Amazon Wins Courtroom Order Blocking Perplexity AI Purchasing Agent – Decrypt

A federal decide in San Francisco handed Amazon a win this week towards Perplexity AI, blocking the startup’s Comet browser from making purchases on Amazon on behalf of customers—a minimum of for now.

The ruling, issued Monday by U.S. District Decide Maxine Chesney, is a preliminary injunction, not a ultimate verdict.

The broader authorized battle over whether or not AI brokers can store on third-party platforms with out the platforms’ consent stays an open query.

The case started in November 2025 when Amazon filed go well with towards Perplexity below the federal Laptop Fraud and Abuse Act and a California pc fraud statute, accusing the startup of disguising Comet’s automated periods as common Google Chrome browser visitors.

Amazon mentioned it had warned Perplexity to cease a minimum of 5 instances beginning in November 2024.

When Amazon deployed a technical block in August 2025, Perplexity pushed a software program replace inside 24 hours to get round it. The decide cited that transfer in her ruling.

Decide Chesney discovered that Amazon supplied “primarily undisputed proof” that Perplexity accessed password-protected Prime accounts with customers’ permission however with out Amazon’s authorization.

The excellence is the crux of the dispute. Perplexity argued that Comet merely automates what customers direct it to do, which means it inherits the consumer’s permissions.

The court docket, a minimum of preliminarily, rejected that logic.

Below the order, Perplexity should cease accessing these accounts and destroy copies of Amazon buyer knowledge it already collected by way of Comet. The injunction is stayed for seven days to present Perplexity time to enchantment to the Ninth Circuit.

Perplexity framed its public response round consumer rights, saying it would “proceed to combat for the precise of web customers to decide on no matter AI they need,” based on a CNBC report on  Tuesday.

In a November weblog publish, the corporate labeled Amazon’s authorized marketing campaign as “bullying” and argued that agentic procuring would imply extra transactions for Amazon, not fewer.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy beforehand mentioned in November that agentic commerce “has an opportunity to be actually good for e-commerce,” however argued brokers aren’t but correct sufficient on personalization and pricing.

It is a distinction Amazon used to justify blocking Comet whereas creating its personal instruments.

Amazon generated $68.6 billion in promoting income in 2025 alone. When an AI agent skips on to checkout, each sponsored itemizing between search and buy disappears.

AI danger

And there is nonetheless the safety angle to think about, Amazon argues.

Safety researchers at Courageous disclosed prompt-injection vulnerabilities in Comet in October 2025, and enterprise evaluation discovered that the browser was extra weak to phishing than Chrome.

Amazon cited these findings in its criticism, alongside proof that it spent greater than $5,000, together with important engineering hours, constructing new detection methods to filter Comet’s automated advert visitors.

Amazon’s founder and govt chairman, Jeff Bezos, is a private investor in Perplexity. Amazon’s cloud division, AWS, struck a $38 billion infrastructure cope with Sam Altman’s OpenAI on November 3, 2025, sooner or later earlier than the lawsuit towards Perplexity was filed.

Amazon has its personal AI procuring instruments and has individually blocked ChatGPT from procuring on its platform.

Amazon up to date its Enterprise Options Settlement, efficient March 4, 2026, formally requiring all AI brokers to establish themselves when accessing its providers.

If the injunction stands, it might set an early precedent: platforms can refuse entry to AI brokers even when customers have explicitly licensed it.

How the Laptop Fraud and Abuse Act applies to agentic software program appearing on a human’s behalf has by no means been examined at trial. That query is now squarely earlier than the court docket.