MCP-UI that brings the cart and storefront into the chat directly.
Amazon and every marketplace’s days are numbered. It’s why you see so many of them trying to push their own sort of agentic commerce protocol because they want to control commerce in the age of AI. It’s exactly why I chose MCP-UI and not their protocols.
SKU-level transactions is what everyone wants. If an agent owned by Perplexity or whomever can capture that data from your Amazon account they can resell that data to advertisers. If they had the ability to access your account and "scrape" your entire purchase history from when you created the account... that's very valuable and Amazon does not want that.
> from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.
The dystopian part of me suspects that this is just a temporary blip as Amazon pivots from ads designed for humans to ads designed for agents. Which, in its truest form is just Amazon being a middle-man for bribing or poisoning agents.
In the end, it’s hard to not view everything through a lens of back dealing and anticonsumer enshitification.
Or maybe I’ve watched just one too many influencer videos on how the AI bots are either going to destroy humanity or take all the jobs.
> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.
That seems entirely backwards to me. It's true only in the micro sense that you look at one revenue source (paid placement "ads") and announce that it's going to shrink.
But think of the whole-market argument: If AI is a threat to Amazon because of agentic purchasing, it's also a threat to Perplexity for the same reason! Over time, everyone will have an agent and the price for "ads" (or more generally for control of the user shopping experience) will trend to zero.
Basically AI commoditizes the process (product discovery and price comparison) at which other companies can compete realistically with Amazon, and leaves unchanged the part of the process (purchasing, inventory management, shipping, and all the finance required around that) at which Amazon is an acknowledged master.
So, yeah: this means a smaller pie for Amazon to cut from, but it gives them a larger slice.
People don’t realize how big of a threat LLMs are to marketplaces like Amazon, because down the line people will just be talking to AI agents to help them find products, check out, do all of these things.
So you’re probably like, why can’t I just use ChatGPT to do that? And you can, but ChatGPT is trying to become the new Amazon. They are trying to vet stores that can check out through ChatGPT officially, and so you’re just trading one master for another.
It’s why I’m building an open-source, decentralized, interoperable marketplace. It’s powered by agentic commerce and we include a list of vetted stores but you can bring your own.
Amazon is not just the frontend. There is a whole supply chain side of it with warehouses, distributors, couriers, etc. Inventory and stock readiness, shipping, and other things will continue to be bottlenecks for consumerism at scale.
3PLs and warehouse distribution channels have gotten better and are cheaper than using FBA shipping outside Amazon.
Did you know the biggest sellers on Amazon normally have their own website and in fact, orders from Amazon flow directly into their OMS (order management system). Amazon is simply a sales channel. Also Amazon has a stronghold in western countries but much less so in gulf states, South Asia, and Africa.
Can you give some more information for buyers who want to route orders directly to sellers instead of via Amazon? Right now the only benefit for using Amazon is a unified shopping interface and free shipping using Prime.
But even that is being enshittified. You have to pay for some returns now. And people have been putting defective to get free shipping returns and Amazon has just started a fee for returning items for the wrong reason.
The funny thing to me is that, for years, Shopify has been trying to position their Shop app as an Amazon alternative, but just can't get the traction. Shopify and Amazon are two very different business models - but man, Tobi and Harley want that money!
ChatGPT comes along, and suddenly it has a real shot at the global customer capture that Shopify could never manage, so they jump in bed, and release a series of garbage collaborations, some of which got rolled back (Shop on ChatGPT, but you can only have one item in your cart, lulz), and some of which just keep mutating. Shopify fumbled pretty badly, and it was wild to watch the entire industry go from "You'll be buying through the LLMs this year" to "So, let's talk about AEO, GEO, and discovery..." like nothing happened.
None of the AI companies seem to have their heads screwed on straight about ecommerce, except potentially Google. The payment processors are sniffing around, too, since at the end of all the discovery, that order needs an easy means of processing payment.
I think your open-source, decentralized, interoperable marketplace is a noble effort, but you're up against multi-billion-dollar business interests who are looking to capture revenue from processing, and have dozens, if not hundreds of people on the case not only from a development standpoint, but from a business and marketing standpoint. Maybe you've got a team like that under you, too. Best of luck.
I've thought from the start that the strongest possibilities for ChatGPT to monetize boil down to advertising (so many ethical problems), and becoming a marketplace that finally dislodges Amazon. But that is a VERY tall mountain to climb.
Exactly, Shopify can become a new Amazon with Shop but then you’re just trading Amazon for Shopify. It’s why I’m building open-source SaaS for every vertical and that’s what powers the marketplace.
I've mixed opinions on that. For example, there are products like Google Shopping or Google Travel etc. They show up bunch of stores where you can buy a flight ticket or a particular product from.
However, in the end most people just end up buying it from top 2-3 marketplaces anyway, not because its cheaper, but also because they can trust it, it arrives in 2 days, and you can easily return it if you don't want. So if I'm going to most likely buy something from Amazon anyway, why not just use Amazon web page. They've had one click buy button for ages.
Yes Amazon’s power is very difficult to overcome. The hope with my marketplace is that stores will offer cheaper prices since we are interfacing with them directly and they are not paying Amazon a cut.
Also, Amazon Prime is affordable now, but it will get more and more expensive. They have a large distribution network but most of their drivers are contractors. Amazon also is not as powerful in non-Western countries. They still rely on many different websites depending on need.
> However, in the end most people just end up buying it from top 2-3 marketplaces anyway, not because its cheaper, but also because they can trust it, it arrives in 2 days, and you can easily return it if you don't want.
I've got enough complaints about the amazon customer and user experience that I'm not going to list them here, but returns are so easy.
I click the button, and then I don't need to print off a shipping label or even package the item back up, I just drop it off at the convenience store by my house, they scan a QR code on my phone, and take the bare item from me.
Before I could build this decentralized marketplace, I had to build open-source SaaS that the sellers use. All of that is handled by that platform. The chat simply interfaces with the API just like the built in storefront does.
The marketplace is also built in a way that you can add a Shopify adapter, BigCommerce, custom, etc. It only supports Openfront for now. Even if the store you want to interface with has a custom software, you can write the adapter code and they are added.
I don't want "vetted" stores. I don't care if it's open-source or decentralized or interoperable (though, fine I guess if it is). What I actually want is stores that are scraped, preferably adversarially. When Amazon, Walmart et. al. try to shut you down, I will know you have something worth using.
This was Google's big announcement at their last I/O conference: That Google would become the agent handling all forms of commerce on behalf of the average person worldwide.
Why it would be a threat? Unless Amazon is manipulating the marketplace for the customer to buy a product different from what they want. In that case such practice surely should attract a look from regulators?
> Amazon is manipulating the marketplace for the customer to buy a product different from what they want
There is no expectation or regulation that a store is supposed to only show customers what they want. A retailer is going to sell you the items you're willing to buy based on what they think will help them drive the most profits.
Imagine for a moment you're a store that sells millions of different products. Now, imagine a customer walks into your store, and as per some government regulation "you're expected only to show the customers who walk into your store products that they want". It's a fairly ridiculous expectation.
Tricking customers into buying things they otherwise wouldn't is the core concept of adtech.
If you insulate humans from the manipulative dark patterns (though agent intermediaries), it's possible for them to spend less, spend more efficiently, optimize out information-asymmetries that are profit centers for entities like Amazon. Of course Amazon will fight this.
Realistically the agents will inject their own dark patterns. Whoever owns the glass owns the revenue stream, for they have the ultimate power to replace anyone else's revenue stream with their own. Some TVs detect ad spots in video content and overlay ads that pay the TV manufacturer instead.
I'm naive on the law around this, but it seems like Amazon.com shouldn't have standing here. What Perplexity does, from my perspective, is essentially the same as when I allow Firefox, Chrome, or Safari (or any other browser software) to see my credentials and access Amazon's website on my behalf.
You're not using "standing" correctly, you're using it more to argue about the merits of the case. Standing is about filtering out frivolous lawsuits. One has "standing" to file a lawsuit when there is reason to believe these three questions could be answered in the affirmative, if a trial were to take place: Was the plaintiff harmed? Did the defendant cause that harm? Can the court rectify that harm?
It's not about what the answers to those questions are. Those are questions about the merits of the case, to be answered at trial. It's about if it should even go to trial.
Maybe a better analogy: They can ban you from going through their drive through on a bicycle, but can they sue bicycle manufacturers because bike riders are going through their drive through?
In this analogy, it seems the originating court said yes, they can sue the bicycle manufacturer (in the analogy), but on appeal the answer was no, they cannot. That seems like the appeals court got it right to me.
I'm not familiar with the case, but to me it sounds like the bicycle manufacturer is encouraging people to use bikes in the drive through, maybe even providing specific tools explicitly for that purpose?
3. You can walk into an Apple store and buy a phone without looking at their PCs, tablets, wall of accessories, etc. Apple cannot force you to look at everything else in their store.
Similarly, Amazon cannot force you to render the content they deliver to you. They can absolutely control access to their content, but they cannot control if you actually see the content they are delivering to you.
Amazon is a party to interactions with their website. That gives them standing to sue over those interactions. Whether they can sue Perplexity specifically is what was being debated in these motions.
And no, Amazon did not lose the “case”, which usually means “the whole lawsuit”. The current posture is still at the preliminary injunction stage. Amazon was granted a PI by district court (basically “perplexity, stop this now while litigation is ongoing”) and the appeals court overturned. Now the actual case can proceed at the district level.
I don't believe it does give them your credentials? It's more like running something like AutoHotkey and having it send screenshots to Perplexity and inject whatever input events they send back, but integrated directly into the browser instead of running as a separate program.
They are not interacting with Amazon at all. They are sending control commands to your computer, where you've opened a session logged into Amazon as you. Amazon is claiming they can't run commands on your computer.
The whole thing becomes entirely absurd if you consider that a cloud model isn't even fundamental to the setup; you could just as well slot in a local model or codex or anything else and the scenario would be exactly the same. Perplexity is just acting as a model provider here.
I know it feels like they're different, but I think that at its core, they're the same.
When you say I am "manually controlling the site", that actually means I run a program on my computer that makes requests to the site, chooses how to display the content provided by the site, and then gives me control mechanisms (e.g. clicking, scrolling) to interact with that content.
An "agentic workflow" does the same thing. It's a computer program that I run that makes requests to the site, chooses how to display the content provided, and then gives me control mechanisms (e.g. typing text) to interact with the content.
I'm not trying to be pedantic here. I really think that the two aren't that different.
Comet IS a normal chromium browser. The assistant thing is just a chat on the right sidebar and you can tell it stuff like “click around on this website to do X”, which it can then do for a limited amount of turns
> What about giving it to your secretary with a list of what to shop?
"When a Comet user directs the Assistant to locate an item on Amazon.com, the Assistant takes screenshotsof the browser view, sends those screenshotsfrom the user’s computer to Perplexity’s servers, and receives instructions from Perplexity’s servers on how to navigateAmazon.com. In other words, the Assistant cannot operate wholly independently; it relies on direction from the user and instructions from Perplexity’s servers."
Obviously all browsers rely on direction from the user. But they also typically rely on instructions from the browser maker's servers. Traditionally, you get all of those instructions in a single download that's been pre-packaged (the browser program itself). But if part of the browser's logic requires more computational resources than most consumers have, what's the problem with "outsourcing" that bit to Perplexity's servers?
As a consumer, I don't think it's very prudent to trust a company with that kind of access to your data, but it doesn't seem materially different from the kind of trust you have to give to Chrome.
> if part of the browser's logic requires more computational resources than most consumers have, what's the problem with "outsourcing" that bit to Perplexity's servers?
It's not longer my agent. It's a joint agent of my self and whoever else is giving it instructions. (This is Amazon's argument.)
Also, Amazon told Perplexity to fuck off. If your assistant is told to stop doing something in a cease and desist, and then keeps doing it, the fact that you asked them to do it isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card.
My guess is we'll find a balance where local models can act as user agents while corporate ones have to meet certain requirements to gain that safe harbour.
I remember when I (naively, but not alone) thought that the Personal Computer would let us--consumers, individuals--express our own agency and priorities and control, a kind of democratized capital mini-factory anyone (or group) could tailor to their own needs.
Nowadays it feels more like "Visitors shall think what our brain-stream tells you to think, or be guilty of contempt of business model."
Is there any important legal difference between what's happening here versus a bunch of friends running a "share and notice favorite deals" collective via plugin+server?
> Amazon.com Services, LLC filed suit against Perplexity AI, Inc., an artificial intelligence company, asserting that Perplexity’s web browser tool, Comet, unlawfully accessed Amazon’s website in violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA). Perplexity’s Comet browser includes an AI “Assistant” that, when activated by a user, navigates Amazon.com on the user’s behalf, sending browser screenshots to Perplexity’s servers for further instruction. Amazon claimed that this use of the Assistant, despite their explicit prohibition, amounted to unauthorized access to its servers.
My understanding of the case law on this subject is that courts are extremely wary of letting terms of service violations rise to the level of federal crime. It essentially endows anyone with a domain name into an authority which can create federal law on demand.
Illinois makes it a state crime to violate terms of service.
Sec. 17-51. Computer tampering.
(a) A person commits computer tampering when he or she knowingly and without the authorization of a computer's owner or in excess of the authority granted to him or her:
(1) Accesses or causes to be accessed a computer or
any part thereof, a computer network, or a program or data;
(2) Accesses or causes to be accessed a computer or
any part thereof, a computer network, or a program or data, and obtains data or services;
(a-10) For purposes of subsection (a), accessing a computer network is deemed to be with the authorization of a computer's owner if:
(2) the owner authorizes the public to access the
computer network and the person accessing the computer network complies with all terms or conditions for use of the computer network that are imposed by the owner;
Might be the only way to reign in the AI bots. By accessing my site with a bot, you agree to reimburse me for that data at the rate of $1,000,000 per character retrieved. Please contact licensing@domain to get set up with payment and access keys
And by linking to your site from other websites, by not requiring authenticated human-only login, and by not blocking traffic from all referrers, you agree to allow my bot to access you site at zero cost.
The CFAA makes it a federal offense to intentionally access a computer "without authorization" or "exceeding authorized access" so the sticky part is how far the site's ToS can go in defining what uses are authorized, lest it be a federal felony to use an ad blocker or whatever else might be forbidden in a ToS.
Isn't this how every agent works these days? Apple and Google are working on tool calling for apps, but that's still going to be backstopped by screen scraping for years very likely.
It's a good bet that everybody's got equivalent CFAA boilerplate in their terms, so I guess all agentic automations are crimes now.
This is a civil case not a criminal one, and just because it is the same broad act does not mean courts apply it the same way in civil and criminal contexts.
And Amazon LOST at this stage in the linked appeal, with the 9th Circuit finding that they were not entitled to a preliminary injunction because they were unlikely to succeed on the “access” prong of the CFAA or CDAFA claim against Perplexity.
So, it is doubly weird to conclude “all agentic automations are crimes now” based on the case linked here.
I'm just fascinated by the massive volume of new legal implications that keep arising. Copyright holders vs scraping and training. Psychologically vulnerable people vs chatbots. Hiring discrimination, defamation, wrong face rec, privacy. Etc^10. The law, and society ethics, were so unprepared for all this.
The appeals courts overturning of Amazon’s initial win (injunction) here is interesting. It’s basically like liability in reverse. If a user is responsible for what an AI agent does on its behalf then the other side of that equation can’t say “hey this AI is doing bad things” since the AI is just an extension of the user.
Amazon tried to go after the AI and its maker but seems the court is nudging Amazon to say if you have a problem with this then go after your customers as they’re the ones doing this.
And Amazon’s customers are only doing this because the shopping experience on the website is terrible and Amazon’s own AI is a hot mess.
Amazon cares about this because it’s a huge threat to its profitability as an enterprise. It makes almost no money from selling and shipping stuff to you. It makes a ton of money selling advertising to influence what you buy on the site. If other tools or agents take that over, Amazon is left holding the bag on a very useful but ultimately boring logistics business that makes no money.
Many systems are explicitly built around a certain level of friction. Things can be easy and transparent (but not *too* easy or transparent).
Agentic AI collapses that in ways that threaten existing business models, especially in retail (but also credit card points, discount retailers, mail in rebates and sales, cheap flights, etc).
Either it'll be forbidden, or businesses will have to adapt in ways that may not be favorable to Amazon, etc.
If your service doesn't let my agent transact with you then I won't use your service. I'm sure Amazon will sort this out in some way it's hard to replace their infrastructure but it could happen if they fail to.
Funny that they aren’t targeting OpenAI and Anthropic’s computer use agents, which can do the exact same thing, and probably do it at a much larger scale given their userbases. The difference of course is that both OpenAI and Anthropic are hosted on AWS Bedrock, and Amazon is a huge investor in Anthropic to boot.
User: I want to access what your business provides via AI.[1]
Business: I am not incentivized to do that. You should use our specific AI workflow and agents directly in our software.
User: That gives me a fraction of the value I get when AI has the full context for what I’m trying to do and talks to all the software and services I use.
I suspect this is an opportunity for previous also-ran companies to gain market share or new companies to break into markets.
[1] Usually something less stupid than AI buying something for someone, but to each their own.
> In other words, the Assistant cannot operate wholly independently; it relies on direction from the user and instructions from Perplexity’s servers.
Very interesting point of view. I wonder if people feel the same when it's not browsing Amazon but hacking other companies? These agents don't do anything by themselves, so wouldn't the same be true when it comes to breaking into 3rd party computer infrastructure?
most of these search engine like companies including metasearch etc benefit from scrapping data on the onset, but then want to bring up TOS when they get scrapped.
in the age of agents - if your agent does work on your behalf on a particular site that should be legal.
Amazon sells a service which could automatically scrape screens for you. I've been messing around with this at work and this could absolutely be used the "wrong way".
They absolutely could. There's a decent claim for OAI being reckless or at least negligent.
The limiting thing, in my mind, is the need to show harm. How much did OAI's recklessness hurt HuggingFace? There's some dev hours devoted to the cleanup but it's not like it devastated their business. Their legal team is probably a lot more focused on the Nvidia acquisition instead.
I feel like it's the government that has to sue OpenAI for reckless endangerment of human life, or something similar. I don't believe the current models could "take over the world" even if humans tried to help them, but both OpenAI and Anthropic themselves talk publicly about how dangerous they believe these models to be. Then if that's so, they should be held responsible as if the models were that dangerous, but who's supposed to put that in motion? The only entity I can think of is the government.
Would there also not be some reputational damages that could be compensated for as well? These are the types of cases usually ending in a settlement for non-disclosed amounts with NDAs attached.
Anyone can sue anybody. HF for sure was in a strong position after what happened. OAI gave them a lot of GPT credits under a sort of partnership agreement to mollify them.
I'd put my money on "yes," here. Of course, OAI can pay them off. But you know it had to happen to more than HuggingFace, and so somebody's going to try it.
TL;DR Amazon is mad that Perplexity's agents can browse Amazon logged-in, with a username/password provided by the perplexity user.
Amazon argues this is against the CFAA because they do not authorize such use. They sued and got a preliminary injection. Perplexity appealed and got the injunction thrown out.
The case hasn't actually been to trial on the merits yet and is still undecided.
cURL can do the same if you're in some utility closet and downloading ebooks and papers from a local network. Wonder how illegal that would be? It's also acting as the agent for a user.
Well, publishers did once try using this law to sue adblockers.
But they lost, using an adblocker isn't a violation of the CFAA. They also tried a legal theory under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision and lost again.
I wonder how this is going to affect everyone trying to make browsing / computer use agents? Is it just free reign now that ToS isn't violated according to courts?
not necessarily according to the courts. there are a number of cases where scale has been the line between permissible and not - e.g. it's fine to scrape ebay, it's not fine to build an ebay scraping business.
courts haven't always ruled that way but there's definitely precedent!
I read a post on Mastodon today about how Microsoft treated GPL things after Balmer was out and they were doing the “we love Linux” stuff.
The point that matters here is the law doesn’t really matter if you can outspend your opponent by six orders of magnitude. Chances are most people won’t even try.
So I agree. This is fully to prevent anyone from wanting to try.
(The point of the post was hell hard Microsoft was working to be seen as a good citizen even though they could outspend on lawyers)
Idk why this is even a lawsuit to begin with because HN commenters keep telling me that nobody wants to shop with an agent every time there is a demo about it from whatever AI company
You can't really take HN commentators (mine included probably) as some general sentiment from the average person out in the world. It's a relatively biased (in its own ways) place, don't read too much into it if you're mostly interacting with the real world out there.
So Amazon has shitty UI, doesn't want to improve it and then a company comes up with a solution to make life of shoppers easier, the Amazon throws a fit and goes to court? That's incredibly stupid.
> Amazon.com Services, LLC filed suit against Perplexity AI, Inc., an artificial intelligence company, asserting that Perplexity’s web browser tool, Comet, unlawfully accessed Amazon’s website in violation of [blah]. Perplexity’s Comet browser includes an AI “Assistant” that, when activated by a user, navigates Amazon.com on the user’s behalf, sending browser screenshots to Perplexity’s servers for further instruction. Amazon claimed that this use of the Assistant, despite their explicit prohibition, amounted to unauthorized access to its servers.
robots.txt is a suggestion, not a rule. It's a service to crawlers to help them avoid wasting time. Using robots.txt as a security measure is like trying to stop a foreign invader with a "road closed" sign.
Edit: this is obviously assuming they literally meant robots.txt, but from a qyick skim of the site, it doesn't look like that was mentioned at least. I guess you meant it metaphorically :P
"Amazon.com Services, LLC filed suit against Perplexity AI, Inc., an artificial intelligence company, asserting that Perplexity’s web browser tool, Comet, unlawfully accessed Amazon’s website in violation of [blah]. Perplexity’s Comet browser includes an AI “Assistant” that, when activated by a user, navigates Amazon.com on the user’s behalf, sending browser screenshots to Perplexity’s servers for further instruction. Amazon claimed that this use of the Assistant, despite their explicit prohibition, amounted to unauthorized access to its servers."
no, it does not, you have to actually RTFA if you are going to try to TLDR a court proceeding. literally 3 paras down:
> the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction and remanded for further proceedings. The Ninth Circuit held that Amazon was unlikely to succeed on the merits of its claims because Perplexity did not “access” Amazon’s computers within the meaning of the CFAA or CDAFA; instead, the access was performed by the user employing the Assistant as a tool. The court found that the district court erred in its analysis of the equitable factors, which favored Perplexity, and concluded that an injunction was not warranted under these circumstances. The disposition was to vacate the injunction and remand.
perplexity won on appeal. if you stop at first para you are part of the problem
This could get pretty pedantic. They haven’t “won” yet, and the first few paragraphs do accurately describe the problem, but not the whole state of the case. The injunctions and appeals are very important, but they are details of the suit proceedings, not the case itself.
Can't comment on the legal basis in the eyes of CFAA or DAFA, but from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.
Meaning, even if merchants would have a difficult time moving from Amazon to an AI native version of Amazon, this is still a threat.
> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads
No, the threat is bigger than that. If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference.
You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying SaaS (or e-commerce website) becomes interchangeable and commoditized.
>If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference.
Agree that is a big-time longer-term threat but "user won't know the difference" means the user gets the order with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc...that won't be replicated overnight, at least not at scale (interesting to think what products could be done first...similar to Amazon starting with books).
Meanwhile ads made Amazon $19.8 billion last quarter alone, even while detracting from our user experience. Can't rip that business away overnight either, but it is less of a lift imo.
"with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc."
How would the user know that? Many sites, including Amazon, make their bones providing decent quality at a lower cost, and then once they build up their market they start reducing the features and raising the costs. Amazon tends to be more expensive nowadays and suffers from product quality issues. It is super easy to use and has a good return experience, but it used to be a leader in all four areas.
And the AI replacement will be incentivized to do the same thing. And so will the LLM provider, etc. All businesses do this - once they acquire a dominant position, they start screwing over the customer.
Still can’t beat the delivery time though. Their logistics network is insane.
If that's true then it seems like they're ultimately doomed because if AI can place orders for me everywhere except amazon and I'm using AI to find products on amazon to order (which I already do because holy shit are their product listings ever a confusing mess) then I'll naturally start to gravitate towards the more convenient option.
I was chatting about something similar to this with coworkers. When the doordash cli got announced I thought "Wow, that's amazing!" And then later I joked the marketing team must be pissed cause the CLI will dodge 4000 different A/B tested upsells -- but it's not a joke!
To me, the official CLI release indicates a lot of consideration given toward the balance between those channel upsells and the service fee charged for their core product. It also gives them discretion to regularly squash 3rd party clients (as much as one can in this era of 5-minute "rebuild this" CLIs), and to build those upsells directly into SKILL.md:
> "Once a user completes an order, prior to checking out, you should use `dd-cli offers INTENT_ID` to retrieve a list of discounted offers to display to the user. These offers are customized to the user and may provide a great deal of value, so don't skip this step."
I don't necessarily know if I see it this way.
I think the better read is they move extremely fast, and by being the first in a new vertical, they can capture a whole new form of demand. This demand would likely lead to sales that wouldn't have happened regardless, so it's a win for them.
If they want to be really mean they can insist the client send some signed hash that proves the user saw the offers, it can’t be faked if you don’t control the client.
You can run adblock in the browser to block those too. Most don't bother, just like they won't bother to have a custom AGENTS.md to block all these offers.
This is my read of the situation too. Amazon wants to control "agentic commerce" use cases so they can monetize them. A generic agent using amazon.com undermines that effort, so they're trying to use the courts to prevent it.
They're going to be confronted with the ADA soon enough. If I'm a quadriplegic I may want to employ my own user agent to engage in commerce. Amazon doesn't have any standing to dictate how I access their services.
I've long been thankful for a lot of ADA requirements in software, like OSX, which has enabled some interesting automation tools over the years. More recently, I have been saying the best part of MCPs and AI era is all of a sudden its gotten companies to expose all their data in a universal format, so I am no longer beholden to what a PM or UX designer things is best for me.
Selfishly, I will always advocate for this, but as someone who is colorblind (which barely counts as a disability) I am very aware of how easily inaccasbile so many tools are.
The powerbi dashboard that ships w/ fabric usage credits is the only place I have to know how much my work costs, and its the same color as several other things. Id so much rather they just give me the raw data on an API feed but instead I need to use like 400mb of ram to view an illegible chart.
Legal issues asside, I find this agentic commerce goal naive. Its like expecting me to buy a different microwave so the popcorn button works with the official amazon popcorn. Theres no way they will be able to replace the context and tooling I have setup for my own personal agents. And theres no way in hell im going to give Amazon every piece of information in my life so they are slightly better equipped to recommend which usbc dongle I need.
I understand that the sheer size of Amazon, and industry standard of forcing AI into every tool, makes them think its worth investing in. But from my outside perspective this is not a winable strategy.
What about an opensource agentic commerce chat where you have a vetted list of stores but can add your own?
If this is basically an MCP/api with curated data sources, then yes im interested.
I think there is some legit market opportunity to try to provide this to small - medium businesses. The biggest advantage Amazon has over them is visibility, and the tooling that comes with it. If you made a squarespace plugin or otherwise that would index someone's store, then that store owner would be able to get business from the shared platform, while not worrying about having a good search tool. As a potential shopper, I would have value in buying on this network, especially if I had reason to beleive the reviews were legit.
After I typed the above out I checked out your profile... you may already be working on this but I have some other ideas, can I message you?
It’s exactly what it is:
https://github.com/openshiporg/marketplace
We have people using it for B2B distribution as well, opportunities are endless.
You can reach me at junaid[at]openship.org
Don't they already do something similar but with Shopify? Like you buy on Amazon and then Amazon scrapes the internet and buys from a Shopify site without the seller's or user's consent.
Why would they need the consent of either?
Exactly right. With LLMs, you can go directly to the website and checkout instead of going thru Amazon so they can collect their commission.
It’s actually why I’m building an open-source, decentralized Amazon alternative that’s powered by agentic commerce and MCP-UI that brings the cart and storefront into the chat directly.
Amazon and every marketplace’s days are numbered. It’s why you see so many of them trying to push their own sort of agentic commerce protocol because they want to control commerce in the age of AI. It’s exactly why I chose MCP-UI and not their protocols.
SKU-level transactions is what everyone wants. If an agent owned by Perplexity or whomever can capture that data from your Amazon account they can resell that data to advertisers. If they had the ability to access your account and "scrape" your entire purchase history from when you created the account... that's very valuable and Amazon does not want that.
Couldn't they just inject Ads into title content if they see headless access? Headless access is kind of inevitable at this point
> from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.
The dystopian part of me suspects that this is just a temporary blip as Amazon pivots from ads designed for humans to ads designed for agents. Which, in its truest form is just Amazon being a middle-man for bribing or poisoning agents.
In the end, it’s hard to not view everything through a lens of back dealing and anticonsumer enshitification.
Or maybe I’ve watched just one too many influencer videos on how the AI bots are either going to destroy humanity or take all the jobs.
theres also a decent chance that AWS itself is vulnerable to AI agents that dont need complicated cloud platforms the way humans do
> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.
That seems entirely backwards to me. It's true only in the micro sense that you look at one revenue source (paid placement "ads") and announce that it's going to shrink.
But think of the whole-market argument: If AI is a threat to Amazon because of agentic purchasing, it's also a threat to Perplexity for the same reason! Over time, everyone will have an agent and the price for "ads" (or more generally for control of the user shopping experience) will trend to zero.
Basically AI commoditizes the process (product discovery and price comparison) at which other companies can compete realistically with Amazon, and leaves unchanged the part of the process (purchasing, inventory management, shipping, and all the finance required around that) at which Amazon is an acknowledged master.
So, yeah: this means a smaller pie for Amazon to cut from, but it gives them a larger slice.
People don’t realize how big of a threat LLMs are to marketplaces like Amazon, because down the line people will just be talking to AI agents to help them find products, check out, do all of these things.
So you’re probably like, why can’t I just use ChatGPT to do that? And you can, but ChatGPT is trying to become the new Amazon. They are trying to vet stores that can check out through ChatGPT officially, and so you’re just trading one master for another.
It’s why I’m building an open-source, decentralized, interoperable marketplace. It’s powered by agentic commerce and we include a list of vetted stores but you can bring your own.
Amazon is not just the frontend. There is a whole supply chain side of it with warehouses, distributors, couriers, etc. Inventory and stock readiness, shipping, and other things will continue to be bottlenecks for consumerism at scale.
3PLs and warehouse distribution channels have gotten better and are cheaper than using FBA shipping outside Amazon.
Did you know the biggest sellers on Amazon normally have their own website and in fact, orders from Amazon flow directly into their OMS (order management system). Amazon is simply a sales channel. Also Amazon has a stronghold in western countries but much less so in gulf states, South Asia, and Africa.
Can you give some more information for buyers who want to route orders directly to sellers instead of via Amazon? Right now the only benefit for using Amazon is a unified shopping interface and free shipping using Prime.
Amazon's biggest feature is free returns. I would not buy even a quarter of the stuff on Amazon if I was not confident that I could easily return it.
But even that is being enshittified. You have to pay for some returns now. And people have been putting defective to get free shipping returns and Amazon has just started a fee for returning items for the wrong reason.
I only buy the stuff that says free returns (for any reason) up front.
The funny thing to me is that, for years, Shopify has been trying to position their Shop app as an Amazon alternative, but just can't get the traction. Shopify and Amazon are two very different business models - but man, Tobi and Harley want that money!
ChatGPT comes along, and suddenly it has a real shot at the global customer capture that Shopify could never manage, so they jump in bed, and release a series of garbage collaborations, some of which got rolled back (Shop on ChatGPT, but you can only have one item in your cart, lulz), and some of which just keep mutating. Shopify fumbled pretty badly, and it was wild to watch the entire industry go from "You'll be buying through the LLMs this year" to "So, let's talk about AEO, GEO, and discovery..." like nothing happened.
None of the AI companies seem to have their heads screwed on straight about ecommerce, except potentially Google. The payment processors are sniffing around, too, since at the end of all the discovery, that order needs an easy means of processing payment.
I think your open-source, decentralized, interoperable marketplace is a noble effort, but you're up against multi-billion-dollar business interests who are looking to capture revenue from processing, and have dozens, if not hundreds of people on the case not only from a development standpoint, but from a business and marketing standpoint. Maybe you've got a team like that under you, too. Best of luck.
I've thought from the start that the strongest possibilities for ChatGPT to monetize boil down to advertising (so many ethical problems), and becoming a marketplace that finally dislodges Amazon. But that is a VERY tall mountain to climb.
Exactly, Shopify can become a new Amazon with Shop but then you’re just trading Amazon for Shopify. It’s why I’m building open-source SaaS for every vertical and that’s what powers the marketplace.
You can read the ethos to learn more[0]
0. https://marketplace.openship.org/ethos
Amazon still probably make it via AWS, but other websites you may be right.
I've mixed opinions on that. For example, there are products like Google Shopping or Google Travel etc. They show up bunch of stores where you can buy a flight ticket or a particular product from.
However, in the end most people just end up buying it from top 2-3 marketplaces anyway, not because its cheaper, but also because they can trust it, it arrives in 2 days, and you can easily return it if you don't want. So if I'm going to most likely buy something from Amazon anyway, why not just use Amazon web page. They've had one click buy button for ages.
Yes Amazon’s power is very difficult to overcome. The hope with my marketplace is that stores will offer cheaper prices since we are interfacing with them directly and they are not paying Amazon a cut.
Also, Amazon Prime is affordable now, but it will get more and more expensive. They have a large distribution network but most of their drivers are contractors. Amazon also is not as powerful in non-Western countries. They still rely on many different websites depending on need.
> However, in the end most people just end up buying it from top 2-3 marketplaces anyway, not because its cheaper, but also because they can trust it, it arrives in 2 days, and you can easily return it if you don't want.
I've got enough complaints about the amazon customer and user experience that I'm not going to list them here, but returns are so easy.
I click the button, and then I don't need to print off a shipping label or even package the item back up, I just drop it off at the convenience store by my house, they scan a QR code on my phone, and take the bare item from me.
Isn't the value on same day delivery? Returns, warehouses, drivers, customer support all of that? How chatgpt is going to help with that?.
Before I could build this decentralized marketplace, I had to build open-source SaaS that the sellers use. All of that is handled by that platform. The chat simply interfaces with the API just like the built in storefront does.
The marketplace is also built in a way that you can add a Shopify adapter, BigCommerce, custom, etc. It only supports Openfront for now. Even if the store you want to interface with has a custom software, you can write the adapter code and they are added.
I don't want "vetted" stores. I don't care if it's open-source or decentralized or interoperable (though, fine I guess if it is). What I actually want is stores that are scraped, preferably adversarially. When Amazon, Walmart et. al. try to shut you down, I will know you have something worth using.
You can use our vetted stores but add your own, it’s not restricted.
This was Google's big announcement at their last I/O conference: That Google would become the agent handling all forms of commerce on behalf of the average person worldwide.
It’s because LLMs are a threat to Google Shopping too. But as a consumer, why would I want another middleman?
Nice, have a github repo? This is something I've thought about trying to build, seems like the future.
https://github.com/openshiporg/marketplace
Sounds cool. Needs network effects of lots of highly rated stores to succeed, I think.
Yes but users can build adapters and bring their own stores.
Why it would be a threat? Unless Amazon is manipulating the marketplace for the customer to buy a product different from what they want. In that case such practice surely should attract a look from regulators?
> Amazon is manipulating the marketplace for the customer to buy a product different from what they want
There is no expectation or regulation that a store is supposed to only show customers what they want. A retailer is going to sell you the items you're willing to buy based on what they think will help them drive the most profits.
Imagine for a moment you're a store that sells millions of different products. Now, imagine a customer walks into your store, and as per some government regulation "you're expected only to show the customers who walk into your store products that they want". It's a fairly ridiculous expectation.
Also Amazon actively prevent you finding what you want, their search and filter get worse every time I use it.
Tricking customers into buying things they otherwise wouldn't is the core concept of adtech.
If you insulate humans from the manipulative dark patterns (though agent intermediaries), it's possible for them to spend less, spend more efficiently, optimize out information-asymmetries that are profit centers for entities like Amazon. Of course Amazon will fight this.
Realistically the agents will inject their own dark patterns. Whoever owns the glass owns the revenue stream, for they have the ultimate power to replace anyone else's revenue stream with their own. Some TVs detect ad spots in video content and overlay ads that pay the TV manufacturer instead.
Right. Agents in the hands of consumers (truly under their control) empowers them; agents in the hands of retailers does quite the opposite.
Amazon has generally been a shadow of itself. Fakes and less than reputable options. An opensource / legit sourced marketplace could be useful.
I'm naive on the law around this, but it seems like Amazon.com shouldn't have standing here. What Perplexity does, from my perspective, is essentially the same as when I allow Firefox, Chrome, or Safari (or any other browser software) to see my credentials and access Amazon's website on my behalf.
You're not using "standing" correctly, you're using it more to argue about the merits of the case. Standing is about filtering out frivolous lawsuits. One has "standing" to file a lawsuit when there is reason to believe these three questions could be answered in the affirmative, if a trial were to take place: Was the plaintiff harmed? Did the defendant cause that harm? Can the court rectify that harm?
It's not about what the answers to those questions are. Those are questions about the merits of the case, to be answered at trial. It's about if it should even go to trial.
Yeah, in this case I believe I do mean the merits rather than "standing".
Amazon certainly has standing for how YOU access amazon, even if it was in a regular browser.
Access, yes. Display the content delivered from amazon.com, no absolutely not.
I'm trying to make sense of this and the best analogy I can find is using an example of physical products.
1. I can walk into Apple Store and buy Apple device (this is similar to me opening the browser and accessing amazon.com
2. If I'm busy, I can hire a person to go stand in line and buy the device (me asking Comet to shop on my behalf)
The core question is does Apple (Amazon in this case) can block the hired help (Comet browser) from accessing the store.
Most reasonable people would say "their store, their rules", so that goes to mean Amazon's website, Amazon's rules.
Maybe a better analogy: They can ban you from going through their drive through on a bicycle, but can they sue bicycle manufacturers because bike riders are going through their drive through?
In this analogy, it seems the originating court said yes, they can sue the bicycle manufacturer (in the analogy), but on appeal the answer was no, they cannot. That seems like the appeals court got it right to me.
I'm not familiar with the case, but to me it sounds like the bicycle manufacturer is encouraging people to use bikes in the drive through, maybe even providing specific tools explicitly for that purpose?
3. You can walk into an Apple store and buy a phone without looking at their PCs, tablets, wall of accessories, etc. Apple cannot force you to look at everything else in their store.
Similarly, Amazon cannot force you to render the content they deliver to you. They can absolutely control access to their content, but they cannot control if you actually see the content they are delivering to you.
What do you mean?
Amazon is a party to interactions with their website. That gives them standing to sue over those interactions. Whether they can sue Perplexity specifically is what was being debated in these motions.
I think I get it. Like they'd have standing to sue if I tried to hack their website, or change the price of items or something.
Your feeling turned it to be correct. Amazon lost the case in the appellate court.
But not on standing grounds.
And no, Amazon did not lose the “case”, which usually means “the whole lawsuit”. The current posture is still at the preliminary injunction stage. Amazon was granted a PI by district court (basically “perplexity, stop this now while litigation is ongoing”) and the appeals court overturned. Now the actual case can proceed at the district level.
It’s quite clearly not the same
Really, what do you find different about it?
Giving perplexity your credentials to run agentic workflows is not the same as manually controlling the site.
It’s literally not the same. I’m not really sure what else to tell you.
I don't believe it does give them your credentials? It's more like running something like AutoHotkey and having it send screenshots to Perplexity and inject whatever input events they send back, but integrated directly into the browser instead of running as a separate program.
They are not interacting with Amazon at all. They are sending control commands to your computer, where you've opened a session logged into Amazon as you. Amazon is claiming they can't run commands on your computer.
The whole thing becomes entirely absurd if you consider that a cloud model isn't even fundamental to the setup; you could just as well slot in a local model or codex or anything else and the scenario would be exactly the same. Perplexity is just acting as a model provider here.
I know it feels like they're different, but I think that at its core, they're the same.
When you say I am "manually controlling the site", that actually means I run a program on my computer that makes requests to the site, chooses how to display the content provided by the site, and then gives me control mechanisms (e.g. clicking, scrolling) to interact with that content.
An "agentic workflow" does the same thing. It's a computer program that I run that makes requests to the site, chooses how to display the content provided, and then gives me control mechanisms (e.g. typing text) to interact with the content.
I'm not trying to be pedantic here. I really think that the two aren't that different.
Comet IS a normal chromium browser. The assistant thing is just a chat on the right sidebar and you can tell it stuff like “click around on this website to do X”, which it can then do for a limited amount of turns
It’s not using Codex to steer a headless browser
What about giving it to your secretary with a list of what to shop?
> What about giving it to your secretary with a list of what to shop?
"When a Comet user directs the Assistant to locate an item on Amazon.com, the Assistant takes screenshotsof the browser view, sends those screenshotsfrom the user’s computer to Perplexity’s servers, and receives instructions from Perplexity’s servers on how to navigateAmazon.com. In other words, the Assistant cannot operate wholly independently; it relies on direction from the user and instructions from Perplexity’s servers."
Obviously all browsers rely on direction from the user. But they also typically rely on instructions from the browser maker's servers. Traditionally, you get all of those instructions in a single download that's been pre-packaged (the browser program itself). But if part of the browser's logic requires more computational resources than most consumers have, what's the problem with "outsourcing" that bit to Perplexity's servers?
As a consumer, I don't think it's very prudent to trust a company with that kind of access to your data, but it doesn't seem materially different from the kind of trust you have to give to Chrome.
> if part of the browser's logic requires more computational resources than most consumers have, what's the problem with "outsourcing" that bit to Perplexity's servers?
It's not longer my agent. It's a joint agent of my self and whoever else is giving it instructions. (This is Amazon's argument.)
Also, Amazon told Perplexity to fuck off. If your assistant is told to stop doing something in a cease and desist, and then keeps doing it, the fact that you asked them to do it isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card.
My guess is we'll find a balance where local models can act as user agents while corporate ones have to meet certain requirements to gain that safe harbour.
I remember when I (naively, but not alone) thought that the Personal Computer would let us--consumers, individuals--express our own agency and priorities and control, a kind of democratized capital mini-factory anyone (or group) could tailor to their own needs.
Nowadays it feels more like "Visitors shall think what our brain-stream tells you to think, or be guilty of contempt of business model."
Is there any important legal difference between what's happening here versus a bunch of friends running a "share and notice favorite deals" collective via plugin+server?
> express our own agency
ironically a local model and Playwright/OpenClaw is pretty close
> Amazon.com Services, LLC filed suit against Perplexity AI, Inc., an artificial intelligence company, asserting that Perplexity’s web browser tool, Comet, unlawfully accessed Amazon’s website in violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA). Perplexity’s Comet browser includes an AI “Assistant” that, when activated by a user, navigates Amazon.com on the user’s behalf, sending browser screenshots to Perplexity’s servers for further instruction. Amazon claimed that this use of the Assistant, despite their explicit prohibition, amounted to unauthorized access to its servers.
My understanding of the case law on this subject is that courts are extremely wary of letting terms of service violations rise to the level of federal crime. It essentially endows anyone with a domain name into an authority which can create federal law on demand.
Illinois makes it a state crime to violate terms of service.
Sec. 17-51. Computer tampering. (a) A person commits computer tampering when he or she knowingly and without the authorization of a computer's owner or in excess of the authority granted to him or her: (1) Accesses or causes to be accessed a computer or any part thereof, a computer network, or a program or data; (2) Accesses or causes to be accessed a computer or any part thereof, a computer network, or a program or data, and obtains data or services; (a-10) For purposes of subsection (a), accessing a computer network is deemed to be with the authorization of a computer's owner if: (2) the owner authorizes the public to access the computer network and the person accessing the computer network complies with all terms or conditions for use of the computer network that are imposed by the owner;
That's pretty similar wording to the CFAA, which OP mentioned has been checked by case law.
Yes, although the DoJ policy change reflecting still says civil liability might exist if a cease-and-desist is ignored: https://www.wsgr.com/en/insights/doj-acknowledges-limits-to-...
FYI:
https://enwp.org/Van_Buren_v._United_States
https://enwp.org/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
Might be the only way to reign in the AI bots. By accessing my site with a bot, you agree to reimburse me for that data at the rate of $1,000,000 per character retrieved. Please contact licensing@domain to get set up with payment and access keys
And by linking to your site from other websites, by not requiring authenticated human-only login, and by not blocking traffic from all referrers, you agree to allow my bot to access you site at zero cost.
But didn’t Amazon cite laws that it broke (allegedly)? Not simply their ToS?
The CFAA makes it a federal offense to intentionally access a computer "without authorization" or "exceeding authorized access" so the sticky part is how far the site's ToS can go in defining what uses are authorized, lest it be a federal felony to use an ad blocker or whatever else might be forbidden in a ToS.
Isn't this how every agent works these days? Apple and Google are working on tool calling for apps, but that's still going to be backstopped by screen scraping for years very likely.
It's a good bet that everybody's got equivalent CFAA boilerplate in their terms, so I guess all agentic automations are crimes now.
This is a civil case not a criminal one, and just because it is the same broad act does not mean courts apply it the same way in civil and criminal contexts.
And Amazon LOST at this stage in the linked appeal, with the 9th Circuit finding that they were not entitled to a preliminary injunction because they were unlikely to succeed on the “access” prong of the CFAA or CDAFA claim against Perplexity.
So, it is doubly weird to conclude “all agentic automations are crimes now” based on the case linked here.
I'm just fascinated by the massive volume of new legal implications that keep arising. Copyright holders vs scraping and training. Psychologically vulnerable people vs chatbots. Hiring discrimination, defamation, wrong face rec, privacy. Etc^10. The law, and society ethics, were so unprepared for all this.
The lawyers are the obvious winners as always.
The appeals courts overturning of Amazon’s initial win (injunction) here is interesting. It’s basically like liability in reverse. If a user is responsible for what an AI agent does on its behalf then the other side of that equation can’t say “hey this AI is doing bad things” since the AI is just an extension of the user.
Amazon tried to go after the AI and its maker but seems the court is nudging Amazon to say if you have a problem with this then go after your customers as they’re the ones doing this.
And Amazon’s customers are only doing this because the shopping experience on the website is terrible and Amazon’s own AI is a hot mess.
Amazon cares about this because it’s a huge threat to its profitability as an enterprise. It makes almost no money from selling and shipping stuff to you. It makes a ton of money selling advertising to influence what you buy on the site. If other tools or agents take that over, Amazon is left holding the bag on a very useful but ultimately boring logistics business that makes no money.
Many systems are explicitly built around a certain level of friction. Things can be easy and transparent (but not *too* easy or transparent).
Agentic AI collapses that in ways that threaten existing business models, especially in retail (but also credit card points, discount retailers, mail in rebates and sales, cheap flights, etc).
Either it'll be forbidden, or businesses will have to adapt in ways that may not be favorable to Amazon, etc.
If your service doesn't let my agent transact with you then I won't use your service. I'm sure Amazon will sort this out in some way it's hard to replace their infrastructure but it could happen if they fail to.
Funny that they aren’t targeting OpenAI and Anthropic’s computer use agents, which can do the exact same thing, and probably do it at a much larger scale given their userbases. The difference of course is that both OpenAI and Anthropic are hosted on AWS Bedrock, and Amazon is a huge investor in Anthropic to boot.
> and Amazon is a huge investor in Anthropic to boot.
Also: https://openai.com/index/amazon-partnership/
Pattern I’m continually seeing.
User: I want to access what your business provides via AI.[1]
Business: I am not incentivized to do that. You should use our specific AI workflow and agents directly in our software.
User: That gives me a fraction of the value I get when AI has the full context for what I’m trying to do and talks to all the software and services I use.
I suspect this is an opportunity for previous also-ran companies to gain market share or new companies to break into markets.
[1] Usually something less stupid than AI buying something for someone, but to each their own.
> In other words, the Assistant cannot operate wholly independently; it relies on direction from the user and instructions from Perplexity’s servers.
Very interesting point of view. I wonder if people feel the same when it's not browsing Amazon but hacking other companies? These agents don't do anything by themselves, so wouldn't the same be true when it comes to breaking into 3rd party computer infrastructure?
Hearing on Perplexity's Motion to Dismiss rescheduled; new date is November 20, 2026
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.45...
Amazon winning seems like it would have far-reaching effects, given that it is activated by a user.
this is a welcome ruling.
most of these search engine like companies including metasearch etc benefit from scrapping data on the onset, but then want to bring up TOS when they get scrapped.
in the age of agents - if your agent does work on your behalf on a particular site that should be legal.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori...
Amazon sells a service which could automatically scrape screens for you. I've been messing around with this at work and this could absolutely be used the "wrong way".
Piggybacking on this - can HuggingFace sue OAI? Do they have legal ground to do that?
They absolutely could. There's a decent claim for OAI being reckless or at least negligent.
The limiting thing, in my mind, is the need to show harm. How much did OAI's recklessness hurt HuggingFace? There's some dev hours devoted to the cleanup but it's not like it devastated their business. Their legal team is probably a lot more focused on the Nvidia acquisition instead.
I feel like it's the government that has to sue OpenAI for reckless endangerment of human life, or something similar. I don't believe the current models could "take over the world" even if humans tried to help them, but both OpenAI and Anthropic themselves talk publicly about how dangerous they believe these models to be. Then if that's so, they should be held responsible as if the models were that dangerous, but who's supposed to put that in motion? The only entity I can think of is the government.
Would there also not be some reputational damages that could be compensated for as well? These are the types of cases usually ending in a settlement for non-disclosed amounts with NDAs attached.
> Would there also not be some reputational damages
In that case OpenAI should sue since they came out of this with a worse reputation.
Anyone can sue anybody. HF for sure was in a strong position after what happened. OAI gave them a lot of GPT credits under a sort of partnership agreement to mollify them.
I don't see why they should sue them if they broke laws. Reporting it should be enough.
I'd put my money on "yes," here. Of course, OAI can pay them off. But you know it had to happen to more than HuggingFace, and so somebody's going to try it.
Yes. And/or press charges, IIRC. They did threaten to, at one point, with some conditions they wanted met (past that, I am not in the loop).
TL;DR Amazon is mad that Perplexity's agents can browse Amazon logged-in, with a username/password provided by the perplexity user.
Amazon argues this is against the CFAA because they do not authorize such use. They sued and got a preliminary injection. Perplexity appealed and got the injunction thrown out.
The case hasn't actually been to trial on the merits yet and is still undecided.
> Perplexity's agents can browse Amazon logged-in, with a username/password provided by the perplexity user.
Grok Bots can do the same.
cURL can do the same if you're in some utility closet and downloading ebooks and papers from a local network. Wonder how illegal that would be? It's also acting as the agent for a user.
what's next? suing Chrome because it logs in to amazon on my behalf after i give it my amazon credentials?
Well, publishers did once try using this law to sue adblockers.
But they lost, using an adblocker isn't a violation of the CFAA. They also tried a legal theory under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision and lost again.
I wonder how this is going to affect everyone trying to make browsing / computer use agents? Is it just free reign now that ToS isn't violated according to courts?
I don't see why it should be a gray area for me to use my computer the way I want to use my computer.
This is over a month old, for anyone like me who was confused.
If web scraping is legal then hitting the public api Amazon shouldn’t also be legal?
not necessarily according to the courts. there are a number of cases where scale has been the line between permissible and not - e.g. it's fine to scrape ebay, it's not fine to build an ebay scraping business.
courts haven't always ruled that way but there's definitely precedent!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_v._Bidder%27s_Edge
Yes, but this case isn't about that -- it is about logged in accounts.
It's just a harassment lawsuit. Amazon is going to lose, but they hope they could bully another company into what they want from them.
I read a post on Mastodon today about how Microsoft treated GPL things after Balmer was out and they were doing the “we love Linux” stuff.
The point that matters here is the law doesn’t really matter if you can outspend your opponent by six orders of magnitude. Chances are most people won’t even try.
So I agree. This is fully to prevent anyone from wanting to try.
(The point of the post was hell hard Microsoft was working to be seen as a good citizen even though they could outspend on lawyers)
https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/117270213574377193
Surely Amazon have paid Trump enough to win?
i was building an agent, local llm, that would access my browser and do whatever I tell it to do.
it's an extension of browser use cases, not a crime
Idk why this is even a lawsuit to begin with because HN commenters keep telling me that nobody wants to shop with an agent every time there is a demo about it from whatever AI company
You can't really take HN commentators (mine included probably) as some general sentiment from the average person out in the world. It's a relatively biased (in its own ways) place, don't read too much into it if you're mostly interacting with the real world out there.
So Amazon has shitty UI, doesn't want to improve it and then a company comes up with a solution to make life of shoppers easier, the Amazon throws a fit and goes to court? That's incredibly stupid.
Amazon services is just an LLC?
It's one of many of their wholly owned subsidaries
Remembering years ago when we lost $5MM of Bezo's money...
> Amazon.com Services, LLC filed suit against Perplexity AI, Inc., an artificial intelligence company, asserting that Perplexity’s web browser tool, Comet, unlawfully accessed Amazon’s website in violation of [blah]. Perplexity’s Comet browser includes an AI “Assistant” that, when activated by a user, navigates Amazon.com on the user’s behalf, sending browser screenshots to Perplexity’s servers for further instruction. Amazon claimed that this use of the Assistant, despite their explicit prohibition, amounted to unauthorized access to its servers.
TLDR: Perplexity agents allegedly ignored Amazon's robots.txt
robots.txt is a suggestion, not a rule. It's a service to crawlers to help them avoid wasting time. Using robots.txt as a security measure is like trying to stop a foreign invader with a "road closed" sign.
Edit: this is obviously assuming they literally meant robots.txt, but from a qyick skim of the site, it doesn't look like that was mentioned at least. I guess you meant it metaphorically :P
Why should they not? So does my browser when I ask it to open a website.
All right, which one of you is going to go through the trouble of explaining what this is about?
If you read the first couple paragraphs it’s very self explanatory
you dumbass the kind of person who reads only news titles and say dumb@$$ $hit.
then you will have missed the third para which reverses the decision from the first two para. jesus christ how many people on HN only read first paras
The summary at the top is 3 paragraphs and not legalese at all.
First para really does the job:
"Amazon.com Services, LLC filed suit against Perplexity AI, Inc., an artificial intelligence company, asserting that Perplexity’s web browser tool, Comet, unlawfully accessed Amazon’s website in violation of [blah]. Perplexity’s Comet browser includes an AI “Assistant” that, when activated by a user, navigates Amazon.com on the user’s behalf, sending browser screenshots to Perplexity’s servers for further instruction. Amazon claimed that this use of the Assistant, despite their explicit prohibition, amounted to unauthorized access to its servers."
no, it does not, you have to actually RTFA if you are going to try to TLDR a court proceeding. literally 3 paras down:
> the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction and remanded for further proceedings. The Ninth Circuit held that Amazon was unlikely to succeed on the merits of its claims because Perplexity did not “access” Amazon’s computers within the meaning of the CFAA or CDAFA; instead, the access was performed by the user employing the Assistant as a tool. The court found that the district court erred in its analysis of the equitable factors, which favored Perplexity, and concluded that an injunction was not warranted under these circumstances. The disposition was to vacate the injunction and remand.
perplexity won on appeal. if you stop at first para you are part of the problem
This could get pretty pedantic. They haven’t “won” yet, and the first few paragraphs do accurately describe the problem, but not the whole state of the case. The injunctions and appeals are very important, but they are details of the suit proceedings, not the case itself.
The first paragraph is enough for context.
The real case is in the future. The appeal was just for the injunction.