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Judge blocks Perplexity’s AI bot from shopping on Amazon in early test of agentic commerce
Posted by on March 10, 2026 at 4:18 pmA federal judge in San Francisco granted Amazon a preliminary injunction Monday blocking Perplexity from using its Comet browser’s AI agent to access password-protected sections of the Amazon website to shop on behalf of customers.
It’s an early legal milestone in the fast-moving field of agentic commerce, in which AI assistants browse, compare and buy products on behalf of consumers. The case highlights a fundamental question: who controls access when an AI agent shows up at a retailer’s digital front door?
In the ruling granting the preliminary injunction, Senior U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney found that Amazon is likely to succeed on its claims that Perplexity violated the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and a California computer fraud statute.
The judge drew a key distinction, finding that Comet accesses Amazon accounts “with the Amazon user’s permission, but without authorization by Amazon.”
In its own legal filings, Perplexity had argued that Amazon was less concerned about cybersecurity than about eliminating a competitor to its own AI shopping tools. The San Francisco-based startup contended that AI agents bypass the advertising Amazon shows to human shoppers, and that protecting ad revenue was the real motivation for the lawsuit.
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1 Reply
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aka we arent making any money and want our cut
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