Amazon threatens legal action against Perplexity, demanding the AI startup identifies its AI crawlers coming to Amazon’s shopping platform.
Amazon claimed that Comet, Perplexity’s AI shopping assistant, was crawling on its shopping platform without identifying itself as an AI agent. This violated Amazon’s terms of service, the company said in a Cease and Desist letter to Perplexity outlining its demands.
“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 said in a statement.
“Agentic third-party applications such as Perplexity’s Comet have the same obligations, and we’ve repeatedly requested that Perplexity remove Amazon from the Comet experience, particularly in light of the significantly degraded shopping and customer experience it provides.”
The letter shared that Comet’s agentic activity was first spotted on Amazon’s platform in August 2025, misidentified as Google’s Chrome browser.
Cyberbullying?
In response, Perplexity claims that Amazon’s reason for forbidding its shopping assistant is to proritise its own sponsored ad placements – including “upsells and confusing offers” – that AI agents can bypass.
Amazon has its own shopping assistant, Rufus. This AI tool was used by 250 million users this year and is expected to generate over $10 billion in annual sales, Amazon’s CEO announced in the company’s third-quarter earnings call last week.
Perplexity explained that Comet has the right to access Amazon’s shopping services, since it is acting on the behalf of human users.
“User agents are exactly that: agents of the user. They’re distinct from crawlers, scrapers, or bots.” Perplexity stated in its letter addressed to Amazon. “A user agent is your AI assistant–it has the same permissions you have, works only at your specific request, and acts solely on your behalf.”
The AI company likened Amazon’s legal position to a “bully tactic,” titling its letter “Bullying is Not Innovation.”
Amazon reiterated that, going forward, Perplexity must make its Comet assistant identifiable. The company could still block Comet altogether.
Perplexity’s Crawling History
This is not the first time Perplexity has been accused of unathorised website crawling. In August, cybersecurity company Cloudfare published research which showed the AI startup had crawled and scraped web pages — bypassing AI bot block requests. In this instance, Cloudfare found that Perplexity had avoided bot blocks by altering the bots’ identification markers.
The AI startup was also recently sued by Reddit. The platform claimed Perplexity had unlawfully collected data from user comments to feed into its search engine.
