alt Hacker NewsAmazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
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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.
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?
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.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.
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.
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.
It wasn't clear to me if Comet is doing something that was purposefully built in or trained in to let it do things on Amazon, or if it was built/trained to try to do things on any website.
From what the net tells me it is the latter. There is no special "work with Amazon" stuff.
If that's true I expect will lose when the actual trial takes place and when that is appealed. (The decision today is just about a preliminary injunction before they get to actually trying to decide the outcome of the case).
I expect the reasoning will be similar to that used in copyright cases when the question was if the user is the sole infringer or the tool maker can also be liable. There it came down to whether the tool has substantial non-infringing uses.
I'm sure Perplexity will have trouble showing that there are a large number of website owners that don't mind Comet helping people on those sites so unless something was specifically built into Comet for Amazon I expect that will be good enough.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Hearing on Perplexity's Motion to Dismiss rescheduled; new date is November 20, 2026
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.45...
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.
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.
Piggybacking on this - can HuggingFace sue OAI? Do they have legal ground to do that?
They want to own the glass (the one in our pockets) so much.
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?
This is over a month old, for anyone like me who was confused.
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.
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.
If web scraping is legal then hitting the public api Amazon shouldn’t also be legal?
There is nothing they hate more than user agents.
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
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.
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.
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TLDR: Perplexity agents allegedly ignored Amazon's robots.txt
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All right, which one of you is going to go through the trouble of explaining what this is about?
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.