Amazon has asked Perplexity to pull its agentic browser from its online store, both companies confirmed publicly on Tuesday. Confusion after repeatedly warning that Comet, its AI-powered shopping assistant, was infringing on Amazon Terms of Service Without identifying itself as an agent, the e-commerce giant sent a strongly worded cease-and-desist letter to the AI search engine startup, Confusion In a blog post titled, “Shuttering is not an invention.”
“This week, Perplexity received an aggressive legal threat from Amazon, demanding that we ban Comet users on Amazon from using their AI assistant. This is Amazon’s first legal salvo against an AI company, and threatens all Internet users,” marveled the blog post.
The confusion logic is that, since its agent is acting on behalf of the human user’s instructions, the agent automatically has the “same permissions” as the human user. The implication is that it does not have to identify itself as an agent.
Amazon’s response Indicates that other third-party agents acting at the behest of human users identify themselves. “How others work, including food delivery apps and restaurants they take orders for, delivery service apps and stores they shop at, and online travel agencies and airlines book tickets for customers,” Amazon’s statement explained.
If Amazon is to be trusted, confusion can simply identify its agent and start shopping. Of course, the risk is that Amazon, which has its own shopping bot called Rufus, could block Comet — or any other third-party agentic shopper — from its site.
As much as Amazon suggests in its statement, which adds, “We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer shopping on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect the service provider’s decision to participate or not.”
Confusion claims that Amazon will block the shopping bot because Amazon wants to sell advertising and product space. Unlike human shoppers, a bot tasked with buying a new laundry basket probably won’t be tempted to buy a more expensive one, or the latest Brandon Sanderson novel and a new set of earphones (on sale!).
TechCrunch event
San Francisco
|
October 13-15, 2026
If this all sounds familiar, that’s because it is. A few months ago, CloudFlare published research accusing AI bots of confusing websites to scrape them while specifically denying requests from blocked websites. Interestingly, a lot of people came to Perplexity’s defense at the time, because it wasn’t a clear-cut case of bad web crawler behavior. CloudFlare documented how the AI was accessing a specific public website when its user asked about that specific website. Confusion fans argue that this is exactly what every human-powered web browser does.
Perplexity, on the other hand, was using some questionable methods to access when a website opted out of the bot, such as hiding its identity.
As TechCrunch reported at the time, it was a harbinger of things to come if the agent world materialized as Silicon Valley predicted. If consumers and companies outsource their shopping, travel bookings and restaurant reservations to bots, would it be in the best interest of websites to block bots entirely? How will they allow and work with them?
The confusion may be right that Amazon is setting a precedent. As the 800-pound gorilla in e-commerce, it’s clearly saying that the way it works is to let an agent identify itself and let the website decide.