Amazon has removed Perplexity’s AI-powered shopping assistant, “Comet,” from its platform, citing violations of Amazon’s terms of service.
Amazon stated that it had issued multiple warnings to Perplexity, declaring that Comet broke the rules by failing to identify itself as an AI agent when performing purchases on behalf of users. Following these warnings, Amazon sent Perplexity a formal cease-and-desist letter.
In response, Perplexity published a blog post titled “Bullying is Not Innovation”, defending its position:
“We received an aggressive legal threat from Amazon demanding that we prevent Comet users from using AI assistants on Amazon. This marks Amazon’s first legal attack on an AI company and poses a risk to all internet users. Comet acts directly under user instructions and should therefore have the same permissions. There is no need for an AI assistant acting on a user’s behalf to explicitly state ‘I am a bot.’”
Amazon quickly responded, emphasizing that all intermediary applications must clearly disclose their identity when performing actions on behalf of customers and must respect the platform’s rules regarding permission.
This is not the first time Perplexity has faced such issues. In previous months, Cloudflare accused Perplexity of secretly crawling certain websites despite “block bot access” warnings. Perplexity had defended itself by claiming it acts only under user instructions, although evidence showed that it sometimes accessed sites without revealing its identity.
