AI startup Perplexity confirmed that it has received an “aggressive legal threat” from Amazon, demanding that its browser-based assistant Comet, which can make purchases on Amazon’s platform, be disabled from doing so.
In a blog post titled “Bullying is Not Innovation”, Perplexity argued that Amazon is attempting to suppress user choice and innovation by forbidding thirdparty AI agents from shopping on its site. The company stated that “Bullying is when large corporations use legal threats and intimidation to block innovation and make life worse for people.”  According to Perplexity, the Comet assistant stores user credentials locally and never on its servers — a design meant to protect privacy and empower users.
Amazon’s position is that third-party tools that purchase items on behalf of users must operate transparently and respect the platform’s rules about participation. The retailer noted it has “repeatedly requested” that Perplexity remove Amazon from Comet’s purchasing features, “particularly in light of the significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience it provides.”
In a blog post, Perplexity wrote: “Amazon should love this. Easier shopping means more transactions and happier customers. But Amazon doesn’t care – they’re more interested in serving you ads, sponsored results, and influencing your purchasing decisions with upsells and confusing offers.”
In the blog post by Perplexity, the startup said Amazon is making the move to protect its advertising-centric model rather than genuinely improving customer experience. The post called the legal threat Amazon’s “first legal salvo against an AI company” and said it raises “a threat to all internet users.”
The dispute marks a wider turning point in how agentic AI tools — those that can act autonomously (e.g., buy items, schedule tasks) — will be allowed to operate within major digital platforms. By deploying purchasing capability via its Comet browser, Perplexity is testing how far AI assistants can go beyond search or conversation and into transaction execution.
In the blog post, Perplexity’s CEO (via post) wrote: “We would be happy to work together with Amazon to figure out a win-win outcome for both us and them. But attempts to block our Comet Assistant on Amazon and hurt our users — we will have to stand up for them and not get bullied by Amazon.”
As the blog post shows this week, Perplexity has clearly framed this as a fight over user rights and platform control. The company said its design is centred on privacy, autonomy and user choice — listing three key principles: “privacy (being indistinguishable from you), personal service (working for you, not for Perplexity, and certainly not for Amazon), and capability to perform any task that matters to users.”
In turn, Amazon appears to be defending its ability to govern third-party integrations, citing concerns that Comet’s autonomous purchases may undermine customer service, data integrity, and its marketplace experience. Some analysts see this conflict as emblematic of a broader battle: whether AI agents will serve users independently across platforms, or be locked into the ecosystem of dominant platforms like Amazon, Google, Apple.
