The AI Shopping War Just Went Nuclear: Amazon Kills Perplexity’s Comet Bot — Are Agents Already Illegal?

The biggest corporate showdown of 2026 is officially here.

Amazon just sent a brutal cease-and-desist letter to AI startup Perplexity, demanding that the company immediately kill its Comet AI agent that automatically shops on the Amazon platform. Amazon’s reason? The bot allegedly provides a “significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience”.

This is not a petty squabble over site traffic; this is the first major legal battle in the Agentic AI revolution. Amazon is not just protecting its user experience; it is protecting its multi-billion-dollar recommendation engine and its dominance over the entire retail process. Perplexity has slammed the move as a “bully tactic”—and they might be right.

The question is no longer if AI can shop for you, but who controls the agent? And are these autonomous bots already operating outside the boundaries of the law? Let’s break down the demands, the desperate corporate strategy, and the terrifying future of AI shopping 👇

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🛑 The Cease-and-Desist: Why Amazon Is Fighting Dirty

Amazon’s actions against the Comet AI agent are a desperate attempt to defend its turf against a new form of digital disruption: the autonomous consumer agent.

🤖 The Agentic Threat to Recommendations

The Comet bot is designed to serve as a personal shopper, browsing, comparing, and completing online tasks autonomously for the user. This process cuts Amazon’s core profit mechanism out of the loop:

• No Personalization: Amazon contends that Comet fails to take personalized recommendations into account, which is the core driver of Amazon’s massive impulse purchasing and targeted ads.
• Data Blindness: The bot fails to operate “transparently,” violating Amazon’s terms of service by not disclosing that an independent AI is doing the shopping.
• The Revenue Risk: Every successful AI agent purchase is a data point lost for Amazon’s own testing of its in-house AI agents, which the retail giant is currently testing. Amazon is playing defense to ensure their own agents dominate the marketplace.

💸 Perplexity Slams the “Bully Tactic”

Perplexity, the AI startup valued at approximately $20 billion, immediately fired back with a blog post accusing Amazon of using a “bully tactic”.

• The Stance: Perplexity claims Amazon is trying to scare “disruptive companies” from innovating and making shopping easier for people.
• The Reality: The truth likely lies somewhere in the middle. Comet may genuinely be causing customer service headaches with wrong delivery times and incorrect orders, but Amazon’s fear is clearly the unauthorized data extraction and loss of control over the consumer journey.

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📈 The War for the Digital Front Door

This legal showdown is just the opening volley in a much larger war for the digital front door. Whoever controls the autonomous agent controls how people interact with the entire internet.

🌐 The Browser Agent Invasion

Amazon is not alone in its fear. The rise of Agentic AI is affecting all major platforms:

• OpenAI’s Atlas: OpenAI recently launched the ChatGPT Atlas web browser on Apple computers, which is already capable of shopping at some websites.
• Google and Microsoft: Similar AI agent shopping capabilities are expected to be integrated into Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers in the coming months.

The goal of these powerful agents is to remove the need for manual clicking and searching. They automate the process, but in doing so, they also automate the removal of publisher traffic and platform control.

⚖️ The Violation of Terms

Amazon’s core argument that Perplexity uses tactics to gain “unauthorized access” goes directly to the heart of the web scraping debate. When an AI agent is scraping data or interacting with a site as a user without identifying itself, it violates nearly every major platform’s terms of service.

This lawsuit could set a huge legal precedent for how autonomous AI agents are legally allowed to function on the open web, potentially crippling the business model of every AI startup relying on automated web interaction.

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💬 Final Thoughts — Who Is the Real Customer?

Amazon’s move against the Perplexity Comet bot is a loud, clear signal: Big Tech will use its legal and financial might to crush any AI agent that threatens its established data and revenue models.

The irony is thick: Amazon is testing its own powerful AI agents. They aren’t against the technology; they are against the competition.

This fight for the consumer’s wallet and data is now officially in the courts. The autonomous AI agent is here, but its freedom—and its legality—is far from settled.