Amazon sends legal threats to Perplexity over agentic browsing (techcrunch.com)

Amazon has sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist demanding that Comet — Perplexity’s “agentic” shopping assistant that can browse and buy on behalf of users — be removed from its storefront unless it complies with Amazon’s terms (chiefly that third‑party agents must identify themselves). Perplexity says Comet is simply exercising the same permissions as the human user and therefore needn’t declare itself an agent; Amazon counters that other third‑party services already disclose when they act on a customer’s behalf and that openness allows sites to choose whether to participate. Amazon also warned that it could block Comet or any agentic shopper (it has its own bot, Rufus), while Perplexity frames the move as an anti‑competitive, first legal salvo against AI companies. The dispute matters because it establishes an early legal and technical precedent for “agentic browsing” — autonomous tools that interact with websites on users’ behalf. Key technical issues include authentication/authorization models (does an agent inherit a user’s session/permissions?), bot identification and signaling, site-level policies (robots.txt/TOS), and incentives (ads/product placement versus utility-optimized bots). Prior controversies — notably Cloudflare’s finding that Perplexity sometimes hid its identity when sites opted out of bots — underscore the risk that agentic behavior could run afoul of site rules. Expect tighter TOS, new agent-identification standards or APIs, and potential blocking by major platforms as the ecosystem negotiates how autonomous agents should behave online.