alt Hacker NewsCan'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.
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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!
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.
I just don't think that'll ever happen. The amount of people that will blindly have a machine buy something for them is very, very slim. Amazon has been trying to do auto orders for a looong time now and it's hardly taken off. It'll be a goldmine for scammers which will end up killing consumer trust very quickly. The only way to really have a "headless amazon" is have a hand curated list of approved merchants, which... you're basically back to just having amazon in the mix.
I think Amazon should be more worried about simple price comparison and tracking. They fought really hard against having to show the 90 day low and have gone out of their way to still rig it.
In summary - if a perfect AI is made that orders the ideal product for someone, the best mix of price, performance, and reliability, then Amazon will be screwed because they make more money on ads than by selling people the exactly what people want/need.
As a brief reminder to readers at home, in a theoretically perfect free market, profit trends towards 0 as competition increases.
From a business perspective, Amazon was/is a legit business threat to ~every physical bookstore (and, arguably, many publishers). It doesn't follow that they could take Amazon to court for that.
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
theres also a decent chance that AWS itself is vulnerable to AI agents that dont need complicated cloud platforms the way humans do
> 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.
Ads are 10% of their revenue. Not insignificant, but not a "large part".
> 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.
> 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.