Amazon has formally asked Perplexity to remove its “Comet” shopping agent from Amazon’s platform. The company released a statement on November 4, citing repeated requests that Perplexity stop allowing users to make purchases through Amazon. A cease-and-desist letter sent on October 31 argues that Comet’s behavior violates Amazon’s terms of service and creates a “significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience.”
In its statement, Amazon drew parallels to food delivery and travel apps, emphasizing that third-party agents must operate transparently and respect whether a business chooses to participate. The company’s position is that Perplexity’s agentic automation, specifically its ability to make purchases and retrieve product data on behalf of users, requires explicit authorization, not scraping or simulated browsing.
Agents like Comet (and OpenAI’s Atlas, and Google’s newly announced AI mode agents) are designed to act autonomously on users’ behalf, but most commercial websites are not built for independent software to transact without formal API agreements or partnerships. As more models start interacting directly with the web, the rules for consent, attribution, and participation are becoming central to digital commerce.
This is the first major public clash between a top retailer and an AI company over agentic transactions. If you’re thinking about building AI systems that execute actions in third-party environments (shopping, booking, scheduling, publishing, etc.), expect a wave of new access controls, licensing rules, and compliance audits. The “agentic web” will not run on good intentions; it will run on contracts.
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.