In November 2025, I reported that Amazon filed a lawsuit against Perplexity to stop the company's AI browser, Comet, from shopping on its website. Amazon had previously sent cease and desist notices to Perplexity, which it ignored, and tried to block Perplexity's AI agents with technology, which it bypassed.
In early March 2026, Amazon won a temporary federal injunction against Perplexity to block Comet browser from accessing password-protected areas of Amazon to make purchases after Judge Chesney ruled that the retailer provided strong evidence of unauthorized access. Amazon argued that third-party AI agents bring risk to the customer experience and security of their shoppers and that it has the right to mitigate that risk as it so chooses. The company also argued that Perplexity is breaking multiple laws by not abiding by its requests to stop accessing its website and attempting to circumvent its firewalls.
Shortly after that happened in March, a U.S. appeals court subsequently suspended the ruling and paused the court order, allowing Comet to continue shopping on Amazon in the meantime.
Now Perplexity is asking a federal appellate court to vacate the injunction entirely, making the following arguments:
- Perplexity says it doesn't actually “access” Amazon, and that consumers themselves use Comet to access its website.
- They wrote, “Amazon account holders authorized the [shopping agent] to access their own private information … to facilitate shopping on Amazon.com.”
- Perplexity believes that Amazon failed to prove it would suffer “irreparable harm” without an injunction, noting that its shopping agent was available for eight months before the previous judge issued an order banning it.
- They wrote, “Even after eight months of the Assistant's operation, Amazon did not submit any evidence of harm to its reputation or goodwill: no declaration from a dissatisfied customer, no survey showing reputational damage, no data showing decreased traffic or lost sales.”
What does Jeff Bezos have to say about all this?
Everyone knows that Bezos is the founder of Amazon, but did you also know that Bezos Expeditions Fund participated in Perplexity's $73.6M Series B round in January 2024, and that Perplexity runs on AWS? There's a very strange interconnected relationship between Amazon and Perplexity, which makes Perplexity's public disparaging of Amazon feel particularly out of place.
This is a case that I am following with great interest, as the outcome will set a precedent for how courts treat AI agents in the future as to whether or not they can access websites without permission. I've previously argued that websites can already choose whether or not to function on certain browsers, regions, or devices, so they should also be able to choose which AI can interact with their systems, and I anticipate finding out whether the courts agree with me.