Amazon Demands Perplexity Stop AI Agent from Making Purchases

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-04/amazon-demands-perplexity-stop-ai-agent-from-making-purchases

by monkeydust • 9 months ago

98 71 9 months ago

bloomberg.com

Finnucane• 9 months ago

Pot has words with kettle.

statguy• 9 months ago

https://archive.ph/nGmOJ

pants2• 9 months ago

Anyone know why Amazon wants AI agents to stop making purchases?

I used to make Amazon purchases through ChatGPT Agent before Amazon blocked them. I could take a picture of a wrapper and say "buy a new one on Amazon" and it would handle the whole process. Awesome. I actually started shopping at other retailers when Amazon blocked their agent.

One theory I have is that an AI agent can more efficiently price-compare the dozens of different listings of the same item and order the cheapest, cutting into Amazon's margins.

busymom0• 9 months ago

Probably because it's taking away from their ads/sponsored business?

upupupandaway• 9 months ago

This is the correct take. I was at Amazon not long ago and their Ads business is now absolutely massive and growing. Anything that takes away from that is bad news for their growth numbers.

Scaevolus• 9 months ago

Simplest possibility: agent-sourced purchases are incorrect and returned at a notably higher rate, perhaps even enough to be unprofitable as a category.

tcdent• 9 months ago

I highly doubt this is widespread enough for them to notice a trend, or if they did, to actually feel like it was a significant amount of revenue.

Doesn't Alexa let you buy stuff? It's probably more to do with the walled garden scenario: use our AI to shop on our platform for our products.

hattmall• 9 months ago

It would very easily allow someone to undermine their business. If you could shop at Walmart, by walking into Target it would be very easy for Target to say "here is the same item for $0.01 less"

If people find a benefit from using AI to shop on Amazon at scale then there's really no reason to keep Amazon in the loop at all. Especially for products that are high margin.

nradov• 9 months ago

Amazon's strategy is based more on fast, fairly reliable delivery of an enormous range of products rather than being the cheapest. Whenever I need anything I can be pretty sure that Amazon will have it in stock and deliver it within a couple days. Sure they're occasionally out of stock or they screw up deliveries but Target isn't any better. So it's worth keeping a Prime membership and Amazon remains the default option.

Ferret7446• 9 months ago

I can't imagine a significant portion of Amazon's value comes from their website, which by many accounts is an ungodly piece of UX crap.

It's the logistics that matter.

DonnyV• 9 months ago

You never want to lose direct contact with your customers. Having someone insert themselves between you and the customer is a recipe for disaster.

6510• 9 months ago

They know this better than anyone.

dgently7• 9 months ago

I’m sure it’s for many reasons but I guarantee that one is that they don’t get the ancillary sales. Eg I go to Amazon looking for socks, they have lots of time to show me other things I might buy. Maybe some other customers who bought socks liked these shoes etc.

If an agent can go and buy exactly and only the thing I need that is going to crush those other sales.

dragonwriter• 9 months ago

Anyone know why Amazon wants AI agents to stop making purchases?

Because it bypasses their efforts to promote preferred products in the short term and, more importantly, in the long term someone else becoming the front door to purchasing also enables that actor to commodify Amazon the same way Amazon commodifies other sellers, and before long to cut out Amazon as a middleman entirely and become the marketplace where buyers purchase from a diverse array of functionally anonymous, interchangeable sellers.

plumeria• 9 months ago

In short: because they don’t want to become Toys “R” Us.

mrandish• 9 months ago

Anyone know why Amazon wants AI agents to stop making purchasess

For the same reasons Amazon intentionally removed their search box's ability to require or exclude terms and target phrases. More efficient, faster searches for YOU reduces their opportunities to shovel more "not what you're looking for right now" in front of your eyeballs to increase impulse sales of adjacent goods.

darth_avocado• 9 months ago

Because they want users to use their own agent (which obviously will maximize their own profitability).

stubish• 9 months ago

Large retailers rely on all sorts of psychological tricks and UI work to steer you to the most profitable transactions, some of which we have labelled Dark Patterns. Not just Amazon, not just online. All that is gone with agents. At least until they work out how to manipulate the agents as well as a person, most likely by buying control of the the popular agents before their competitors do.

npilk• 9 months ago

If anything it seems like the agents would be easier to trick (at least right now).

paxys3• 9 months ago

Yup. Retailers sell a ton of popular goods at or below cost to attract customers knowing that they will load their cart with other high-margin items to make up for it. If you remove these upsells and other temptations then the store takes a big hit.

kelnos5• 9 months ago

Probably a few things:

1. When you visit amazon.com looking for a product, even if you are looking for a very specific product, they'll put other products in front of you. You might end up buying one of these other products, and that might make someone more money than if you bought the product you initially planned to buy.

2. You might buy more than you initially intended if you visit the site yourself, via the "Customers Also Bought" links, and other advertising.

3. Agents aren't perfect, and it's possible that they were making ordering mistakes at (much?) higher rates than humans were doing, which was costing Amazon more processing returns or other customer service inquiries.

4. Amazon wants to control the experience of buying a product through them, from start to finish. If they can't do that, they just become a commodity product aggregation site. An agent making purchases for someone can find the same product from another retailer, perhaps with better pricing, faster shipping, a better return policy, etc.

Of course, if other sites allow agents to make purchases, and that eventually becomes the way a significant number of customers want to shop, Amazon will have to get on board.

odyssey7• 9 months ago

I’d guess they want to reserve the right to charge LLM vendors to use a proprietary AI purchasing process

NoPicklez• 9 months ago

This is exactly what I saw as the benefit of using ChatGPT to purchase goods. Helping me find healthier options of the same item, or even the cheaper of a x number of brands for that shop.

It means ChatGPT just gives me more of just what I'm asking for rather than giving Amazon the opportunity to push something else on me.

maytc• 9 months ago

It’s probably because their paid advertising spots are being viewed by bots instead of humans. Amazon still charges the advertisers, since it detects the traffic as coming from a non-bot user based on the user agent.

Buttons840• 9 months ago

One theory I have is that an AI agent can more efficiently price-compare

If AI enables regular people to sleeplessly and ruthlessly exploit the market, like large companies do, it would be a really really good thing.

ankit2192• 9 months ago

I think its more to do with obfuscation than simple agent buying stuff. Perplexity disguises its agents as chrome browser, and that messes up things at Amazon's end. Not saying its good or bad, but think of ad relevance, then recommendations effectiveness, placements etc. because by default an agent is going to click more and more randomly than a user.

Then, when the agent buys stuff, my guess is that returns are a higher %age (because naturally agents have no preference model so end users might not like what they purchased eventually and returned). I don't know if enough people returned for it to matter, but as a user, if an agent is making a purchase and i know its super easy to return, i won't check everything agent did, just buy and then return if I dont like it.

I don't think it's always a price comparison or margin thing at this point. Given their margins and volume, the agent purchases woudl need to be an order of magnitude more to matter on that front.

pjjpo• 9 months ago

One of Amazon's biggest growing segments is ads which agents circumvent. Owning the platform they are in a position to block and it's probably reasonable to. Google is in a much worse situation since their ads are on content they don't own - when agents go straight to the content nothing they can do really. Wonder how they'll manage - lots of YouTube videos maybe.

tencentshill• 9 months ago

It's an extremely effective adblock. You're no longer exposed to any recommendation algorithms or distractions. They're obligated to shut that down.

SilverElfin• 9 months ago

The original source is being discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45814846

fakedang• 9 months ago

Because Amazon has Rufus in beta which they want to push going forward?

fxtentacle• 9 months ago

Let's hope they will still allow me to use Kagi to search for the product I want to buy.

The official Amazon search is so bad and deliberately pushes "promoted" or overly expensive products to the top that I would say it's only a matter of time until someone reverses the enshittification by building a 3rd party Amazon client. And it looks like that's precisely what Perplexity did here: They offer an agent that works for you, not for Amazon. And, predictably, Amazon hates it. It reduces their power to strong-arm brands into purchasing advertisements for their own product names.

estimator7292• 9 months ago

Searching with site:amazon.com has always been the only useful way to find the thing you actually wanted.

Well, that is if you use a real, functional search engine

DANmode• 9 months ago

Which is your default choice?

Thanks

andreybaskov5• 9 months ago

Originally posted this in another thread, but very curious what others think.

Can I ask my partner to buy a product on Amazon?

Can I ask my personal assistant to buy a product on Amazon?

Can I hire a contractor to buy products on Amazon?

Can I communicate with a contractor via API to direct them what products to buy?

What if there is no human on the other end and its an LLM?

Same issue with LinkedIn. I know execs who have assistants running their socials. Is this legal?

Like, where do we draw the line? In the future, would the only way to shop on Amazon be with approved VR goggles that scan your retina to verify you are a human?

simonw• 9 months ago

Can I use Amazon Mechanical Turk to place orders for myself on Amazon?

paxys3• 9 months ago

The law has nothing to do with it. Amazon is a private company and can make rules about who can or can't place orders on its website. When you create an account you agree to their ToS.

kelnos5• 9 months ago

I don't think GP meant "legal" in the literal sense. Regardless, the post's meaning is still the same if you replace "Is this legal?" with "Does this conform to Amazon's ToS?", so please read it charitably and avoid being pedantic about this sort of thing.

andreybaskov5• 9 months ago

Interesting. Amazon ToS actually has a section about agents - https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

And they even provide a definition of what an Agent is:

"Agent” means any software or service that takes autonomous or semi-autonomous action on behalf of, or at the instruction of, any person or entity.

Though to me it raises even more questions. What is a software that takes "autonomous" action on my behalf. Is curl "autonomous"?

whatever13• 9 months ago

No.

That is why you have personal credentials to log in to Amazon. If you want to have delegating capabilities you can open an Amazon business account.

kelnos5• 9 months ago

Would Amazon be ok with me opening a business account, creating credentials for a Perplexity assistant, and having it buy products?

Based on this article, I'd think not?

andreybaskov5• 9 months ago

Me and my wife share the same Amazon account. Should I open a business account to do grocery shopping?

JumpCrisscross• 9 months ago

where do we draw the line?

Perplexify has shown itself to be a bad actor [1][2][3], and possibly incompetent, too [4].

We need to draw a line, eventually. But it’s far from urgent. And I don’t think Perplexity should be the one deciding.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-is-using-stealth-unde...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/perplexity-ai-loses...

[3] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/reddit-sues-to-b...

[4] https://brave.com/blog/comet-prompt-injection/

neilv• 9 months ago

When Perplexity refused to stop its bots, Amazon sought to block them, but Perplexity released a new version of Comet to get around the security measure.

I'm not a lawyer, but the "security measure" wording sounded just slightly odd to me, and I wonder whether it's meaningful, and came from Amazon.

kelnos5• 9 months ago

Amazon would certainly be incentivized to try to frame it as a "security measure", as that might increase their chances of a favorable legal outcome if they decided to sue Perplexity.

rs186• 9 months ago

Apple cites "no external payment link" as "security measure".

Sounds familiar?

honeybadger1• 9 months ago

they didn't seem to care about all the scalping or nvidia cards

maerF0x0• 9 months ago

To me this seems simply anti-competitive. Could Amazon say I cannot make purchaess with a Mac, or Xfinity internet, or a logitech keyboard, or while wearing Levi's jeans? IMO they should have no right to dictate how I make a purchase. Sure, I am not allowed to mass harvest and distribute their data (such as the prices of every item), but for the purposes of making my own best choice I should be allowed to collect datapoints that I could easily and legitimately find on my own .

anon848736282• 9 months ago

Kinda rhymes with that whole "net neutrality" thing, eh?

Spivak• 9 months ago

But they're a private company and they're allowed to make you drink a verification can if it's in their ToS.

ankit2192• 9 months ago

They can block the site on a mac if they dont want you to purchase via a mac. They can block any browser agent they want if they dont like the traffic. They can also close your account if they have some reasons. They dont need a reason either. You agree to a terms of service when you make an account, and that usually means giving them broad leeway.

darkwizard42• 9 months ago

Yes they absolutely can, none of the things you mentioned are protected classes and they are a private company.

I'm not sure why you would feel entitled to make a purchase on their site outside of their (whatever reasonable or unreasonable) rules may be.

sbinnee• 9 months ago

Srinivas argued that agents should have “all the same rights and responsibilities” as a real human user. “It’s not Amazon’s job to survey that,” he said.

I am not against people using agents to do shopping although I won’t do that until I see a reliable agent. From the title I thought Amazon might have a point to protect users. But oh no. I should have known better that Amazon must have been cooking their own shopping agents. It’s already hilarious at this point.

Anyway, this excerpt from Perplexity has so many issues. It just looks like an ugly fight.

theturtletalks• 9 months ago

The reason Amazon doesn’t want AI involved is because then AI could skip Amazon altogether in the future and checkout directly on seller’s websites.

It’s actually the idea behind the decentralized marketplace I’m building. It uses MCP-UI to bring the whole storefront and checkout into the chat.

I’m keeping a close eye on e-commerce and AI and the recent deal Paypal made with OpenAI and Amazon getting aggressive, it’s clear they want to make AI powered commerce a walled garden.

a_vanderbilt• 9 months ago

This approach is either a means to delay and allow them to hedge, or it's a shortsighted attempt to stop the inevitable. When Google ships their competitor to Atlas, the outcome will already be decided.

rvz• 9 months ago

So Amazon has drawn a fine red line that you are not allowed to use AI agents to scrape on their website for purchases. (Because it destroys their ads and traffic to Amazon.com)

Perplexity sitting on AWS and doing this is like the tenant (Perplexity) turned their apartment into an Airbnb and making tons of money with the landlord (Amazon) getting very upset.

Perplexity may have to think about moving off of AWS.

neoattikos• 9 months ago

This is morphing definition of intellectual property rights in age of agents & chat bots in specifically western world, public should not be calm about this, if ai scrapes all indie blogs of authors, chefs, journalists and even major news outlets with this weird logic that agents are humans, won’t it leave those human endeavors (creative or not, we can all agree it’s unique & done by humans with good economic incentives) vulnerable to stagnation and people forgetting that side of internet & going back to passively consuming it instead of participating in it because of lack of economic or even sociological incentive (if people summarize or loose attention anyway, why think or write of any nuance in politics, law, even fiction books, recipes etc., it becomes evolutionarily costly for humans to do this gradually) > Perplexity’s argument is that, since its agent is acting on behalf of a human user’s direction, the agent automatically has the “same permissions” as the human user. The implication is that it doesn’t have to identify itself as an agent.

Prudent or not, self serving or not, amazon is right to argue its access controls be strict and that it as owner of website should control it with industry wide accepted rules of engagement, this argument from perplexity is a bad one, human or not while browsing web is a low bar already, captcha etc. were easily circumvented even before ai agents, now if we argue agents are human adjacent, it is a direct case for removing humans of any agency (largely philosophically speaking) and not to mention, imagine the horror show of scams & ransomware it unleashes on millions of users (even engineers can’t recognize or stop them today, prompt injection etc)

This argument that websites controlling their access to bots & agents is a good idea. It should be the way it is, for businesses (amazon or not) and for internet blogs and open web associated sites, if they choose to exclude themselves from upcoming lovely silicon valley stories of ai utopias, they should be able to do so. No one should force them to ‘get with the program’.

mgdev• 9 months ago

Very simple. Undermines their ad business - which is their fastest-growing profitable business.

OCTAGRAM• 9 months ago

Sounds like SkyNet had a good time shopping for military upgrades on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Amazon Demands Perplexity Stop AI Agent from Making Purchases

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