Amazon sues Perplexity over Comet

This fight showed that agentic shopping stopped being a feature demo and became a control battle over who owns checkout. Perplexity was trying to move from answering shopping questions to logging into Amazon accounts, comparing products, and placing orders inside Comet. Amazon treated that as unauthorized machine access to its store and customer accounts, not just a better browser, because the browser agent sits between Amazon and the buyer at the exact point where search, merchandising, ads, and checkout economics are decided.1 2 3 4 5

• Comet mattered because it pushed Perplexity upstream from search into action. By August 2025, Perplexity had already framed the browser as the new battleground, with Comet filling forms, making purchases, and booking travel, which is a much bigger revenue opportunity than a plain answer box.2 4
• Amazon had strong incentives to block this layer. In shopping, the valuable real estate is not just the final transaction, but the product ranking, sponsored placement, and account level customer relationship that shape what gets bought. Agentic layers threaten to reroute that flow and compress the ad and marketplace take rate built into Amazon search.3 5
• The case also became an early test for the rules of browser based AI agents. The district court granted Amazon a preliminary injunction in March 2026, but the Ninth Circuit later vacated it and remanded in August 2026, showing that the legal boundary between human directed browsing and unauthorized agent access was still unsettled even after Amazon won the first round.1 6 7

Going forward, agentic commerce is likely to split into two models. Open web agents will keep trying to act on behalf of users across merchants, while large platforms will push for direct integrations, identity rules, and payment rails they control. The winners will be the products that can complete purchases reliably without losing merchant access or customer trust.3 5 6 7