Perplexity accused Amazon of “bullying” in a blog post Tuesday, responding to a cease-and-desist letter from the e-commerce site regarding its agentic shopping feature that makes purchases on users’ behalf.
“This isn’t a reasonable legal position, it’s a bully tactic to scare disruptive companies like Perplexity out of making life better for people,” the post read. It argued that Amazon prioritizes serving ads, sponsored posts, and upselling users, rather than focusing on customers.
Amazon’s suit filed the same day alleges the startup improperly accessed accounts and disguised the agent as a human user, violating its terms of service. The e-commerce giant is also working on similar automated shopping tools.
The dispute puts a spotlight on a problem we’ve been writing a lot about: Walled gardens threaten to slow down AI adoption.
The courts will have to decide whether consumers have the right to automate their shopping, even if online retailers are against it. But the technology itself may not be good enough to circumvent whatever companies like Amazon do to block it. The reason Amazon doesn’t want its customers using their AI agents of choice is simple: Last year, Amazon made $56 billion showing ads to users, 9% of its total sales.
Rather than being forced to adapt, the incumbent leaders want to retain their cash cow businesses as long as possible. As we’ve written before, it’s more lucrative to prevent innovation than to innovate.